NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 8289385" data-attributes="member: 11760">I think it also is a matter of degrees. In my long-running Ptolus campaign, I have a player who, like a lot of player characters, did something that completely screwed up my plans for the campaign's near term. What I thought would be an agonizing choice that he would regret and carry with him instead turned into "OK, I'll leave the rest of the party and go to another city and join an order of knights."(First off, yes, don't put choices in front of your players that you're not prepared for them to take. That one was definitely on me.)But instead of agonizing and saying "oh, I'll show him for taking that exciting opportunity to become a Knight of the Dawn," I came up with a whole exciting parallel adventure series for him, culminating in him exposing infiltrators among the knights-aspirant who were hoping to assassinate the emperor, which he had to combat while underground in a ghoul warren beneath the capital city's necropolis.He eventually got reintegrated in with the rest of the party after not becoming a knight -- what's the point of having a Lawful Good order of knights if some of them won't get stuck on all the pendantic details of knighthood, and the PC wasn't the horseman some of the other aspirants were -- but he also got a heroic arc of his own where he got to grapple with his faith and sense of duty (long-running themes for this paladin) and, when the campaign came to a climactic point, and an army of kobolds and an aspect of Tiamat were going to destroy the heroes' home barony, he was able to call on some of the greatest knights in the realm to help save the day.The DM and my Grand Plan for the Campaign is not the most important thing in the campaign: It's that everyone have fun and the people who showed up to be kick-ass heroes get to be kick-ass heroes, even if that means I have to say "um, I need to take a break and figure out what the hell happens now that you've set fire to all my expectations here."Yeah, in combat, this principle can mean something as simple as "don't nickel and dime the PCs to death when they want to do something cool that's more or less within the spirit of the rules," but I think it's mostly a general attitude that PBtA (and, frankly, lots of great books on GMing) endorses.</blockquote>

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