: Re: organising complex networks I've decided to experiment with mystery novels and went for the type I most like: Miss Marple kind of tale. I set the story in a small town (about 2000 people)

@Cody1607638

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I did this with about 500 people (men, women and children) for a mystery RPG scenario build, it was a massive headache until I realised you don't have to track the individuals individually. By creating sub-groupings like "the Randell family", "Tuesday night book club", "the bank staff", and "Saturday night poker game" and then noting where they interact you can build up a small town very quickly and with a minimum of effort. Since everyone belongs to a number of groups you can track, and somewhat define, them by membership and have a small bio for the "important" characters where necessary.

A word of warning, no matter how you arrange things, I used an A3 sheet of paper and drew circles for the various groupings, the whole thing ends up resembling nothing so much as a giant mess if you can't differentiate the really important relationships. I had to colour code heavily to eventually make sense of the web I had created, even though all the individual steps in that web made sense when I was putting the links together. In the end I learned that there weren't actually that many people or groups that were really important, partly that was deliberate, largely that was due to the fact that any numerically confined group of people actually share a relatively small pool of points of interaction.

I'll be interested to see what software solutions people come up with, I had a quick look and found Draw.io which is free and should be effective. Just remember to keep your eye on what's important about how your network functions or you'll get lost in the details and you run the risk of losing sight of what you were trying to work out in the first place.

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