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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7313991" data-attributes="member: 6779196">This specific example is pretty easy to deal with. You just narrate past it. “After several more hours of interrogation, you don’t manage to get any useful information out of him.” As for the more general problem, just don’t be afraid to tell your players in no uncertain terms that an NPC does not have the information they’re looking for. Do it out of character so they know it’s not the NPC lying to them.You need time pressure in your adventures to prevent this. Either have a ticking clock, like “In exactly one month, the stars will align for the evil ritual; if you don’t stop the cult before then, they’ll summon Cthulhu.” or to roll for random encounters every hour  (of in-game time). If there’s no time pressure preventing the players from taking a long rest after every encounter, that’s the adventure design’s fault, not the players’. Assume your players will use the optimal strategy, and design your adventures to make the 5-minute workday a suboptimal strategy if you don’t want the players employing it. And you do that by making time a meaningful cost of resting. Either by limiting time to complete the adventure, or creating a risk of danger that increases over time.In my experience, this kind of thing  usually happens because the players lack direction. If the adventure doesn’t have clear goals and structure, the players end up just <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />ing around. If the fun you’ve prepared for them isn’t obvious, they’ll make their own, and players making their own fun is often disruptive to the DM’s plans. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a make-your-own-fun game if that’s what the group is into, but it sounds like it’s not the kind of D&D experience you’re looking for. The time pressure will help with this. If the players only have three days to save the Dragon from being sacrificed to the evil princess, they won’t waste any time getting in altrications with the town guard unless they think it’s absolutely necessary to their plan to rescue the Dragon. The other thing that will help is having very clearly defined goal, structure, and resolution for your adventure. The Skyrim style “here’s a big open world, do whatever you want in it. Oh, and there’s a main quest you can do if you feel like it” approach doesn’t work very well for tabletop. The players need to know what the mission is, why they should care, and what happens if they don’t complete it.I highly recommend the Angry GM’s series on adventure design, and in particular the sub-series on different adventure structures.<a href="http://theangrygm.com/the-shape-of-adventure/" target="_blank">http://theangrygm.com/the-shape-of-adventure/</a></blockquote>

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