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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2744150" data-attributes="member: 26473">I prefer to think of it as the "most likely" or "probable" story path.I'm not 100% sure I understand your point here, but I will respond to the idea of an adventure hinging on a single roll: in my humble opinion, that's poor adventure design.I'm running an investigative adventure right now. Investigative adventures are really tough for me as a GM, because I find it challenging to create the right balance between offering clues that are either too obvious or too obscure. Generally the first time I run an investigative adventure I'll work with the players out-of-game so that they can develop a sense of how I place clues and build the puzzle to be solved.While I don't consider investigative adventure design to be among my strengths as a GM, I do know not to prepare an adventure such that it hinges on a single clue. I create multiple clues leading to the solution of the puzzle to avoid a terminal bottleneck in which a single die roll determines success or failure.What this does is put control of the adventure in the hands of the players: they have access to multiple clues, and can find their way to the solution by more than one path depending largely on their choices and luck. That doesn't mean they will always succeed, however - in the adventure that I'm running right now, the adventurers mucked up an interview with one witness (in part because on an unsuccessful skill check), ignored two others, and never came into contact with two more (in part because of a successful skill check). However, a sixth witness provided another clue that the players and their characters recognized, and it appears that the characters may yet solve the puzzle.Here's the thing: if the players and the adventurers had in fact missed all six pathways (and for a time it looked like it might go that way), I had no intention of "nudging" or "fudging" anything to get them back on track. They would not solve the puzzle, and the game would go on from there. I imagine that some GMs here would find this outcome unsatisfying: it's not memorable, it wastes my hard work, it's frustrating for the players, and so on - some might choose to cook up another clue at that point and drop it in the adventurers' lap, or fudge a 'bad' die roll, in order to "keep the plot moving" along the "proper path." However, it's the only outcome that reflects the results of the players' decisions.I created the adventure and assigned a variety of different means of solving the puzzle, involving a plethora of possible skill checks and roleplaying opportunties, and let the dice fall where they may - there is no "proper story path," only a set of more or less likely outcomes at which the players arrive through good gameplay and a bit of luck.</blockquote>

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