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="FireLance" data-source="post: 5215852" data-attributes="member: 3424">In the first place, if you are a beginner DM (as you mentioned in your thread title) it may be better to stick to the standard D&D tropes and assumptions. Getting the hang of DMing is tough enough on its own without taking on the extra burden of communicating to the players that certain things are different in your campaign. Is there a particular reason why you want to do that?That said, if something is common knowledge, or important enough to your campaign that things will get messy if the players get it wrong, you should simply tell the players flat out how your campaign is different without asking their PCs to make a knowledge check of any sort. If Lolth and most drow are not evil in your campaign, you should simply tell them that. And once you have told them that, don't confuse matters by having them face off against a stereotypical evil drow NPC antagonist. It will be difficult for you to get your players to believe anything you say after that.In other cases, it may be enough to gradually allow the truth to seep in. The ogre example is probably one such case. After the PCs have encountered enough smart ogres, the players may eventually come to realize this fact. Even if they never do, the worst that could happen is that they underestimate ogre opponents. This may make ogre encounters tougher than they expect, but it shouldn't cause your campaign to fall apart.Why should this a problem? Intra-party conflict can be problematic if it's not handled properly.It looks like you've fallen into the basic trap of assuming that the PCs will only follow one course of action. A DM who knows his players fairly well may have a good chance of predicting what they will do in response to a particular in-game situation, but it's always better to have one or two contingency plans in place in case the players decide to do something else, and be prepared to improvise in the event that they try something that is not even covered by your contingency plans. For example, you could have turned the players' attempts to calm the bear into a skill challenge. If that failed, escaping from an angry, attacking bear could be another skill challenge. That said, if you have been quite upfront about the fact that it is a scripted adventure, and the players aren't playing along by taking up the missions offered by the NPCs, then it's really their own problem if they miss out on XP and other rewards.</blockquote>

Verification