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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertsconley" data-source="post: 9624618" data-attributes="member: 13383">I'm not sure if this will help your discussion, but my perspective is that at the start, we have a situation involving events with NPCs that have already unfolded.  If it is a situation involving a mystery, then one or more of those events will not be known to all those involved, NPCs and PCs alike.Now my notes for this, like for the Scourge of the Demon Wolf, and the Deceits of the Russet Lord (which you played a while ago) are all about describing the situation as it stands when the PCs arrive.The only thing that is about the future is a rough timeline of what will happen to the people involved if the PCs never got involved.In your case, if the Bishop never hired your group to go collect his tithe from the Monks at Woodford, then a fortnight later you would have heard about how the shrine and village were wiped out in a devastating Orc raid.  And later, if you and your group were still in the region, it was the result of the monks' bad administration, not properly surviving their bailiff, leading to a peasant revolt that left the village open to attack.But you and the group did accept the job. Thus got involved with the situation. At the time I ran it for you, you were the third or fourth group that I had run with the adventure. Your group forged its own path to discovering the full picture of what going on compared to others. At the same time you also did some of the same things the other groups did as well. Plus I continued to run that adventure up to the present as part of the playtesting I am doing before releasing it. Over ten times so far. I didn't have any preconceived notion of how it would play out. What I do know are the personality, goals, and resources the NPCs involved have.  So when you and your fellow players did stuff, I looked at which NPCs were involved, their goals, motivations, and resources and roleplayed accordingly. As you know, I prefer to roleplay in the first person, acting as the character rather than describing what happens in the third person. For the other NPCs, I look at how soon, if at all, they would be aware of what the PCs did and make notes on what they would be doing.For all the NPCs you encountered, my foundation for deciding how to roleplay is asking the question, "What would this character do in this situation." I don't consider any overarching metagame goals, such as solving the mystery or winning the day. In one of the most recent run throughs of the Russet Lord adventures the group didn't even go after the Russet Lord. What happened is that after visiting the monks, they caught one of the Russet Lord's faerie lackeys, successfully made her talk about her liege's plans. Then, through a bit of clever roleplaying, made her go to where the orcs the Russet Lord hired to destroy Woodford and tell them that the raid was off. She went through with a bag of silver to pay them off for their trouble courtesy of the monk.Then the group went about settling the situation between the monks, the knight bailiff, and the peasant, and helped them properly organize the defense of the shrine and the village in case the orcs returned. They returned to the bishop with the overdue tithes, briefed him on the situation, and he promptly dispatched additional troops for reinforcements. Overall a very different resolution to the situation than what happen with your group and the others.</blockquote>

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