The “A” Plot
We’ve come so far, and we’re so close to the end! I’m sad to say, however, that my megadungeon campaign has officially stalled. Our last session was in February, and I remain uncertain when academia will relinquish the necessary brain space for me to finish telling the tale. I contend, however, that this is not entirely my fault.
For that past three session, my group of ne’er-do-well heroes have chased every possible lead EXCEPT the dungeon. They’ve negotiated with foreign dignitaries, helped a medusa recover religious relics, aided a witch in un-cursing a shoplifter, and once again threatened to give up the adventuring life in favor of raising magical ducks. Meanwhile, the only remaining passage through Level 18 of Dragon’s Delve remains un-explored.
I’ve had the encounter in the next room prepared for over a year now. >:[
But then again, this is all par for the course with players. Quick asides become detours, minor characters take center stage, and vague foreshadowing goes straight to the top of the party’s must-be-investigated-immediately itinerary. And when you’re running an exploration game like mine, the central hook of “get to the bottom of the dungeon” is easily put on the back burner.
I suspect it’s on me as the GM to allow my players their freedom. After all, what the party decides to do is the story, not the contents of a preconstructed dungeon. Wandering about in the wilderness is a grand tradition in quest narratives, and that includes side quests.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we trade tales of B-Plots superseding A-Plots? Did your party go mushroom picking rather than fight the dragon? Perhaps their side-hustle in salt mining became the cornerstone of your campaign? Or maybe a party member needs to be elected to town council before anyone can free the imprisoned moon goddess? Whatever your derailment, let’s hear all about it down in the comments!
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*scratches head* A session of mine got sidetracked once because the party had gone to an area of Port Blacksand that had many magnificent fleas. My players were having a riveting discussion as to whether it’d be better to take their clothes off or keep them on when they took a bath to het rid of the little pests. Does that count?
As to today’s page: Awww! Good luck and much happiness to both of them.
Just got to the part of the “Dungeons & Daddies” podcast where Beth May is like, “This is a long and boring argument. Let’s do adventure.”
I wish more players had that instinct, lol.
Because of the way the Gold Box games are structured it’s possible to wander away from a chase scene in the first dungeon of Champions of Krynn, do a bunch of stuff, and then mosey on back and resume the chase
I imagine the somatic components to that spell involve shaping your hands into a rough short of T, while the vocal components include the phrase, “Timeout!”
Had a couple in a nWoD campaign. One involved one of the characters becoming a pro wrestler. The other involved a rat infestation and the whole party getting caught up researching curses, vermin spirits and banishing rituals involving mass quantities of raw meat, rather than checking on the strange smell emenating from our roommate’s bedroom (he OD’d a few weeks previously and was starting to decay, which is why the rats were swarming the place).
Nice. How did they finally realize they’d flubbed their “notice the obvious” check?
We did our stupid ritual, decided to go out to celebrate, went to the roommate’s room to ask if he wanted to come with, he didn’t answer but the door was unlocked, went inside and saw a decaying corpse. Then panicked.
So my players do this to themselves, twice now they’ve been distracted from the main plot by trying to set up two separate sets of NPCs on dates.
AND IT’S WORKED. I’ve fallen into the trap and made these romances wholesome and sweet as heck just because they expect some wholesomeness in the rather heavy campaign we’re running.
They take immence pleasure in this matchmaking stuff. I can only sit there and cackle away like some demented witch. It’s actually very fun.
Did that biz with Shalalau…
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Shalelu_Andosana
…and my half-orc barbarian. The whole party was peering in through the window at their lunch date, desperately trying to ward my guy against awkward small talk.
It’s not high adventure, but it IS good times.
Is the comic going to officially end? 😮
And I see the other marriages are underway as well – Goldie and Mr. Stabby, Druid and Arcane Archer, and… Either Warlock and Ninja or DH and Necromancer?
Warlock and Ninja, considering the tags. Though Warlock is such a himbo he might not fully understand what they’re doing.
Sadly, Ninja’s head got lopped off by the word bubble. He’s totally there though!
One group spent a month of real time gaming within a mile of the dungeon crawl I had set up for them. They even had it on a map, so they didn’t have the excuse they didn’t know it was there. They decided they needed to thoroughly investigate the little village I had there for them to restock in. I had to scramble to flesh out the characters and populate all the buildings. It took me having an undead incursion from the dungeon kill off several of the NPCs in the village to actually get them in the dungeon.
I’ve got massive amounts of hours in Skyrim and Fallout 4 (and the previous games in the series) and have finished the main quests a handful of times. My favorite type of mods add questy content and let me chose not to be the “hero” so I’m not constant bombarded with NPCs reminding me that I’m the savior of the realm.
Going to miss this group of misfits. It’s been an amazing ride.
> It took me having an undead incursion from the dungeon kill off several of the NPCs in the village to actually get them in the dungeon.
This is a good point. The dungeon is allowed to reach out beyond its confines. I’ve used that trick before myself. It’s just that my guys have reached the “this level has been undisturbed for centuries” part of the dungeon. Hard to justify random monsters coming out to threaten their comfortable lives.
You know what though? That’s a weak excuse. It’s my dungeon, gods dammit! It can do whatever I want!
All it takes is something in Level 18 to think “hey, I haven’t heard the iron golem on level 17 stomping about in a while. Or the cockatrice, now that I think about it. I wonder what the little critters got up to?”
So no crap, there we were, out in the wilderness fighting electrically-charged displacer beasts. We’d been led there by a local guide, who turned and headed back to the village a bit before we fight the monsters. After defeating them, we head partway back to town before camping for the night.
The next morning we enter town victorious, only to be asked by the mayor where the guide is.
Oh.
We promptly turn around to go find him. Eventually we discover him, apparently mauled to death bu the displacers before we encountered them. We camp for the night (discovering an entrance to the underdark) and head back to the village the next day to report, only to discover a trader had passed through the town while we were gone, leaving a type of magical corruption in its wake.
Our DM later told us he didn’t anticipate us spending a day looking for the lost guide, but also decided not to postpone his next adventure hook, leaving us scrambling to catch up to a trader who had commandeered all the available horses (as wasn’t afraid to ride them to death) to escape us.
On the one hand, fair. Time doesn’t stop because the PCs are off chasing a subquest.
On the other hand, the DM gave us zero hints that the main quest would be found if we stayed in town.
Ah, well.
Unable to catch this source of corruption before it passed into the neighboring jurisdiction (ruled by someone who didn’t like our current employer), we were instructed by our patron to return to the local town to investigate the magical corruption.
Well hey, it’s the mayor who asked you to go find the guide. The DM brought this upon himself! (And that’s a feeling I know all too well.)
I once had the opposite reaction from the other players. We were nearing the end, the enemy army was 6 days away from the city. So I wanted those 6 days to pursue *all* the subplots just in case any one of them hid a key to a secret ending… But the other players decided to focus on triggering the ending ASAP. Dammit ! Being promised divinity probably gave them motivation.
Did you ever find out whether a side quests would have yielded TRUE ENDING + BONUS DLC WEAPON?
Bet it’s Elvis Parsley up there before the ceremonies. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the great plane of Nevada, I now pronounce you we’d.”
*weed.
*WED! FRACKING SAKE I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU WED!
And here I thought you were making a plant pun. That’s is Elvis’s thing.
This literally just happened in a Rise of the Runelords play-by-post I’m part of
CW: abuse, spoilers for Rise of the Runelords.
We’ve been getting to know the quaint little town of Sandpoint and investigating the circumstances behind the goblin attack at the Swallowtail Festival, as the adventure path sets, but one of our players managed to add a whole spontaneous side-story about her mother becoming increasingly abusive as she blossomed into a hero more and more and inadvertently began pushing her mom’s PTSD buttons.
Naturally, our PCs tried to intervene, with such intriguing roleplaying moments as my wizard having an epic verbal standoff with the mom in the market street where she let her know that all her sniping and cruel words didn’t scare her like they did the locals, and our alchemist concocting a blackmail scheme to get in writing that she wanted to use brain moss to essentially lobotomize her daughter as a way of removing her magic (she’s a bloodrager), with the intention of not actually giving her said moss but using the signed contract as proof of her malicious and increasingly unhinged intent. This all culminated in a confrontation at the Rusty Dragon, after our bloodrager had just suffered a double whammy of trauma from having her familiar nearly killed by the arc villain Tsuto Kaijitsu (which she avenged by killing him) and discovering that her dead childhood friend Nualia Tobyn was not only alive but was in fact the mastermind behind the goblin attack and was preparing for a new one. We all stood up for her and defied her mom’s venomous words, and then when she finally spoke up to meekly tell her mom she was making a bad situation worse, the mom finally snapped and clawed our bloodrager across the face (she and her mom are both catfolk)! We sprung into action to protect our friend, and she got knocked out, and now the whole town knows how unstable and cruel she’d become (her husband, our bloodrager’s dad, had been murdered by a local serial killer, and before that her brother’d tried his hand at adventuring and got himself killed, leaving her incredibly bitter and resentful of adventurers and magic).
I hasten to add that the bloodrager’s player was writing all her mom’s dialogue, rather than the GM, so everything was above board in terms of consent and stuff. The GM barely had to do anything with this sequence, it was mostly just us, the players, acting off each other to create what turned into a real bonding moment for the party and some real juicy roleplaying.
Yeesh! All that before the inciting incident? Good on ya for commitment to RP! Wizard would be proud.
More “the inciting incident was happening alongside all this,” but yeah!
I once had a paid DMing gig –we had the space for 5 hours. The players spent the first 4.5 hours in the village where the “you meet in a tavern” introduction was supposed to occur, buying gear, performing a concert in the tavern, shopping in the markets– basically doing anything and everything EXCEPT following the fairly explicit clues to the 5-room dungeon I’d specially prepared for the evening. Still, everyone insisted that they had a fantastic time gaming, so I guess Mission Accomplished (?)
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/918/810/a22.jpg
“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” truer words were never spoken, except when you’re the one asking “are we there yet ? are we there YET ??” 😉
I can’t help but wonder if your ‘easily sidetracked’ players read this and know you’re prompting them to go into the next part to finally reach the destination but are actively resisting to make the trip last longer ? I think I would 😉
Methinks they know exactly what they’re doing.
I was one in a group doing the D&D adventure City of the Spider Queen.
After a few sessions, we have cleaned this Drow outpost a few steps into the Underdark. Nice place. Market on one side, barracks on another, and a little off both a temple to Lloth, and a mage tower. Then the party’s wizard decided he wanted to settle in the now-emptied mage tower.
The other adventurers were also milling around. The whole adventure bogged down.
Deep below, this albino Drow was busy building an army of undead, aiming at conquering everything she can. Oh, well, I guess another party of adventurers went past us and saved both the Underdark and the surface world.
Would an undead albino drow simply be a wight? :3
Oh, she was not an undead herself. Yet. But she did had an interesting collection. Ever met a vampire drider? How do you stack it?
I later DMed the whole adventure with another group of friends and discovered all I missed the first time. We had fun.
During one of my early forays into DMing, my players decided that they wanted to use their quest rewards to construct a theater, in the style of Shakespeare’s Globe. They also planned to sell cheap lemonade, then charge exorbitant amounts for the pay toilets.
Gotta spend all that hard-won gold on something!
My own players opted to finance an academy for adventurers in their town. Everyone got a chance to pick a library or a gym or whatever to engrave their names on.
I don’t know that I’ve had that level of derailment yet, but I do remember something close.
So, I’m playing as Jake from Angel Farm (yes, his name literally is Jake) and the party is in a tower of ominous danger. Partway through the tower though is what the GM probably meant as a one off gag: a troupe of spiders putting on Hamlet.
I am TRANSFIXED by this bit. It doesn’t matter what Jake thinks, because I, the player, am utterly delighted by the Shakespearean spiders. Now there’s an encounter right after this bit, with a gimmick of us entering the fight one by one. I wind up being the last to join the fray, which means that Jake has plenty of time to think of little more than “man, those little spiders were such good actors…”
So naturally, when Jake DOES enter the fight, the first thing he does is Hold Monster so that he can go on about what a good show that was.
After the fight, we come back to the spiders who are in the middle of A Winter’s Tale. A tarantula has substituted in for the infamous bear.
Exit, pursued by Terry.
My three favorite side couples (and Ninjalock) are finally getting married!
Oh god, I only now read the mouseover text.
Claire always sneaks the good jokes in there 😀
Gave myself a chuckle re-reading that one. Honestly, I think the sarcastic mouse-overs are often funnier than the comic.