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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7910665" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Yes, this kind of thing happens all the time. The players may pick up on the wrong thing and then latch on to it. What I wonder is if the clues have actually been presented reasonably well.....that's hard to say. As a DM, we know the big picture, so it may seem painfully obvious to us how the clue points toward some logical next step. But the players have a small sliver of the picture, and that clue may not mean jack to them. Or maybe the way I portrayed it as DM made one thing look important, and another look less important. I don't want to blame the players when this happens. Instead, what I want to do is not have them spend the entire session chasing some dead end because it sounds like a waste of time. So I adjust, and present information again in another way, or I have something else come up that helps move things along. Again, this is about making them succeed where they could fail. It's about recognizing that communication is imperfect, and not "punishing" players for that.Sure, this is all perfectly fine. My only addition would be to say it's also fine if the shift in goals occurred to the DM during play rather than just having planned it beforehand.Doesn't sound like much of an adventurer. "Indifferent Jones and the Temple of Doom" doesn't seem like it'd be a fun movie to watch.That's how I described my game very early in the thread. It's goal based. There are multiple goals possible, based on PC desires and those of their group, and also based on elements I've introduced. They kind of pursue anything they want at any point. But typically, and this is just as true of sandbox games, goals involve some kind of sequence of events that need to happen to be achieved. There may be slightly different sequences that can be found, but there's still some kind of steps involved. And this is something that strong sandbox proponents seem to not want to say because they consider it too railroady. Which I don't really get, but I think that's what happens a lot.It should still be a goal that is always forefront, though. That should always be what you're trying to do, even though you won't always succeed.</blockquote>

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