A vast number of writers have stories about telling someone that they are a writer and being offered a "million-dollar" story idea. Said person will be happy to share it for half of the story's profits and all the author has to do is write the thing.
This reflects a profound ignorance of both the craft and the business of writing. First is the idea that there is any money to writing. The second is that there is any special value to ideas. Anyone in the industry can tell you that the real challenge is not the uniqueness of the idea but the quality of its implementation.
The hardest part of writing is not coming up with an idea for a story, or even characters. It's not even coming up with a plot. It's the process of actually putting those ideas into words. With the proliferation of various story structure schemes, it's possible to outline a detailed plot, craft richly detailed characters, know your story's theme and symbolism, and still be stuck trying to decide how to begin the thing. In fact, those schemes may make it worse since they give you so many additional elements to juggle instead of just thinking of what would be fun or interesting.
I don't have as much experience with solo RPGs, but I expect similar or even worse difficulties.
Fortunately, there is an increasing number of "Oracles" available to gamers to suggest story events. Unfortunately, many of them are both arbitrary and random, containing vague non-sequiturs that confuse as much as inspire...
So I spent much of Thanksgiving weekend compiling a semi-structured list of several hundred plot objectives. My goal was to create something that was both exhaustive and structured so that one could select the scope of randomness desired. It turns out that "exhaustive" and "structured" are rather difficult to balance. To make matters worse, reading some actual play accounts, it seems that many players prefer a very simple--even minimalistic--tool.
I've always liked the telescoped approach where you provide a simple basic structure and allow for optional levels of increasing detail. Among the numerous scholarly papers that I've read on procedurally generated content, one of the authors discussed how you can generate an enormous amount of material by combining several smaller lists of items.
With those two things in mind, I tried to sort my not-yet-exhaustive list of plot objectives into basic categories.
Action Goals
- Creation – create something new or cause something to be
- Destruction – kill, impair, render useless
- Protection – prevent or resist change and maintain the status quo
- Change – improve, repair, redirect, persuade or transport
- Knowledge – detect, identify, locate
- Concealment – hide, deceive, trick
- Control – buy or sell, steal or give, capture or release
- Help – advise, assist, equip or empower
Domains
- Information, Ideas
- Person, Relationship, Organization
- Place
- Thing, Tool, Resource
This is certainly subject to change, but I think it can already cover a very broad range of missions. For example, Knowledge + Concealment + Organization could cover a spy mission while Concealment + Destruction + Place could be a sneak attack.
I'm still planning on expanding this into a more robust-yet-still-structured list so that if you already know you want some sort of investigation mission, you can randomly select from among a number of options which would not only include more specifics but supplementary lists of required support elements as well.
