By Any Hook Necessary
Once upon a time, I spent a year of my life locked away in a dungeon. It was a self-imposed exile, but a necessary one. My task was vital. Each day I labored at my alchemy table, mixing exotic powders into solution flasks, pouring with steady hand and squinting eye. It was exhausting work in unsavory conditions, but I steadily progressed. My store of wonders slowly accumulated, as I transmuted base elements into the raw stuff of creation! Shards of a world were taking shape! And when it was finally time to reveal the wonder I’d wrought, I unveiled something like this.
For real though, I spent all my lunch breaks for a year casting Hirst Arts bricks for a modular dungeon. What started as dental plaster became 2″ x 2″ modular tiles. I painted them. I sealed them. I set them up for my group’s very first dungeon crawl.
My players: “Hey guys! Why don’t we just stay in town and RP this session?”
Then the bastards laughed.
My modular dungeon quickly became a piece of wargaming terrain, while the megadungeon got the wet erase treatment. It was just too much work to set it all up every Sunday, much less rearrange it if my players decided to go to Level 7 instead of backtracking to Level 3.
I tell you this tale of woe because it contains a very important truth. No matter how hard you hint at your players, no matter how many clues you give or NPC guides point the way, the decision to progress through the world always lies with the players. The freedom to navigate through a limitless 3D world is the secret magic of immersion, and you constrain it at your peril.
Question of the day then! When have your players zigged when you expected them to zag? What meticulous plans did they foil? And did you ever get to recycle your “wasted” effort into something new? Tell us your tales of quest hooks dodged and dungeons un-plundered down in the comments!
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Most of my world is made of modular pieces that I can plug in anywhere. I’ve also been known to snitch maps out of modules and box sets and plunk them down in random places. Even when I’m actually running a story arc that requires set pieces, most of the pieces are recycled from my store of encounters and dungeons.
Then you run into the thing where you’ve got a little side quest in the middle of the big, over arcing one and the group decides that saving that small tribe of goblins is way more important than stopping the incursion from the planes of hell. The military motto of adapt, improvise and overcome comes in handy at that time. Plus then you get to have the goblins white washing the rocks around the arch druids dwelling and trimming the hell out of her garden :).
Is there a sense in which this style evolves as a reaction to pic related?
It means that when the group decides to go of on a tangent, I usually have more than enough prepared to adjust to what they want to do. Like the example I gave. The group went full bore into saving the goblin tribe and searched for a way to keep them safe. One of them came up with the bright idea of putting them under the protection of the arch druid they had helped a couple weeks prior. Since she owed them a pretty hefty favor and there were only about 15 left in the tribe, she agreed.
That got them back on track for incursion and when they visited the arch druid later, to check on the goblins, they found them happily trimming and styling all the wild vegetation around the druids home. And one very frazzled arch druid. They continued to visit the whole time that particular adventuring party was running.
I like that Quest Giver is also on the list of characters for this strip. However, I’m a bit surprised that Lady Celestial has apparently been renamed to “Lad”. I don’t think it fits her.
Argh! Fixed!
Along these lines, did the mouse-over text fill you with “fear, pit, and empathy”, or “fear, pity, and empathy”?
MOTHERFUCKER
Just last session, our party’s Columbian coffee magnate needed to talk to a gunrunner for some important information. The gunrunner was very business focused though, and only wanted to talk shop. To get his foot in the door and talk to her, our Columbian hero decided to buy some guns from her, but failed the d20 roll by 17 points. He wound up buying around 3000 guns in bulk (the smallest volume the gunrunner was willing to sell) and he had to sell half the family estate to finance this. Now he has to explain to his family why exactly 3000 guns and becoming a mercenary outfit is more useful than being coffee plantation owners, and I have to discover how to integrate a newly formed columbian mercenary company into this very social heavy campaign. Good times!
Could be fun if the merc outfit was necessary for maintaining a coffee plantation. After all, it’s hard to stay in business when the local warlord is looking to expand to your property.
Just recently, in my game in the new Marvel system, I had grown tired of our low power street-level game, and unexpectedly abducted my heroes into space via hostile aliens! I had planned a multi-week space adventure of them bouncing around the cosmos before successfully returning home. On week two of said adventure, they did exceptionally well saving a shuttle craft I had expected to crash, and then browbeat some friendly aliens into giving them what they needed to make it home. They were so insistent and single-minded, that finally, at the end, I just let them go home. The aliens dropped them back on Earth, and that was the end of it.
After the session was over, they asked, as they often do, “What was supposed to have happened?”, and I answered, as I always do, “Nothing was supposed to have happened, it’s always up to you guys where the story ultimately goes.” “But…?” “But if you’d stayed with the aliens there would’ve been some political intrique and light alien pirate fighting.” “Aw man, that sounds fun.”
It’s all right, now we’re doing individual “solo” sessions to level up everyone, where one player runs their normal character, and everyone else plays special supporting characters for the week, and so far everyone is having much more of a blast doing that than they were being in space. And I’m still using some of the ideas I had for the space adventure in them, naturally.
There is a sense in which “what I am supposed to be doing” is always less interesting than “what I choose to do.”
If you’re running Shadowrun, be sure to double-check whether your players have SINs before starting play. On one hand, that kind of thing can add extra complications for the player. On the other hand, if your corporate goons try to pull something on an actual citizen, they can call the cops.
This gives me the same vibe as something that happened in a Cyberpunk game I am a part of. Where we were helping our groups bounty hunter with a target, and were trying to figure out how to get information on the target from government.
We were in the middle of planning how we could cause a distraction, while the hacker hacked into the system, when I had a realization and suggested that we simply went up to the clerk and asked for access. Seeing that our bounty hunter had an official license and that there was an official warrant on the guy. And it worked. Just like that.
I think there is something vaguely unsettling about just taking the completely sane, rational and legal solution to a problem, as a TTRPG player.
Happened in my Firefly game. The captain simply called the nearest Alliance cruiser for help with the space pirates. Goodbye boarding action adventure!
It can be fun to Uno-Reverse this on your players. They’re travelling on a road through the woods? Maybe some goblins built a peaceful village in the middle of the road. See how they deal with that.
Heh. I think you’ve just invented the notion of the side quest. 😀
“When have your players zigged when you expected them to zag?”
I don’t have expectations, so… probably all the time? But that’s why I don;t plan, many years of being on the Player side of the screen and seeing us dash the GM’s plans so when I started GMing I went immediately into “seat-of-pants” GMing. I have “sweeping ideas” but i rarely put anything into concrete as i know how Players are.
“What meticulous plans did they foil?”
See above “lack of planning”, so no plans to foil.
“And did you ever get to recycle your “wasted” effort into something new?”
Probably the biggest reason i never was a “planning GM” is I hate doing unnecessary work, so i never put int he work, it can’t be wasted. I just keep very, very good notes while I play so I/we* can flesh in the world as we go.
.* Sometimes I’ll tell the Players they can ‘design’ the area their PCs came from if they’re foreign, and sometimes I take their “we’re just goofing around” idle banter and run with it.
Do you ever design locations? Or do you simply make up the contents of the enemy fortress as you go along?
Kinda both, while I am a big fan of “grab castle plans from the premades or online and alter as I go” (if alterations are necessary), I very often just start sketching in locations as I need them and often roll with minimalist plans until things get fleshed out through the course of play.
Luckily I’m either “just smart/knowledgeable enough to make things plausible on a first try” or “my Players are very forgiving and never mention inconsistencies or problems they spot”. I not sure which, but it’s never been a problem so I don’t really worry about it.
(I do have one Player – my oldest friend and longest group mate – who claims they’re frustrated by my ‘seat-of-the-pants” approach, only because so many other GMs they’ve had pull Quantum Ogres, but since I’ve never done that, he tolerates my “shenanigans”.)
I am a bit of a chaos agent* as both a Player and a GM, so I have a lot of shenanigans.
.
.* In that I have a tendency to do things the GM or my fellow Players do not expect, not that I literally try to make everything weird, chaotic, or broken, I just come up with options or take actions that, to me are perfectly logical, but seem to come out of left field to everyone else. Except the people who really know me, they’ve gotten used to me finding a fifth option and upsetting carefully planned out apple carts. I work really well with GMs who are flexible and can adapt their plans rapidly, “by the premade” GMs, not so much. And I work great with self-motivating Players, but have to struggle a little with “just give us the rails man” Players. It’s why I’m a fantastic //massive// LARP GM, “pretty good” sit down GM, but really struggle with very small LARPs or “beer and pretzel D&D” type Players in sitdown.
I worked and planned and retrofitted two different Eberron modules into a long-running campaign in order to adapt it to two specific players.
Shaker of Salt,
They zigged. It was never played.
Years later, however, it became the basis for Quest for the Lost Shaker of Salt and seven other adventures for other campaigns.
Never throw away your notes! 😀
Its the norm, afaik. The PCs were going to hunt a dragon and decided they needed a proper deep sea fishing net. Not a bad plan but they were three hundred miles inland and teleportstion wasn’t a thing. Cue a four month side quest that also revealed the history of one PCs birth parents.
My players will now indicate plots they want to defer by saying “ok, but first we need a net…..”
I now have three tiers of character incitements:
Plot hint: these are where the PCs are rationally able to ignore something because another thing can look more important to a rational being.
Plot hook: these are clearly intended to capture player intention. Often deployed in sets, to snag player interest from different directions. “My brother hasn’t written in a while, would you visit his fishing village on the coast near Wet River?” “No healing potions. Would you get willowbark from the druids? Follow Wet River.”
Plot harpoon: requires active and willful dodging to avoid and they get sharper each time.
“A wave of brackish water twenty feet tall came up Wet River! We rescued one person who said they lived near the ocean where the wave there was as wide as the horizon! ”
“Your house is destroyed! the wizard’s library is flooded! Everyone’s favorite puppy drowned!”
“The cleric and the warlock are having grand mal seizures! The painful spasms of their limbs spell out words in the dirt!”
“How long can a little beach vacation take?”
MFW: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/quest-support
My main campaign is a single world with the same premise and opening for each group I’ve run it with. This meant that I could use it over and over again to refine its output each time it was run. That, combined with 4 starting hooks that ran in all 4 cardinal directions, meant that no matter where they ran, the players would find the plot. Part of this was the limitation of the geography which had a thin and long continent that bottlenecked players to eventually going North or South no matter what. So they started with 4 hooks, then got driven in one of two directions after the first arc depending on the hook they took. The best way to make a smooth campaign? Make 2! Apparently. Well that worked for me.
I remember reading a great article by Chris Perkins called “The Covenant of the Arcs.” You can still find it in the old “The Dungeon Master Experience” column in PDF format. He wound up doing something similar with three different plot arcs, allowing them to unfold against one another. Good stuff.
They had arrived at a new city, where the villain had a mcguffin the needed. My plan was for them to scout out the city, after which they would very quickly be introduced to a resistance movement, who would promise to help them deal with the villain. The plan was for them to spend some time helping the resistance work against the villain, and gain a couple of levels, before they confronted him.
Instead, they split up into two groups as soon as they arrived into town. One to spy on the villain and the other to spy on the lieutenant. Which was fine, except the ones that decided to spy on the villain spontaneously decided to try and steal the mcguffin right then and there. Even when the only thing they knew about the villain was that they were incredibly dangerous, even if the entire party was together. Looney Tunes shenanigans ensued, including, but not limited to, the villain spending several rounds trapped in a water elemental, a chase scene through hell, a brief timeout as both side got their breath and several wine bottles being thrown around by various people.
And the two players succeeded. Instantly completing the goal that was the reason they came to the city in the first place. Rendering pretty much every sidequest there obsolete. And since the villain was still alive, it instantly escalated his plans straight into emergency mode. So my plan of them helping out the resistance for some time, and learning about the city and its powerplayers, was instead replaced by them helping the resistance get the hell out of dodge, as they went from a minor nuisance to “Annihilate Completely”.
I have since learnt not to plan too far ahead. At least not in detail, broad strokes is fine.
I think maybe “plan just enough to cover the next session” is a good goal, lol.
Just realized, with the exception of the wedding, it’s been a loooong time since we’ve seen the cousins together:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-outer-planes-part-4-family-reunion
‘Tis the nature of Handbook World. Storytelling in single-panel format means we only get brief windows into unfolding plots. Naturally they had long conversations after the demonic wedding arc, but that all happened off-screen.
So, seems like my players know exactly how I expect them to approach a situation, and then always choose the opposite. Most recent and egregious example is choosing to treat with the Lich Queen and her Zombie Hordes, but immediately attack and destroy an outpost for the potential NPC allies that I’d put on top of their latest quest marker.
Oof. It’s going to be tough to come back from that in terms of faction relationships. Maybe the next group of allies talks about how one of their outposts was “sacked by those damned undead.”