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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dustin Cooper" data-source="post: 9352024" data-attributes="member: 6922447">1. Plans last until they come into contact with players.  Even when you know your players and their characters well, they're sometimes going to just snap your plans in half.  Let them.  You can make new plans later, and players tend to love finding out that they did something they weren't supposed to do.  Some of the best experiences I've had running games were when this has happened.  Like one time, I made an adventure where some pirates kidnapped a mermaid, and the players were supposed to get up top of their ship and work their way down into the bottom like it was a dungeon.  Instead, the monk made the longest series of successful stealth rolls I'd ever seen, got into the room with the mermaid, and announced to me that as a martial artist, she had plenty of experience breaking planks of wood, so she was going to just punch through the hull of the ship, grab a hold of the mermaid, and have her swim her safely back to shore.  She made her rolls, I let it happen, figured out a way to still have a decent boss fight after that, and it was easily the most memorable session of that campaign for all involved.  It's still the session I go to first if I ever start talking about D&D stories with people, and that never would have happened if I'd contrived something to make sure my dungeon worked like it was supposed to.2. If an adventure ever has a section where the big villain fights the PCs for a little bit, then runs away, no they naughty word don't.  I don't mean you should change the adventure as a GM, I mean the players are not going to let that happen.  Letting an enemy get away, particularly one that an adventure like this tries to get the players to really hate, goes against every desire and instinct they have.  They will pull out every stop, remember every power and item they kept forgetting in all previous sessions, and put themselves in incredible risks of a level they never have before to get that naughty word.  If you run one of these adventures, keep in mind point 1 above, and make sure you have an idea what to do if (probably when) that escape attempt fails.3. If you're a player in a D&D style game, and you're starting to wonder if you all should run away from something that seems to hard, just run.  I've been in multiple situations where everyone was muttering about how a fight might cause a tpk, and maybe we should run, but no one wants to make the first move, so most of the party died.  If you just run, the worst that's going to happen is everyone goes in the other room, says "we can totally take that guy, let's try again," and then you go back in the room and finish the fight.</blockquote>

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