Astronomical Event
Well here’s a first. Laurel is just as stoked as Thief about today’s eclipse, so they banded together to bring you a 2nd panel. I feel a little sorry for Thief though. Trying to find one pair of eclipse glasses is hard enough today, let alone three! 
Any dang way, what say we talk a bit about time-sensitive questing? When handled properly they can be absolutely amazing. After all, you want your players in unbearable suspense. You want them on the edge of their seats as events unfold towards an exciting conclusion. But ask yourself: Do your players want that?
Pacing is the hardest thing to learn. New GMs often stutter their way through overplanned session notes or belabor rules lookups to the point of existential ennui. Now that I’ve got a few years worth of campaigning under my belt though, I find myself going too far in the opposite direction. I’ll wind up chasing that sense of breakneck speed you get from action movies or page-turner type novels. And even though those sessions can be exciting, they can also be exhausting. Even worse, they’re also just a little bit selfish.
Players like to be storytellers too. They want moments to let their characters breathe and grow. You know all those dots they put into Contacts? All those tool proficiencies they picked up? That whole backstory they invented about a secret college of assassins? Well that stuff will never get its moment in the sun if every quest must be done right now. Sure you want your players to have a sense of urgency, but maybe not every single session. I mean, if the kingdom is in imminent jeopardy all the freaking time, you wind up being exhausting rather than exhilarating.
Of course, you don’t want the world to feel stagnate either. Case in point, my megadungeon party discovered a dragon’s lair about a year ago. They heard it snoring, decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and summarily ignored the beast. They kept on ignoring it for months, passing those chambers by in favor of exploring deeper in the dungeon. Well you recall that I like to include an anti-party in my games, right? A couple of weeks back my players finally plucked up their courage and decided to confront this dragon. They readied their weapons, kicked open the door, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when they found that it was a goodly gold dragon. It turned out to be a quest giver, and a talkative one at that. The big guy went on and on about this legendary diamond tipped lance in his hoard. How it was forged by the gods. How it was the only thing that could defeat his ancient foe. How he needed someone strong in arms and valiant of spirit to wield it.
“Good thing those guys from the Friendly Rivals were here last week. I have no doubt they’re putting my Diamond Lance to good use. I’m afraid I have no further use for adventurers at present. Thanks for stopping by though.”
My cavalier was beyond outraged. Weirdly though, I think that’s a good thing. Just as it’s possible to have too much urgency in a campaign, it’s equally possible to have too little. Finding that balance is the trick.
So what do the rest of you guys think? Do you enjoy driving the party forward with time-sensitive quests, or do you prefer a more relaxed campaign structure? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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UPDATE: The Handook’s latest con appearance is this weekend!
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I admit I have a bad habit of moving things along at the speed of plot. The players have a time sensitive issue that must be solved, and it happens to just be about to go down as soon as the players arrive. If the players dawdle around too long I fudge the other way and have them miss it beginning. It’s worked ok so far, but once they catch onto it I’m afraid it will rob the game of some verisimilitude.
As to player backstory having a chance to come up, that one actually isn’t much of a problem for me. I have a decent ability to weave different stories and details together, so that secret college of assassins in the Rogue’s background just so happens to be hired by the BBEG in part because of their knowledge of the PCs tactics, but one of the rogue’s old contacts isn’t happy about this development and wants to help the PCs quiet like. Stuff like that. The main downside is the world ends up feeling a bit contrived, like when it turns out the evil duke who burned down Alice’s village when she was a child also ended up marrying Bob’s older sister and has hired Charlie’s old rival to be his court magician. I’m still working on contriving things together without it feeling too contrived.
Weaving in the backstory is always a challenge for me. Not because it’s difficult to invent a quest hook, but because you want players to have input on their story all the way through. Implementing that without spoiling plot points is tough.
The best way I’ve seen of weaving backstory into a game was my tiefling psion who’s family ran a cult (which he eventually ran away from). Later on, the party is in Sigil when I recognize a woman from the cult who likely doesn’t know i left. turns out she was helping with current bad guy do his evil thing as a side job. so i lied my face off trying to convince her to help us stop him which eventually she did. she came back later after learning i left to try to convince me to rejoin the cult (by kidnapping me in the middle of a fight) which backfired and now I’m using her as my first attempt to break the bond between cultist and demonic master so i can eventually save my family (whether they want to be saved or not…)
Yes! This is exactly what I’m talking about. You gave your GM a backstory, he gave you a hook. Now the two of you get to go back and forth with the storyline, and both of you get input on how it turns out. This is what I mean when I say, “Players like to be storytellers too.”
Yup, I’m in a 40k campaign where my character is an Adepta Soriritas (holy warrior nun with a gun, for the uninitiated!). But she’s always been quite two-faced, never letting anyone see her real face, lying and manipulating most problems away. She’s a “the power behind the throne” sort of character, where one of the other PCs is the leader of our “acolyte cell”, but in the end everyone really does what she’s manipulated them into doing anyway. Except if anything ever goes wrong, that guy will be taking the blame for it as our “leader”. Stuff like that.
It gets to the point where she doesn’t really know herself anymore what her “real” face is.
To make matters worse, she ended up in the Sisterhood when she was rescued from a Chaos cult (worshipers of dark gods), where she was the center point of some ritual. She and her parents belonged to a bored noble class, and she had no idea if she was in that ritual willingly, or unwillingly with her parents sort of forcing her. Her mind was fussy on it, her memory from before a big hole.
So one day, she finds out her mother is back in the hive (massive, multi-layered city) along with her little sister, and goes check up on them. The mother seems to be reformed, living in an abbey, trying to atone, and her sister idolizes her new path as an Adepta Sororitas and wants to follow in her footsteps. Other characters warn her not to trust her mother too much, but she ignores it and all seems well. It helps her grow closer to her (new) faith, and become a better Sororitas.
Then one day, in a solo session, some stuff transpires, the sister is fake-kidnapped, my character goes to rescue her, things happen, and then it’s revealed the mother really isn’t reformed at all, she’s corrupted the entire abbey, and the sister is a fake memory that the mother (who is a Psyker, the “mages” of the setting, drawing on the imaterium, the realm of demons, for their powers) implanted in her and the “sister’s” minds. Apparently my character was to be the champion of this cult, commune with a daemon prince and lead the pleasure cult to glory, but the ritual was interrupted; however, all that’s needed to finish it is for my character to give in and offer herself to Slaanesh by stabbing herself with a knife (a symbolic gesture). Some back-and-forth happens, emotional moments, hair pulling as my character’s inner psyche doesn’t know what to feel anymore. Finally deciding that giving in means being a family again (and deciding she doesn’t care if the “sister” is fake, she’d rather have one), she stabs herself and goes down.
GM and me look at each other for a few minutes in stunned silence. “Well… I didn’t expect that,” he says. “I’ll need some time to figure out where this goes from here!”
So now she’s secretly a Slaaneshi cultist again, has a mark of Slaanesh on the inside of her cheek where a demon tongue-kiss lashed her (Slaanesh is a pleasure god, but there’s a lot of lashes and blood everywhere, too), and is trying to slowly corrupt the rest of the party away from the righteous service of the God-Emperor, and into the good life of hedonism, pleasure, and demonic rites. Good times.
And it all came from just writing “Yup, neither I, nor my character, have any idea what happened there that night.” in my background story.
(Personal moments in our campaigns tend to be a mixture of some short “daily life” RP moments during sessions, and more fleshed out solo-sessions that tend to be run as play-by-post or some other virtual medium, between full sessions.)
Reading this while waiting for the eclipse to begin! I generally only introduced timed elements, or at least the consequences of them, if the players spend time screwing around and taking detours.
So it’s sort of an accelerator / handbrake depending on what the PCs are doing? That seems like a solid paradigm.
I have wanted to make a twenty-four-hours sort of mini campaign where there is an active background event that is altering the environment more with each session.
Guess I could make a mini space campaign now where a huge, heavily damaged star ship is slowly drifting towards a star and the party has to fight through pirates and different ship systems to get it back up and running again before it is pulled in and burned up…
You mean like the show 24? Jack Bauer and such? Well that sounds fun. Would you actually keep an egg timer out? I know that something called Fourthcore worked on that principle:
http://dreadgazebo.net/revenge-of-the-iron-lich-one-year-later/
No it would be more like a “today’s session is representative of actions in the first hour” sort of thing. An egg timer or “you have 14,400 turns left” would be too much for me to keep track of, and probably not as much fun for my group. I want them to be in suspense, but not upset at me or eachother for taking too long…
I do have one campaign that is sort of like that, in that it has a background political side that can change over time, and would impact the game.
So how would you plan for a 24-hour game then? Extremely detailed timetables of events that get reworked whenever the PCs affect them?
I think like the show would be best.
24-1hr sessions.
i could use the egg timer to simulate the urgency of the situation. “If you take more than 6 min on your turn then you skip it”, but there are also out-of-combat situations that you would have to decide on how much time was taken, like opening a door that is jammed, or making rolls to cross a zero-g storage where containers broke free of restraints in a collision, etc…
One thing is for sure, taking a twenty or a ten would be a much bigger deal.
Meant longer than 6 seconds, but maybe 12. Not sure.
Well hey, if we ever manage to organize a Handbook Con on Roll-20 I’d be happy to sign up for this one. It sounds like an intriguing premise.
I have seen a very well put together adventure where an evil cult is performing a ritual. The players start by entering town and hearing one of the cultists calling out in the town square like a crier, preaching of his church and god. The pcs will notice more, and if they’re like mine, they’ll mostly ignore the cultist thinking him some backdrop to set up the town as some religious place or theocracy. But as they enter the inn they are forcibly stopped by a small crowd gathering outside, blocking their way. By this time the pcs, of they didn’t bother before, will hear the new cultist preaching. The town is pretty split, and the pcs will inevitably be approached as “impartial outsiders” to help, as this is a low-level adventure.
There are about 12 or so different things the pcs can do to uncover the wicked plot, and each one takes a number of hours. Questioning the barkeep takes half an hour, investigating the church takes 1d3 hours, tailing a cultist takes the rest of your day, etc. The pcs will quickly learn that tonight is the night of an eclipse (or another important celestial event that fits your world). The eclipse will happen approx 12 or so hours from when they arrive, and so tracking time is important and the pcs should learn what time the eclipse will come, and be kept up to date on how long that is. Eventually, the pcs will find the cultists hide out, a small run-down shack on the edge of town. Underneath is a small series of chambers, and under that is a large altar room. The pcs may arrive sooner than the ritual, in which case there are a small handful of cultists and a very wel hidden trapdoor.
If they arrive later, whem it’s starting, they will notice many cultists goning in but none emerging, much too many to fit (giving them a suitible bonus to find the trap door). There are a series of puzzle/combat encounters that could be circumvented by clever pcs (dressing like cultists skips combat, but now you have social encounters or the ruse is up). The altar room has several people tied to each of the four main posts. Each post has three people and they are being ceremonially killed one at a time, clockwise around each post and counter clockwise around the room. When the pcs come in, it is up to the dm how many people, if any, have alreafy been killed depending on the timeline. If the last person is killed, the ritual is complete, and any remaining cultist becomes possesed (by laying a demonic template over them or just increasing stats/spells appropriately) and attempt to take the town over. If the pcs win they will be rewarded by whoever tipped them off that the cultists may be kidnapping the homeless and wanderers in town, and if they lose then there is now great story and quest fuel in this town.
One of my favorite time sensitive adventures.
That sounds like a blast to play. 🙂
Your post made me realize an important point: there’s a world of difference between session-level and campaign-level planning. Individually, I don’t think that pulse-pounding sessions are ever a bad thing. But if you’re running game after game without downtime or a chance to explore at leisure, then your players might wind up exhausted. I guess what I’m arguing for here is a sense of dynamics, with rises and falls in action, along with suitable moments for the players to insert their own narrative ideas into the game world.
I fine one of the hardest things about writing prewritten adventures is the odd relationship I have with my target audience. I need to write enough that everything is clear, and anyone can pick it up and have an adventure. But I also need to purposefully leave certain parts blank, to be completed later by people other than me in an excersice of unscripted theater. At the same time, I still need to pick up after those unscripted moments in sucha way that can make sense, meaning I literally must anticipate how a stranger might react. Need less to say, a strange way to write.
I have found that writing what is at the disposal of the GM, then how those areas/items/encounters connect, and then just… Stopping. That usually works best. After all, isn’t that what you really need when you buy an adventure? A tactical fold-out map, some monster stats, sugguested treasure, and a generic enough town to be dropped into any campaign yet with interesting enough npcs that the players will even care. Easy enough. 🙂
I like to think of it as “leaving space” for the next author. You wind up building in sign posts telling them where to build, saying “add your motivation here” or “expand on your relationship with this NPC here.” That way the next guy down the chain can flex his creative muscles without disrupting what’s come before.
The other technique I’ve seen involves “deputizing” PCs into the service of the story. Think of all those campaign-specific traits from the Paizo APs that tie player characters to story:
http://archivesofnethys.com/Traits.aspx?Type=Campaign
Basically, these guarantee that players will be motivated to follow the story line, and even provide them minor mechanical rewards for doing so.
I like your Diamond Lance story. The party got what was deserved, compensation for their temerity. If you’re not dancing on the edge of your last hit point, you’re not on an Adventure!
Generally speaking, the DMs I’ve been able to play under have paced things nicely enough that we didn’t feel like we were lagging or speeding when viewing it from the outside. However…a significant portion of my adventuring has been done via Digichat or other D&D chat rooms, if anyone remembers those sites in days of yore. Time flux was absolutely rampant then. “Okay, everyone in the Ice Cellar room is actually a week in the past, and Jim and Becky and Stu are wrapping up their Q&A with the barkeep from last night, and right now DM Jeff is running a scene for levels 3 to 5, who wants in?” And all the addies that weren’t one-offs happened exactly when you could collect at least N-1 players in the initial scene.
Oh man… I am feeling the time flux BAD here lately. Since all the dudes in my megadungeon game have two PCs (but have to choose which to play in any given session), we’ll sometimes run into situations where the three players who showed up last time are on level 13 while the three players who showed up this time want to solve some mystery on level 11. At one point we had three active groups in the dungeon, and I could hear the thunderous voice of GYGAX shouting at me from the past:
“YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”
On a slightly different note my party almost failed the campaign because all but one member of the party was blinded permanently and apparently greater restoration doesn’t fix that… only lesser… which the cleric didn’t bother to prepare, and having just recently finished a long rest and having ~12 hours to stop the evil ritual… the DM let the cleric spend an hour to swap out a spell for lesser restoration rather than the party giving up and going home
5e, right? I’m looking at older versions of D&D, and most of them seem to say something like, “This spell functions like lesser restoration, except that it also etc. etc.” I wonder why they didn’t adopt that method in 5e?
Anywho, good on your GM for allowing the switch. Divine intervention is tradition!
I’ve tread on both sides of this dilemma. As with most things on Ye Olde’ Tabletop, a combination of both offers the best results in my opinion.
I’m currently running a Pathfinder campaign that straight-up has a calendar which I keep filled out with snippets of what happened each day. The group is starting their own guild-house, and I wanted the missions to have some sense of urgency.
Even just getting started they had to prioritize between two missions. Either they could go save an unfortunate family’s farm from goblins, or they could delve into a newly uncovered dungeon exposed by an earthquake. The untouched dungeon definitely had more potential for loot, but it was an open contract and there was no telling what destruction would be wrought by the goblins if left to their own devices for too long.
Ultimately they went to clear out the goblins, which netted them a little gold and a contact for keeping the new guildhouse/tavern stocked with discounted food. Once they really get rolling though, I plan for there to be a large list of potential jobs, of which some will be more time sensitive than others.
Always give the players room to breathe, but never too much room 😛
Sounds like you run a well-paced game. I’m beginning to think that what we’re really talking about here is dynamics. You want a contrast between “the clock is ticking” and “I’ve got time to enjoy the fruits of my labor.” Your message board idea is especially good for this sort of thing since it allows the players to decide for themselves when the clock starts ticking.
I say mix it up. It’s a bit unrealistic to run every adventure as a race against some hidden clock, but it’s just as unrealistic to never need to hurry. It depends upon who or what is driving the adventure. In one of my gaming groups, we have fought Elder Evils that needed to be defeated (or re-sealed) before a specific deadline or the world would end, and it provided a much-needed sense of urgency which prevented the much-reviled “15-minue adventuring day”. Our current adventure at that table, however, is an attempt to further destabilize the power structure of a layer of the Abyss, which is largely self-directed and has no hard deadline.
Sonds like we’re on the same page here (see my other comments on “dynamics”).
You’ve got my curious though. How does one “destabilize the power structure” of the realm of chaotic evil? Have they been mobilized into an army or something?
Most James Bond adventures are time-sensitive. o that is always in the back of the minds of the players. 007 (or the players) is send in to investigate some rather minor mishap, and then, through skill, further mishap or just blind luck, stumbles upon the nefarious “take over the world” plot of the Big Bad, which will come to fruitation within the next (insert any time less then a week here). So now they have to hustle…
To ease the burden of the GM in this there are very good rules for chases and such, which give both the correct feel, and give players options to do their stuff. So in that setting time-sensitive adventures is more or less de-rigeur.
In genral I think rpg’s in more modern surroundings like Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, lots of SF games and such, usually also have that same urgency. But in most fantasy settings I played it was less of a problem. That might have to do with the way players and GM;s see the pace of information gathering and reaction. In a modern setting it is percieved as to be far easier to react to news then in a pre-industrial seting, even with the possibility of magical near instantanious message traffic, hence more time-sensitive adventures.
our whole group pretty much hated Carrion Crown for the tight schedule on top of all the ability damage. We dropped the campaign after Lepidstadt.
I’ve heard…. Less than flattering things about that adventure path. I haven’t played it myself, but I’m perplexed about its existence. I mean, Crimson Throne was also an urban campaign. Why do another one right away?
it wasn‘t much urban, no bloddy time to linger in town. Hardly enough time to collect loot and dump it in the temple to get the ability damage fixed before rushing out to solve the puzzle. my char got killed by Mummy Rot because he got poisoned before the first save for that.
Have I mentioned the segment in the old AD&D CRPG “Champions of Krynn” in which you can actually rest for eight hours in the middle of a chase scene at the end of the first dungeon and it won’t change the outcome?
Sometimes the “why not both?” method isn’t the best solution, lol.