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Originally Posted by meek75
Thanks for the advice. I will play with the storyboard a bit more. I haven't used it as you suggest for a couple of reasons. I do, generally, love flow charts for game prep. However, my initial experience with RW flow chart tool was very disappointing. There are some really good free flowchart creators out there that far exceed RW abilities. Not being able to manually pull pieces of the flowchart around was a HUGE issue. The automatic placement of RW kept messing things up and looping things around in ways I didn't want. When the chart got even moderately large it really seemed to break down. Now, perhaps I gave up to soon on that feature. Have you used this method in a game session and found it helpful? My other big complaint was that the descriptions I put in my plot line don't auto-link and I am limited to one connection per element. I found that very limiting and frustrating. I am hoping that the story boards improve as RW get upgraded, but as they stand now I judged them very poor. However, if they work for you I'll go give them another chance. I have been known to throw the baby out with the bathwater on occasion.
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You might try using it so you have a number of storyboards. The first one is just a skeleton giving a really rough idea of where the party may go. Make each step in that storyboard link to another, so when you click on it, it'll open up a more specific storyboard that details just that step. You can keep "drilling down" to more and more granular levels, depending on how detailed you want to get. That approach works pretty well for me.
Also, at some point in the storyboard for each more detailed level, I'll have the link back to the broader level. So I may have the Duke ask the players to do something with 3-4 choices. Rather than trying to put all those paths on the one storyboard, I'll do something like having a link from "work for the Duke to find stolen goods" to the sub-storyboard that shows all the steps in that quest. Then at the end of the sub-board, I'll set a link that takes me back to the main storyboard to follow it to whatever direction they choose to go.
It makes for a lot more boards, but if you link them to and from the adventures it keeps it pretty orgainized, and the main board stays fairly neat, without a whole lot of spaghetti mess to follow.
If you follow shows like Burn Notice, Justified, or even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you can see kind of how my mindset works. A "season" will have an overall arc, ie Burn Notice season 1 - figure out who burned Michael. That would be the main storyboard with the steps needed to figure it out. Each of those steps would be an episode of the show, in the case of Burn Notice, all the stuff that Michael and Crew do to help out others in need, while still working toward figuring out the "season" arc. Each Episode, which is a step in the "Season" arc gets its own storyboard, you could continue to go further with each event in each episode getting its own storyboard, depending on how many levels you want to get to. The episode then has some nugget in it that helps with the overall arc, Michael gets a file that gives him the identity of someone who helped burn him. That step in the "Episode" storyboard links back to the "Season" Storyboard, and you can follow those paths to whatever step the PCs take next.
Hope that helps
