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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7099434" data-attributes="member: 29398">Where my assertion is that for this to have any weight at all, and for it to be consistently acted on and roleplayed by you the DM, you yourself must - must! - know the answer to "Why?" as soon as the mystery is presented.  It doesn't matter a whit whether the players and-or characters ever find out or not, but you have to know so you can be consistent in your narrations and actions and not play/write yourself into a corner.Spurring them to action is great!  But you need to know the answers right now, because......when that reason emerges it has to be consistent with what has gone before; and the only way to ensure that is to have the backstory nailed in place beforehand.  The "earlier fiction" is in your head or your notes.Different strokes, I guess.You say you're good at sniffing out whether a DM is using pre-planned notes or not; by the same token I'm good at sniffing out inconsistencies and things in the fiction that in hindsight don't make sense, and I'm not shy about calling them out.What I don't understand is how you can keep it all consistent.  If I'm a player in that game and we as a group see the skulker flying out of the Hob fortress I'm going to assume that he has some reason for being there and that said reason is already locked in as a part of the hidden fiction.  Doesn't matter if it ever becomes relevant or visible to the PCs or not; it's still part of the fiction, and if three years later we for some reason happen to find out what the guy was up to the answer given then would be exactly the same as it would be if we found out right now.It's the same as the real world.  I see some guy walk out of a Starbucks (Starbucks...hobgoblin fortress...pretty much the same), get in his car, and drive away.  He doubtless had some reason or other for being in the Starbucks, and also had some reason for leaving at that moment.  Realistically I'll never know or care what those reasons are, but that's immaterial: they're known to the guy involved in the actions, are locked in as a fact of life, and will be the same whether told to someone right now or told to someone in 5 years.The same is true of your guy flying out of the Hob fortress.  He knows why he's there, and why he's leaving at that particular moment...and if he knows that means you must know as, being an NPC, he's you.So the time to determine those reasons is, at the very latest, right at the time the PCs see him fly out and leave.  Why?  Because - to repeat - in the fiction he knows what they are; and as he's you, you must also know.Exactly.  Which is why you can't make stuff up now that explains what happened then; you need to have made it up at the same time it happened, otherwise you are in fact changing things around on the fly - except that instead of changing from one thing to another thing you're changing from nothing to something.  This is just as big a change, like it or not.You keep going on about something being "mere colour" as if it means something.  It doesn't.Whether something has significance for resolution or establishes fictional positioning or is a meaningless diversion is irrelevant.  It's all an equally important part of the fiction and all an equally important part of the story being told.We're in the forest on some important mission and we get attacked by a wandering pack of wolves.  While in-character I might be chafing at the delay, you can rest assured that the most important things to me-as-character (and thus, even by your definition, to the story) in that moment in that place is that I not be eaten by wolves; that we find a way to defeat or drive off these wolves; and that we not attract too much other unwanted attention in the process.  Even though in the grand scheme of things the wolves may be utterly irrelevant they inescapably do, once beaten, become part of the characters' story.Lan-"my, what big teeth you have"-efan</blockquote>

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