D&D General Advancing the Plot when the PCs don't take the bait. . .

[el-remmen]

So I was just prepping my notes for next week's 19th session of my D&D 5E game and I realized that some of my notes from Session #16 could be copied over since in that session the PCs made a choice to follow one thread at the cost of not following up on something else. Now they will be coming back to see some of the consequences of their choice and I have to think through how things have advanced since when I originally planned for them to go back to a town from their early adventuring days.

The details don't matter. I am not asking for advice or suggestions, I have some ideas that make sense and I am very aware of avoiding making the consequences seem like a "punishment" for making their own choices (either choice came with benefits and downsides and they talked them through as a group when choosing). But wanted to know if anyone else loved moments like these in their games as much as I do, and ask for examples of in-game events where PCs had to deal with the consequences of not acting or taking a different path for a while. What was the choice? What were the consequences? How did the players react?

 

[Krachek]

As player I love when the DM take time to describe results of our choice. It makes a world living and attractive. But I would not use the term consequence, because I rarely see player feel guilt, remorse or shame based on DM descriptions.

 

[Charlaquin]

That’s the only way to make those decisions matter. If the players could come back and take the other option later with no consequence, it wasn’t really a meaningful choice.

 

[Oofta]

I regularly have multiple paths and plot hooks for the PCs to follow, they always have the last say in what they follow up on.

So PCs may come back to villages that are smoking ruins only to meet an NPC that had asked for help blaming them for not saving the town, or having had a rival adventuring group being paraded around a heroes (even though the PCs know they're really heartless mercenaries).

I don't want to rub things in their face too much, because sometimes there is no great solution. I don't want to force a choice of two evils unless there's a third, possibly much more dangerous option. It's a game, and while they can't fix everything I don't want them feeling too guilty.

 

[el-remmen]

As player I love when the DM take time to describe results of our choice. It makes a world living and attractive. But I would not use the term consequence, because I rarely see player feel guilt, remorse or shame based on DM descriptions.

Yeah, "consequences" can make it seem like they are to blame which is not always the case. Nevertheless, they may feel responsible depending on their characters and the specific circumstances.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yeah, "consequences" can make it seem like they are to blame which is not always the case. Nevertheless, they may feel responsible depending on their characters and the specific circumstances.

It can make it seem that way, but consequences is a neutral term - there can be positive consequences or negative consequences.

 

[NotAYakk]

So I don't like telling stories where the PCs die and lose.

Instead, give them too much to do. They succeed at what they try, and fail at what they don't.

If there are 5 problems and they do 2 of them, the other 3 the "bad thing" advances.

Steal Fronts – Dungeon World SRD -- plan for the players to not be able to do everything (or even know about what things are going on always), and know what things will happen when they players don't get involved (in a player-facing manner!)

Spew new fronts as old ones get cleaned up!

 

[el-remmen]

It can make it seem that way, but consequences is a neutral term - there can be positive consequences or negative consequences.

Sure, but people rarely use the word consequences to speak of positive or expected results regardless of its technical neutrality. No one ever says, "You are gonna have to deal with the consequences of being a law-abiding citizen."

Anyway, that is neither here, nor there.

Any more examples?

 

[Krachek]

Yeah, "consequences" can make it seem like they are to blame which is not always the case. Nevertheless, they may feel responsible depending on their characters and the specific circumstances.

But I do see a lot of remorse, frustration and anger in characters. Bad events are key point to role play. Loosing a favorite npc is far more effective than a close TPK.

 

[Faolyn]

I think it really depends on how it's done. I'm in a CoC game where I found I really dislike my character (she was basically useless, and I've grown to hate the system) and asked the GM to kill her off. We were in the middle of an adventure so I said I could take one of the many NPCs until the next game. My PC was therefore killed horribly in the middle of the night, which was fine.

The other PCs took a day to deal with my ex-body, since we were in the middle of the wilderness and they didn't want to leave it for scavengers, and in that time, the bad guys beat us to the goal of the adventure, and we were told it would be impossible to catch up with them and get the MacGuffin, and that there was no point in going to the place where it had been kept, leaving the entire adventure absolutely pointless and me feeling pretty bad for disrupting things.