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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 6151575" data-attributes="member: 6669384">I'm curious how you handle things in your games.Our group swaps the DM hat around.  As one DM finishes an adventure run, another is ready to take over, and the story continues.Recently though, our group did something we haven't done before:  The PCs turned and walked away from a challenge.  That left us in the odd situation of swapping DMs before the next one had anything ready to run.I took over, for the interim, and pretty much told the players what their next mission was:  To escort the body of a fallen comrade home for a proper Viking funeral.  (He'd been a Cleric of Baldur, a Norse god.)Now I had pretty much nothing ready.  But, since I don't play that the world levels up with the party, I took some relatively standard encounters and ran them.  "Relatively" being the operative term.  Bar room brawl, being challenged by the road patrol as a group of outland mercenaries, some pirates trying to sneak aboard their ship while they were in port waiting out a storm, some highwaymen, etc.Now, exactly zero of these were worth any Exp for a 15th/16th level group.  At least not according to the Exp table in the DMG.  They were, functionally, speed bumps.  Ways to waste time until a new DM was ready to take over.So, do you ever fill time this way?  Do your heftier leveled parties still deal with the relatively mundane tasks of life like showing their papers to the road patrol, or having to deal with some pirates or highwaymen who mistook them for somebody they could take in a fair fight?(As a note:  My group's encounter with the Highwaymen caused one PC to reveal that he's a Shadowdancer, and that will have fun/drama impact in the future.  And I actually got a PC to barter away 10% of his soul to a Devil to get him to spare the life of a common thief.  That's a service the PC owes.  And what's fun is that the PC could have taken that Devil to the cleaners all by himself, had he chosen to fight.)  I managed to seed in several juicy plot hooks this way, things that I or any other of our DMs can pick up and use.So, do you make them play out the speed-bumps, hand wave them, or never mention them at all?(Good stories are always appreciated, of course, so feel free.)</blockquote>

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