You know you're running a complicated game plot when...

[Darklone]

You KNOW it's complicated when you have to bust Darth Vader out of Jail, in order to save him from Luke Skywalker - and you're the GOOD GUYS.

Ask my players why the evil vampires kept helping the paladin

 

[RangerWickett]

I once made a flowchart that had several different color codes.

Black - X knows this person.
Dashed Black - X knows of this person, but has never met him/her.
Blue - X hates this person.
Green - X likes this person.
Red - X killed this person.
Purple - X loves/has had sex with this person.

It was fun to see how many red lines could go from any one person's name.

 

[shilsen]

Ask my players why the evil vampires kept helping the paladin

In my case, the question would be why the evil vampire kept hitting on the paladin She wasn't even jealous when he mentioned he had a girlfriend - just asked if he was into threesomes

 

[Darklone]

In my case, the question would be why the evil vampire kept hitting on the paladin She wasn't even jealous when he mentioned he had a girlfriend - just asked if he was into threesomes

Uhm... Vampire girls are not often jealous. But I'd watch for my girlfriends back, just in case. Or neck.

 

[Vrecknidj]

Silly me, I've been running one such complex campaign for a while now. There are 11 regular players, each has two, three or four characters (no, each player doesn't play each character at once).

The group is on an island where they and their NPC allies are the only real city (the nearest other city is over 3000 miles east, across a lot of water).

But, there are lots of baddies on this island (blue dragons, red dragons, the blue's allies, the red's allies, the blue's allies' allies, the red's allies' allies, etc., etc.). Included in the enemies are a small mind flayer city, a githyanki outpost, a beholder enclave, and tons and tons of giants and humanoids. (The really tough bad guys tend to be far removed on the island, and often in underground lairs, and often have one another as enemies--keeping the PCs a bit safer than otherwise.)

So, I have this mammoth 3-ring binder with about 300 NPCs and all their connections in it.

I work about 60 hours a week, I probably spend another 10+ just keeping all this campaign stuff in order.

Sigh.

But, the players are loving it--so it's worth it.

Dave

 

[Azure Trance]

Y'know, if you lopped off three NPCs that one large flowchart would fall into three seperate ones, making it much less complicted Still, purdy. Did you use a program to create it?