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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6611426" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm trying to think how many episodes in my 4e campaign (6+ years, currently 29th level) have resulted from NPCs making requests.I can think of two.The campaign started with the PCs meeting in a tavern (of course) and being recruited to perform a task (driving horses to market, I think) by a forester. The players knew I was using a module which at least one had a copy of himself. And they knew I had indicated that every PC must have a reason to be ready to fight goblins. So they knew that this was just a plot device to get the game moving. I can't remember what happened to the horses, but the PCs certainly never had anything to do with them!The other one I can think of is a PC being tasked by his god to recover a lost artefact (which turned out to be the Rod of Seven Parts), but that was the player's idea so probably doesn't fit your definition of a quest.A third one might have been when they went looking for the missing niece of the Baron, although it may be that they initiated that themselves - I can't remember now.In any event, in a game in which the players are taking the lead, the GM's agency is in interposing opposition and driving towards conflict. Whereas the players provide the dramatic motivations for their PCs. This does not give the GM any lack of agency, and has nothing much in common with computing.I think a lot of people like foreshadowing (maybe not [MENTION=66434]ExploderWizard[/MENTION]). But that is fairly orthogonal to the current discussion. It possible to generate foreshadowing without using the sort of heavy-handed style that the adventure you've described does.Here is an example from my 4e game:* The PCs travel temporarily into the past, and while there rescue a young apprentice from the mirror in which her crazed master had trapped her; * Back in the present, the PCs see a series of family portraits on the wall of the Baron's hall - two of the women greatly resemble the rescued apprentice, although the one in the older portrait is quite a bit older than the apprentice was when she was rescued; * The PCs learn that the older woman (the apprentice aged 50-ish?) was the Baron's grandmother, and that the more recent portrait is of his niece, who (i) happens to be engaged to marry the Baron's advisor, whom the PCs know to be a secret Vecna-worhsipper, and (ii) happens to be missing; * The PCs track down the niece, thinking she's been kidnapped by undead and/or her fiance, only to learn that she is a necromancer who has accidentally revived Kas from torpor; * The PCs defeat the niece, but save her from Kas's vengeance by striking a deal with him to track down the apprentice, who was the one who trapped him in a torpor.When the apprentice first appeared in the game, the Baron's niece had not been conceived of. When I introduced her as an off-screen NPC, I can't remember if I had the idea for Kas's role or not. The idea that Kas would ask them to hunt down the apprentice emerged in the course of play, as the PCs negotiated with him.Another less intricate example:* The PCs meet a friendly duergar and accompany her to the duergar hold. On the way, the tiefling PC cautions them that trafficking with devils will be their undoing - like the tieflings, they are a dying race; * A couple of sessions later the duergar stronghold is destroyed, along with many of its inhabitants, by forces introduced into it by the chaos sorcerer PC, who had (only slightly inadvertently) called upon Pazrael/Pazuz.That one has irony mixed with its foreshadowing.There is no necessary connection between foreshadowing and GM roadblocking, or similar uses of force, of the sort that you are describing in this module.I think in RPGing the notion of "just the right moment" has to be reversed. Rather than the GM withholding information or blocking the players "until the right moment", the GM should be ready to pull out all the stops at the moment the players put it all together and work out what's going on. That's what makes it the right moment.</blockquote>

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