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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 1292260" data-attributes="member: 259">Someone suggested that at low levels, mystery adventures involve railroading and handholding.  I disagree. Examples of character actions in my aforementioned first-level mystery, actions I wasn't expecting: * Rather than give information to the meddling cop, a PC stood up to her, called her bluff, and quoted laws back at her until she backed down.* Knowing that criminals were trying to scare the PCs off the trail, the PCs took the initiative to find out where the criminals hired their goons, went to that tavern in disguise, and hired themselves out as hit-men against themselves.  Eventually they turned on their criminal "bosses," in a very fun scene.* Once they found out who was behind the crime, the charisma-monkey went to her house to talk, while the party bard hummed an improvised song about treachery and crime in order to intimidate her.* Because the party didn't act quickly enough, one more victim died; their victory was bittersweet. It was not the least bit of a problem to set up a non-railroading adventure for them; indeed, the problem was, if anything, a lack of direction for the PCs.  There was plenty for them to do, and their actions did have consequences:  because of their investigations, a meddling (but intelligent and honest) guard was hired on by one of the better noble houses, and a corrupt and impoverished noble house failed to take over a rival house, and they made valuable allies.  (They later completely failed to follow-up with the valuable allies, but the opportunity was there). The worst thing to do with low-level adventures, IMO, is to throw dozens of goblins, skeletons, and fire beetles at them.  Everyone has done that before, and it's lost its charm.  There's plenty of cool stories you can tell with plucky newbies <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />. Daniel</blockquote>

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