Finally started my new campaign. Where did I go wrong?

[Segev]

Hey, watch out with that real world stuff... Next thing we know someone will bring up Dihydrogen Monoxide and how lethal it is when you breath it.

Not to mention the terrible burns its gaseous form causes when exposed to unprotected skin.

[Segev]

More seriously, though, Talekeal, your main problem, as I see it, was a difference in expectations.

Take some pains to point out what the goal is in character, and this probably won't be nearly so big of an issue in the future.

As I've said, the way I'd have handled it would've been to have a village leader come forth - not necessarily THE village leader, just somebody respected and capable - when they rallied the town, and spell out, "We can only hold out for [time length] once the attack starts, unless we get help. You guys are the best suited to find that help. Go!"

[Talakeal]

So. The PCs came up with ideas that you as the omniscient GM had already thought of. Why so smug about that? What was it that made you want to shut down every single one of those ideas in favour of things illogical and that they would never have thought of?

There is nothing "smug" about it. The DM needs to create problems so the PCs have problems to solve, simple as that.

To go back to using a Lord of the Rings example, imagine if Gandalf had never suggested throwing the ring in mount doom, the DM hoping the Hobbit's would figure it out on their own. So instead Frodo's player decides their quest is to go to Mordor and kill Sauron directly. So the DM accommodates them and lets four first level hobbits storm the gates of Mordor, defeat the armies of orcs, and finally kill Suaron in a dual. The game might be fun, but sooner or later the players are going to start making jokes and asking question like "Man, that Sauron guy sure was a pushover. Why was everyone so afraid of him? If four hobbits could take him out why didn't Gondor think of killing him years ago?"

In my game, the plot was the village is going to be destroyed by a huge enemy horde. That's the setup. Its not about "shutting down ideas" its about saying they are insufficient for the enemy they are fighting. Again, like I said on page 1, if the players are fighting a dragon and they decide to "conserve their power" and try and kill it with a few sticks and stones, a magic missile, and a trained wardog it isn't the DM shutting down anything when the dragon kills them, it is just running the given scenario by the rules.

The intended quest was to find a way to enlist the aid of the huge ghost army which is only a few hours away and which the players had seen for themselves just the previous day. That doesn't seem illogical to me. (And again, they could have found other solutions to the problem, they just would have involved thinking outside the box. If they had done something like Vaarsuvius' plan to summon an imp and mail his severed head to his former master I would have allowed it to work just fine and applauded their creativity.)

Again, the problem is a lack of communication and telegraphing imo.

And no it wouldn't have made the PCs redundant to deal with things. As you found out what you did actually made the PCs redundant. What they were trying to do wouldn't have.

If the threat was small enough that the townsfolk could have defeated the enemies themselves they would have done so; the players could play a small role in the victory, but they wouldn't have been crucial to the effort.

Now, verisimilitude aside, how is getting a ghost army to defend a town any more of the players being left out than getting griffons, animated objects, and a peasant militia to fight for them? Both were the PCs (and the player's) ideas, and both involved them marshaling allies to defend the town for them rather than fighting themselves.

They were the only ones with the bravery and curiosity to explore the haunted tower and find the ghost army. They couldn't figure out how to control it directly, so they came up with and executed the idea of freeing the lich and using his phylactery to compel him to do it for them.

The only difference in my mind is that one was their first idea rather than their second.

In short the PCs responded appropriately to the rumour because it was a false rumour. There was no dragon to help.

Well, no, it wasn't false, it was just slightly inaccurate. It was an optional side mission, but the reward was vast amounts of information on both the local region and the enemy, which the players could have easily used to come up with a plan or find a weakness to exploit. It was a dragon-like creature, and it would have been more than willing to help.

Honestly your statement seems to be intentionally antagonistic; you seem to be saying that unless a rumor is 100% accurate it is false and should best be ignored even though it has an element of truth and would be tremendously useful.

Why is there this mismatch between their expectations and yours? And what do you mean 10-15 minutes?

And that is the million dollar question.

I mean 10-15 minutes were spent on the plans.

As a sequence of events:

I say the sheriff comes back furious at the local lord for ordering the people to evacuate the local militia to protect refugees rather than the town.

The players ask if they can convince their parents and some of their friends to stay and defend the town and ask the sheriff to form them into a posse and give them what equipment and training she can.

I say ok, but they are still outnumbered fifty to one, it won't be enough.

The players ask a local tinker if he can rig up some booby traps. (We then get into a side conversation about how Home Alone would have been a horrific deathtrap rather than a comedy, which stopped the game for a bit) The tinker agrees, and tells them that his traps will sure kill a few of the invaders, but he himself isn't going to stick around to help defend the town as the fight is hopeless.

Then the monk wants to hunt down and kill some of the enemy's scouts. I ask him why, he says to demoralize them, and I say ok, you can kill enough scouts to demoralize them enough that they will no longer leave the main group and now the enemy has no idea what you are planning; but keep in mind that killing a few scouts does not significantly diminish the size of the overall force.

The players then ask if they can burn the crops and poison the well, and I say sure, those are fairly standard tactics, however that will only come into play after the village has already been lost. The players ask if they can poison the well preemptively and then come up with a neutralizing agent to deploy if the village is saved. I tell them it is possible but they don't have the skill or materials to do so, and so they go visit the wise woman. They find that she is gone and has left a note saying she has gone to a library in a local city to research the enemy and will be back as soon as she can*.

The players then wait until nightfall of the second night (I didn't plan on this big time skip, this kind of caused a crunch that wasn't initially part of the scenario) and sneak into the enemies camp and set fire to their supply tents. They succeed, but fail a stealth test to escape and are captured.

They are then interrogated by the big bad and set free. They are told that burning their supplies will make the enemy a bit hungrier and more desperate to raid the village, but that they can survive by foraging for the 36 hours until the attack. The PCs try and convince the enemy to give up his plan as it is dishonorable, but the enemy, an animalistic neutral, tells them that he has literally no concerns with such mannish concepts as honor. I suppose this is the only time I actually "shut them down," but having a player with no social skills appeal to something which the villain doesn't care about and cause them to abandon their entire life's work is, in my mind, both anticlimactic and immersion breaking.

Aside from the conversation with the big bad, which wasn't actually part of the PCs plans and more an RP / exposition option, none of this took more than 15 minutes, not counting side chatter about Home Alone.

At this point I asked the players what their next step was, and they said "Wait until they attack and fight," and I then I explained to them that none of their plans were enough to actually fight of the enemy, they are still outnumbered 50 to 1 and a few traps aren't going to change that.

The sorceress then says she will spend all her spells animating objects. I say that it is a good idea, but again, a few extra fighters aren't going to swing the battle, and she will then be out of spells for the rest of the session. She says she doesn't care and does it anyway.

I say the players still need to find help. They say they can't think of any. Then the adventure stalls.

After an hour or two of sitting around doing nothing I have the local wise-woman return and act as DM mouth piece, telling them they need to do something desperate and dangerous as it will take a miracle to save the town. One player suggests waking the lich, the other's say no.

After some more indecision I come out from behind the screen and tell them that they still have yet to investigate the why the lord is acting so strangely, the rumors about the druid or the dragon, and that there are still a few rooms in the haunted tower that they haven't explored which could have relevance.

So they go to the lord, get more info, and then try and mess with the griffons but lack the skills to make anything come of it. But they do get more RP and info out of the situation.

Then they go back to the tower, explore the last few rooms, find the liche's phylactery, and try and communicate with the ghosts. Unfortunately as the sorceress is out of spells this turns out to be trickier than they anticipated and again they are out of ideas. One player wants to raise the lich, and the other two refuse. They sit there squabbling and grasping at straws for another 20 minutes or so before I tell them to just let him free the lich as it is a valid solution to the problem and everyone is getting bored and grumpy just sitting around arguing and doing nothing.

They wake the lich and tell him what is going on. He magically compels the ghosts to follow him (again, something the sorceress could have potentially done herself if she was near full power), and marches to the village.

Then we play out the battle. The players fight and get pretty beat up but kill more than their fair share. Due to the defenses the players placed in the village there are zero casualties or property damage inflicted. The lich tries to destroy the big bad directly and is killed, but the big bad, who is no wounded, seeing his army slaughtered by ghosts, orders a retreat, and the party returns to town as heroes and have won the respect they set out for in the first place and saved the town.


*This was probably a misstep. If she had been there she could have acted as DM mouth piece a bit and set them on the right track. Instead I could have had her deliver her research to the PCs in the epilogue and gotten the same thing across.

Ever read Lord of the Rings? Sure, you could protest that that's a Macguffin, only it's not from the critical angle - namely, that The One Ring ISN'T a crazy powerful item that solves all the problems for them.

I think a large part of your problems is that you have a tendency to use extremely strange and unhelpful definitions.

Hmm, yeah looking at TV tropes you appear to be correct. It actually has an article on why most people think the One Ring is a classic Macguffin but actually isn't one at all. What definition do you think would be better?

Now, you see, you're running into all kinds of social contract issues, and you probably haven't given any thought to that at all. IS IT an implicit assumption of your games that the players will "play nice" and "follow the plot"? Do your PLAYERS know that? And if so, have you accepted that you are basically running a voluntary railroad, and that you need to put down some track so that people will know where they are going?

Because one of the first rules of a LOT of games is "play to find out what happens" and that could very easily mean "The PCs don't go on the adventure you thought they were going to go on." Of course, you're running D&D, so if that happens you're kind of screwed because your game is a mechanical monster that requires tons of setup to make its core activity happen.

Honestly it has never come up for me. I have played in and ran a lot of games over the years and have never seen this happen. As I said unthread, occasionally one player will want to abandon the plot or the group, but the rest of the players stick to it and social pressure to stick with the group always defuses it.

I have always assumed that in any game there is a social contract that the DM will try and run and adventure the players want to play in and the players will go along with it, and I have never seen evidence to the contrary except for an occasional lone player who wants to go all murder hobo on the game.

No, you're not obligated, but you might want to just give the neighbor a bloody alibi so that you can all get on with your lives, right?.

This means that the DM needs to know what the players are thinking beforehand. In the murder example that's pretty easy. In my case the players did a bunch of things, none of them taking more than 2-3 minutes, and I didn't know what their end goal was, so I (in retrospect probably incorrectly) just let things play out naturally to see where they were going.

This is ridiculous. Why not come up with some reasons with the NPCs haven't done these things that don't involve those things being absolutely impossible under all circumstances? How about "They just don't have enough poison for that." or "It has a great sense of smell, so you'll need a very sneaky poison"? Why does the area being inaccessible to horses stop the NPCs from doing anything? What kind of cave can't be blocked off with dynamite? Or surrounded? Seriously? I mean, if you're operating under the assumption that the NPCs have all that stuff (snipers? Really?) then I've already found two or three holes that you've left unblocked that the NPCs could totally have done. Consider limiting the capabilities of your NPCs instead of making your challenges crazy convoluted.

Ok, so this is still just something that is in the brain storming stage rather than an actual adventure, so don't analyze the scenario too heavily.

Basically, the location is based on a real cave I saw last summer in the Grand Canyon. A deep cave high up on one of the canyon walls under an overhang, which was only accessible by a narrow scree covered trail which you would have to climb on foot single file. I thought it would make a great lair for a flying desert monster because it is so well defended.

The monster absolutely could be killed by a special poison, it is just too large to easily drug with things the locals have on hand. It doesn't have absolute immunity or anything, and an alchemist PC probably could come up with something, and a merchant PC could probably track something down.

By sniper I don't actually mean like a veteran sharpshooter, one of those would be very helpful and probably will be one of the PCs. What I mean is that the monster lives in a cave on a cliff face and only comes out at night, so they can't just set up a posse with rifles on the far canyon wall and shoot it while it is eating / sleeping / pooping / etc.

The only thing that is kind of contrived that I need to work on is why dynamite can't simply be used to bring down the whole cliff face, which I think can be handled by some sort of avalanche risk. A variation on what Warhammer 40,000 says when asked why in this far future they are still handling things with infantry skirmishes rather than orbital bombardment; you don't want to risk destroying the very thing you are fighting over.

These are not hyper competent NPCs or something. They are just a regular small frontier town defended by a sheriff and his deputies and a few local hunters and ranch hands with rifles and shotguns. It doesn't take anything special to simply station a ring of guys with shotguns outside the monsters lair or to throw a bunch of dynamite in the entrance and run, anyone can do this unless I go out of my way to cripple them.


I guess I could make it like a convent of nuns or a town too poor to afford gunpowder or something, but why? Doing so would be fore more convoluted and would make whatever the PCs do more anticlimactic and less heroic, so what's the point?


The very first non freeform RPG I run was an AD&D second edition game. The players defeated the boss monster effortlessly by simply running around and shooting arrows and spells at it without ever letting it get into melee range. I mentioned this to our regular DM, one of our teachers (we were 12-13 at the time) and he explained to me that you need to place monsters in appropriate terrain. A creature with a low movement speed and no ranged attacks won't just be out in the middle of a field, it will choose a lair that covers up its weaknesses. That seemed like a good lesson at the time, and you are the first person I can recall talking to that seems to think its a bad idea.

Although I did have a player once who bitched anytime I put terrain on the battlefield because monsters always live in environments suited to their own abilities rather than the PCs and that the CR system doesn't account for fighting sea monsters in the water or kobolds in dungeons with low ceilings.

Well, good luck, since it sounds like you've never found one of those. Actually, I have a hard time believing Fate was that much worse than most of the stuff you post on this board.....

Basically I am a deep immersion RPer and I really get into character. They wanted me to keep getting out of character to play NPCs and sometimes they even had us swap PCs for a while. I said I wasn't comfortable playing someone else's character and didn't like the idea of other people taking control of my character away from me. I asked if I could simply stick to one character for a session or two until I got the hang of the game and felt a little bit more comfortable with other people's characters before controlling them. They said no, and then kicked me out of the group for having the audacity to even make the request.

As I said, I am willing to give the game a try if I can find a group who will let me ease into it rather than simply throwing me in the deep end and saying sink or swim.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Which word? Narrativist? Could you please elaborate on how my definition differs from yours?

You're right. You don't understand. How does only having 6-10 things that you are forced to roll for "limit" your actions? Do you roll when your PC walks somewhere in D&D? No, you do not. And yet, walking somewhere is still an option that is available to you, even though you don't have to roll for it...

Where do you get the idea that all characters are equal? And in fact, if you had read the moves thoroughly, you would understand that you NEED that compelling argument before you can even roll. Unless of course the NPC finds "DO WHAT I SAY OR ELSE!" a very compelling argument. Which they might, depending on the situation, don't you think?

What do you mean "Who decides"? The same person who decides that you need mithril to make a mithril shirt, no matter how high your crafting roll is. The GM? The same person who decides that if you roll a natural 20 on your diplomacy check, that the bad guy doesn't kill themselves because you asked REAAAAALLLY nicely. Nowhere in D&D does it say in the rules that you can't persuade someone to fall on their sword by offering them a copper piece. Dungeon World doesn't need to say that in the rules either.


What you are doing is throwing up a lot of straw-man arguments without considering how you know these things are already handled. By the GM not making things happen if they don't make sense. If a player in D&D says "My character jumps to the moon" and then rolls a 20 on an athletics check, does it happen? Apparently, in your games it does? Or if it doesn't, then that is EXACTLY the reason it doesn't happen in Dungeon World.

Again, please try to keep this constructive and not be overly antagonistic. I am trying not to be defensive, but it is hard when you phrase things like this.

D&D actually does have rules for walking from place to place, and for just about everything a real person could do short of graphic biological functions and purely internal processes. But yeah, walking from place to place is not extraordinary or contested. You say I am making a straw-man argument, but don't you think comparing walking to actively using a skill which would require a test is a bit of the same?

I do not "already know how these things are handled," as I have not read Dungeon World. I asked a friend to let me borrow his copy, but it is packed away somewhere and he says he will get it to me when he finds it.

I was told in this thread that an action can't fail in Dungeon World, and that running it would teach me how to game without being able to say No to my players. I took this at face value, I have no reason not to, and I am genuinely curious about how the game handles a few of the glaring problems that spring to mind. For example, PCs who attempt ridiculous tasks, or that if something is possible anyone can still succeed on it regardless of their specific methodology or character abilities.

Now you are telling me that the DM can deny a player success, so I am wondering what the actual difference is. This isn't a "straw man" I honestly and legitimately don't see what the difference is between telling a player "No, that's impossible" and "No, that's impossible unless you can make a DC 600 athletics test," in practice they will have exactly the same outcome.

More seriously, though, Talekeal, your main problem, as I see it, was a difference in expectations.

Take some pains to point out what the goal is in character, and this probably won't be nearly so big of an issue in the future.

As I've said, the way I'd have handled it would've been to have a village leader come forth - not necessarily THE village leader, just somebody respected and capable - when they rallied the town, and spell out, "We can only hold out for [time length] once the attack starts, unless we get help. You guys are the best suited to find that help. Go!"

Yeah, I pretty much totally agree at this point.

[OldTrees1]

@Talakeal

By now most of the areas of improvement have been discussed in depth. However I think there is one more that you would benefit from examining in more detail.

You are not running a sandbox campaign, yet you give your players free reign in planning what to try. This is a good structure since it emphasizes player choice while still remaining on target. However this inherits one of the challenges that sandbox campaigns have. Namely how do you enable the players to see what you didn't see yourself. Success with this challenge will greatly enhance your game if the attempted plans of your players are any indication.

[GloatingSwine]

Now, verisimilitude aside, how is getting a ghost army to defend a town any more of the players being left out than getting griffons, animated objects, and a peasant militia to fight for them? Both were the PCs (and the player's) ideas, and both involved them marshaling allies to defend the town for them rather than fighting themselves.

Griffons are animals, animated objects are the players' own constructs, and a peasant army is individually weaker than the PCs.

It's easier for the players to see those as resources they are deploying to solve the problem rather than a vastly more powerful force they are appealing to to solve the problem instead of them.

[Talakeal]

Griffons are animals, animated objects are the players' own constructs, and a peasant army is individually weaker than the PCs.

It's easier for the players to see those as resources they are deploying to solve the problem rather than a vastly more powerful force they are appealing to to solve the problem instead of them.

Well, I am not sure if an animated construct and a magically compelled undead are that different, but I will give you that one.

However the ghosts, peasants, and griffons are all individually weaker than the individual PCs but stronger than them as a group. Even the lich is weaker than the PCs as a party.

However I do see that the ghosts, as a group, are stronger than the ENEMIES while the other groups are not.

@Talakeal

By now most of the areas of improvement have been discussed in depth. However I think there is one more that you would benefit from examining in more detail.

You are not running a sandbox campaign, yet you give your players free reign in planning what to try. This is a good structure since it emphasizes player choice while still remaining on target. However this inherits one of the challenges that sandbox campaigns have. Namely how do you enable the players to see what you didn't see yourself. Success with this challenge will greatly enhance your game if the attempted plans of your players are any indication.

/agree

[The Glyphstone]

Ghosts might be, where griffons, animated constructs, or a peasant army aren't enough to beat the enemy. But griffons and animated constructs and a peasant army and rigging booby traps andperforming a mass prayer ceremony to Elanicus, God of Narratively Unlikely Victories, might be enough to beat the enemies. If the players come up with enough small contributions, it's not unreasonable to allow for them all to collectively equal the one big contribution you already had planned.

[JAL_1138]

There is nothing "smug" about it. The DM needs to create problems so the PCs have problems to solve, simple as that.

To go back to using a Lord of the Rings example, imagine if Gandalf had never suggested throwing the ring in mount doom, the DM hoping the Hobbit's would figure it out on their own. So instead Frodo's player decides their quest is to go to Mordor and kill Sauron directly. So the DM accommodates them and lets four first level hobbits storm the gates of Mordor, defeat the armies of orcs, and finally kill Suaron in a dual. The game might be fun, but sooner or later the players are going to start making jokes and asking question like "Man, that Sauron guy sure was a pushover. Why was everyone so afraid of him? If four hobbits could take him out why didn't Gondor think of killing him years ago?"

In my game, the plot was the village is going to be destroyed by a huge enemy horde. That's the setup. Its not about "shutting down ideas" its about saying they are insufficient for the enemy they are fighting. Again, like I said on page 1, if the players are fighting a dragon and they decide to "conserve their power" and try and kill it with a few sticks and stones, a magic missile, and a trained wardog it isn't the DM shutting down anything when the dragon kills them, it is just running the given scenario by the rules.

The intended quest was to find a way to enlist the aid of the huge ghost army which is only a few hours away and which the players had seen for themselves just the previous day. That doesn't seem illogical to me. (And again, they could have found other solutions to the problem, they just would have involved thinking outside the box. If they had done something like Vaarsuvius' plan to summon an imp and mail his severed head to his former master I would have allowed it to work just fine and applauded their creativity.)

Again, the problem is a lack of communication and telegraphing imo.

It's also a problem with the intended solution. Recruiting a big ghost army is generally not the best option. Yes, LOTR did it, but that's a book, not a game. In the game, the PCs should either A) retreat; B) find a solution they do, not just a miracle cause; or C) die in a failed defense (at which point they roll new characters elsewhere and get the setup of "A village was overrun by a large army recently; now the King is recruiting specialists in addition to regular troops..." and get hired as Spec Ops).

If the threat was small enough that the townsfolk could have defeated the enemies themselves they would have done so; the players could play a small role in the victory, but they wouldn't have been crucial to the effort.

Never seen The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven, I take it? Maybe the players are the only ones who can persuade them to fight, teach them to fight, and organize them.

Now, verisimilitude aside, how is getting a ghost army to defend a town any more of the players being left out than getting griffons, animated objects, and a peasant militia to fight for them? Both were the PCs (and the player's) ideas, and both involved them marshaling allies to defend the town for them rather than fighting themselves.

They were the only ones with the bravery and curiosity to explore the haunted tower and find the ghost army. They couldn't figure out how to control it directly, so they came up with and executed the idea of freeing the lich and using his phylactery to compel him to do it for them.

The only difference in my mind is that one was their first idea rather than their second.

Glyphstone took the words right out of my mouth upthread. The peasant army, animated objects, and booby traps might equal a ghost army if taken together, and then it'd be the players' plan that won the day.

It's also a difference in kind. One is a supernatural "Win Button," a miracle so to speak, the other is something that involves but does not solely consist of player-deployed and player-controlled magical elements and does consist of things the players did, not just technically caused (at least two of the players are probably feeling like the Lich is the "hero" rather than themselves, even though they're technically the reason he got involved, if only because you told them to go ahead and do that to get the session done with).

And that is the million dollar question.

I mean 10-15 minutes were spent on the plans.

As a sequence of events:

I say the sheriff comes back furious at the local lord for ordering the people to evacuate the local militia to protect refugees rather than the town.

The players ask if they can convince their parents and some of their friends to stay and defend the town and ask the sheriff to form them into a posse and give them what equipment and training she can.

I say ok, but they are still outnumbered fifty to one, it won't be enough.

The players ask a local tinker if he can rig up some booby traps. (We then get into a side conversation about how Home Alone would have been a horrific deathtrap rather than a comedy, which stopped the game for a bit) The tinker agrees, and tells them that his traps will sure kill a few of the invaders, but he himself isn't going to stick around to help defend the town as the fight is hopeless.

Why would they even *be* outnumbered 50:1? Armies don't use that kind of force on a pissant village they expect to wipe out. If they want to destroy it, they pretty much set fire to it and leave. If they want to raid it for supplies, they don't want to send more troops than the village, when raided, will actually supply, otherwise they've lost, logistically speaking. They want to use as few troops as they can get away with and still be assured a win. And for every soldier, there's at least one or two in a support role. Horses have to be fed and kept and shod. Meals cooked, wounds tended, equipment maintained and ported. To outnumber them 50:1 with just the troops, there are going to be more people in the opposing force than raiding the village can probably support. And the PCs don't need to kill off all the support (although that wouldn't be a bad idea if they could pull it off somehow, like let the enemy overrun the empty village and spring a surprise attack on the camp, now that the Monk took out the scouts).

Why would the tinker not stick around (fight is hopeless, yeah, sure, have the PCs persuade him maybe), or at least leave plans the PCs can follow to build or deploy traps? Why would nobody suggest things that large numbers of peasants could rig up large numbers of fairly quickly, like wooden spikes to severely impede cavalry and infantry? Collapse a building onto a road to block it, preferably while enemies are on it? Archers on rooftops? Caltrops? You don't have to slaughter the whole force, just make it no longer feasible for the enemy to take the village without excessive losses quickly enough.

The players then wait until nightfall of the second night (I didn't plan on this big time skip, this kind of caused a crunch that wasn't initially part of the scenario) and sneak into the enemies camp and set fire to their supply tents. They succeed, but fail a stealth test to escape and are captured.

They are then interrogated by the big bad and set free. They are told that burning their supplies will make the enemy a bit hungrier and more desperate to raid the village, but that they can survive by foraging for the 36 hours until the attack. The PCs try and convince the enemy to give up his plan as it is dishonorable, but the enemy, an animalistic neutral, tells them that he has literally no concerns with such mannish concepts as honor. I suppose this is the only time I actually "shut them down," but having a player with no social skills appeal to something which the villain doesn't care about and cause them to abandon their entire life's work is, in my mind, both anticlimactic and immersion breaking.

Ok...here's where I get called a killer DM...saboteurs have infiltrated the camp, set supply tents on fire, and gotten captured? No commander in his right mind would set them free. Off with their heads, roll new characters (at another location), continue the campaign in a new location as described earlier, after the destruction of the village. I'd give them a chance to escape before having the BBEG show up to monologue, but if they botched that or didn't take it...off with their heads. The BBEG setting them free after they burned all the food would just not happen, I don't think. But I'm probably in the minority there.

Aside from the conversation with the big bad, which wasn't actually part of the PCs plans and more an RP / exposition option, none of this took more than 15 minutes, not counting side chatter about Home Alone.

Infiltrating the camp should take more than 15 minutes. I dunno if you didn't draw out a map or what, but this shouldn't go this quick. This should be a fair amount of the game session. Draw out a map, go into combat rounds or "dungeon mode" for time, and run it like a dungeon. Burning supply-tents are going to be a HUGE distraction for the enemy, so a failed stealth roll after the tents are ON FIRE shouldn't draw more troops than the ones IMMEDIATELY near them. They can potentially fight and/or run their way out, here. Even if several spot them, a fighting retreat should still be an option because the enemy troops are going to be busy with ALL THE FOOD IS BURNING.

Again, though, if they do lose the (few) fight(s) on the way out, that should be death or a daring escape.

At this point I asked the players what their next step was, and they said "Wait until they attack and fight," and I then I explained to them that none of their plans were enough to actually fight of the enemy, they are still outnumbered 50 to 1 and a few traps aren't going to change that.

The sorceress then says she will spend all her spells animating objects. I say that it is a good idea, but again, a few extra fighters aren't going to swing the battle, and she will then be out of spells for the rest of the session. She says she doesn't care and does it anyway.

I say the players still need to find help. They say they can't think of any. Then the adventure stalls.

After an hour or two of sitting around doing nothing I have the local wise-woman return and act as DM mouth piece, telling them they need to do something desperate and dangerous as it will take a miracle to save the town. One player suggests waking the lich, the other's say no.

An hour or two? Out-of-game, real world hours? You didn't suggest something they could do, like "you could go do X," or just play the fight out and let them die off? Anything's better than stalling out for two hours doing nothing, even "Rocks Fall." You eventually brought in an NPC and mentioned things, but that should happen way before an hour or two of zilch goes by.

Unfortunately as the sorceress is out of spells this turns out to be trickier than they anticipated and again they are out of ideas. One player wants to raise the lich, and the other two refuse. They sit there squabbling and grasping at straws for another 20 minutes or so before I tell them to just let him free the lich as it is a valid solution to the problem and everyone is getting bored and grumpy just sitting around arguing and doing nothing.

They wake the lich and tell him what is going on. He magically compels the ghosts to follow him (again, something the sorceress could have potentially done herself if she was near full power), and marches to the village.

Then we play out the battle. The players fight and get pretty beat up but kill more than their fair share. Due to the defenses the players placed in the village there are zero casualties or property damage inflicted. The lich tries to destroy the big bad directly and is killed, but the big bad, who is no wounded, seeing his army slaughtered by ghosts, orders a retreat, and the party returns to town as heroes and have won the respect they set out for in the first place and saved the town.

They saved the town by doing what two of the three players expressly did not want to do, raise a lich, which you told them to do because they wree getting grumpy. I can see why they're miffed. And if your lich is weaker than the party and the party can take the Big Bad, why are the party not facing the Big Bad instead of the lich doing it? Then they would be heroes (or die trying).

Honestly it has never come up for me. I have played in and ran a lot of games over the years and have never seen this happen. As I said unthread, occasionally one player will want to abandon the plot or the group, but the rest of the players stick to it and social pressure to stick with the group always defuses it.

I have always assumed that in any game there is a social contract that the DM will try and run and adventure the players want to play in and the players will go along with it, and I have never seen evidence to the contrary except for an occasional lone player who wants to go all murder hobo on the game.

It's there to a degree; if you show up to play D&D, you should want to play D&D, which tends to involve adventuring of some variety and not just sitting in the inn drinking or running from everything (a character that wants to run, but ultimately doesn't because of conscience, is another matter). But there's often solid reason not to bite on a quest ("this other threat seems bigger, we can't get sidetracked" or "that seems pointlessly dangerous for no reward, let's try another approach" or "wait, they said something about going to Greyhawk, let's skip this bumblescum town and go straight to the city," for example.) Or just coming up with a different solution to the adventure's problem. I've said it a few times now, but it worked out for the best in my current game, including for me as a DM, for my campaign to go completely off the rails.

Ok, so this is still just something that is in the brain storming stage rather than an actual adventure, so don't analyze the scenario too heavily.

As a geek, I'm legally obligated to overanalyze things on the internet.

Basically, the location is based on a real cave I saw last summer in the Grand Canyon. A deep cave high up on one of the canyon walls under an overhang, which was only accessible by a narrow scree covered trail which you would have to climb on foot single file. I thought it would make a great lair for a flying desert monster because it is so well defended.
[snip...]
The very first non freeform RPG I run was an AD&D second edition game. The players defeated the boss monster effortlessly by simply running around and shooting arrows and spells at it without ever letting it get into melee range. I mentioned this to our regular DM, one of our teachers (we were 12-13 at the time) and he explained to me that you need to place monsters in appropriate terrain. A creature with a low movement speed and no ranged attacks won't just be out in the middle of a field, it will choose a lair that covers up its weaknesses. That seemed like a good lesson at the time, and you are the first person I can recall talking to that seems to think its a bad idea.

I'm putting words in someone else's mouth here, but using terrain at all isn't the complaint, it's that you're arbitrarily using it and making it way too restrictive. You're describing it ways that limit what the players can do to exactly one thing, rather than simply not having NPCs who can pull that stuff off. The PCs getting the idea to dynamite the cave and having to either go buy or brew up their own dynamite might be a good option (most towns aren't going to have it sitting around unless they're mining or railroad towns, and the mine or railroad may not want to part with their necessary supplies).

Instead of describing it as "a cave that can't be snipered, dynamited (any cave can be dynamited, even Mammoth Cave), ridden to on horseback, etc." try describing it as "a cave on a narrow ledge under an overhang" and see what the players do, rather than trying to think of things they can't do. Maybe they can't snipe directly into the cave, but they could station a sniper and throw in a smoke bomb to get the monster to fly out. Stationing outside with shotguns is a good idea, but maybe it's going to simply take better gunfighters and braver people than the town has--it's going to be to convince a bunch of people who are being eaten by this thing to go stand next to its den and wait for it to come out, for one thing. Not to mention, guns are expensive, ammunition's expensive, etc., and there are going to be fewer of them than you think--a lot of old west towns actually didn't allow guns in the town limits, or had strict rules about how they could be kept, so only the farmers on the outskirts and the sherrif and deputies would have them legally.

And why would any of the townsfolk do it themselves if they can easily hire a bunch of out-of-towners to do it? If they die, the townsfolk are not out much. Maybe the monster's only started its attacks just before the PCs arrive, so they haven't even found its den yet, other than "somewhere up in them there hills, and I ain't goin' up there to look. I'll gladly pay you gents to do it, though."

Basically I am a deep immersion RPer and I really get into character. They wanted me to keep getting out of character to play NPCs and sometimes they even had us swap PCs for a while. I said I wasn't comfortable playing someone else's character and didn't like the idea of other people taking control of my character away from me. I asked if I could simply stick to one character for a session or two until I got the hang of the game and felt a little bit more comfortable with other people's characters before controlling them. They said no, and then kicked me out of the group for having the audacity to even make the request.

That's Bizarro Gaming World, not how FATE is played from what I understand of it. It's just a rules-lite, flexible gaming system that also gives you some narrative-impacting abilities you can spend to succeed where you'd otherwise fail (FATE points, Stunts) or affect the story; and gives you clearer social-interaction stats than CHA, Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidate (like Aspects). Having you play NPCs and switch characters with other players is...frankly weird. The game does not normally play that way, unless I'm badly mistaken.

[Talakeal]

It's also a problem with the intended solution. Recruiting a big ghost army is generally not the best option. Yes, LOTR did it, but that's a book, not a game. In the game, the PCs should either A) retreat; B) find a solution they do, not just a miracle cause; or C) die in a failed defense (at which point they roll new characters elsewhere and get the setup of "A village was overrun by a large army recently; now the King is recruiting specialists in addition to regular troops..." and get hired as Spec Ops).



Never seen The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven, I take it? Maybe the players are the only ones who can persuade them to fight, teach them to fight, and organize them.



Glyphstone took the words right out of my mouth upthread. The peasant army, animated objects, and booby traps might equal a ghost army if taken together, and then it'd be the players' plan that won the day.

It's also a difference in kind. One is a supernatural "Win Button," a miracle so to speak, the other is something that involves but does not solely consist of player-deployed and player-controlled magical elements and does consist of things the players did, not just technically caused (at least two of the players are probably feeling like the Lich is the "hero" rather than themselves, even though they're technically the reason he got involved, if only because you told them to go ahead and do that to get the session done with).




Why would they even *be* outnumbered 50:1? Armies don't use that kind of force on a pissant village they expect to wipe out. If they want to destroy it, they pretty much set fire to it and leave. If they want to raid it for supplies, they don't want to send more troops than the village, when raided, will actually supply, otherwise they've lost, logistically speaking. They want to use as few troops as they can get away with and still be assured a win. And for every soldier, there's at least one or two in a support role. Horses have to be fed and kept and shod. Meals cooked, wounds tended, equipment maintained and ported. To outnumber them 50:1 with just the troops, there are going to be more people in the opposing force than raiding the village can probably support. And the PCs don't need to kill off all the support (although that wouldn't be a bad idea if they could pull it off somehow, like let the enemy overrun the empty village and spring a surprise attack on the camp, now that the Monk took out the scouts).

Why would the tinker not stick around (fight is hopeless, yeah, sure, have the PCs persuade him maybe), or at least leave plans the PCs can follow to build or deploy traps? Why would nobody suggest things that large numbers of peasants could rig up large numbers of fairly quickly, like wooden spikes to severely impede cavalry and infantry? Collapse a building onto a road to block it, preferably while enemies are on it? Archers on rooftops? Caltrops? You don't have to slaughter the whole force, just make it no longer feasible for the enemy to take the village without excessive losses quickly enough.




Ok...here's where I get called a killer DM...saboteurs have infiltrated the camp, set supply tents on fire, and gotten captured? No commander in his right mind would set them free. Off with their heads, roll new characters (at another location), continue the campaign in a new location as described earlier, after the destruction of the village. I'd give them a chance to escape before having the BBEG show up to monologue, but if they botched that or didn't take it...off with their heads. The BBEG setting them free after they burned all the food would just not happen, I don't think. But I'm probably in the minority there.



Infiltrating the camp should take more than 15 minutes. I dunno if you didn't draw out a map or what, but this shouldn't go this quick. This should be a fair amount of the game session. Draw out a map, go into combat rounds or "dungeon mode" for time, and run it like a dungeon. Burning supply-tents are going to be a HUGE distraction for the enemy, so a failed stealth roll after the tents are ON FIRE shouldn't draw more troops than the ones IMMEDIATELY near them. They can potentially fight and/or run their way out, here. Even if several spot them, a fighting retreat should still be an option because the enemy troops are going to be busy with ALL THE FOOD IS BURNING.

Again, though, if they do lose the (few) fight(s) on the way out, that should be death or a daring escape.


An hour or two? Out-of-game, real world hours? You didn't suggest something they could do, like "you could go do X," or just play the fight out and let them die off? Anything's better than stalling out for two hours doing nothing, even "Rocks Fall." You eventually brought in an NPC and mentioned things, but that should happen way before an hour or two of zilch goes by.


They saved the town by doing what two of the three players expressly did not want to do, raise a lich, which you told them to do because they wree getting grumpy. I can see why they're miffed. And if your lich is weaker than the party and the party can take the Big Bad, why are the party not facing the Big Bad instead of the lich doing it? Then they would be heroes (or die trying).

To answer your questions:

Sure, a group of experienced warriors could figure out a way to defend a town. That is a fine adventure and one that I have run before. However, this was never intended to be that sort of mission, and the PCs are not warriors, experienced or otherwise. This was a follow up to the previous days game about exploring ancient mysteries, and the PCs were simply a bunch of curious kids out to have an adventure and prove themselves.

The tinker might have been persuaded to stay in the town. Basically he was an outcast and said he would help the town, but didn't care to die trying to save the people who cast him out and treated him like garbage. The party agreed and said goodbye, they probably could have convinced him to stay if they tried.

The liche could not take the Big Bad, and was killed fairly quickly when it tried.

The enemy was not a traditional army. Basically, he was an aspect of a god who materialized in the region and compelled all of the indigenous peoples to go on a rampage and destroy any human settlements in their territory.

The big bad has a powerful ally who is only helping on the condition that he does everything in his power to minimize casualties on both sides, so he isn't eager to off the PCs. He also hopes to recruit one of the PCs for reasons not really relevant to this discussion.

Also, basically I had them roll a stealth check to infiltrate the camp (they passed). Then they cast control winds to blow their campfire into their tent and then spread the fire. They cast the spell, no roll required. Then I had them roll another stealth test to leave, which they failed, and then I RPed the interrogation scene.

As a geek, I'm legally obligated to overanalyze things on the internet.



I'm putting words in someone else's mouth here, but using terrain at all isn't the complaint, it's that you're arbitrarily using it and making it way too restrictive. You're describing it ways that limit what the players can do to exactly one thing, rather than simply not having NPCs who can pull that stuff off. The PCs getting the idea to dynamite the cave and having to either go buy or brew up their own dynamite might be a good option (most towns aren't going to have it sitting around unless they're mining or railroad towns, and the mine or railroad may not want to part with their necessary supplies).

Instead of describing it as "a cave that can't be snipered, dynamited (any cave can be dynamited, even Mammoth Cave), ridden to on horseback, etc." try describing it as "a cave on a narrow ledge under an overhang" and see what the players do, rather than trying to think of things they can't do. Maybe they can't snipe directly into the cave, but they could station a sniper and throw in a smoke bomb to get the monster to fly out. Stationing outside with shotguns is a good idea, but maybe it's going to simply take better gunfighters and braver people than the town has--it's going to be to convince a bunch of people who are being eaten by this thing to go stand next to its den and wait for it to come out, for one thing. Not to mention, guns are expensive, ammunition's expensive, etc., and there are going to be fewer of them than you think--a lot of old west towns actually didn't allow guns in the town limits, or had strict rules about how they could be kept, so only the farmers on the outskirts and the sheriff and deputies would have them legally.

And why would any of the townsfolk do it themselves if they can easily hire a bunch of out-of-towners to do it? If they die, the townsfolk are not out much. Maybe the monster's only started its attacks just before the PCs arrive, so they haven't even found its den yet, other than "somewhere up in them there hills, and I ain't goin' up there to look. I'll gladly pay you gents to do it, though."

Ok, so I am now kind of confused. Earlier people were telling me "Don't think of solutions, just think of problems and let the players figure out what to do," but now you seem to be telling me that I need to come up with player solutions.

Other people are telling me not to give players false hope. So if I describe a setting where X plan obviously won't work, should I not mention it upfront?

At this point I don't have any idea how the players will solve the problem, and I certainly don't have "just one thing" in mind as you imply. Your smoke bomb plan sounds like it would work fine, and it certainly wasn't something I thought of.

All I have done so far is set up the scenario so that the villagers have a need to call upon HEROES rather than patsies, which is more or less what the players are if the only reason the villagers hired them is because they don't want to risk their own hides performing a simple, albeit dangerous, job.

That's Bizarro Gaming World, not how FATE is played from what I understand of it. It's just a rules-lite, flexible gaming system that also gives you some narrative-impacting abilities you can spend to succeed where you'd otherwise fail (FATE points, Stunts) or affect the story; and gives you clearer social-interaction stats than CHA, Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidate (like Aspects). Having you play NPCs and switch characters with other players is...frankly weird. The game does not normally play that way, unless I'm badly mistaken.

I have been told they did it wrong, but that was still my experience. Everything I hear about storytelling games seems to imply that breaking immersion and thinking outside of your characters head are big parts of the game though, so I am kind of hesitant to try as I can't help but feel it will turn out the same way.

[LnGrrrR]

Talakeal, your biggest problem is trying to think of every possible action the PCs might take and coming up with an answer for it. For one, they will come up with something you haven't thought, and then you are stuck. Two, your worlds become artificial because everything becomes too perfect, which leads to railroading.

So the players want to use dynamite to crush the cave. Sure! But maybe the explosion ends up way bigger than they thought, or there's something hidden in the cave that they want to get their hands on instead, or any number of results.

It's fine to let players win in non-traditional fashion. And you know, you could always have the dragon fly out, bruised but alive, and really pissed off.

See, if you think of 10 things the PCs can do, and then think up how to counteract those things, it's a bit unfair. Because guess what? The PCs will likely think of those 10 things too, and when they get a steady diet of "No, that won't work" or "No, that's not enough", they're going to feel a bit bummed out. You know why they call adventurers? Because they're too lazy/afraid/etc. Hey, I could make donuts at home if I really wanted to. But usually, I just buy them. You're overthinking it here.

Finally, I would suggest making villains who at least have some sort of motivation that... is realistic. You've got this random guy who listens to a god, who wants to cause famine for some reason, and yet the god is only interested in taking out random small villages? None of that really makes sense. Why are there suddenly a million indigenous peoples in the area? Where do they get knowledge of attacking a city? Are they mind controlled or what?

[Talakeal]

Talakeal, your biggest problem is trying to think of every possible action the PCs might take and coming up with an answer for it. For one, they will come up with something you haven't thought, and then you are stuck. Two, your worlds become artificial because everything becomes too perfect, which leads to railroading.

So the players want to use dynamite to crush the cave. Sure! But maybe the explosion ends up way bigger than they thought, or there's something hidden in the cave that they want to get their hands on instead, or any number of results.

It's fine to let players win in non-traditional fashion. And you know, you could always have the dragon fly out, bruised but alive, and really pissed off.

See, if you think of 10 things the PCs can do, and then think up how to counteract those things, it's a bit unfair. Because guess what? The PCs will likely think of those 10 things too, and when they get a steady diet of "No, that won't work" or "No, that's not enough", they're going to feel a bit bummed out.

Again, I don't care what the PCs do, only what the NPCs do. I am absolutely not thinking up an answer for everything the PCs might do, I am just thinking of a couple plans that the NPCs would have tried before the players even got there.

You really think that having the sheriff go "Well, the problem is the beastie spends its days in that cave over yonder. (pause to describe the cave) As you can see, the trail's too narrow for a posse to climb, and none of my deputies fancy their chances of going in alone. We thought about just dynamiting the cave shut, but old man smith, he's the town local engineer, thinks that we might start an avalanche and bury the whole dang town, so that's right out," is going to make the players feel discouraged and railroaded?

Off the top of my head the players could:

Directly climb into the beast's cave during the day and kill it.
Figure out its feeding pattern and ambush it while it is eating.
Bait it into a trap.
The aforementioned smoke bomb idea.
Wait until it leaves its lair and then shoot it in the wing (perhaps with a ballista) to ground it
Figure out a way to dynamite the cave that won't cause an avalanche
Brew a poison strong enough to affect a creature of its size
Use animal empathy or the like to tame the creature or convince it to find a new hunting ground
Use magic to do, well, anything
Call in outside help to do something they can't

That's ten ideas just off the top of my head. Your really telling me that four players between them, given some time to prep, can't come up with any of those ideas, or indeed anything else besides have a posse surround its cave with shotguns or blow up the cave with dynamite?

Heck, I just thought of a few more ideas in the time it took me to write that last sentence, mostly involving having someone sneak into the cave while the creature is out.

Finally, I would suggest making villains who at least have some sort of motivation that... is realistic. You've got this random guy who listens to a god, who wants to cause famine for some reason, and yet the god is only interested in taking out random small villages? None of that really makes sense.

Ok, so imagine your goal is to destroy a kingdom.

You have total control over all of the indigenous peoples in the region, which outnumber the civilized men by a noticeable, but not enormous, margin.

The natives lack the strength to storm the cities or castles or to defeat the kingdom's armies in an open battle.

How would you go about doing this?

For that matter, isn't creating a famine to defeat a fortified opponent a fairly basic military tactics? Isn't the whole concept of a "siege" based around cutting off the enemy's food source and then starving them out?

[John Longarrow]

Talakeal

Please let me know if you type very differently from how you talk in person. From what I am gathering, most of the information that is most relevant to how you set up your adventure, how the players reacted, and how you dealt with their plans has been coming out very piecemeal. The picture we are getting days later is different than the initial description of what happened at your table.

If you speak as you type, then a major problem that you may want to work on is making sure to get information out early and in a memorable manner. If you are unclear why I am pointing his out, please re-read your original post and then all of your subsequent posts elaborating on your game. From behind the screen, making sure everyone has a clear understanding of what is going on and why is very important. This is especially true if you have important plot points you need the players to complete to advance your story.

As has been pointed your descriptions are of a party that doesn't understand the type of adventure you had planned. If you have not done so, I'd recommend asking your players what they understood the adventures goals to be and ask them how you can better convey your intents. Its all find and dandy if WE understand what you are going for, but if your PLAYERS don't, the game doesn't work.

[John Longarrow]

Ok, so imagine your goal is to destroy a kingdom.

You have total control over all of the indigenous peoples in the region, which outnumber the civilized men by a noticeable, but not enormous, margin.

The natives lack the strength to storm the cities or castles or to defeat the kingdom's armies in an open battle.

How would you go about doing this?

For that matter, isn't creating a famine to defeat a fortified opponent a fairly basic military tactics? Isn't the whole concept of a "siege" based around cutting off the enemy's food source and then starving them out?

If your goal is to starve out the city, you do so by sending out a LOT of raiding parties to hit all of their sources of supply at once. You don't do it by keeping your army concentrated if you can't defeat their armies in an open battle. You also don't attack the villages, you attack the crops. Crops burn easily. Crops are BIG and hard to defend. Crops don't fight back.

Even better is to identify how those crops get to the cities. Attack infrastructure and storage. Burning a thousand acres of grain won't affect the city tomorrow. Burning down the granary will. Destroying a village doesn't stop other villages from sending crops to the city. Destroying goods to market/burning or smashing bridges does. If the goal is to start a famine, about the WORST option for your leader is to keep his army in one place for any length of time. Doing so means he's not working on removing resources and paints a giant bullseye on his army. Even in an E6 game several spell casters can do a lot of damage to an army in the thousands that is being nice and stationary.

[Talakeal]

If your goal is to starve out the city, you do so by sending out a LOT of raiding parties to hit all of their sources of supply at once. You don't do it by keeping your army concentrated if you can't defeat their armies in an open battle. You also don't attack the villages, you attack the crops. Crops burn easily. Crops are BIG and hard to defend. Crops don't fight back.

Even better is to identify how those crops get to the cities. Attack infrastructure and storage. Burning a thousand acres of grain won't affect the city tomorrow. Burning down the granary will. Destroying a village doesn't stop other villages from sending crops to the city. Destroying goods to market/burning or smashing bridges does. If the goal is to start a famine, about the WORST option for your leader is to keep his army in one place for any length of time. Doing so means he's not working on removing resources and paints a giant bullseye on his army. Even in an E6 game several spell casters can do a lot of damage to an army in the thousands that is being nice and stationary.

This was not a one time event, he is hitting villages like this all across the kingdom. He is also starting plagues, kidnapping or blackmailing noblemen, inciting riots, destroying roads, dams, and bridges, and the like. This whole plot is a lot bigger than the scope of this one adventure, this is just the story of how the PCs got involved.

This is also far from his only army, he can compel tribes across the land to fight for him. He also doesn't normally appear in person or give a three day warning, but his advisors told him he needed to here because of reasons involving the PCs that have not been revealed yet.

Now I don't quite get the distinction between crops and villages. Aren't the crops located next to farming villages? Likewise where are granaries usually located that are not inside of a city or village or near the crops themselves?

Talakeal

Please let me know if you type very differently from how you talk in person. From what I am gathering, most of the information that is most relevant to how you set up your adventure, how the players reacted, and how you dealt with their plans has been coming out very piecemeal. The picture we are getting days later is different than the initial description of what happened at your table.

If you speak as you type, then a major problem that you may want to work on is making sure to get information out early and in a memorable manner. If you are unclear why I am pointing his out, please re-read your original post and then all of your subsequent posts elaborating on your game. From behind the screen, making sure everyone has a clear understanding of what is going on and why is very important. This is especially true if you have important plot points you need the players to complete to advance your story.

As has been pointed your descriptions are of a party that doesn't understand the type of adventure you had planned. If you have not done so, I'd recommend asking your players what they understood the adventures goals to be and ask them how you can better convey your intents. Its all find and dandy if WE understand what you are going for, but if your PLAYERS don't, the game doesn't work.

When I type I try and stay as brief as possible, my initial post was already really long, and in my experience the longer a post the less likely people are to read and respond to it. So I leave out the details that I feel are not relevant or abbreviate the longer plot points. This is a thread trying to pinpoint and solve a very specific problem, not a campaign log.

But yes, trying to find the right level of communication between being too vague and being too boring / condescending is an ongoing problem for me.

[John Longarrow]

This was not a one time event, he is hitting villages like this all across the kingdom. He is also starting plagues, kidnapping or blackmailing noblemen, inciting riots, destroying roads, dams, and bridges, and the like. This whole plot is a lot bigger than the scope of this one adventure, this is just the story of how the PCs got involved.

This is also far from his only army, he can compel tribes across the land to fight for him. He also doesn't normally appear in person or give a three day warning, but his advisors told him he needed to here because of reasons involving the PCs that have not been revealed yet.

Now I don't quite get the distinction between crops and villages. Aren't the crops located next to farming villages? Likewise where are granaries usually located that are not inside of a city or village or near the crops themselves?

I am not understanding why he would use an army in the thousands to attack a village. Villages are defined in the DMG as having a population of between 401-900 people. This big of a force is going to require tons of supplies per day. They need to either keep moving (taking what they need from where there is food) OR they need a steady supply line. Either makes them very vulnerable to attack. From a military perspective this does not make sense.

Even if HE needs to be there, all those troops don't.

For where most societies place granaries, they are found located at transport hubs. Classic example is Ancient Egypt. Theirs were along the Nile. They could provide food to communities close by (say 20 miles) and were able to be accessed within a day by farmers bringing in their grain. Normally they are not in individual villages (lack of populace) but can also be found in major cities/fortifications. They are normally considered strategic assets and are defended. Attacking them requires coordinated attacks so they can't all be defended.

Please note, this is the first comment we've seen that this is anything besides a big army coming against one village. You've not provided context about this being wide spread.

[Talakeal]

I am not understanding why he would use an army in the thousands to attack a village. Villages are defined in the DMG as having a population of between 401-900 people. This big of a force is going to require tons of supplies per day. They need to either keep moving (taking what they need from where there is food) OR they need a steady supply line. Either makes them very vulnerable to attack. From a military perspective this does not make sense.

Even if HE needs to be there, all those troops don't.

For where most societies place granaries, they are found located at transport hubs. Classic example is Ancient Egypt. Theirs were along the Nile. They could provide food to communities close by (say 20 miles) and were able to be accessed within a day by farmers bringing in their grain. Normally they are not in individual villages (lack of populace) but can also be found in major cities/fortifications. They are normally considered strategic assets and are defended. Attacking them requires coordinated attacks so they can't all be defended.

Please note, this is the first comment we've seen that this is anything besides a big army coming against one village. You've not provided context about this being wide spread.

I didn't work out the exact numbers. The village has a few hundred people in it, while the raiders outnumber them probably 3:1. I doubt there are thousands of them, probably not even one thousand, but they are drawn from all of the indigenous peoples within the local region rather being an army which marched from a great distance away.

But even 100 raiders would be a nearly insurmountable challenge for 3 first level PCs, 10-20 first level commoners, a sheriff, and a handful of animated objects, even with booby traps.


I didn't mention the larger context because it wasn't relevant to the adventure or to the thread, and I only bring it up now because people are making a unfounded assumptions about what exactly is going on. If people are really curious I can write out a long hand copy of my campaign notes, although I am kind of loathe to do so both because it will take a lot of time to write up and because I don't want my players stumbling across it.

[CombatBunny]

You defend yourself against any suggestion or comment to identify where did you failed, yet the reality is that your players got bored and/or enraged, and I would as well if I was playing your adventure (for what you describe).

For what you say, all of your setting, NPC motivations, layout and all of your elements are brilliantly planned and justified. What’s the merit of that if your final result is a boring adventure?

Tell me one movie that has made you bored and then tell me why you didn’t like it. Having me justify all of your arguments and contradict all of your opinions will make the time go back and make you actually had enjoy the movie?

Who cares if the mine explodes or not? Who cares if your layout respects all of the geographic logics? Do you think that blockbuster hits try to be perfect and accurate in their physics or logic? We gather to have fun; we don’t gather to awe at how magnificently consistent your setting is.

Make things explode, make things go haywire as long as it’s fun. When a session is fun, everyone forgets about plot-holes and inconsistencies, but when a session is boring, we are going to inspect it in all detail to justify why it was horrible.

Don’t make your world a hive-mind. Not all the soldiers agree or are contempt with their master’s plans, not all members of a regimen are alert at all times trying to spot spies. Flaws make a world come alive, and in a breathing world there is lazy people, there are things that the aggressors didn’t thought about the layout.

You have many hours to plan your adventures and make your villainous plans a master piece of cleverness. Your players on the other side have to think on their feet for something that you planned without pressure and guess what, the same way that the adventurers have more strength, constitution and dexterity than their player’s counterparts, the same way that they have more wisdom, intelligence and social skills than their counterparts.

Smart solutions work on T.V. because the writers control the problem and the answer given by the hero, but almost all the time the viewers are left unable to figure out the solution until the hero comes with it. Either you are more flexible with plans and solutions, or you let them roll intelligence to give them the answers or find a way not to make your adventures insufferable.

As for the example that you mentioned of Sauron from LOTR, in a sandbox game Sauron wouldn’t be a menace right away, because you don’t define your plot ahead of time, you wave it as the players get interested in one particular thread or another. If they simply didn’t engaged with Sauron, he would just be remembered as one of many villains; If they on the other hand feel interest and nurture a particular thread, then that would happen to be the one that will eventually grow to be a world-shaking event.

[Talakeal]

You defend yourself against any suggestion or comment to identify where you failed, yet the reality is that your players got bored and/or enraged, and I would as well if I was playing your adventure (for what you describe).

For what you say, all of your setting, NPC motivations, layout and all of your elements are brilliantly planned and justified. What’s the merit of that if your final result was a boring adventure?

Tell me one movie that has made you bored and then tell me why you didn’t like it. Having me justify all of your arguments and contradict all of your opinions will make the time go back and make you actually had enjoy the movie?

Who cares if the mine explodes or not? Who cares if your layout respects all of the geographic logics? Do you think that blockbuster hits try to be perfect and accurate in their physics or logic? We gather to have fun; we don’t gather to awe at how magnificently consistent your setting is.

Make things explode, make things go wary as long as it’s fun. When a session is fun, everyone forgets about plot-holes and inconsistencies, but when a session is boring, we are going to inspect it in all detail to justify why it was horrible.

Don’t make your world a hive-mind. Not all the soldiers agree or are contempt with their master’s plans, not all members of a regimen are alert at all times trying to spot spies. Flaws make a world come alive, and in a breathing world there is lazy people, there are things that the aggressors didn’t thought about the layout.

You have many hours to plan your adventures and make your villainous plans a master piece of cleverness. Your players on the other side have to think on their feet for something that you planned without pressure and guess what, the same way that the adventurers have more strength, constitution and dexterity than their player’s counterparts, the same way that they have more wisdom, intelligence and social skills than their counterparts.

Smart solutions work on T.V. because the writers control the problem and the answer given by the hero, but almost all the time the viewers are left unable to figure out the solution until the hero comes with it. Either you are more flexible with plans and solutions, or you let them roll intelligence to give them the answers or find a way not to make your adventures insufferable.

As for the example that you mentioned of Sauron from LOTR, in a sandbox game Sauron wouldn’t be a menace right away, because you don’t define your plot ahead of time, you wave it as the players get interested in one particular thread or the other. If they simply didn’t engaged with Sauron, he would just be remembered as one of many villains, if they on the other hand feel interest and nurture a particular thread, then that would happen to be the one that would grow to be a world-shaking event.

First off, let me say that I actually AGREE with your overall premise. A few plot holes or minor technical flaws DO NOT ruin a movie or a game. Which is why I am NOT trying to justify the actual flaws which came from lack of communication and not meeting player expectations. The only things I am defending myself against are little things like "Your bad guy is dumb! How can you feed an army? Why can't griffons carry riders? How can the sorceress command undead but not kill the army?"


My adventure was not boring and terrible. My PCs all had fun, there was just one snag in the middle which was a bit boring and got people a bit grumpy, but the overall session was a good one and people had fun overall, and after the snag was over they came back and had fun participating and finishing the session. I am fully aware that there were flaws in the game, and I created the thread to address them, I am not the egomaniacal jerk who thinks themselves infallible you are making me out to me and I can admit that, but you are blowing them way out of proportion.


Now then, let me say that you are a vastly different sort of gamer than me or any of my players. A game where I am guaranteed to win and logic and verisimilitude takes a back seat to nonstop action and the RULE OF KEWL!!! would drive me nuts as either a player or a DM, and so frankly your opinion over whether or not you approve of my scenario holds very little bearing for me.


And also, not everyone has the same tastes in movies. From your description it sounds like you feel that Michael Bay's Transformers is the perfect moviebecause it is dumb and loud and exciting, but a lot of people still find it boring as all get out precisely because it is all pretty pictures and black and white stories with no thinking or depth.

[JAL_1138]

To answer your questions:

Sure, a group of experienced warriors could figure out a way to defend a town. That is a fine adventure and one that I have run before. However, this was never intended to be that sort of mission, and the PCs are not warriors, experienced or otherwise. This was a follow up to the previous days game about exploring ancient mysteries, and the PCs were simply a bunch of curious kids out to have an adventure and prove themselves.

My point is that whether it was intended to be that or not, that's what the PCs wanted/tried to do. There are ways to let them do that, that neither bork your setup nor rely on "I win" buttons.

The tinker might have been persuaded to stay in the town. Basically he was an outcast and said he would help the town, but didn't care to die trying to save the people who cast him out and treated him like garbage. The party agreed and said goodbye, they probably could have convinced him to stay if they tried.

Fair enough; that information wasn't given (a running theme, I think; no offense meant, but there seems to be an issue of you saying something, someone reacting to exactly what you said, but turns out there was more information they didn't have. I don't think you're doing that on purpose at all, but think you may need to work on making your explanations and descriptions clearer to begin with. That's also relevant to your game woes--your players can only react to exactly what you describe exactly the way you say it; they can't work on information they don't have). [EDIT: Ninja'd.]

The liche could not take the Big Bad, and was killed fairly quickly when it tried.

I'm working from hindsight when discussing your campaign session, obviously, while you weren't; you wouldn't plan out the whole scenario with the one end result that they fight the boss. They still might not've fought him even with no lich there. My point was, if the party could take the boss, would they be allowed to try? And why was it the lich fighting him, rather than the party, if they stood a chance?

I would run up the whole scenario without the ghost army once they've decided to fortify, gather their peasant army, and booby-trap the place. Those three things together stand a chance of succeeding. (And if they die, they die. But I'm in a minority there.)

The enemy was not a traditional army. Basically, he was an aspect of a god who materialized in the region and compelled all of the indigenous peoples to go on a rampage and destroy any human settlements in their territory.

The big bad has a powerful ally who is only helping on the condition that he does everything in his power to minimize casualties on both sides, so he isn't eager to off the PCs. He also hopes to recruit one of the PCs for reasons not really relevant to this discussion.

How...how does that work, exactly? You don't minimize casualties by creating famine. That does the opposite. It's a slower, more painful death on a much larger scale than simple military victories at key strategic points would be. Defeating the armies and leaving noncombatants alone as much as possible would minimize casualties, not starving enough peasants to death that the military and nobility eventually can't keep levying supplies and have to surrender or starve themselves. (It's always the peasants who get hurt first. The Irish potato famine didn't hurt the landlords one whit, and it cost a million lives among the poor and led to a mass exodus...which still didn't hurt the landlords much).

Also, basically I had them roll a stealth check to infiltrate the camp (they passed). Then they cast control winds to blow their campfire into their tent and then spread the fire. They cast the spell, no roll required. Then I had them roll another stealth test to leave, which they failed, and then I RPed the interrogation scene.

That's putting too much on a couple of dice rolls. Like I said, they shouldn't automatically lose once they fail the stealth roll, particularly given that all or much of the army's food is on fire. There should be a great deal of confusion, commotion, and chaos from that, and so a single stealth check should not be their only option to escape once they get to that point.

Ok, so I am now kind of confused. Earlier people were telling me "Don't think of solutions, just think of problems and let the players figure out what to do," but now you seem to be telling me that I need to come up with player solutions.

Other people are telling me not to give players false hope. So if I describe a setting where X plan obviously won't work, should I not mention it upfront?

At this point I don't have any idea how the players will solve the problem, and I certainly don't have "just one thing" in mind as you imply. Your smoke bomb plan sounds like it would work fine, and it certainly wasn't something I thought of.

All I have done so far is set up the scenario so that the villagers have a need to call upon HEROES rather than patsies, which is more or less what the players are if the only reason the villagers hired them is because they don't want to risk their own hides performing a simple, albeit dangerous, job.

Was just chucking out a couple of things I'd try if I were a player, not suggesting you should plan for them to do those particular things. I didn't convey that clearly. The operative phrase was "see what they do," while the smokebomb thing was just an off-the-cuff example of what they might do, based on your description.

Heroes are not just the people who could do the things nobody else could do (those are specialists, who may or may not be heroes). They're the people who do the things nobody else is brave enough or willing enough to. There are a lot of people who are physically fit and quite strong. They still rely on the fire department to run into burning buildings. Some of them are also great shots with a rifle, and they still rely on the members of the military to go to war, because they're not willing themselves. There are plenty of bystanders who are capable of helping an injured person, even if it's just by just calling 911, but they don't, thinking someone else will do it. Lots of people are very much physically capable of tackling someone, but they're not going to do it when that someone is shooting at them or swinging a knife around. Heroes are the ones who do it.

By trying to set it up so that they have to be HEROES~! (actually specialists) to pull off the goal instead of just being the people doing things the townsfolk haven't yet or are too scared to, you inadvertently create a setup that seems very narrow and restrictive on how it can be done. You may have a huge number of things you think would work, but as LnGrrrR said, it becomes a bummer when the immediate solutions someone thinks of get a steady diet of "that won't work." Even if there's ten thousand things that would work, the presentation, the way you're describing it by starting off with "a place where this won't work and that can't be done and neither can this thing," makes it seem like those other 10,000 things won't either; if you set it up that way in game, it's going to make the players feel like none of their ideas will work and they're going to have to do it the specific way you envision, even if you think you haven't done it that way. Your initial description of the cave made me a) want to buck what you're saying can't be done and try to ride a horse up there and throw dynamite in while someone tries to snipe and everyone else is standing around with shotguns, just out of pure spite for the restrictions, and b) think that you intended the players to go in and fight it in its lair and that diddlysquat else would be allowed to work. And that wasn't what you intended! You intended a cave on a narrow ledge underneath an overhang with a monster in it, that there were plenty of approaches toward handling. But because of the way you phrased it, it ended up looking like there was one solution, and nothing else would work.

[LnGrrrR]

Again, I don't care what the PCs do, only what the NPCs do. I am absolutely not thinking up an answer for everything the PCs might do, I am just thinking of a couple plans that the NPCs would have tried before the players even got there.

You really think that having the sheriff go "Well, the problem is the beastie spends its days in that cave over yonder. (pause to describe the cave) As you can see, the trail's too narrow for a posse to climb, and none of my deputies fancy their chances of going in alone. We thought about just dynamiting the cave shut, but old man smith, he's the town local engineer, thinks that we might start an avalanche and bury the whole dang town, so that's right out," is going to make the players feel discouraged and railroaded?

Off the top of my head the players could:

Directly climb into the beast's cave during the day and kill it.
Figure out its feeding pattern and ambush it while it is eating.
Bait it into a trap.
The aforementioned smoke bomb idea.
Wait until it leaves its lair and then shoot it in the wing (perhaps with a ballista) to ground it
Figure out a way to dynamite the cave that won't cause an avalanche
Brew a poison strong enough to affect a creature of its size
Use animal empathy or the like to tame the creature or convince it to find a new hunting ground
Use magic to do, well, anything
Call in outside help to do something they can't

That's ten ideas just off the top of my head. Your really telling me that four players between them, given some time to prep, can't come up with any of those ideas, or indeed anything else besides have a posse surround its cave with shotguns or blow up the cave with dynamite?

Heck, I just thought of a few more ideas in the time it took me to write that last sentence, mostly involving having someone sneak into the cave while the creature is out.

The problem lies if you don't have the town sheriff enumerate those in advance. Picture this: the sheriff explains the situation, and gives one or two things they've tried. Then player 1 says, "How about we do X?" and sheriff says, "Nope, we already did that." Then the same happens to player 2. Then player 3. What do you think player 4 is going to think happens when he tries to suggest something?

Of course YOU can come up with those ideas. You know exactly what the cave looks like, the monster's habits, etc etc. It should be much easier for you than the players, who are still trying to grok the whole situation. I doubt most players would think of trapping it (what, with nets?), poisoning (with a poison dart or something?), and calling in outside help somewhat defeats the purpose of them being adventurers.

As I noted, the sheriff doesn't have to explain why they want the adventurers to help at all. Does the sheriff have money? Boom. Easy. Do I have to explain why I want a donut when I go to buy one? "Well you see I could've made it at home, but I was running late at work..." It's fine for him to explain one or two things of course (the dynamite thing is a nice touch, but it will also probably put your PCs on path to talk to the engineer about other plans, which is likely a good thing.)

Ok, so imagine your goal is to destroy a kingdom.

You have total control over all of the indigenous peoples in the region, which outnumber the civilized men by a noticeable, but not enormous, margin.

The natives lack the strength to storm the cities or castles or to defeat the kingdom's armies in an open battle.

How would you go about doing this?

For that matter, isn't creating a famine to defeat a fortified opponent a fairly basic military tactics? Isn't the whole concept of a "siege" based around cutting off the enemy's food source and then starving them out?

Ok, so where does this god get the idea of tactics from? What exactly is he a god of? Why does he want to destroy a kingdom anyways? If he wanted famine, polluting the water supply would probably be a little bit easier. Or heck, just introduce some e coli into the meat. :D

A seige is a pretty basic idea, but the EXECUTION of it isn't. Do the indigenous peoples know the trade routes? Do they know exactly when the deliveries are coming? What about their own supplies? Are they raiding the caravans, and how would so many indigenous peoples be able to feed themselves anyways? Usually a siege relies on a smaller number of foes locking out a larger amount of foes, due to their being only so many ways to supply an area.

And to talk about your villain, let's look at him. He's just a figurehead for a deity, right? A deity who, for some reason, wants famine. Does this god have a reason for it, or is it just evil mustache twirly time? Does he get power or is he just a psychopath? What powers does he have? He just doesn't seem well-defined at all.

Up above you said the odds might be 3:1, but 3:1 odds are very defendable. Like, small forces with homeground and the upper hand have prevailed against odds far higher than that. You also stated originally that it was a fight of 50 vs a thousand or something ridiculous, which is why people said running made sense.

So, let's make this easy. How many townspeople are there? (And don't just be like "10 able bodied men" because that's not a town, that's just six houses that happen to be close to each other. Kids, wives, etc could help booby trap, put up walls, etc etc.) And how many raiders are there? Do you know or is it an esoteric number in your head?

[Talakeal]

Ok, so where does this god get the idea of tactics from? What exactly is he a god of? Why does he want to destroy a kingdom anyways? If he wanted famine, polluting the water supply would probably be a little bit easier. Or heck, just introduce some e coli into the meat. :D

A seige is a pretty basic idea, but the EXECUTION of it isn't. Do the indigenous peoples know the trade routes? Do they know exactly when the deliveries are coming? What about their own supplies? Are they raiding the caravans, and how would so many indigenous peoples be able to feed themselves anyways? Usually a siege relies on a smaller number of foes locking out a larger amount of foes, due to their being only so many ways to supply an area.

And to talk about your villain, let's look at him. He's just a figurehead for a deity, right? A deity who, for some reason, wants famine. Does this god have a reason for it, or is it just evil mustache twirly time? Does he get power or is he just a psychopath? What powers does he have? He just doesn't seem well-defined at all.

Up above you said the odds might be 3:1, but 3:1 odds are very defendable. Like, small forces with homeground and the upper hand have prevailed against odds far higher than that. You also stated originally that it was a fight of 50 vs a thousand or something ridiculous, which is why people said running made sense.

So, let's make this easy. How many townspeople are there? (And don't just be like "10 able bodied men" because that's not a town, that's just six houses that happen to be close to each other. Kids, wives, etc could help booby trap, put up walls, etc etc.) And how many raiders are there? Do you know or is it an esoteric number in your head?

I don't have exact numbers. The total village population was a couple hundred and they are outnumbered roughly 3 to 1 if you include all of the men women and children. The town militia was ordered not to fight, and most of the population has been evacuated. The players were able to convince a couple dozen men and the local sheriff to stay and fight, leaving them outnumbered by something close to 50:1. Exact numbers are probably closer to 35:1 give or take, plus the leaders who have a few supernatural tricks up their sleeves.


The villain is an aspect of the god of the Savage Races. Basically Beastmen, Cyclops, Ettins, Giants, Gargoyles, Goblins, Sahuagin, Grimlocks, Kobolds, Orcs, Ogres, Goliaths, Neanderthal, Yeti, and Scrags. Maybe Lizardfolk and Illithids as well, I haven't decided.

Essentially humans have a stranglehold on the setting, and their Empire controls most of the world. Humans created this Empire because millennia ago a group of gods gave them the secrets of metal working, alchemy, medicine, astronomy, and magic while the rest of the world was in a stone age hunter gatherer state. They were able to quickly rise to power and conquer and exterminate most of the nonhuman races.

The god's goal is too topple the human empire and cull the human population, essentially giving everyone a fresh start. He sees himself as correcting the balance which was upset by the intervention of other gods.

The aspect is more or less just a big strong barbarian of indeterminate species who has the power to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of savage humanoids on a regional level. He also has a magic standard that grants those fighting in his immediate presence the ability to heal by inflicting damage upon civilized men.

His armies are absolutely looting and raiding, but mostly they are just living off their own stores which they foraged from the wilderness and brought with them when they were formed into a horde. Right now his army is not something that can maintain itself for long periods of time.

I am not quite sure what you mean when you ask where he got the idea of tactics from. Poisoning the water supply or creating a plague are beyond the aspect's abilities, although I imagine some of his agents could manage it on a large scale.

I could go into a lot more detail, but this is dragging on, so let me know if you need any more specifics.

[Earthwalker]

A lot of people have commented on the set up and I think a lot of valid points were made. I can certainly see how the complains your players made have some grounds.
What I find odd about the whole premise of the adventure is this -
At one stage as a player they know this information.

You are not heroes, you are just curious kids. (Original campaign idea)
There is a force at the walls of the village that is beyond your personal power to stop.
The Lord has left the village and taken his guards with him, telling everyone to evacuate.

With this information it seems to be that the first option is to do as the authority figure is telling you and evacuate the village. This was an “I have nothing else prepared” result which I find odd.

[HammeredWharf]

Bullet-proof world-building isn't that important in typical D&D. It's a good bonus, but players usually care about their current adventures way more. In other words, the most important failure on your part was letting the session stall for a few hours. That's should never happen. The players should always be doing something. That's why you keep a quest giver NPC on standby. If (s)he's not needed, good. However, if the session is turning aimless, the NPC can barge in and tell the players what they should be doing. Maybe it shouldn't be the best option, but it should be something the PCs can do if they run out of other ideas.

[Apricot]

So much of this adventure you're running seems so strange, and you're very strongly resisting efforts to point that out. I'll just run through the quick list of things which people have already noted as being incredibly odd.

1. The attackers' strategy: if the numbers are anything like what you've pointed out, this is a logistical nightmare. Even if the attack succeeded, they'd starve. If they wanted to stay together, then they'd move quickly instead of waiting days to attack one tiny village. Nobody but you can imagine a realistic foe who would make this kind of bizarre move.

2. The solution to the assault: the players have to both figure out that they're intended to appeal to some higher power to do the fighting for them and figure out what that power is. When writing an adventure, the fundamental rule is that you give people tasks that you can accomplish. The players trust that they will be able to do what is required of them, and that if something is impossible that it will be appropriately communicated. You broke that trust, which is evidenced by your players' reaction.

3. Awakening greater powers, part 2: from a story sense, it isn't reasonable to expect that the first solution one goes to in order to defend a small village is waking up a lich, coercing a dragon, or getting ghosts to do your work for you. That is a last resort, when not even running away is an option, and you're willing to risk the threats of those greater powers over the enemy before you. Consider this: people in times of war will often refuse to call on foreign nations for aid, even when they desperately need it, because the risk of invoking those stronger countries is higher. Replace country with lich, and you'll understand why no reasonable person would ever use your method of saving a village.

4. The characters themselves: the players are kids, and their small village is being attacked. Why wouldn't they run away? They'd have to be stupid to not recognize that an entire army is above their pay grade, or to have been misled into thinking this army was something they could manage. You misled them, because you didn't have another adventure planned. You made the players bear the consequences of your lack of preparation.

There are other problems too, but these are enough to seriously sink an entire campaign, let alone a single mission. You can certainly explain each and every one of these away, if given enough time, but that isn't a justification. In fact, if there are things you need to come up with convoluted reasons to explain away, that's a very good sign that you as a DM have messed up massively. When a story stops sounding reasonable (distinct from realistic), people stop caring about it. That's the death-knell of a campaign.

You might have noticed that I emphasize your role in these proceedings. That's intentional. Everything here is your own personal failing, and you need to own it. Trying to wave these things away isn't going to help you grow as a DM, and it isn't a healthy way to respond to any problems. Fact is, everyone is criticizing you because you made some pretty bad mistakes. My advice to you? Start by accepting that truth, and then read through everyone's responses with humility and with an eye towards changing yourself. If you do that, you can avoid making these mistakes in future and become a good DM. You've already run sessions that your players enjoyed, so you clearly have it in you. But you can't achieve that by trying to argue against what everyone is trying to say. From now on? Your only response to anyone should be to ask clarifying questions. If you think they're wrong, then what's probably going on is that you simply don't understand what they mean. Ask and find out instead, and educate yourself instead of fortifying your position.

[Airk]

These are not hyper competent NPCs or something. They are just a regular small frontier town defended by a sheriff and his deputies and a few local hunters and ranch hands with rifles and shotguns. It doesn't take anything special to simply station a ring of guys with shotguns outside the monsters lair or to throw a bunch of dynamite in the entrance and run, anyone can do this unless I go out of my way to cripple them.

So if they're not particularly competent, but you have to come up with irritating ways to deny the players options lest they ask "Why didn't the NPCs already do this?" maybe it's not a good setup? I still don't actually understand why the NPCs can't just all stand around outside the cave and shoot it when it comes out to hunt. Maybe they don't actually know where it lives?

The very first non freeform RPG I run was an AD&D second edition game. The players defeated the boss monster effortlessly by simply running around and shooting arrows and spells at it without ever letting it get into melee range. I mentioned this to our regular DM, one of our teachers (we were 12-13 at the time) and he explained to me that you need to place monsters in appropriate terrain. A creature with a low movement speed and no ranged attacks won't just be out in the middle of a field, it will choose a lair that covers up its weaknesses. That seemed like a good lesson at the time, and you are the first person I can recall talking to that seems to think its a bad idea.

Once again, it seems like everyone is saying one thing, and you are taking away something different. There's nothing wrong with putting a creature in terrain that makes sense, or which gives it an advantage (or, as the case was in the original example, DON'T put a monster in a location that cripples it.) but your situation comes across as contrived and needlessly restrictive. Some of us are actually having problems even imagining what kind of cave meets your bizarre criteria here.

D&D actually does have rules for walking from place to place, and for just about everything a real person could do short of graphic biological functions and purely internal processes.

See, now you are starting to get it! A real person COULD NOT jump to the moon, or convince someone to kill themselves for a gold piece. And the rules don't have to tell you that. So why are you so concerned that suddenly, in some other game system, the rules are the only thing restricting the actions a player can take? Do you have PCs declaring "I grow wings and fly up!" when there's no reason they should be able to do that? Do you think that is because of the rules? Do your players try to tie flasks of flaming oil to arrows with hemp rope and then fire them to the maximum range of their longbow because the rules don't say they can't?

But at the same time, your assertion that D&D has rules for everything is.... come on man. Does D&D have rules for wine tasting? Does it have rules for beating someone in a philosophical debate? Does it have rules for losing an arm? Does it have rules for dissecting monsters? And harvesting their parts? Does it have rules for how long a character can stay conscious while hanging upside down? Does it have rules for alchohol poisoning? What about for juggling? Juggling torches? Estimating the weight of a gold idol? D&D doesn't even have rules for called shots in most editions.

Please kindly dismiss the idea that D&D has rules for all circumstances or even all actions. It is both incorrect and extremely misleading, leading to all sorts of false assumptions. NO GAME has rules for everything.

But yeah, walking from place to place is not extraordinary or contested. You say I am making a straw-man argument, but don't you think comparing walking to actively using a skill which would require a test is a bit of the same?

I'm attempting to use hyperbole to get you to consider the fact that lots of things in D&D are not in fact governed by the rules.

I do not "already know how these things are handled," as I have not read Dungeon World. I asked a friend to let me borrow his copy, but it is packed away somewhere and he says he will get it to me when he finds it.

I meant in D&D. Or GURPS. Or Rolemaster. Or whatever random simulationist system you like. They all use exactly the same method for preventing people from doing things that they obviously can't do, and none of them need to have rules to say it.

I was told in this thread that an action can't fail in Dungeon World, and that running it would teach me how to game without being able to say No to my players. I took this at face value, I have no reason not to, and I am genuinely curious about how the game handles a few of the glaring problems that spring to mind. For example, PCs who attempt ridiculous tasks, or that if something is possible anyone can still succeed on it regardless of their specific methodology or character abilities.

Actions "can't fail" because of the dice. But that doesn't mean that every action gets as far as the dice. In fact, in some ways, Dungeon World is more simulationist tha D&D - because in D&D, the rules say that if you're adjacent to a giant, you can hit it with your sword by rolling an attack roll versus its AC, and if you hit, you always do your damage to its hitpoints, and that if you hit it enough, and it's hitpoints reach zero, it dies, even though all you've ever done is hack away at its foot and ankle, because that's all you can possibly reach. In Dungeon World, a character hacking away at the foot of a giant with a sword is unlikely to even be allowed to roll... because hacking at the giant's big toe isn't engaging it in melee in any meaningful way.

Now you are telling me that the DM can deny a player success, so I am wondering what the actual difference is. This isn't a "straw man" I honestly and legitimately don't see what the difference is between telling a player "No, that's impossible" and "No, that's impossible unless you can make a DC 600 athletics test," in practice they will have exactly the same outcome.

The DM cannot deny the player success on an action they can legitimately take. If a player comes up with a great argument for why the lord should stop sulking and get out there and defend the town, in D&D, he rolls Diplomacy, and when he gets a 2, the GM says "The lord is not convinced, sucks to be you." and that angle dries up. That's not what happens in Dungeon World.

[John Longarrow]

I didn't work out the exact numbers. The village has a few hundred people in it, while the raiders outnumber them probably 3:1. I doubt there are thousands of them, probably not even one thousand, but they are drawn from all of the indigenous peoples within the local region rather being an army which marched from a great distance away.

But even 100 raiders would be a nearly insurmountable challenge for 3 first level PCs, 10-20 first level commoners, a sheriff, and a handful of animated objects, even with booby traps.


I didn't mention the larger context because it wasn't relevant to the adventure or to the thread, and I only bring it up now because people are making a unfounded assumptions about what exactly is going on. If people are really curious I can write out a long hand copy of my campaign notes, although I am kind of loathe to do so both because it will take a lot of time to write up and because I don't want my players stumbling across it.

Post 36, you posted "It is an army of thousands of individuals in an e6 world."

The larger context is very important to explain many of the motivations going on. If this is the only army, why wouldn't the king help? Based on the larger context it makes a lot more sense that the king can't help.

[Kalmageddon]

It seems to me that by this point people are just nitpicking on every detail of your campaign.
Let's be honest, it's not the plausibility of an invading army of savage humanoids or the battlefield logistics of said army that has made your players unable to enjoy the session.

You probably shouldn't let your players stall for as long as you did. Communicate OOC more and think about having them solve problems by themselves instead of having to use some outside force.

This is not an absolute criticism, honsetly, outside of the session stalling for too long, I don't see anything bad in how you run the game. So please don't get overwhelmed by all this feedback because bad things might happen to your creativity if you try to listen to every piece of criticism that comes flying your way by people that haven't even played with you once.

[Talakeal]

1. The attackers' strategy: if the numbers are anything like what you've pointed out, this is a logistical nightmare. Even if the attack succeeded, they'd starve. If they wanted to stay together, then they'd move quickly instead of waiting days to attack one tiny village. Nobody but you can imagine a realistic foe who would make this kind of bizarre move.

This isn't an army in the traditional sense, he is simply calling a raid from all of the creatures that live within a few days of the village. After the raid they will go back to their lives, feeding themselves in the normal fashion plus whatever food stuffs they have raided.

Maybe from a purely realistic perspective the population density is too high, but this is a fantasy world, and they have always had a lot of monsters, including many apex predators, living closely together, so it doesn't seem too far fetched to me.

2. The solution to the assault: the players have to both figure out that they're intended to appeal to some higher power to do the fighting for them and figure out what that power is. When writing an adventure, the fundamental rule is that you give people tasks that you can accomplish. The players trust that they will be able to do what is required of them, and that if something is impossible that it will be appropriately communicated. You broke that trust, which is evidenced by your players' reaction.

Yeah, it looks that way. It just kind of surprises me. So dang many fantasy stories and published modules) are resolved by artifacts and divine intervention and secret missions and all sorts of other plot contrivances that I guess I just assumed it was ok. What baffles me is that I have both played in and run many games like this before and this is the first time it has ever been an issue.

But yeah, communication is absolutely key. I still need to figure out when I need to communicate things though, as if I do it too early I feel that I might be accused of railroading the players or shutting down their ideas, and if I don't see where they are going they might actually be doing something different than I thought.

4. The characters themselves: the players are kids, and their small village is being attacked. Why wouldn't they run away? They'd have to be stupid to not recognize that an entire army is above their pay grade, or to have been misled into thinking this army was something they could manage. You misled them, because you didn't have another adventure planned. You made the players bear the consequences of your lack of preparation.

This accusation comes completely out of left field for me. How did I mislead the players at all? I presented a scenario, they (correctly) knew that it was a winnable one, and they went through with it. It just wasn't winnable through force of arms which I (incorrectly) thought I communicated to them.

You seem to be saying that I intentionally lied to them because I wanted them to think they could defeat the enemy army though force of arms? Why the hell would I do that? That didn't happen, and there is no reason for that to have happened.

As to your last sentence, Are you saying that it is wrong for the DM not to have a backup adventure planned? Because if so I don't think I have ever met a DM who isn't a huge jerk.


As for in-character motivations; one player doesn't like authority and doesn't behave simply to be contrary. The other wants to protect people and was out to prove herself as the biggest thing to over come out of this two horse town. They also had knowledge from the previous adventure that there was something off about the lord, and that he might even be a traitor, so they were not keen on following his orders.

Now, the third player who did want to run, wanted to do so because the PLAYER is a sociopath and doesn't like helping people unless there is a huge reward. He has a long habit in RPGs of stealing from fellow party members and friendly NPCs, and my very first DM back when we were 12 pointed out that he is the kind of guy who wouldn't save a drowning baby unless he was offered a reward. I thought he would have outgrown this sort of behavior, and to some extent he has, but there you have it. So he didn't want to run because he was not having fun or because it was the logical thing for his character to do, he did it because he wanted a payout.

And I never had to say anything to him, "This is the only adventure I have prepared," was never, ever, stated during the session. The other PLAYERS, not me, said they wanted to stick around and see how this goes.

There are other problems too, but these are enough to seriously sink an entire campaign, let alone a single mission. You can certainly explain each and every one of these away, if given enough time, but that isn't a justification. In fact, if there are things you need to come up with convoluted reasons to explain away, that's a very good sign that you as a DM have messed up massively. When a story stops sounding reasonable (distinct from realistic), people stop caring about it. That's the death-knell of a campaign.

Huh. I can see where you are coming from, but I don't think I agree. The first session in a long story arc is usually full of mysteries and things that don't make sense, things that the DM has explanations for but the PCs have yet to discover.

This game is set up as a sort of "conspiracy theory". A whole bunch of seemingly unrelated occurrences are actually part of a larger agenda. When viewed individually they don't make sense, but slowly as the players interact with them they fit together into a whole.

This is, imo, a perfectly valid style of story. My current DM is running a game in this style, and it is by far the best game I have ever played in. It is a giant mystery, and every session something strange happens, and for every answer we get we also uncover two more questions. The mystery keeps us hooked, and we show up every week in the hopes of seeing a little more of the bigger picture.

Now, I may have botched my execution (it is really too soon to tell, especially considering that the problems people are dissecting on the forum weren't even brought up in the actual game and had nothing to do with why it stalled), and I almost certainly won't pull it off as good as my DM is doing it, but the notion that the DM has "messed up massively" is patently absurd.

However, I do fully agree that if there is no bigger picture or explanation, or at least doesn't appear to be, the plot holes will break immersion. That is basically the crux of my argument in this thread when talking to Airk and CombatBunny after all.

You might have noticed that I emphasize your role in these proceedings. That's intentional. Everything here is your own personal failing, and you need to own it. Trying to wave these things away isn't going to help you grow as a DM, and it isn't a healthy way to respond to any problems. Fact is, everyone is criticizing you because you made some pretty bad mistakes. My advice to you? Start by accepting that truth, and then read through everyone's responses with humility and with an eye towards changing yourself. If you do that, you can avoid making these mistakes in future and become a good DM. You've already run sessions that your players enjoyed, so you clearly have it in you. But you can't achieve that by trying to argue against what everyone is trying to say. From now on? Your only response to anyone should be to ask clarifying questions. If you think they're wrong, then what's probably going on is that you simply don't understand what they mean. Ask and find out instead, and educate yourself instead of fortifying your position.

If your goal is to get me to be less defensive, this is probably not the way to go about it. Taking at face value your post is basically saying that I am wrong about everything and the critics are never wrong. You are also telling me that I shouldn't respond even correct misconceptions, clarify my statements or answer other people's questions, which I can't agree with, because I one way dialogue where people just chase their own perceptions regardless of act really isn't helping anyone.

You may have meant to say "You will get a better results if you pretend that.." which I agree with (to an extent, if I accepted every criticism as gospel I would have such a low opinion of myself I would crawl into a corner and die), but the way you phrased it makes it sound like a bunch of absolutes which paint me in the worst light possible and is amongst the nastiest and most condescending things I have read.

But anyway, thank you for taking the time respond. You did make a few good points which will actually help me.

So if they're not particularly competent, but you have to come up with irritating ways to deny the players options lest they ask "Why didn't the NPCs already do this?" maybe it's not a good setup? I still don't actually understand why the NPCs can't just all stand around outside the cave and shoot it when it comes out to hunt. Maybe they don't actually know where it lives?



Once again, it seems like everyone is saying one thing, and you are taking away something different. There's nothing wrong with putting a creature in terrain that makes sense, or which gives it an advantage (or, as the case was in the original example, DON'T put a monster in a location that cripples it.) but your situation comes across as contrived and needlessly restrictive. Some of us are actually having problems even imagining what kind of cave meets your bizarre criteria here.

They can't stand outside and shoot the monster because the cave is located on a cliff face ~10 meters above a rocky narrow trail and only comes out at night. There simply isn't a position to stand where you could get multiple good shots off at it.

But look, I just don't see where you are drawing the line between a legitimate challenge and "irritating ways to deny players options," Heck, right out of the monster manual most creatures have some form of immunity or ability that nullifies certain tactics, I don't see why it is so unreasonable to for the scenario to provide others, assuming of course the DM keeps that in mind when working out the difficulty.

Let me give two extreme examples to show you what I mean:

A kobold is sitting outside the gates of the lords castle and all the knights and men at arms are afraid to leave lest it destroy them, so they call upon a band of adventurers to dispatch it. The adventurers are all first level, while the dozens of knights in the castle average second or third. It is just an ordinary kobold, not tucker's kobold or a half dragon kobold or a kobold with PC levels or anything like that. It might be a perfectly appropriate challenge, but I am going to bet the players will be picking apart the flaws in the setup so hard they won't enjoy the fight even if it is a fair and level appropriate encounter.

The second scenario involves a straight fight between a high level party and the tarrasque. The tarrasque has hundreds of HP and deals enough damage to shred players in melee. It has DR against non magic weapons, typeless regeneration, immunity to fire, poison, disease, energy dragon, and ability damage. It has scent and blind fight to sniff out those hiding. It has high SR and reflects most types of magical direct damage. In many editions it can shoot spines, rush, burrow, or increase gravity so that people can't kite it. It has great cleave frightful presence so you can't bog it down with weak minions. It flat out requires a wish to kill permanently. Now look at the tarrasque and think how many gosh danged strategies its by the book abilities shut down? And yet it has been a staple monster of D&D for 30 years, and many people actually regard it as weaker than it should be because of the few gaps it does have in its defenses and post fixes online to make it tougher.

If you want a game that is either realistic or challenges the players you need to have complications. I fully agree that you can have unfair complications, and it can be frustrating if they come as surprises too often (and are outright cheating, imo, if the DM comes up with them on the fly because they didn't think of the player's plans), but I see absolutely nothing wrong with having a monster who, for whatever reason, has covered its ass against the most straightforward tactics.

See, now you are starting to get it! A real person COULD NOT jump to the moon, or convince someone to kill themselves for a gold piece. And the rules don't have to tell you that. So why are you so concerned that suddenly, in some other game system, the rules are the only thing restricting the actions a player can take? Do you have PCs declaring "I grow wings and fly up!" when there's no reason they should be able to do that? Do you think that is because of the rules? Do your players try to tie flasks of flaming oil to arrows with hemp rope and then fire them to the maximum range of their longbow because the rules don't say they can't?

But at the same time, your assertion that D&D has rules for everything is.... come on man. Does D&D have rules for wine tasting? Does it have rules for beating someone in a philosophical debate? Does it have rules for losing an arm? Does it have rules for dissecting monsters? And harvesting their parts? Does it have rules for how long a character can stay conscious while hanging upside down? Does it have rules for alchohol poisoning? What about for juggling? Juggling torches? Estimating the weight of a gold idol? D&D doesn't even have rules for called shots in most editions.

Please kindly dismiss the idea that D&D has rules for all circumstances or even all actions. It is both incorrect and extremely misleading, leading to all sorts of false assumptions. NO GAME has rules for everything.

I'm attempting to use hyperbole to get you to consider the fact that lots of things in D&D are not in fact governed by the rules.

I meant in D&D. Or GURPS. Or Rolemaster. Or whatever random simulationist system you like. They all use exactly the same method for preventing people from doing things that they obviously can't do, and none of them need to have rules to say it.

Actions "can't fail" because of the dice. But that doesn't mean that every action gets as far as the dice. In fact, in some ways, Dungeon World is more simulationist tha D&D - because in D&D, the rules say that if you're adjacent to a giant, you can hit it with your sword by rolling an attack roll versus its AC, and if you hit, you always do your damage to its hitpoints, and that if you hit it enough, and it's hitpoints reach zero, it dies, even though all you've ever done is hack away at its foot and ankle, because that's all you can possibly reach. In Dungeon World, a character hacking away at the foot of a giant with a sword is unlikely to even be allowed to roll... because hacking at the giant's big toe isn't engaging it in melee in any meaningful way.

The DM cannot deny the player success on an action they can legitimately take. If a player comes up with a great argument for why the lord should stop sulking and get out there and defend the town, in D&D, he rolls Diplomacy, and when he gets a 2, the GM says "The lord is not convinced, sucks to be you." and that angle dries up. That's not what happens in Dungeon World.

As a side note, I said "just about" every situation, and most of those examples you gave D&D does actually have rules for or are very easy rulings to make given the existing rules.

But to the main point, I think we might be arguing past one another. We started talking about Dungeon World because someone said I needed to learn from it as it is a game where the DM can't say "No" to plans which he feels would never work. And I was pointing out that this doesn't appear to be the case.

I seriously doubt dungeon world has moves to allow a creature which is not strong enough to carry you to carry you, or to turn farmers into expert warriors who can defeat 50 men, or to convince the bad guy to give up his plans with no leverage of any kind aside from calling him names. These were the only things I told the players they couldn't do in my actual session, and I don't see how using Dungeon World would have solved any of them.

Bullet-proof world-building isn't that important in typical D&D. It's a good bonus, but players usually care about their current adventures way more. In other words, the most important failure on your part was letting the session stall for a few hours. That's should never happen. The players should always be doing something. That's why you keep a quest giver NPC on standby. If (s)he's not needed, good. However, if the session is turning aimless, the NPC can barge in and tell the players what they should be doing. Maybe it shouldn't be the best option, but it should be something the PCs can do if they run out of other ideas.

Yes, this is a very good point. Thank you.

I remember running the original Dragonlance modules once. At the end of the Silvenesti segment the module states that the ONLY WAY to free the land from the nightmare is to ask Alhanna "What would your father do if he were in your place?". That made for one of the worst gaming sessions of my life because the players couldn't figure out what to do and it dragged on forever because I was afraid to deviate from the module.

And the real kicker is, I knew this might be a problem coming into my current adventure, and I didn't fix it. And for all you keeping score, once again, I totally messed up and it is completely on me.

This thread has been some help, but I still don't know completely how to eliminate things like this. I have had adventures in the past where the players sat around the table paralyzed with indecision about how to solve a "puzzle" that wasn't there, and turn simple "go kill the monster and get the treasure" quests into logistical nightmares that never went anywhere. I posted a thread a year or two ago about my players annoying habit of coming up with a perfect solution almost immediately, but then sitting around debating the issue so long that they have actually forgotten that solution by the time they actually enact their plan.

It seems to me that by this point people are just nitpicking on every detail of your campaign.
Let's be honest, it's not the plausibility of an invading army of savage humanoids or the battlefield logistics of said army that has made your players unable to enjoy the session.

You probably shouldn't let your players stall for as long as you did. Communicate OOC more and think about having them solve problems by themselves instead of having to use some outside force.

This is not an absolute criticism, honestly, outside of the session stalling for too long, I don't see anything bad in how you run the game. So please don't get overwhelmed by all this feedback because bad things might happen to your creativity if you try to listen to every piece of criticism that comes flying your way by people that haven't even played with you once.

Thank you very much Kal. That is very kind of you to say.

[John Longarrow]

So far it looks like there are 4 issues that you would want to work on.
1) Communications. Make sure your players understand what you are trying to convey.
2) Sharing information. This should be up front, even if you don't think it is directly relevant. Paint the scene at the beginning with as much information as you can. Let the players decide what they really want to pay attention to.
3) Hooks. Early and often. If you don't give the players plenty of reasons to follow your story its hard to get them to. You can use several different hooks to lead to the same place.
4) Scope. Make sure the players and their characters understand the scope of the adventure. If one player thinks this is a 'save the kingdom' adventure when you are running a 'save the town' you get a lot of distractions and misused time.

A way of 'fixing' your adventure is with a short narrative description to (hopefully) get everyone on board with not only your story but what they need to do. One example would be;

"Returning from the dread lich's fastness, you discover your home town is beset by an army of beastly humanoids. Though the town is only a few hundred in number, the host gather before numbers near a thousand. This is even more terrifying when you remember that many other villages have been plagued by similar forces recently, to the extend that the King himself no longer allows his army to face them in the field.

Though your homecoming does shed a brief glimps of hope to your desperate neighbors, little joy is felt as most prepare to evacuate. They have been given three days to depart before the humandoids start burning everything, crops and homes alike. You even hear the sheriff lamenting how your local lord is hold up in his keep, refusing to allow his troops to help. The messenger sent to the king has responded that no help is forth coming. The sheriff has tried to rally the people, but with only a handfull able to wield a blade he knows defeat would be inevitable. With a look of pure desperation he asks if you can find someone, anyone with the power to turn aside these horrid monsters? Though deserted by their lord, can you find another who has the power to stop this rampaging force before they strike?"

Please note: Having DMed for a fairly long time I learned very early to have multiple paths an adventure can take. I don't flesh out every detail but I have more than enough to run a session. After 20 odd years I'd better have something I can call upon. This is also very true of most DMs. The guy I originally played with could spin a new arc off in minutes if that was the way the party was going. Stating otherwise does show you are very new to DMing.

[Talakeal]

Please note: Having DMed for a fairly long time I learned very early to have multiple paths an adventure can take. I don't flesh out every detail but I have more than enough to run a session. After 20 odd years I'd better have something I can call upon. This is also very true of most DMs. The guy I originally played with could spin a new arc off in minutes if that was the way the party was going. Stating otherwise does show you are very new to DMing.

I agree with pretty much everything you said except for the last bit.

I am not in any way new to DMing, I have been running games fairly regularly for almost 25 years now.

However, I don't see any real correlation between experience and skill. No matter how many lessons I learn or guides I read, the actually quality of the game doesn't really change. I can look back at my old games and point out major flaws, while if I look at my more recent adventures the defects become harder to point out, but the rate of bad sessions to good sessions has, if anything, increased as time goes on.

Honestly, I am not sure if DMing is a skill that one improves with experience. By far the worst DM I have ever played with was also the oldest. He claims to have been DMing for over 40 years and the other day flat out boasted "No one has as much experience as me," and he tells (almost certainly fabricated stories) of how Monte Cook came to him for advice when he was just starting out because he was the most veteran DM he could find short of Gygax himself.

And this guy is TERRIBLE, worse than kids we played with in middle school who gave DMing a try for the very first time. Far worse.



Also, its not that I can't run a session on the fly, its just that generally the more thought someone puts into something the better it is, and the players know this. The players also get invested in the story, they like to see things through, to solve the mysteries and fix the problems, and don't generally like leaving something half done. Being prepared for the players abandoning your adventure and going off on their own isn't necessary because it just isn't a thing that happens in the games I have been a part of.