Planning ahead

Once you have started to get to know your character, the game setting and your writing is flowing, it is time to start thinking about what your plans are for the future.

A PBEM game can continue for several years, so if you do not plan ahead from the start, you may very well be painting yourself into a corner. Just like with us, our characters never stay the same. They have a life of their own and their lives tend to take the most unlikely directions. In what direction do you want your character to evolve?

A character, just like a real person, can change during the years. Traumatic experiences but also other, more common, experience changes the way we see the world. Do you want your character to, over time, turn into for example a bitter person fighting his inner demons? Unless you want this change to occur over night, you will have to set it up for a long time. Gradually introduce a new behavior and new emotions and give your character a reason to change in that way. It will also give you more to post about if you let these changes happen over time. Imagine a series of posts, over perhaps a year or even more, where you describe and add small parts of the character. It is a perfect opportunity for character development.

If you start thinking now about where you want your character to be in a year, you will not only be able to focus more but you will also get plenty of opportunities for posting. Are there are any special events you want your character to experience? We all go through some defining moments during our lives, occasions that forms us as individuals and that shapes us. A special event does not necessarily need to be a defining moment; it can also be more commonly experienced things like graduating, being promoted or becoming a parent. A child does not happen over night and being promoted usually requires some hard work.

So again, you need to start thinking about where you want to take your character maybe a year from now in the PBEM game.