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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 9867479" data-attributes="member: 6677017">Ideally, the party realizes it's too dangerous (especially since they have already demonstrated they are invested in keeping the NPC crew safe) and just tries to minimize casualties while escaping.What I would love the experience to look like is the monster repeatedly damaging the ship while picking off a few crew and injuring the party until the ship manages to travel far enough that it doesn't want to pursue. At the same time, after I set the parameters of a scenario, I'm not going to DM fiat it: things will happen naturally according to the dice and the choices of the PCs, NPCs, and monsters. Of course that means it may not look (or go) much the way I imagine, but that's okay as long as it's a possibility, and we avoid the extremes of an unintentional character death or an overly easy getaway without really feeling the danger.I suppose I could have it just be a kraken (so it's clearly way too powerful to survive) but appear far enough away that they can entirely avoid engaging if they hightail it out of there immediately, and just set it up so ship damage will come from the storm. I'd be concerned in that case that they might somehow manage to get engaged with it anyway, and that would be bad.This adventure is more linear than the typically sandboxy ones I run. I never constrain where the PCs go or what approach they can take, and since there are reasons that it's best if they end up with a damaged ship and afraid to go back into this storm, it's taking me a lot of finesse to make that result basically unavoidable without handwaving, or contriving situations that don't make sense in the world. Worse case scenario is I tell the players, "look guys, it's going to be more fun if you go this way rather than that way, so how about you try to think of an in-character reason to do that?" But it's going to feel more satisfying if the world works as it should, the game rules work acceptably, and they choose freely while having having that all results in the desired outcome. So that why I'm looking for just the right monster.</blockquote>

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