The thing about these prompts is that I never know what I’m going to write, my responses are unexpected. I’ve tried not to look at the upcoming prompts, but only focus on the current day and writing what comes into my mind on that day (or on the day that I actually start writing my response…which seems to be a couple of days later in many cases when I’m trying to get back on track).

Like many things in life, I’ve come to expect the unexpected, and in most cases what arrives is less unexpected than I had hoped for. If you play games with the same regular people, they can sometimes surprise you, but quite often a person will have the same repertoire of half a dozen things that they fall back on. You can lead them with a subliminal hook, and have them favour two or three of their commo options. Then you can throw in a couple of contingency plans and make certain choices undesirable in the situation.

Two players can work together, perhaps strategizing before a game, or between sessions, suggesting things during the course of play to prompt one another’s agendas.

I’ve known players over the years who would do this, and who would play the player rather than the game. They have a certain understanding of what someone was likely to do, and they’d push narratives that caused the player into a “fight/flight/freeze” response that they could use to their advantage. It was like a conductor at an orchestra, but every so often someone would jump left rather than right, and it was these moments that made the games far more interesting.

Personally, I try to open options rather than narrowing them down. Then I go with the flow from whatever looks most interesting out of the new range of choices presented. If I can tie one of these random circumstances into the existing structure of the story, all the better….but if it doesn’t fit yet, maybe some other piece will arrive later that will work to achieve a semblance of order in the chaos. I often don’t go looking for it, but when it arrives, that’s cool.