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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MostlyDm" data-source="post: 7027636" data-attributes="member: 6788973">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.</blockquote>

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