[quote=@Morden Man]
Here's a question for you PoW lifers:

I've got a shit ton planned out for Britain, like twenty-twenty five posts ahead of where I'm currently at, and even though I find it helpful to have it all planned out like that I also find it stifles me a bit. For those of you that have been playing for years/since the game began, how far ahead do you plan? How do you stop yourself from feeling like you're just going through the motions?
[/quote]

I don't mean to plan too far ahead, but what happens is I get ideas I like so much that I feel like they have to happen. Part of the reason I've continued to be interested in PoW is that, so far, when I come up with an idea I like I pretty much always [i]do[/i] make it happen. But what I actually have planned out is somewhat scattered.

So, for instance, I have a pretty good idea of what I want Africa to look like after the war - not specific borders mind you, just the general shape of things. I know who I want to survive the war. I had some character death scenes pretty much planned out since the MCF days sometime. I even know, though we will never get this far, what personality Prince Tewodros is going to have when he is an adult. But I didn't figure out what Sahle was going to be doing in Russia until sometime earlier this year. And I didn't know what his personal part in the Russia storyline was even going to be until probably about a week ago. 

Sometimes I have these random ideas that come out of nowhere, like when I am in the car or taking a shower, and I'll stick them in because I like them. An example of this is Revolution-Town in that last Akanni post. That came from me suddenly imagining some little African commune with walls that have communist leaders' faces painted on them. I have no clue where that is going to go, but I'll work it out later because I usually seem to. Another example is the hallucinatory dreams I give Sahle - those are usually just weird scenes that that I randomly imagine of nowhere, and I just roll with them because I like them. I just wrote one for a Sahle post coming up here soon, even though I was already busy writing up the lead-up to the Battle of Dire Dawa. I just liked it so much I had to jot it down before I forgot any part of it. 

So that's kind of how it works for me. I have a general idea of where things are going, I have all these little ideas that are just things I like and want to fit into Precipice, and the rest of the RP for me is weaving all of that together so it makes sense. It doesn't feel like just going through the motions for me because I genuinely enjoy writing this shit. It's like my version of gardening or something - I plant the seeds, go through all the work of growing them, and get that satisfied feeling when I step back and see the end result.