Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Havrik Stoneskimmer" data-source="post: 5512154" data-attributes="member: 6670929">Most of the adventure scenarios that I've written in the past have followed the traditional dungeon with encounter key format. E.g., this room has 4 goblins guarding a prisoner, that room has a trap that releases several animated skeletons that attack, etc. The general assumption is that the PCs will go in, defeat the monsters, and take their treasure and whatever plot leads link them to the next adventure.In my current campaign, though, I have a scenario coming up that I want to run in a looser fashion. Very briefly, the PCs have been following the trail of a group of goblinoids that were raiding their town for plunder and slaves. It turns out that the slaves and supplies are being sent to a large archeological dig site, where the goblinoids have been hired by a mysterious client to excavate an ancient crypt.I want the dig site to be obviously too big for this three PC party to just wade in and start fighting. And I have some important pieces of exposition I want to get across to the players, as well as introducing one of the main campaign villains (the mysterious client).The image I have in my head is the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy and Sallah are at a hill overlooking the Nazi dig site and then proceed to sneak in to access the map room. In fact, this whole scenario is inspired by that movie: I even have a not-entirely-evil but callous archaologist playing the Belloq role.I assume the players will attempt to sneak into the dig to investigate what's going on and somehow eavesdrop on the important exposition. I imagine most of the game will involve a lot of DM improvisation based on player actions, letting their ideas (and my on-the-fly ideas) create the story for the night. They might just find out what's going on and then sneak back out, they might try to lead a slave revolt, they might try to infiltrate the goblinoids and take out their leadership right then and there. I'm not really sure what to expect.One line of thought I had was having the PCs get captured if they mess up their sneaking, and have the villains do the traditional grandstanding plot exposition, but I worry that a) it's harder to capture PCs than you think, and b) the players might feel like they are being forced into a situation out of their control. So I'm ambivalent about attempting this, even though I think it would lead to a dramatic scene that allows me to introduce the villains and give them some personality. But if we don't have a scene like this, I need some other way to get the same exposition across.I'm not really sure how to prepare encounters for this adventure. Given that the events of the adventure really depend on how the players choose to approach the situation, I can't really prep specific encounters with any particular expectation of how or where they will be activated. My current thought is to create a few balanced encounters (e.g., goblin patrol group, the villains and their entourage, etc.) and just put them into play at appropriate places given the players actions.Any thoughts on how to deal with this kind of scenario, where the unfolding events are much more in the hands of the players than is the case for your typical dungeon crawl? I'd also like some advice on the capture-and-exposition scene, and how that kind of thing has gone if you've tried it before.For the most part these questions are system-agnostic, but I will note that we're playing D&D 4e, since the nature of encounter balancing and system-specific incentives may come into play here.</blockquote>

Verification