Short-Circuiting your Adventure
I’ve noted that preparation and planning are some of the hallmarks of both a good DM and IT professional, but sometimes planning gets short-circuited. In the past, I’ve spent hours working on a campaign with intricate details, a slowly building storyline, interesting character interactions, and a clear path from point A to B to C and so on.
Then we sit down to play this epic tale, and the players choose to follow the white rabbit instead of the obvious path in front of them and jump immediately to point J. That’s it. A small change and they’ve completely gone off course. In the past, I’ve had this go one of two ways: the group takes a petty diversion and makes it more than it’s supposed to be or they’ve jumped ahead in the story so much that I don’t have anything else planned. As the DM, you can either throw up your hands and walk away, force them back on the “right” path, or see where the adventure leads.
One of those avenues reminds me of scope creep in IT projects. You’ve outlined everything in a beautiful waterfall plan and the team starts taking side-trips and tacking on new requirements. The adventure of discovery is upon you! Keep going! Let’s see where this will end up. Will planning to only swap out a power supply lead to the adventure of replacing all the UPS’s in a data center? Who knows? Mystery abounds.
The clear answer here is “within reason.” You’ve planned one change and now people are adding more and more to that change request. Where do you draw the line? I can’t answer that for you, because it’s different for every scenario, but you should be open to change. Embrace it where you can and push it off where you cannot.
The flip side of this scope creep is having your entire plan thrown out and being asked to “skip to the end.” Just like in D&D this leaves you asking, “what’s next?” and not having a clue. Maybe you’ve only planned for five steps and you need to jump right to step six. Can you plan for this? Probably not. About the only thing you can do it plan for unexpected.
Looking back, the same solution presents itself for each problem: plan for the unexpected. This applies to the players, the DM, and the IT professional. There’s always going to be another tree in the forest, and there might be a goblin archer behind one. Plan for these diversions, but don’t let them pull you from your goal.
