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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 7976170" data-attributes="member: 2525">In my view, you are way too hung up on "your story."When people say D&D tells a story, usually they don't mean it's a pre-planned story that the players act out. They mean it's universe the players make decisions in, and after it's all over you can tell the story of what happened.Screw your story. The game is telling a new story now. Go with that story.So now they have witnesses they need to deal with. Do they bribe the witnesses, threaten them, obtain disguises to take on a new identity, come up with another bluff, frame some baddies who that can use deception to claim those baddies were disguised as the PCs? Let the players know there are witnesses and there is a flaw with their plan and let them decide how to deal with that challenge. If it ends them in prison, then that will be the next challenge. If it ends them fleeing the town or being run out on a rail, that's the next challenge. If it ends in them allying themselves with the bad guys, run with that. If it ends with them infiltrating the bad guys and later using the attack on the guards as the unfortunate justification of circumstances they needed for said infiltration, run with that. Just let the game go where it's going to go. Give the players the freedom to break out from the plan.Here is an example from one of our games:Literally our best game session ever involved my group arriving in town at the docks with a complete adventure planned by the DM. DM had prepped an adventure path for months before this first session.When the PCs stepped onto the docks they saw a pirate ship docked there with a bunch of orc pirates on the ship. This was all purely color the DM was using to describe the docks. It was not part of the adventure, just really a town description to set the mood.And then our paladin charged up the gangplank and attacked the orcs unexpectedly.And so the party followed him. And we were in a huge pitched battle which the DM had to throw together on the fly.And against the odds, we won. The paladin did, alas, die valiantly in the battle he started. But the city guard was on the way. And we had a ship. So...we sailed away.And that was that. Months of planning thrown in the garbage. So the DM just grabbed another adventure which took place on an island, and that's where we sailed to.And it was a total blast!And that DM never planned that in depth more than a session or two in advance again. But we've never noticed. So the moral of the story is just let your players go play the adventure they want to play, and you adapt as best you can on the fly. Your players will appreciate it, and after a while you will too.</blockquote>

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