The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[Ryujin]

When I hear "Player Agency" I visualise a specialised staffing firm that's built their business model around providing substitute players to groups whose regulars are otherwise unable to run because some of them have called in sick or had to work late.

"Hey, how come I'm 16th level now? And when did my paladin turn Chaotic Evil?"

"Oh that was Bill, the temp. He did an awesome job last week. We're definitely goin to ask for him again."

I think of players (at the) agency.

 

[CleverNickName]

My wife and I cannot recommend Hades highly enough...or any game by Supergiant (Transistor, Bastion, and Pyre). They are one of our favorite indie game studios. Fun games with cool mechanics, good stories, and excellent music--what more do you want?

 

[Umbran]

I'm glad that user blew up at me, and not in a discussion. That would've been nasty.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

My wife and I cannot recommend Hades highly enough...or any game by Supergiant (Transistor, Bastion, and Pyre). They are one of our favorite indie game studios. Fun games with cool mechanics, good stories, and excellent music--what more do you want?

What more do I want?

I want a game that knows, when I ask for a Negroni, I have implicitly demanded the use of top shelf gin. Not well.

Because I want a game that's better than my bartender last night.

 

[CleverNickName]

Eh, I'd just settle for a bartender that asks me if I want ice in my bourbon, rather than just assuming. Yes, I sometimes order my bourbon on the rocks and sometimes I order it neat, Kevin. I'm fickle. But more importantly, I'm paying.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That reminds me of one of the scenarios that someone ran at our D&D club. The set-up was "you've slain the dragon, now you have to get its head back to town to prove that it's dead, in order to prevent the corrupt dragon-cult from taking over." We'd been sold on the time pressure of the mission from the start.

So when the DM had us passing near another town and described it being under attack by a different red dragon, he sat back and waited for the party as a whole - and my oath-of-vengeance paladin in particular - to charge in like big darn heroes and rescue the town. And was very taken aback when I said that, for the greater good, we needed to keep heading back to the city and not get distracted.

And he basically spent ten minutes trying various arguments to convince us that we absolutely had to go to the town, my favourite of which was "It's getting late, and this is the only safe place to sleep for miles."

"Yeah, but it's being attacked by a dragon. That's definitively the least safe place to go to sleep."

I forget how it ended, but we did, in the end, go to the town and find out that the dragon was an illusion cast by the evil dragon-cultists to maintain the pretence that the dragon was still alive.

I have made a mistake like that DM once and not only did it result in a great solo sidequest for a character, it taught me to never, ever try and "script" D&D adventures. Player characters are gonna player characters. Just create situations and NPCs with their own goals and expect the PCs to Jason Mendoza it with Molotov cocktails all over.

 

[Gradine]

Sometimes y'all talk about threads in here and I think they're somehow hidden from me because I can't in any way find them.

 

[payn]

Sometimes y'all talk about threads in here and I think they're somehow hidden from me because I can't in any way find them.

 

[Umbran]

Sometimes y'all talk about threads in here and I think they're somehow hidden from me because I can't in any way find them.

That's a good thing.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

My players are currently in the same situation. They are on a quest to find a McGuffin, no particular time pressure (it has been sitting in a lost ruin for 100 years).

They start getting there. Two sessions of fun travel happen. We end the session in a random town. I prepare many (I hope interesting) things to happen on the rest of the journey.

No. They spent 5 sessions in the random town. I had to stuff it with mystery, assassins, cults, murderous middle school teenagers invoking a demon to destroy their school and in need of being saved... At this point, I had expected the campaign to become city based as they didn't shown any intent to move ever again. So I prepared many thing and retconned the city to be 20,000 and not 2,000 (which my player readily accepted, noticing that "many things are happening in this nondescript hamlet on the map").

Next session, they gather and decide... that they are late on their quest and move immediately. I drop my prepared city-based things, take my two sessions worth of events happening on the move that I had prepared, like two month before, hoping that I'd remember enough of it to make a fun session for them... but they took exactly NONE of them, hurrying toward their destination in the shortest path possible, ignoring a plague striken population of a cursed village, a band of mercenary-turned-bandit, an armaggeddon-bringing cult because... "we need to press along to recover the McGuffin!".

I half expect them to let me prepare the lost ruin adventure before saying, beginning the next session "after all, I feel guilty about the plague-stricken villagers, let's move back..."