D&D 5E DM forgets to mention and describe a plot point, how should that be addressed?(Storm King's Thunder:possible minor spoilers)

[Rya.Reisender]

I guess as DM it's generally better to think "What could I have described better for my players to notice it" instead of "Why don't my player notice this obvious fact?".

 

[jasper]

My question is, how would you think that a DM should address that? Do you retcon the scenario where the plot item should have been introduced? Do you find some other way to introduce it? Our DM told us that it wouldn't be an issue, but I'm just curious how this sort of thing would generally be handled.

1. Dm. Guys I forgot to mention the HUGE THINGY. IT is a plot point. Here what you need to know. Dm assumes and gives the players information off board.
2. No retcons.
3. A new dm should do 1. An experience dm could work into the next session. By moving the Huge Thingy, npc doing info dump, etc.

 

[iserith]

I'd just do it as a flashback where we make fun of my mistake in not mentioning it. The flashback would necessarily include a lot of dramatic irony about the events that we have already played out so far.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Presumably these are minor spoilers for SKT.

We started Storm King's Thunder's the other day, and as we're wrapping up the session(we had defeated all the Orcs in the town), our (very new)DM casually mentions that we had completely missed a plot point because we never examined something that was in the town square and it was gone now. Immediately, we're just like "What are you talking about?" And he tells us that we never examined the obelisk that was in the town square. We all look at each other, and we're like "Um, what obelisk? You never told us about an obelisk?"

Turns out, because we took a different route(following the walls of the town) to go to the keep from the drawbridge on our first trip into town, the DM completely forgot to ever describe the obelisk any of the times we passed by it before the obelisk was taken. So we're telling him "Dude, that's not our fault, you never mentioned an obelisk, or really described the town square or town in general at all." My character spent a little time walking around the town in general before the attack on the town, so I would assume that I would have at the very least noticed a large obelisk in the midst of the town. So we're all just wondering what this thing is, that our characters technically don't know anything about at this point.

My question is, how would you think that a DM should address that? Do you retcon the scenario where the plot item should have been introduced? Do you find some other way to introduce it? Our DM told us that it wouldn't be an issue, but I'm just curious how this sort of thing would generally be handled.

So, um, who took the obelisk? Given your description, your GM has already altered events in Nightstone, so it's unclear what he changed about the obelisk (called the Nightstone, natch) since it appears he's already altered the fact that, in the module as written, it's been stolen before the players arrive.

 

[jasper]

So, um, who took the obelisk? Given your description, your GM has already altered events in Nightstone, ....

not me. not me. gee my wife loves the new black top drive way.

 

[Satyrn]

it appears he's already altered the fact that, in the module as written, it's been stolen before the players arrive.

Or he forgot that it has already been taken, and his real miztake is thinking that he made a mistake.

Anyway, as a new DM this kind of thing will come up often enough. As I player, my advice to the OP is to give him all the slack he needs to make mistakes and learn from them enough to make new, bigger, better mistakes.

 

[MNblockhead]

I own and havae skimmed Storm King's Thunder. Is it that rail-roady that the game will grind to a halt if the DM fails to mention somthing or the characters just don't explore an area. I though it was designed to be sandboxey. No spoilers please as the OP is a player in this, but I'm not sure why the DM had to even bring it up. Kinda distracts from the game.

I run my campaign in a home brew world and my sessions are either bespoke creations or re-tailored published material to fit the campaign. That gives me a lot of room to just work around "missed" info.

If I really need the party to see/do something to move the plot forward, I'm not above throwing in a big hook.

With the obelisk, if I felt it was so darn important, I wouldn't tell the players they missed anything, whether my fault or theirs--talk about ripping yourself out of the game! I would just have a NPC tell them about it, describe what they needed to know about it. Or find some other way to get the info to them or come up with another way to get them to the place that the obelisk was meant ot drive them to.

* GROGNARD WARNING - old man about to talk about back in his day *

I think this thinking comes from playing video games. I just started playing video games a couple years ago. I binged on Skyrim, went a long time without games, no I'm binging on Witcher 3. The community around these computer RPG seems really focused on not missing things. You can't program every possibility so it is possible that you may get stuck or not progress if you miss out on something and most players, I think, make liberal use of on-line forums and video walkthrough and save points to make sure they don't miss something.

I don't think you would think this way back in the pre-video game days. You would just change the story on the fly if you had to. In the 80s, there was fear of missing treasure, so you would have some players that would want to clear every room and tap every stone so they didn't miss out on loot, but the was never any fear of the getting "stuck" in the story, as far as I can recall.

 

[MostlyDm]

Story time!

I was DMing a game in my early days, this was probably... 20 years ago, ish? 2e, for sure.

I had concocted this really long elaborate adventure of interlocking events and callbacks and grand artifacts and stuff... basically an adventure path, though that term didn't exist as far as I knew. It all seemed very cool and exciting to me as a kid, though in my current sandbox mindset hindsight it was a pretty cringey railroad.

The basic intro was that the party were apprentices to an old retired adventurer, and he needed them to deliver a McGuffin to a nearby city. On the way, they were supposed to be waylaid by drow, knocked out, and the McGuffin stolen. Then they have to go on the first part of the epic quest where they get it back.

My whole first hook and quest line all depended on the McGuffin being stolen.

So, a logical DM would ask "what if the Drow fail to steal the McGuffin?" To which I had no answer. But that's not even the best part. That's not what happened.

What happened is that I narrated them traveling to the city, arrived on the step of the person they were supposed to deliver it to, she came out to meet them... and I suddenly realized what the niggling sense of impending doom in the back of my mind was.

Yeah, I forgot to have the Drow attack them. I forgot the critical encounter upon which my entire campaign was based.

My players still give me crap about that one, to this day. I copped to the total failure, and I honestly don't quite remember what we did to rectify the problem. At first I think I was telling them we had to retcon, which they objected to, and I think we ended up just moving the Drow attack to occur in the city instead.

But it was honestly a bit of a campaign killer. I was so embarrassed, I didn't want something like that to ever happen again. I ended up revamping some of the campaign to be less dependent on any single event occurring.

The sad truth is that with age has not come the ability to consistently remember critical details. I still do stuff like that. These days I just craft my campaigns in such a way that they are much more resilient to it, where nothing hinges on some specific event taking place in precisely the right way. Advisable approach anyway, since PCs have a tendency to make sure events do not unfold how you predicted.

 

[ThakTheManApe]

I shot a message to a friend of mine who has ran SKT as a DM, and he laughed a lot. He said that apparently our DM for this module had gotten a little mixed-up at the beginning of the module. At the beginning of the module, you tell the PC's that they are traveling to Nightstone for a reason(DM's choice, a few examples are given as to why the PC's would be going there). Our DM apparently decided to send our characters all the way to Nightstone to get sent on a mission that isn't part of the module because he thought that's what the module was telling him to do, and when we came back to the village, that's when all of the normal module stuff kicked into play. The obelisk, as others here have pointed out, doesn't really do anything for the story, at least at this point. We should have noticed the big, obviously new hole that's in the midst of the town, so we'll see if anything happens there.

 

[Sunseeker]

Yeah can't say as DM I wouldn't just apologize for that, I'd probably give players an intelligence check to see if they retroactively determined it was of any importance other than a big honking obelisk in the middle of town, if they did, I'd rewind and redo. If they didn't I'd continue forward under the assuming that none of the players determined it was important when they spotted it.