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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 6306220" data-attributes="member: 29398">The assumption here - and it's not always correct - is that the players' sense of what is consistent and viable at least vaguely atches that of the DM.Not necessarily.  The DM's decision could have been made long before the player declared anything, while thinking through the what-ifs ahead of time.  What if the party bails on the adventure and goes to town - what sort of encounters might they hit en route? (a band of ogres will stumble on them unless they're being very watchful)  What if, once in town, they try to go straight to the king with the tales of what they've found in the dungeon - how's that going to play out? (not a chance unless they leave all their Dwarves behind; and that ain't likely)  What if the party keeps going in the dungeon in their current weakened state - is there a plausible way to not wipe them out? (I'll make sure they hear big-monster noises ahead if they bother to listen, and hope they take heed)Again, you're making assumptions.  The players shouldn't be able to tell the difference between a side quest and the real plot, if the DM is doing it right; and sometimes the side quests spawn stories and plots of their own (or can be used to introduce plot elements) that can later be interwoven into the bigger picture.  Or, the players could side-quest themselves - a story from a game last year: - party get planted deep in enemy territory as spies and saboteurs, we check around the various mercenaries' guilds "looking for adventures" (in fact, just trying to find out what's happening where), we find a notice that we (wrongly) guess to be meant for us, and half of us follow up on it.  The DM has no idea we're going to do this, so he makes a mini-adventure up on the fly - essentially the recruitment notice is there to lead adventurers into a trap in a city.  This backfires when we get there, spring the trap, escape, and annihilate the place. - the point of the story is that we as players had no idea this wasn't the real adventure until after we'd done it.  And that's been true for much of that campaign - most of the time we're not sure if we're on plot or not; we just take the hooks we notice (and miss most of them outright, from what I gather) and fly at 'er.Where I quite likely wouldn't have it come out then at all, but there'd be ways for the party to find out later (or much later) - maybe somewhere in a future adventure they find a copy of the prophecy, or something hinting at it, for example.Lan-"this isn't the king you're looking for"-efan</blockquote>

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