Are PCs completely unpredictable?

[Joshua Randall]

What are the essential ways you can interact with something in D&D?

* You can fight it.
* You can use skills on it.
* You can use magic on it (often, but not always, the same as fighting or using skills).
* You can role-play with it.

I try to plan for those four contingencies in my adventures. I have learned, from years of bitter experience, that if I do not cover one of those bases, the PCs almost invariably end up choosing it. Example, I introduce a helpful, innocuous NPC sage for whom I don't have a stat block -- the PCs choose to fight him. Or, I introduce a pyschotic, disgustingly evil monster for whom I don't have a personality or motives -- the PCs choose to role-play with it.

So now I try to cover the four basic modes of interaction (combat, skills, magic, role-play) for all NPCs and all situations.

 

[The Grackle]

If/when you do try to predict/figure out the PCs' actions, how often are you even somewhat correct?

I can predict their actions about 30% of the time. Just enough to lure me into thinking I can guess what's going to happen next and prepare all the wrong notes.

 

[jtone]

A lot of the fun in DMing is that I don't know what the players are going to do next. I'm a fairly new DM so I don't yet see a lot of the patterns that are probably there.

The thing that catches me off-guard the most is when they try to roleplay what I had set up as a combat encounter. "Ummm... we're mooks here to delay you a bit so that the Big Bad can have time to buff up. And how are you doing today?"

 

[Henry]

I manage to predict about three out of four games what my players will do. There's always that one time out of four that they'll throw me...

In an adventure where their superior tells them that stealth is the key to success, they went up and blockaded the road to the adventure location, and proceeded to blow up cars that approached, and fighting their way in all the way.

In an adventure where they plan to fight their way to an artifact and retrieve it, one party member uses telekinesis to toss the artifact into no-man's land...

Every once in a while, the PCs "feel froggy", and decide to do something totally against their usual inclinations.

 

[Munin]

Unless it's quite obvious, I ask my players what they intend to do, but only in the most general terms.
Are you going to the city? or are you staying in the dungeon?

Beyond that, I don't try to guess. I just create npcs and let the game run itself.