Best Plot Your Players Never Noticed

[demiurge1138]

Plots are the bane of civilization.

Seriously. It's like saying, "See how cool I am! And yet those players, what ignoramuses!" Once you let go of plots, you start realizing how constricting they are. Why talk about all the plots your players missed, when you can talk about all the great stories they had?

Generally, I do talk about all the great stories my players have had. Most DMs do. I just thought it'd be interesting to talk about the elements they've missed over the years.

If you don't want to talk about it, don't. But don't tell me and other DMs like me that we're doing it wrong just because we like to have story elements in mind before we sit down to play. There is no wrong way to play D&D.

Demiurge out.

 

[Kafkonia]

There is no wrong way to play D&D.

Well, there is, but it's hard to get the goats to wear the lederhosen.

 

[wingsandsword]

I have a story of a plotline the PC's missed, even though I was dangling hints at them left and right.

It was a Forgotten Realms campaign. The campaign had originally been planned to go into the low-epic range (circa 25th level) over about a year and a half. The players knew this, and I had some overarching plotlines and recurring plot elements, but most of the adventures were stand-alones.

From almost the first session, there were persistent enigmas about portals. They randomly find a strange portal that can apparently be tuned to almost any known plane, figure out how to set it to Arborea, and go on a planar side-trek, before going back to the Prime and continuing their adventure, with little more than a "huh" about the odd portal they found. In further adventures, they find portals they thought that they knew about were now missing. Over the course of half a year NPC's start mentioning that it's slower to get around Faerun because a number of portals have been absconded with lately. The PC's even run across a group of NPC's in a dungeon actually dismantling a portal and teleporting out with it.

On a few occasions, assassins even came after the party. The PC's realized that they were professional assassins from a well known organization (Monks of the Long Death), and they would have to be well paid to be sent after them. I thought it would be clear that somebody was trying to kill them. Oddly, the PC's never investigated this, they just dealt with the assassins as they came.

I was dropping hints left and right that somebody was doing something funny with stealing portals, and somebody was trying to assassinate them. They never picked up on either plot as anything worth investigating. If they'd bothered to check (and they would have found out eventually, the Lich Larloch was building a massive portal network, by modifying existing portals to keep costs down. For a modest fee anybody could use his portal network to go anywhere in Faerun, or to many planar destinations and other locations on Toril. The hidden catch was that anybody who stepped through their portals could have a spell cast on them by Larloch and they would wave any SR or saving throw by willingly using the portal, a very dangerous thing when dealing with a Lich that is thousands of years old, and since they had stepped through one of his incomplete prototypes early on, as a side effect they would be immune to that little hidden catch, meaning he wanted them out of the way as a possible complication).

The PC's never investigated, never checked on who was trying to kill them, who was stealing portals.

 

[Aeric]

One of my players had a dwarf barbarian who was raised by non-dwarves after his clanhold had been destroyed. Early in the campaign, the party ran into a ship full of dragonkin pirates, the captain of whom wore a breastplate with the dwarf's family crest on it. I expected the dwarf to ask the captain where he got it, which would have led the party on an adventure to find the dwarf's home and reclaim it from the monsters that had taken over.

Instead, the dwarf decides that these pirates were somehow responsible for destroying an entire dwarven clanhold and attacks them.

His naked corpse was dumped overboard shortly thereafter, and the rest of the party was pressed into service to replace the crewmembers that were killed.

 

[Kafkonia]

This raises a question -- when threads are left untouched, do you have the plotlines in question unfurl behind the scenes? For instance, did the lich get his portal network up and running?

 

[Wraith Form]

This raises a question -- when threads are left untouched, do you have the plotlines in question unfurl behind the scenes? For instance, did the lich get his portal network up and running?

In my games? Yeah. Time goes on--if the players do nothing, I try to let them know what the results (good or bad) of their inaction was.

 

[jmucchiello]

This raises a question -- when threads are left untouched, do you have the plotlines in question unfurl behind the scenes?

Yes, which is why you never have an "end of the world" plot dangle in the background. Those kinds of plot hooks should become less severe the longer the party ignores them.

Player 1: I say to the barmaid, "I'll have..."
DM: Before you can finish, the world ends. Sorry fellas. You shouldn't have ignored my plot hook 6 sessions ago.

On the other hand, having a bard in the inn singing about the exploits of a rival adventuring party saving the world could be amusing as long as it didn't take up too much game time. (An out-of-game email about it works far better than actually singing to your players )

 

[The_Gneech]

In my game, a friendly NPC was recently killed because he went out to take on a threat the players ignored.

I'm curious to see what their reaction to this will be.

-The Gneech

 

[wingsandsword]

This raises a question -- when threads are left untouched, do you have the plotlines in question unfurl behind the scenes? For instance, did the lich get his portal network up and running?

Yes, the longer they ignored it, the harder it was going to be to deal with it later.

If they'd hopped on it earlier, they would have had a few adventures of tracking down who their assassins were and who was paying them (or who was stealing portals), and would have been able to figure out what was going on. Directly taking on the mastermind may have been beyond their means at that level, but one of the PC's was a member of the Harpers and could have called in a lot of support for them, so they could have started to work on thwarting the plan.

Eventually, if they did nothing, one day the portal network would be unveiled, and people would be very wary of using it at first, but after the first few days or week or two of use when nothing happens, it becomes slowly more popular. However, key people get Dominated, and the lich begins to gain huge amounts of information from spells cast on people passing through his portals, and the whole scenario would have been much more difficult to deal with. It wouldn't have been "the world ends", it would have been waking up one day to find monarchs pronouncing strange alliances, granting diplomatic immunity to visiting liches, illogical military orders, and NPC's they've known all campaign acting bizarrely, and eventually getting asked by a "friendly" (Dominated or Charmed) NPC to go do a "favor" for them (which would be luring them into a trap).

 

[Waylander the Slayer]

In my previous campaign, the players ignored a big plot and the consequences were pretty self evident Some of the prominent members of the counsel of the city there were visiting were in league with a certain demon lord. The cultists were in the process of conducting a long ritual to open a permenant portal to the abyss. The PC's had got wind of something untoward with one of the counsel members and had decided to investigate further. As part of their investigations, they came across a large summoning circle which was guarded by a demon- the demon threated the party and the party, like the brave adventurers they were, ran away. They did'nt report it to the authorities and conveniently forgot about it.

Needless to say, after a week or so, the ritual was conducted.The cultists conducting the ritual had neither the ability or the knowledge to control the portal. As such, a permenant portal to the abyss opened up in the city, with hordes of demons invading and rampaging. The players high tailed out of the city and the city was eventually "contained" with a large magical field by other NPC's to prevent the demons from destroying everything else.