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Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, off to a good start
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7609589" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I think this sums up my whole point in this thread: it's neither inventive, creative, or unexpected. It's almost the first thing that a group of players think of every single time. It comes up all the time. It's probably the least creative solution that PC's could possibly try to apply, and in most cases it is a non-solution. </p><p></p><p>The only time I got took off guard by it was the time I mentioned before hand, and really I only got taken off guard by it because it was <em>such an incredibly stupid plan that if I'd been any more a railroad-y DM I would have just told the PC, "Do you realize how stupid it is to burn down a place you were only planning to enter because you needed to find clues?"</em>. "Let's burn the place down" is a childish impulse that players give way to sometimes when they lose track of what they are trying to accomplish and invariably don't think through the consequences of their action. As it was, it was a huge setback for the party and it forced me to try to come up with alternative paths to allow the players to succeed. Honestly, I could have fairly punished them with just getting stuck and having disaster happen (everyone in the city would have died including quite probably the PCs), had I not felt bad for punishing all six players for the dumb dunderheaded decision one player had unilaterally decided on with a game ending TPK that none of them would have been in a position to do anything about. It would have been a "Rocks fall, you die!" moment had I not worked around it.</p><p></p><p>As it is, I told the players I needed a time out to think through the consequences (one of the few times that happened in the campaign), and after about 10 minutes of reading through the notes I settled on an aftermath concept. The sum total of the results of the PC's actions were: he destroyed all the clues that were needed to stop the city from being destroyed. He destroyed the treasure and magic items that would have advanced the player's cause. A young unwed pregnant mother and her infant child died in the fire (they were in the basement asleep when it broke out). And three volunteer fire brigade workers died when an undead polar bear, broke through the front window on fire, and proceeded to attack them. And I decided that since the young mother died a violent horrible death in a necromantically tainted area, that the odds were very high that she'd become undead herself, so the arsonist has been thereafter haunted by Barb the Ghost - who is occasionally weaponized by the Shaman PC in the party, often with results that backfire spectacularly (Barb induces a spectacularly high DC Fear save, and has a corrupting gaze that causes things she views to spontaneously combust) and/or result in the death and suffering of nearby innocents. And, the NPC necromancer that the PC was trying to kill not only survived, he's still around. Whereas, had they just taken the whole party in, they probably would have killed him.</p><p></p><p>So yeah, it's not creative. It's not inventive. It's usually not unexpected. And it tends to not actually solve the problem the player was originally trying to solve.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7609589, member: 4937"] I think this sums up my whole point in this thread: it's neither inventive, creative, or unexpected. It's almost the first thing that a group of players think of every single time. It comes up all the time. It's probably the least creative solution that PC's could possibly try to apply, and in most cases it is a non-solution. The only time I got took off guard by it was the time I mentioned before hand, and really I only got taken off guard by it because it was [I]such an incredibly stupid plan that if I'd been any more a railroad-y DM I would have just told the PC, "Do you realize how stupid it is to burn down a place you were only planning to enter because you needed to find clues?"[/I]. "Let's burn the place down" is a childish impulse that players give way to sometimes when they lose track of what they are trying to accomplish and invariably don't think through the consequences of their action. As it was, it was a huge setback for the party and it forced me to try to come up with alternative paths to allow the players to succeed. Honestly, I could have fairly punished them with just getting stuck and having disaster happen (everyone in the city would have died including quite probably the PCs), had I not felt bad for punishing all six players for the dumb dunderheaded decision one player had unilaterally decided on with a game ending TPK that none of them would have been in a position to do anything about. It would have been a "Rocks fall, you die!" moment had I not worked around it. As it is, I told the players I needed a time out to think through the consequences (one of the few times that happened in the campaign), and after about 10 minutes of reading through the notes I settled on an aftermath concept. The sum total of the results of the PC's actions were: he destroyed all the clues that were needed to stop the city from being destroyed. He destroyed the treasure and magic items that would have advanced the player's cause. A young unwed pregnant mother and her infant child died in the fire (they were in the basement asleep when it broke out). And three volunteer fire brigade workers died when an undead polar bear, broke through the front window on fire, and proceeded to attack them. And I decided that since the young mother died a violent horrible death in a necromantically tainted area, that the odds were very high that she'd become undead herself, so the arsonist has been thereafter haunted by Barb the Ghost - who is occasionally weaponized by the Shaman PC in the party, often with results that backfire spectacularly (Barb induces a spectacularly high DC Fear save, and has a corrupting gaze that causes things she views to spontaneously combust) and/or result in the death and suffering of nearby innocents. And, the NPC necromancer that the PC was trying to kill not only survived, he's still around. Whereas, had they just taken the whole party in, they probably would have killed him. So yeah, it's not creative. It's not inventive. It's usually not unexpected. And it tends to not actually solve the problem the player was originally trying to solve. [/QUOTE]
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