Alternity's Process: Collaboration vs. Spontaneity

[gwendolyngrace]

It's been almost two weeks since we finished but the after-party still goes on....

We've got loads of other things still in store, including more AMAs, additional post-game analysis, and of course, more Easter Eggs. But in the meantime, we thought we'd switch gears a bit and talk about more behind-the-scenes stuff, like our process.

So, here's a thread to discuss our approach to plotting, how we decided on major plots, and so on. I invite the players to share their thoughts and the readers to ask us about how we worked as a team - and when we chose to split off, change gears, or sometimes, switch to a more "game-master" style of play where certain players were holding their cards closer to the vest.

To get it started, I'll share the basics. As I think you all know, we have a mailing list (that changed its host partway through), where we communicated. We also did a lot of "pre-plotting," by which I mean, the characters who were primarily involved in a given plot would frequently have chats or off-list email threads to sketch out the big picture, and then once it was in a reasonable shape, we would bring the outline to all the players and finish refining it.

There were also any number of times when two or more people were talking in chat (usually Google-chat), while threading one or more of their characters in the game, and the chat would lead to other ideas. Sometimes these were little ideas, like, "Oh, hey, while I've got you, I was thinking I'd like my character to have an encounter with yours" and they would spin their side-plot on their own. Sometimes these were seeds of the larger plots, often times potential solutions to problems we were facing.

Some of our biggest problems were also our biggest plots: things like how to parallel the major events of the books while keeping to the parameters of Alternity; how to find the Horcruxes and eliminate them; how to write ourselves OUT of corners; how to KILL Voldemort when Harry himself wasn't actually a Horcrux, etc. Then there were the major climaxes of every year, some of which were solved mere hours before we had to play them out.

It was also a common practice to keep those chat windows open while we were playing, so that we could interact real-time with the other players who were involved. Sometimes this wasn't possible and there were a LOT of emails flying. For the major plots, we tried to keep a group window going and people would enter and leave as they were available. This sometimes got chaotic with too many people overlapping, which often meant we had to interrupt the chatter to keep everyone on the same page.

Players, what sorts of process stories do you have to share?

Comments

[reenie]

I guess one thing that's interesting to me is that the game as a whole feels like it's divided up into 2 parts, in my head. Part One covers years 1-4, which ran mostly parallel to Rowling's canon in the sense that Year 1 was about a Professor plotting Harrys' death (But Macnair and not Q, and for totally different reasons); Year 2 was about the Chamber of Secrets (with bonus Epidemic!); Year 3 was about Azkaban escapees stalking Harry (But Snape, not Sirius); Year 4 was about the QWC and the Tri-Wiz Tourney.

I know that I was one of those people who kept saying that we ought to worry less about trying to parallel canon every year (to everyone's irritation, probably), and it feels like in Part Two of the game, we really started to do our own thing and get inventive. Year 5, for example, was about the Reign of Umbridge, yes, but all these other fascinating undercurrents, planted in the first four years of the game, started to come to a head: Selwyn's Plot; the introduction of Noble Arts and Dolohov; Draco and Harry and Hydra finally choosing to align with the ISS (though Draco struggled with what that would mean for him); one of the first major character deaths (Arthur); and probably more than I am missing.

So yes, Part Two of the game (years 5-7) were the most interesting to me, plotting-wise. We all got to be really inventive and creative, even if it sometimes meant tossing out ideas that were ultimately rejected. We also were able to pluck out things from Part One of the game and make them even more insidious. When I invented Bella's "Black Curse" all those years ago, I never dreamed that it would be what Harry would use to defeat Voldemort, but it ended up being just perfect - in that horrible Alternity way, of course.

I'm also reading Year 2 right now and just stumbled upon a convo between Ron and Hydra where they are both resolutely sharing their plans to become Aurors. Ha. I didn't actually know that Hydra would at that time become an Auror, so it struck me as funny in retrospect.

[gwendolyngrace]

Hm, yeah. I think you can almost say the same thing about canon itself, though, in that the story in years 5-7 *also* takes a dramatic shift and kicks into a different gear after Voldemort's returned in a corporeal form. I've often said that the books are a series of widening concentric circles, as Harry's understanding of and exposure to the Wizarding world gets larger and larger, until it is finally no longer even contained within the confines of school in the final book. So it makes a lot of sense to me that in our own storytelling, we reached a point - several people have already picked the Frost Faire gladiator games as our Aristotelian climax and I think that's really accurate - when the threat level wasn't about school plots and it wasn't contained within the immediate sphere of Harry's circle.

And even when we had to "pad" our activities because the school-based plot structure was really thin, I have to say that it also REALLY helped us all stay on track. While it was actually very fun to have that last three months with NO canonical structure to follow, between the end of the Battle for Hogwarts and our eventual game-end, I think it was also one of those points where as players, we were in the most danger of really not knowing *what* to do next. It was important to strike a balance between "We're not done just because we won the battle" and "We're going into too many minutiae of showing the new system being built." In other words, no one wanted a scenario where just because Voldemort died, the Dark Tower crumbled and the earth swallowed up all his troops, and we wanted *some* time to show how a new society is formed... but we didn't want to get mired in political in-fighting, either. And btw, that's an area where not handing anyone the idiot stick brought things to a virtual standstill, where we almost had to dictate that neither side would mount a HUGE all-in assault on the other's stronghold *until* we were ready for our final endgame. Otherwise it would have been a chase around the country and I don't even know.

So yeah, two parts, but in a weird way I think canon encourages that division.

On one of the giant AMA threads back when we first opened discussion, there was a short conversation about all the solutions we pulled out of our asses at the last minute - and there are so many of those it's almost hard to list them - but I think that speaks to the creativity you're mentioning. We frequently mined things our characters had said or done to come up with our next solutions. And sometimes, truth be told, that was not so much a matter of planning, as it was someone going back to look for something (else), stumbling upon some thing - spell, action, dropped plotline - and saying, "Uh... If we've had this curse since Y2, why hasn't it been used more?" or "Hey, what the heck has Hagrid been DOING all this time?" or any number of a hundred other things that we threw out and forgot about, only to find later and make use of it.

[jenett]

I think the shift in years 5-7 was also a lot easier because we decided fairly early that none of us was really enthused at all about the Deathly Hallows plot, and so we both knew we'd have to figure something else out, and had the freedom to. (That, and I think the arc of Alternity, that's the point where it really had to start changing, you know? Because we'd already been in the 'the DEs have won' rather than canon's Y6 and Y7.)

As I remember it, that, and "We do not want a year of endless camping" were the two things the players were entirely unanimous on.

[gwendolyngrace]

Fully agreed. The fact that we ALL wanted to drop the Deathly Hallows very early on, and that none of us liked the arc of the 7th book, meant that we already knew we were coming up with something else.

It's also true that we said, from the very beginning, that we were bound to diverge more and more and more from the canon structures as we went along, simply due to the nature of alternate universes. Our solution for Y1 led to a different solution for Y2, which led to different outcomes in Y3, etc.

It occurs to me that we really should also have a thread about the extent to which Alternity existed as giant fix-it fic.

[naomikritzer]

One of the things that I found myself thinking about a lot as the game went on was how to show things on the "screen," how to provide a window to our readers for anything interesting that we were doing. So, for instance, Ron had to not only escape with the horcrux at the end, he needed a way to destroy it that wasn't Fiendfyre, because he needed to survive to tell the story of what happened after he and Harry left 12GP.

It was a chronic challenge to make a battle exciting via journals. On a screen, battles are often a really climactic, exciting thing with explosions and so on. Even in a book, you can provide descriptions that journalers are just not going to plausibly have the time or motivation to describe in real time -- our battles tended to be people writing "[CHARACTER] DOWN, PLS SEND HELP" and not "deadly curses flashed through the air and [character name] flinched as an explosion rocked the floor."

Anyway. The running battle where I think we did the best job of actually showing it unfold was probably Mysteries, which required some significant planning. Maybe I'll come back and talk some about how we plotted that one, specifically.

Also, I'll note that there were a couple of very specific plot devices that players would push back very hard against. Deb would push back against plots that required polyjuice -- obviously, we did run plots that used PJ (Snape impersonating Milland, for instance, and all the baby-rescuing camp runs where it was used) but she wanted us to avoid over-relying on it, because it could've so easily become our go-to solution for freaking everything. Rene and Deb would both push back against any plot that required MLE to act stupid or incompetent -- and, again, that was all to the good. Incompetent bad guys are not much of a challenge, and canon suggests strongly that Barty Crouch Jr. and Bellatrix Lestrange are competent, intelligent people -- given how competent and smart they are even after an extended stay in Azkaban.

[gwendolyngrace]

Another plot device that we all tended to shoot down was "overhearing" something - someone all too conveniently just being in the right place at the right time when an unguarded conversation was going on. I could probably think of a few others, but yes, I think the collective, collaborative process deserves a lot of credit for (most of the) bad ideas not making it into the game at the surface level.

It's a great point about how to show the action. I mentioned on the relationship thread the continual struggle I had with the question of why characters would write in the journals when they could talk in person - and in battles or heavy action sequences that's even more evident. Another convention we had to set that's similar to that was characters who just would not *say* things in their journals in a public forum doing so anyway. Lucius did that a lot in the beginning - not because I was all too comfortable with him laying his cards out, but because we really needed the worldbuilding - and we backed off of that convention more and more and more as the game progressed and the stakes got higher. But even at the end, I have a feeling we told certain things that probably would never have been spelled out in a real-life situation.

[synecdochic]

The "how do we get this onto the screen" thing was so frustrating sometimes, omg. I had that problem with Tosha a lot: he was painfully aware that private messages weren't private, even if he (mostly) trusted the people who were reading them to not pay too much attention to his, but it meant that he always, always had to write with one eye toward how he would defend what he'd said if somebody decided to take exception to it. It made it so hard to get across what he was thinking, especially once Barty died and he was no longer writing regularly to Siz, those being the two people he'd let himself slip a little bit with. It got really annoying -- like, I know exactly what his motives were in the last year of play, but I'm never quite sure how much of it made it out onto the surface of the game because he wasn't exactly being forthcoming, you know?

It made very good in-game sense, but I do still wish we'd come up with some kind of secure channel for the DEs to communicate.

[naomikritzer]

So, in addition to the really carefully plotted, elaborated crafted plots where we all had agreed on stuff in advance, there were some more spontaneous plots.

One of my favorite avenues for play (that really felt like play) was when a couple of players would come up with some mishap that spiraled into the sort of mini-drama that middle and high school are prone to anyway and everyone got to riff off of it. Luna accidentally bringing the wizarding equivalent to Fifty Shades to school instead of the assigned Dark Arts text was one of the more memorable examples of this. The Forgetfulness Potion in Y1 was another (pretty much anyone could have been splashed, so if you wanted to have your character get wildly confused about something, you could.)

Sometimes the impetus for plots like this would just be, "two of us are online and bored. Let's have our characters get into trouble." Or "we need a light, fun plot as a counterpart to the angst." Or "we need a spontaneous, unplanned plot that requires minimal negotiation to kick off and we can just put this thing out there for people to react to."

[lapin_agile]

There were some great hospital wing plots like this. The time Orion Sandoval brought the clap back from summer hols and shared it around. For instance.

[gwendolyngrace]

Right, that frequently happened either right after we'd just dropped some major plot thing that took loads of coordinated play, or often when we felt like all the Private communication was getting to fractured, and we wanted something that was more open and generalized.

[naomikritzer]

We would also do plots where some of the planning was full-group, but a key bit of information had been temporarily withheld.

The specific example I'm thinking about:

When I introduced Rachel, all the players knew from the beginning that she was a member of Dogstar, spying on MLE, although obviously the characters did not. Peg and I had also planned from the beginning to have her wind up sleeping with Bill. (Poor Bill. I loved Alice's OMGWTF line, "it is her job to catch traitors. YOU ARE A TRAITOR. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING," or however she phrased it, when he fessed up to her that he'd been sleeping with an Auror.)

I also decided on my own that Rachel would be the child from the story Sirius told in his Grim Truth, when Dolohov went to teach at Hogwarts. I ran that by Gwen and Denise, but I didn't tell Peg. Instead, I had Rachel reveal that in-character to Bill when we roleplayed out exactly how that conversation went (I should dig that up and see if that works as an Easter Egg): that her real name was Rachel Brodie and Dolohov once killed a man in her kitchen.

Rachel was a really fun character to play. The fen were totally onto a bunch of stuff very quickly. They spotted the Rachel/Bill shipping within about five minutes of her introduction (fair), they guessed that the "Dear Johnny" PM was some sort of code (yes: she wanted to make sure Ridley didn't someone to kill her to make sure she couldn't betray the rest of her cell), and I think someone even speculated that Rachel would turn out to be the vanished Brodie child.

[reenie]

Also totally spontaneous: when we decided that Jason and Rachel used to be an item, back when they were at Hogwarts.

[gwendolyngrace]

Another great example of this was the "Who wants to be a Death Eater" competition in Y6. We decided for that plot specifically to assign the actions of the NPCs to certain players, and I kept track of the "rankings" for each candidate but did not really tell the candidates' players much about where they were in the race. We also had a brainstorm thread to come up with challenge ideas, but I didn't tell them WHICH challenge they were going to get, or WHEN it was going to drop, until I dropped it on them.

[pegkerr]

Another thing that developed out of play which then affected play(and we had to figure out how) were the various locks.

When we started the game, the only lock any w her e but he re had, the only lock we PLANNED to have, was the Order Only lock. The ISS lock was something I came up with the fall of the first year, I think, and when we discovered the usefulness of giving the younger characters the freedom to talk, I think it made characters who could talk under the lock more room for development. The most dramatic example was Terry, the impetus for creating the lock in the first place. But eventually, since it meant that Terry could talk more freely about things than, say, Ernie--or worse, Harry--this started to give an imbalance to the game that we eventually had to figure out.

It was specifically because of the difficulty that Draco and Harry had in talking freely, IIRC, that led directly to the creation of the Ministry private lock. Thematically, its limitations (esp. for Mudbloods like Terry and Hermione) also helpfully underscored things we wanted to bring out.

We thought about creating a DE lock. I, for one, was adamant that the OO lock should never be broken, and I didn't want to give the DE looking for anyone ELSE who might have created a lock.

Alt-galleon gave a voice to our NPC, which was very useful, too.

My big trouble was keeping all the locks straight. I continually forgot the headers or had my chars reading things they shouldn't be able to read--and then Gwen would have to edit my posts because I had left the keyboard.

I kept saying I would have busted the Order's security within a month by getting the locks wrong.

[naomikritzer]

You're not the only one! I think originally we had a rule where you could fix it within 15 minutes and after that, it stood. NOPE. We'd have broken the game. Repeatedly.

[gwendolyngrace]

EVERYONE broke the lock at least once. And everyone, IIRC, replied to a PM thread that they weren't actually PART of at least once.

[keshwyn]

Were Sally-Anne's socks spontaneous or deliberately sent to Umbridge? And who suggested that? >:)

[naomikritzer]

The socks were not originally made with Umbridge in mind.

We did a yearly imaginary-Christmas-shopping thread where we talked about what our characters were giving as gifts to their friends (and, in some cases, their enemies). Like any good Slytherin, Sally-Anne gave gifts to her professors as well as to her friends. In December of Y4, I put this under the heading about Sally-Anne's gifts:

Alecto Carrow: knitted socks in the same heathered yellow as Grubbly-Plank, which is totally NOT HER COLOUR. She had originally knitted Carrow a pair of black socks with a deliberately flubbed "softness" rune that would make them itchy. After the incident with Cassie [where she left cursed pink parchments for Siz, and got cruciated and sent down for a year] Sally-Anne decided it would be too risky to give them to her -- it was designed to be subtle enough that no one would notice but she's not risking it, regardless. She did these socks with no runes at all, partly because she had to knit them in a hurry and partly because this way, she can STILL give her a pair of somewhat itchy socks. I have no idea whether Terry ever gets Carrow's hand-me-down unwanted clothing, but if he winds up with these socks, Sally-Anne will be very apologetic about skipping over the runes.

Early in Y5, every student got interviewed by Dolohov to assess whether they should be in Practical or Theoretical Noble Arts. He asked about their experiences with Dark Arts before. In my e-mail about Sally-Anne's interview, I said:

She might mention the Itchy Socks she made. Originally they were for Alecto -- obviously, she won't mention this. She'll say that she was making socks as gifts with runes and charms that did helpful things (keeping the pair together, softness, durability) and she started thinking about all the unhelpful things you could do with socks and after pondering this for a while, she made a pair that was jinxed with a set of runes that would make them constantly wind up at the top of your sock drawer, and when you put them on they felt fine, and then they would get itchier and itchier all day. Also a very strong durability charm so they would never wear out ever. Having made the socks, she hasn't done anything with them because it occurred to her that they might count as a Dark Object and she didn't want to get into trouble.

She will describe the magic she used to make the socks with probably a little more relish than she entirely realizes.

(She still has the socks, if Dolohov asks to see them. She keeps them in a box at the bottom of her trunk, so they don't wind up at the top of HER sock drawer.)

Denise thought Dolohov would adore the idea of the itchy socks, and said:

When she tells him about the socks, he will start laughing, stop himself and do that "*ahem* serious teacher is serious" self-control face, and tell her that if she's worried that she might get in trouble if anyone discovers them he will *happily* take them off her hands (and offer to compensate her for her time and materials, of course). Either way, he definitely wants to see them.

He will also ask her, very soberly but with a clear undercurrent of amusement, if anybody she doesn't wholly trust knows she's responsible for them, and ask her whether she would feel too nervous if they just HAPPENED to find their way into the hands of someone unsuspecting, assuming that he had satisfied himself that they couldn't be magically traced back to her in any way. He will not mention who he means. Hem. Hem.

(Yes, if the runework on them can be passed off as "oops, I was aiming for the *no*-itch rune and i just didn't do it very well!" and after taking extreme precautions to make sure there's no chance they can be traced back to Sally-Anne, he will bribe the elves to sneak them into Umbridge's sock drawer in a few months. If it would be too risky or Sally-Anne is clearly not cool with the idea, he will give them to Rod, properly disclaimed, as a Christmas present.)

(People gave Rod cursed objects all the time. He had to be very careful when opening his presents.)

Dolohov also assured Sally-Anne that the socks would not end up ANYWHERE they should not be. Obviously, Umbridge's sock drawer was absolutely positively somewhere they ought to be, so. He wasn't lying.

Had they ever been traced back to Sally-Anne, he had instructed her to blame him: she'd made them accidentally, he'd offered to dispose of them, and she had trustingly given them to her Dark Arts teacher just like a responsible student should do with an accidentally-created dark object. Dolohov was going to apologize profusely for mixing them up with another pair of black socks that just got mixed in with someone else's things in the Hogwarts laundry room. But, Umbridge never figured out it was the socks, so she just suffered endlessly with itchy ankles.

[naomikritzer]

She later gave Dolohov a watch. Here's what I wrote about that one:

Professor Dolohov is getting something really special, since he was so ... enthusiastic about those socks. She picked up a pocket watch at a wizarding thrift shop in Hogsmeade, and made some adjustments to it. First, she added a design to the cover to make it attractive, and then altered the magic that makes the watch run.

1. Three-quarters of the time, the watch will make you late. If you're trying to figure out whether you have another five minutes to get something done before you rush off somewhere, and you consult it, it will assure you that you have plenty of time. It keys to your nervousness, to make you extra late to the things you're particularly worried about.

2. One-quarter of the time, it will do the opposite. You ought to have plenty of time but the watch will say HOLY CRAP YOU'RE LATER THAN YOU THOUGHT and you'll arrive, gasping and in a panic, to find it's ten minutes early.

3. Any time you actually compare your watch to another timepiece, it will show the correct time.

There's also a subtle rune worked into the design to make you trust the watch. It's not a compulsion or anything; it mostly directs your attention to the fact that when you look at your watch and another timepiece at the same time, your watch is always RIGHT. So it's not that there's something wrong with the watch; it's you, it's ALL YOU.

She showed it to him on Monday and explained exactly what it did, then gave it to him as a 'curiosity.'

[naomikritzer]

So, despite the fact that like 2/3 of the comments here are me, I'm going to post AGAIN because I went through some e-mail threads to pull together how we plotted the big end-of-year climax for Y5: the Plot to Kill Hitler followed by the rescue of Arista Selwyn from the Department of Mysteries.

The Plot to Kill Hitler was first tossed out as a phrase and a plot idea by me, in February of Y4. (Over a year in advance.) "I think if we run a Plot to Kill Hitler, Selwyn might be a good central figure, both to show the conspiracy forming, and to kill in the aftermath. I'm definitely fine with him dying. High treason against the LP might be grounds for the execution of your entire family, and Arista has a distinct presence in the game, so if people want to go for that particular audience-gut-punch....(alternately, the grownups could get wind of it and Arista and her siblings could either be placed in fostering, or rescued by the Order and smuggled off to Moddey Dhoo.)"

Deb replied, "I like the idea that high treason against the LP could be declared to be a reason to kill the whole family, but of course if they learned of it in time and there were anyway, the Order would try to save his children. Heck, Ron would try to save Arista."

We had a fairly extensive set of discussions about exactly how the killing curse works when you've got horcruxes. In canon, Voldemort doesn't just die when the curse rebounds on him; he disintegrates, apparently, since he "disappears." We decided that temporarily, at least, he would possess Bellatrix. At that point, we were assuming that the Order would be involved, not just the kids.

We then discussed this again in some detail in January of Y5. At that point, we knew that Selwyn was going to organize a conspiracy to kill V.; he was going to try and fail to recruit Bill. We had not decided whether Selwyn would succeed or fail, or whether he'd die or be taken alive.

We knew that someone would find out that Selwyn's wife and children were going to be killed in retribution, but we didn't know who would find out or how. Harry knew that Arista had a Lo-Jac bracelet, and that with spit, hair, or blood from Arista you could use the bracelet to find her; he also knew that Ron had her old stuffed cat, and she had undoubtedly left behind spit, hair, AND blood on that cat before passing it along.

We figured the kids would tell the Order but that no one would see it in time to intervene until the kids had gone in. (Quote from the e-mail I wrote at the time: "I think we'll need to work this out closer to the time.")

I suggested that Arista and Hector were being held IN the Department of Mysteries ("perhaps there is some additional Dark Rite of Awful that could be enacted with the blood of your enemy's children?") and added: "So, they go in; things almost go to hell; the Order belatedly shows up and helps both the ISS kids and the Selwyn kids, so Harry and Draco will presumably at that point find out both about the ISS and the Order in a big emotional shocking scene near the end of the year." This was also the thread where Brook reminded everyone that the masks from earlier in the year could be used as a disguise.

February of Y5, we decided that Maghnus Derrick had been brought in as Dominic's clerk (it was almost Martha Yaxley!) and that Minerva would be part of this conspiracy. We had another go-round about what exactly happens when you AK someone with horcruxes.

March of Y5, Jenett visited Minneapolis and I wound up hanging out in a coffee shop for a few hours with Jenett, Peg, and Elise. That's where we came up with the idea that Dominic was trying to get hold of Felix Felicis for his plot.

April of Y5, we'd figured out that the assassination and resurrection would be shortly before Siz and Raz's wedding, and the rescue of Arista Selwyn and her brother would happen during the reception. From my e-mail about where we were in the planning: "Harry tracks down Ron because he found out (how?) that V. has given orders (to whom?) to kill Chloe, Arista, and Hector. The kids split, using the cat and the Arista's Lo-Jack to track her down and rescue her, almost foiled by SCARY ASS DOLOHOV who is there for some reason."

In trying to hammer out the details, Deb pulled together the first bits that would turn into Strangeweale's device: "[Bella] knows that DoM have a process that makes some sort of distilled essence of your bloodline that they'd then administer to Selwyn that would rob him of all his vigor, transferring it to Voldemort and also forcing him to tell all he knows. (So it's like Veritaserum re-enforced with a ChloeAristaHector smoothie that will completely neutralise Dominic when they make him drink it.) Bella stays while they hook Chloe up to whatever horrible magical device will sap her of her essence and makes sure they lock up Arista and Hector with the intention of processing them in turn. Then Bella goes to the wedding, leaving the process in the hands of whichever one of the Unspeakables is the expert in this arcane process."

(There were lots of caveats about all the still-missing pieces but I wanted to highlight it because that really was where we got the idea for Strangeweale's device -- trying to come up with an answer to where the kids were being held, and for what purpose.)

In trying to hammer out whether Dolohov would just let the kids go, and whether the Order should come riding in, Deb also added: "There is also a question, I know, about whether the Order crash into this scene. If that happens, I think there has to be a much higher price paid for the episode. Canonically, Sirius died as the bottom line of this confrontation between the DEs and Harry. In Alternity, the DEs do not think of themselves as being Harry's enemies, so if it is just Harry and some kids trying to save Selwyn's very young children, then we can step back from the mortal brink, I believe. But if we get the Order into the mix, we owe a significant death to put the proper weight on the engagement."

We decided to run it with just the kids, no Order, and continued to wrestle with how the kids would find out a rescue was needed. Deb came up with that piece, too: "What if that's actually really simple. What if Arista writes Ron back on one of his journal posts to her? And says HELP! MR YAXLEY IS GOING TO MURDER US IN THE DEPT OF MYSTERIES WITH THE LEAD PIPE. His last Satsuma letter (post Umbridge) can be a PM to Dominic and Arista. Then only Ron will be able to see it."

We had previously set up Strangeweale as an evil chum of Umbridge's, and I suggested, "maybe the Life Sucking Dark Arts Machinery of Doom that is going to be used on the Selwyn children is something that Strangeweale has been working on for a while, and he thinks it will create some sort of Potion of Youth."

In May, Peg asked how we were going to prevent Alice from showing up at Hogsmeade weekend so that the kids could take Order oaths, as planned. Because if posting Order Only is an option, NOT telling the Order before they skip off to the Ministry to rescue Arista is a whole lot stupider. She was totally right about this, so Alice came down with food poisoning and the kids' joining the Order was delayed until sumer.

And at that point, I think all the pieces were in place. May 28th, Dominic's assassination went off pretty much without a hitch, aside from the minor detail of the horcruxes that let Voldemort return from the dead. Followed by the raid on Mysteries to rescue Arista, which the Order had no clue about until it was too late to intervene.

I can't remember (and didn't find) the spot where we concluded that Arista had a tiny vial of Felix that her father had given her for emergencies. I think that's how we justified her being able to get her hands on her father's diary, and call for help.

[naomikritzer]

One of the weirder discarded ideas from that plot discussion: at one point I suggested that maybe the Crimson Company snatches Chloe, Arista, and Hector, and that's who the kids go after, and the Cavalry Riding Over the Hill is the Death Eaters.

There were a lot of problems with that idea, and obviously we didn't use it.

It was right around the time of the plot going down, I think, that we decided Selwyn would be taken alive (by Barty) and then tortured horribly by V. after his resurrection. He was never questioned, and we left as an unknown what exactly V. gleaned from his thoughts.

[synecdochic]

I loved that the kids escaping from Mysteries hinged on Arista's tiny vial of Felix and Dolohov's thing about not involving kids unless they've made themselves combatants.

Also, Felix Felicis is such a great get-out-of-plothole-free card (things happened that way because of the Felix!) that we then had to immediately nerf it, especially since Snape would have been capable of brewing it. I don't remember who came up with the "why Felix is a bad idea to use unless it's life or death and probably not even then" explanations -- I think I remember us going around a few rounds on that -- but I had a lot of fun taking that and distilling it into Snape's screed about why using Felix is a bad idea. It was such a perfect example of Snape's Firm Opinions on Everything.

[pegkerr]

Another idea that was tossed around and discarded about this plot was that they would also find Prince William at the Department of Mysteries, and that he would be later useful for taking down the wards. I think it was suggested that he would end up at Moddey. Deb, for one, quite disliked the ideas of royalty getting back in to have any voice in the government at the end of the game and firmly nixed the idea of William hanging out at Moddey, becoming a friend of Terry, etc. I can't remember whether that was the reason that we ended up not scooping up William at the Department of Mysteries, Year 5 but instead postponed it for Year 7 or if there was another, additional strategic reason.

[pegkerr]

This is a very good example (and thanks, Naomi, for pulling together all the bits) of how we ALL contributed pieces of the year end plots. And how they sometimes took MONTHS to work out. One thing I particularly admired about the other players was their ability to shuffle the pieces together to imagine long arc plots--Deb was particularly good at seeing the long vision (she was the one who came up with the epidemic plot) and Naomi was a veritable engine of coming up with ideas to throw at the wall as we were trying to figure out what would stick. I've always thought that my strength as a writer was more at the individual scene level rather than long term plot arcing. I came up with some crucial ideas, too, upon which strategic parts of the game was founded, but I didn't think I was as good at stringing ideas together to structure a plot as some of our other players were. Year 5 worked very well as a year end climax (all the practice we'd had by this point helped) where we worked on the plot all year and had it pretty well worked out by the climax point.

Year 1, in contrast, IIRC correctly, was a year where we pulled the year end climax out of our asses at the very last minute, whoa.

[gwendolyngrace]

So, another "thing" that helped our process was to calendar out significant dates and recurring classes and so on. We deliberately left some wiggle room--at least as much as canon does, as it's woefully inconsistent on the subject of lesson schedules!--and of course, the schedule changed from year to year in order to keep Harry's year at the forefront of whatever was going on. We started with Yahoo calendars in our Yahoo group, and then when we switched to the other mailing list, we set up a bunch of Google calendars.

The ever-awesome Jen has made a page on the wiki to give you a sampling. We're working on ideas to export the calendars*, but for now, this will provide a rough idea of when stuff was at least supposed to occur.

*I am really looking forward to saving the data with confidence, so that we can archive the calendars, unsubscribe from them, and keep the appointments from popping up on our phones! I am still getting notices that today's schedule includes Y5 Defence and History of Magic!