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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6994696" data-attributes="member: 4937">Under what theory of scenario development are you working?I don't see anything inherently wrong with rescuing hostages by tracking their captors and then killing them.  That's fine as far as it goes, and I would oppose the idea of introducing artificial complications purely to thwart the player's from implementing a plan.What seems to be lacking in your concept is a grand design.  A tribe of bandits taking slaves for themselves lacks a grand purpose or design.  So naturally, you shouldn't be surprised that the petty designs of the petty foes are thwarted by a fairly trivial application of heroic force.  What you have here is a suitable random encounter, and not a 'front'.  Potentially, the machinations of some slavers could be a hook leading to a front, but its not generally a grand enough of a foe to serve as a villainous front in an epic fantasy.   1) Unless it is regional flavor or color, a scenario what you describe is a door and not an end to itself.  It's meant to do one of two things.  Either introduce the PC's to an important NPC by way of the service they render: "You rescued me. My hero.", "You have rescued my daughter.  I owe you a debt of gratitude", or else to put the NPC's on the trail to some larger problem, "Someone paid these orcs for this work, look, here are their instructions..."   2) One problem that your description seems to have is that the NPCs involved are pretty faceless.  Detailed NPCs help create drama.  They have connections and motives of their own.  Becoming involved in their lives potentially entangles you in problems.  The more work you have in creating meaningful NPCs, the more stories proceed from them.3) Equally bad, is that the pursuit seems to have gone across largely meaningless space and time.  You didn't cross rivers, canyons, or through a bog with quicksand to either side.  You encountered no prisoners, injured or murdered trying to escape along the way.  You passed through no lairs or territories.  It was an empty road you were following on.  Regardless of whether you address this by filling in the sandbox with preparation, or improvising on the spot, you need granularity to make scenes cool.  There is a fine line between too little detail and too much, but you seem to be on the 'too little' side of it from what I can tell.You also need BBEG's with bigger long term goals manipulating things behind the scenes.  Maybe the orcs were planning to meet up with human slavers.  So when the PC's catch up, they find the captives being loaded onto wagons by numerous heavily armed men.  Maybe the orcs needed captives because their clan has summoned up some blood god or fiend that needs 100 human sacrifices by the winter solstice, or else he'll start eating them and so stopping this force is only a temporary reprieve.  Maybe someone in the town cooperated with the orcs and even arranged the events as part of an elaborate revenge plot against a rival.  Maybe one of the captives is the young betrothed of a powerful noble by arranged marriage, but as result of the PC's rescuing her and her own romantic illusions, she (or he) has now got a crush on one of her (or his) rescuers and now the PC's find themselves entangled unwillingly(?) in a love triangle where both noble houses are going, "A pox on thee."  And so on and so forth.   Or better yet, ALL of that at once.</blockquote>

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