The best thing to see with a well-laid plan is for one of your characters to waltz in and wreak havoc, rendering it utterly useless and irrelevant. Though after spending a decent amount of time writing from the perspective of a specific character, you usually learn some about what will and will not work for him/her/it.

We've learned never to plan out everything a character should do... they tend not to cooperate like that. what we plan is settings like "who will (s)he encounter?" "Where will the encounter happen?" etc.


For our RPs, we usually spend far longer than most on characters, both our own and our players' characters to make sure they are up to par.