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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 8648636" data-attributes="member: 2629">D&D is an RPG.  Characters play a role in a story.  There are a million ways to tell a good story.A lot of these ideas are going to be bad ideas most of the time.  However, they're not always bad ideas in the hands of the right DM and right set of players.  I played in a game where - at about 7th level - the players beat the current BBEG ... and discovered that everything we thought up to that point was wrong.  The BBEG we'd killed was not evil.  He was fighting to protect people that were being enslaved.  And we'd been the unwitting pawns on the slavers.  This was revealed in about 30 seconds - but then we interrogated the person that revealed it.  And that took many hours.  And it was mostly the DM, in character as the NPC, recounting the campaign from the NPC's perspective.  That 3 hours should have checked the boxes on a number of red flags.  The DM did 95% of the talking.  The DM was telling us how clever he was.  He was bragging about all the hints he'd been able to drop without us catching those clues.  He was connecting dots between things that we had not caught with little 'cut scenes' for lack of a better word.  And it was taking a major victory from us and turning it into a horrible defeat.  However, that DM was a great storyteller.  And that was a great story.  And I remember so many moments in the story where I figured out where it was going to go ... and waited with dread for the knife to turn.  Sometimes it went the way I expected - but he had a few more tricks, especially as the story caught up to the present day.  I can't say it was a laugh fest - but that session was engrossing and set up a great next adventure series.  It was not a mistake.My advice: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Consider advice you get, but don't consider it law.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Read the room.  If you're doing something and the players are not invested, switch gears.  (The easiest way to do this is a sudden attack that has an established reason to occur, such as enemies of the party that have been hunting them catching up to them at that time).</li> </ul></blockquote>

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