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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5040496" data-attributes="member: 26473">It's bad to have more concurrent NPC schemes than you can keep track of. Information management, both what the adventurers know (or at least believe to be true) and don't know or have not yet discovered, is critical.Every NPC has schemes and goals, so in a sense the number of plots, as used here, will be at least one per non-player character. However, some of these schemes will overlap: in <a href="http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/le-ballet-de-l-acier" target="_blank">the campaign I'm working on right now</a>, there are major factions representing large social movements, frex the "good French" versus the "devouts," or the gallicans versus the ultramontanists. Many NPC schemes cn be related to the goals of these larger social movements, and any number of NPCs may be working at shared purposes within these factions.Those are largely a function of the station and ambitions of the NPC. In my campaign there are characters literally scheming for ways to seize the crown of France or defeat the Habsburgs for dominance in Europe and characters who are looking to gain revenge against a business rival or woo a mistress.The question is, to whom do the adventurers have access? Do they move in royal court circles? Do they have allies in the provincial government? Are they members of a social organization like an order or a confraternity? The NPCs they meet and with whom they interact on a regular basis may in large part govern the scale and scope of their schemes.In Flashing Blades, characters may begin the game with contacts and secret allies possessing high social rank, so it's not a surprise to find them enmeshed early on in the intrigues of the wealthy and influential. At the same time, the adventurers may be new members of the royal bureaucracy, or of a club, or a military regiment, so that means I need some smaller, more personal sorts of situations as well as the grand intrigues of the age.This will vary considerably with the scope and scale. If one of your NPCs is looking for an advantageous marriage but is rebuffed by another suitor, unless the adventurers somehow intervene to help there's a good chance this situation will not change significantly. On the other hand, large scale events will roll on subject to the adventurers' involvement or lack thereof.As an aside, 'sandbox' is starting to experience considerable drift in its usage around here - for example, I don't agree with much of anything Janx wrote upthread - so to be clear, my own approach is to run what has been called a status quo setting in earlier sources. This means, despite what at least one poster claims, there is no 'plot or script immunity' for player characters; the adventurers may well find themselves at the mercy of non-player characters or institutions far more powerful and influential than they are if the adventurers are neither smart nor lucky.</blockquote>

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