Analysis Paralysis

One challenge that I encountered this week was getting the party moving on the session's mission. There had been a fair amount of back-and-forth on planning, and the conversation was going in circles, both online, and once we started, at the gaming table. The party was trying to figure out the best and most risk-adverse way to carry out their mission, and to get the most out of it. This is the chess-player in many of them, the one that looks moves and moves ahead to try to determine the best long-term plan. The problem, of course, is that with an open-ended problem like an RPG, where the options are really limited by your imagination and your ability to persuade the GM that you should be able to do what you're proposing, there is no clear termination condition to indicate that you've considered all the angles -- sitting and thinking another minute might reveal another possibility. This condition is a particularly severe case of what is called "analysis paralysis" -- the players spend so much time planning they never get to execution.

Again, this is not specific for gaming -- if I had a nickle for every time I've seen in at work, I wouldn't be going to work anymore. The trick is that the situation rarely resolves itself. Some form of outside intervention is required to stay on your schedule, which with only a three-hour session once a week for us, is pretty tight. We start at 0900 in the morning, and we generally have breakfast and stragglers wandering in until 0930. Around 0930 the session proper starts, and we handle the bookkeeping since last session -- spending XP, after action reports XP, maintenance rolls, income, etc. That usually takes 10-15 minutes. By 0945, the party starts discussing preparations for the session.

I am usually silent for the preparation step, and only handle direct questions about game rules, or any information-gathering checks the players make (Protocol, Streetwise, Investigation, etc.) Generally speaking, the party is ready to roll by 1000. If they are not, and the conversation is starting to spiral, I generally speak up and try to find a way to push the party towards whatever my imagined solution to the session is. That was the case this week. Bert had a number of clever ideas that required enormous effort, such as raiding a junkyard for a truck, repainting it as an ambulance, faking an emergency call, and so forth. The rest of the party wanted a plan with less moving parts, and ideally less cost. By 1000, they had lapped the conversation three times.

Around 1000, I was able to steer the conversation in the direction of the rest of the party's plan, which involved scrambling the phone lines into the TerraSec station and then showing up as technicians to repair it. Bert was able to offer a chunk of his plan -- intercepting the station's communications lines so that when the call for help went out it was routed to the party's truck nearby rather than where it was supposed to go, giving them the ability to appear legitimate. They ran the plan by sending only two people in, then sending in more people as the situation developed, until by the end the entire party was in the building. I'll cover the actual execution part of the plan tomorrow.