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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wombat" data-source="post: 1968831" data-attributes="member: 8447">I assume that my players will do something other than what I assume they will...I have become used to the notion that players, especially as a group, will come up with creative notions, fly out in odd directions, and the like.  Sometimes they come up with brilliant solutions; sometimes they flail madly.My two fantastic examples this way:  The Non-Mystery and the Dreaded One Sentence AdventureThe Non-Mystery:  In this campaign (a swashbuckling musketeer game based on Flashing Blades!) my players claimed to love mysteries, yet they were terrible at solving them.  I finally hit on one of the most important notions -- make sure the clues are in multiple locations (until discovered), make sure to give them hints (through NPCs) as to which other NPCs they need to talk to (even though the clues have already said this), and make the mysteries very, very simple.  But in this adventure, a new guy joined us.  Due to one thing and another, the New Guy was cut off from the rest of the characters and we had a mini-session just for him.  During this one-on-one bit, the New Guy became fascinated with one of the NPCs he had heard of; unknown to him, this NPC was the villain of the current mystery.  The New Guy proposed hiring himself to the NPC as a bodyguard -- looking things over, I could find absolutely no reason why the NPC would not hire him (other than simply stating the NPC would never hire the New Guy for stupid reasons).  So...  Instead of a long session slowly building to a climax, the New Guy was able to figure out what was going on and, working with the other PCs, planned an easy ambush of the NPC villain.  No mystery, just a bushwacking.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />The One-Sentence Adventure:  The session began with telling Player A an important bit of information.  Player A, however, became suspicious and paranoid -- there just had to be more to the situation than this!  Thus he decided not to pass the info along to the other players, other than saying that the NPC who gave him the information seemed to have information.  This NPC was a highly decadent nobleman.  The PC gang, now knowing that he was important, decided to crash one of his parties in cognito.  Although, due to the wider situation, they knew they had to keep a low-profile, the players went uber-over-the-top -- using illusion magics, they created the most ghastly, overt, memorable display of all time, including a male dwarf with rouged-nippled chained to the waist of an elven nobleman...  After building all of this up, they finally got close to the decadent NPC.  The NPC then told them exactly what Player A had been told at the beginning of the long, long, and very weird evening.  At this point Player A jumped up and screamed, "That's IT?!?"Everyone else at the table turned to him.  "I knew that already!"  "When did you know that?"  "Wombat told my character at the beginning of the session!"  "And you didn't tell us?"  "I thought there had to be more to it..."  In my notes, this part of the adventure took up one whole sentence in a five page outline...So, no, I never expect my players to do anything in particular.  Sometimes, as GM, I am simply along for the ride...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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