D&D General No Fixed Location -- dynamically rearranging items, monsters, and other game elements in the interests of storytelling

Blue said:

This is an important part of the Fail Forward school of DMing as well. If you need to find the secret door for the adventure to continue, then a failed roll doesn't mean you don't find it, it means something like you took too long searching and a patrol came out of it, surprising you. Now you've got an extra encounter, likely the foes are warned - but the adventure doesn't come to a halt.

Click to expand...

That's just it, though: why is it so important that the adventure keep going where it otherwise wouldn't? Read in a negative light, this sounds like something a railroad-y DM would say; and you've never struck me as one such.

Or if I plant hooks for a next adventure in the town the players end up in. Instead of picking a specific town and if the players didn't go there there wouldn't be hooks.

Click to expand...

Why not plant hooks for different adventures in different towns e.g. if they go to Praetos they're likely to hear about the Slavers' raids; if they go to Xania there's the City Shadows adventure waiting for 'em; and if they try to throw me and sail around to Spieadeia they'll probably hear about the Ghost Ship once there, as well as hear tell of the Renegade Army near Cyrax.

The depending where they go and-or what they hear, you can flesh out whichever adventure they decide to follow up on, if such fleshing-out hasn't been done already. But no matter where they go, they're going to hear about something if they bother to listen.

It's very easy to both respect player agency and adjust. Because the definition of agency is actions taken "especially such as to produce a particular effect". The players are not actively trying to avoid the adventure hooks - it does not invalidate their choices. Whatever reason they picked to go to that town instead of another are still in play.

Click to expand...

That also kind of depends; for example if they're specifically seeking downtime it's possible they are, for the nonce, actively trying to avoid adventure hooks.

That, and sometimes they're operating on their own adventuring agenda, following up on breadcrumbs you've dropped unintentionally but that they took to be important, or working on their own projects that may have grown out of previous adventures.

"Remember when we went into Calagorn's Barony to rescue that prince he'd had kidnapped? We've never been back there since; so how about we go back in there now and raise a little hell, see how miserable we can make ol' Cally's winter?" Calagorn's Prince might have been an adventure from two years ago, and here suddenly out of the blue it spawns another adventure but this time completely player-driven.

hawkeyefan said:

I mean....what if you create a 6 room dungeon and after 2 rooms you realize it’s a cake walk? And the first 2 rooms were the ones you thought would be hard? Do you just go through the motions for the final 4 rooms?

Click to expand...

Sure would - if it's that easy it won't take very long to play through.

All it means in the long run is that their pre-intelligence on the place was a bit faulty.

Prakriti said:

This is how I design one-shots too. I usually include 4 encounters, with the third being "optional," meaning that I can remove it on the fly, if need be, for time considerations. If we're past the three-hour mark when the party reaches it, then it's gone. I move on to the final encounter instead.

Click to expand...

Absolutely. (unless it's a tournament, of course )

One-shots aren't the question here; they're their own breed of animal and needs must be approached quite differently than an ongoing open-ended campaign.

There's more than one level that this idea works at too. Above we're talking about players looking for a hook they like. If that's where the game is at then then answer to moving things around is probably no, the players shouldn't be forced into a particular story. However, that isn't what I was talking about at all. I was talking about situations where the players have already bitten on a hook and are fully engaged in a particular story - one they've chosen. This is a situation where the players want to find the next clue but have, for whatever reason, wandered away from the adventure path. Maybe they misinterpreted some piece of information, or maybe the breadcrumbs weren't as obvious in play as they looked in the design phase. Either way, that's when I'll consider moving a clue around to make sure they at least have an opportunity to find it. It's more specific even than that though, it would generally need to be a situation where without another piece of information they party won't know what to do next.

This isn't about playing on easy mode, and it isn't about railroading. It's about making sure that, after some failure (because that's important too), that the story the players have chosen can continue without an inordinate amount of precious game time being spent backtracking and looking in all the wrong places with no results.

To get back to the OP, once more some suggestion for an Open World are like: let the party go where they want to, the right dungeon to progress the story is right there.
Means pseudo sandbox, it is a bit like railroading without pushing the party in a distinctive direction.

So open world, but without risk that the first level group runs into the level 20 mob because they took the wrong direction.

Although this sounds like a good idea first, it requires as much investment as dropping the right hints in campaign imo. And it might lead to disbelief also, the party finds the fitting clue all the time, how convenient is that? Won't they get suspicious after the third or fourth time?

I do this all the time with encounter disguised as random encounters.

I will happily do this. I have even written things that were fuzzy in their locations even in the planning. Things like "In the first room the characters may be able to find x", "In the second room they search they may be able to find y" and so on. Where the searching happens is secondary. If they don't search, they don't get. If they don't put the clues together then they are not forewarned.

I think it is perfectly fine for a DM to switch the location of items and monsters on the fly, if their locations have not been established yet. However, I tend to not make my adventures dependent on any single item. If they don't search the fireplace, then so be it, they don't find the item. No adventure of mine relies on them finding it. But if the fireplace is important, then I will make sure to highlight it when describing the environment, so my players know to investigate it.

But sometimes I might have miscalculated the challenge of a battle. To compensate I'll change the number of enemies that I intended to appear, to make for a better fight. So instead of one enemy appearing as I intended, there are now two. As long as the number of enemies has not been established yet, I can make it any number I want it to be.

RolemasterBlog said:

I will happily do this. I have even written things that were fuzzy in their locations even in the planning. Things like "In the first room the characters may be able to find x", "In the second room they search they may be able to find y" and so on. Where the searching happens is secondary. If they don't search, they don't get. If they don't put the clues together then they are not forewarned.

Click to expand...

Again another method but much more elegant would be to assign different targets which might be achieved in any order and each covers 1-2 level range in difficulty.

Ultimately, it's a game and it's a story, and sometimes you have to fudge one to focus on the other, and vice versa.