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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Obi-One" data-source="post: 1161269" data-attributes="member: 14650">The best way to regualte their actions without railroading their fun is to have consequences planned in advance. For example, the party decides to wipe a small village off the map because it's harbouring someone they've been chasing for a while. Fine. Let them do it.So the village is destroyed, the locals are dead and their nemesis is captured. What the PC's don't know is the local noble has a rather kick-a** contingent of rangers in his employ. They are dispatched to destroy the characters.Do not hesitate to bring the sneakiest, rat bastardly tactics the rangers would use to bear on your PC's. As long as the encounter level is enough to match them in a fight, you should deplete 70% of their resources and incapacitate at least one of them IF they survive. Obviously allow for them rolling so well that they make a mockery of your careful plan, as my players do sometimes <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> The point being - consequences. Their nemesis may escape because of the attack and survive to haunt them longer. They may kill all the rangers, so the noble puts a death mark on them and hires mercenaries to bring them in dead or alive. Rumours spread of their deeds which attracts good/bad attention. A simple, evil decision can spawn countless encounters, story arcs etc etc.Yet the crucial message is: do overtly bad things to innocents enough and scary good people turn up to hand you your own a**. They'll regualte their own behaviour after that, and you can feed off their paranoia  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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