Help my players are smarter then me!!

[Jhaelen]

There's a concept known as Schrödinger's Gun. It's kind of an amalgam of Chekov's Gun and Schrödinger's Cat.

The idea is that, until such time as you tell the players what happens, anything can be changed.

I didn't know there's a name for this approach but that's what I did in my last campaign, as well.

Basically, I used a 'turning-point' adventure in which the party's decision to negotiate with the aboleth instead of trying to fight them led to the opposing faction (i.e. the mindflayers) being the 'bad' guys trying to overthrow the world. Until that point I hadn't decided anything and was intentionally vague and ambigous.

Likewise, their search for allies was completely open: I had thought about a half-dozen factions and my players decided who they wanted to try to win over (which included a faction I'd not thought about in advance).

 

[NewJeffCT]

First off, why would Villain V be exhibiting odd behavior? While it is not outright metagaming, any unusual NPC mannerisms or actions is going to set the PC's spider senses to tingling. There are several solutions to this:

1) Have a good NPC exhibit odd behavior. If the PCs investigate him or her, they find everything to be on the up & up.

2) Have more NPCs - good and bad. Maybe somebody is a minor crime boss, but is totally unrelated to Villain V? Maybe another NPC is a competitor to Villain V and hopes to steer the PCs into thwarting V's plans? Maybe another is working undercover for a local good-aligned church? Maybe the captain of the town guard is on the take for Villain V or the NPC competitor to V? Maybe the captain's right hand man is brutally honest & straight and is looking for evidence to take down his boss, who is politically connected.

3) Have Villain V be helpful in the beginning - he may want the PCs to succeed for certain reasons (test the loyalty/competence of one of his underlings, wants to set the PCs up for a bigger fall down the road, one of the PCs is a hero of prophecy who must be sacrificed to Villain V's dark god, but only after PC has done A, B and C first)

4) And, maybe Villain V is not the BBEG? Maybe that is Villain X. Remember, behind Darth Vader was The Emperor.

 

[the Jester]

There's some good advice already in this thread, especially using red herrings and having some good guys act funny. I'll add that using layers of villains helps too- instead of introducing V before A, introduce V's lackey W, who runs X and Y, who head the first couple of adventures involving V's big plot... and introduce V, if appropriate, somewhere in the middle. The pcs follow the trail back and finally take on W, only to find THE TRUTH: V was behind everything all along!

I also want to address this:

Should I just be happy for my players, they do have fun inteligbly (?) wrecking my plots, its not theire intention to screw up 20 hrs worth of planning for me. They are just smarter then me...... :.(

Let them have their fun. If you're doing 20 hours of prep, you're clearly enjoying it for its own sake, and there are tons of things you have created that you can build off later. For instance, you can re-use that dungeon they skipped when new bad guys move in.

Don't do the "Bad guy always makes his save" thing- that is extremely tiresome as a player, and they don't get to do that, so it's also unfair.

If the pcs are too on the ball, ramp up the difficulty of things a little bit next time, but I'm firmly against robbing them of their accomplishments.

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

Would give Jester some XP but apparently I've given him too much already. Anyhow, great ideas by Jester and I totally agree with his post. Half the fun of the game for me as a DM is if players throw me the curve ball and make me react to something they figured out and then I have to come up with something cool on the spot to keep challenging them.

 

[haakon1]

2) Have more NPCs - good and bad. Maybe somebody is a minor crime boss, but is totally unrelated to Villain V? Maybe another NPC is a competitor to Villain V and hopes to steer the PCs into thwarting V's plans? Maybe another is working undercover for a local good-aligned church? Maybe the captain of the town guard is on the take for Villain V or the NPC competitor to V? Maybe the captain's right hand man is brutally honest & straight and is looking for evidence to take down his boss, who is politically connected.

4) And, maybe Villain V is not the BBEG? Maybe that is Villain X. Remember, behind Darth Vader was The Emperor.

#2 and #4 resemble my campaigns.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Also, revisit NPCs. Things change with them and sometimes a good guy can become a bad guy. If the PCs have aready had dealing with someone and dismissed them, they can make for great tragic foes.

 

[Barastrondo]

Another vote for "always have more villains." I favor villains who are often parts of an organization*, or who have ties and allegiances to other villains either actual or potential. If the PCs suss out a villain quickly and cut him out of the picture, awesome: but if he was a ranking member of an assassin's guild, that doesn't mean I have to abandon all those assassin stat blocks and miniatures I've got waiting in the wings. His lieutenant may take over, or his lover, or whomever; not only are there still assassins to be fought but now it's personal.

The Big Reveal is very tempting to any GM, but as baskets go, I wouldn't put all my eggs in it. Sometimes it won't play out. It's always good to have a backup plan of More Interesting Things going on in the setting.


*You know what players love? Numbered villains. Ninja Scroll's Eight Devils of Kimon, the Forty Thieves, the Five Deadly Venoms. Make up groups like The Right Hand (a group of five), the Nine Knights of Hell, the Slaughterer Six. Players love the sense of progression they get every time they pick one of them off, and they delightedly pore over their checklists to see who to go after next. It's a fun and easy technique for getting players to get proactive. And if they kill one of your guys early, there's still several more left -- and the remaining villains will step it up all the more readily. And maybe even go on a recruitment drive if the heroes aren't fast enough.

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

You know what players love? Numbered villains. Ninja Scroll's Eight Devils of Kimon, the Forty Thieves, the Five Deadly Venoms. Make up groups like The Right Hand (a group of five), the Nine Knights of Hell, the Slaughterer Six. Players love the sense of progression they get every time they pick one of them off, and they delightedly pore over their checklists to see who to go after next. It's a fun and easy technique for getting players to get proactive. And if they kill one of your guys early, there's still several more left -- and the remaining villains will step it up all the more readily. And maybe even go on a recruitment drive if the heroes aren't fast enough.

Bravo, this is a great idea and one that I've used a few times as well. I used something similar in an evil campaign where the characters were to assassinate some very powerful good guys and they became more powerful and heavily guarded as they progressed.

Things like this definitely make players feel a sense of accomplishment and drive the story as they encounter new and different challenges. They have to think outside the box or creatively which can really make a campaign very cool.

 

[ACreepierFolklaw]

One idea which I have used was that each villain encountered would have a little adviser dude, and it kept being the same one. Eventually this adviser turned out to be the real big bad... no matter who was big bad in the mini quests, let them catchem, killem and as things get nasty, the advisor dude never seems to be around J it seems obvious in hindsight but at the time…

What I mean to say is that if Tolkien was dnd, what PC playing Bilbo would have guessed the ring was the real big bad?

There are some things that are literally impossible to guess for even the smartest of lateral thinkers.

also, take the Joker from the dark knight. you know who he is from the offset, so does batman. he hands himself into the police. But there isn't a situation he hasn't preplanned for to make it to his advantage... the players capture the villain and put them in prison? maybe the villain wanted to break a fellow conspiritor out of that jail... the villain is killed? perhaps they were cursed and could only be free to really do some damage once "killed" by an enemies hand...

let the players "win" then show them how they actually lost. if done confidently enough it will have them scratching thier heads for ages as if it was "aaall part of the plannn..." *licks lips*