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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 4593005" data-attributes="member: 8835">chriton227 and RC have hit upon the wrinkle, that el-remmen was concerned that "having too many timelimits would be cheesy" (not an exact quote).To el-remmen's cheezy point, consider these 2 axioms:1) in RPGs it is cheesy when there isn't a timeline, time limit to finish a quest (take oblivion for example).  Other than the "if you find any more of these wierd things, I'll buy them" quests, most quests are problems, with some urgency2) spend 80% of your time working on the top 20% of your task items.  Your boss won't notice the items you didn't get done, because they weren't actually as important.The 2 statements above are sort of contradictory.  But they're both true.  It turns out not everything is urgent, or important, in the sense that somebody else will do it, or work around it because its not done.  But in the same vein, which is why #1 is true, if the quest isn't finished, SOMETHING happens.  Either the monster gets stronger, another hero kills it, the monster got what he cam for an wanders off, people learn to live with the risk of monster attack (perhaps curtailing travel, or arming themselves into a paramilitary militia).It's cheezy when something doesn't happen as a result of the PCs actions.  Let's say your PCs have 3 choices when they see a mission: Do it, join the bad guys, ignore it.  As GM's we tend to assume the first, they do the mission.  And the expected result is "they succeed, and everything went back to normal, or things got better."  But key factor, they do the mission, and things changed.As Chriton and RC point out, IF we recklessly apply changes for the other 2 choices, we can damage our game world, take it where we didn't want to go.  Ironically, that's the whole point of simulationist or sandbox play, the PLAYERS choices take the game to new directions, not the GM.So I say that yes, every mission should have Changes, based on the 3 "big picture" choices the party could make.  I also say, that giving them more work to do than they can handle, sets them up to not complete some missions.  Unless you want that, don't do that.Nextly, as Chriton excellently points out, "screwed ya" missions should be rare.  You get a dog to be head shy by whacking it on the head everytime it comes near you to get petted.  From then on, you got a dog that won't let you pet it.  Which defeats the point of having a pet dog.Early on (the first few adventures), quests should be straightforward.  Go save the princess, go kill those orcs.  Later, the PCs know people, have a good reputation, things get more complex.  The first "twisted" plot should be that the party gets hired by "bad guy" to do something, and partway through, the party learns they've been duped.  Which means the real quest is thwarting the bad guy.  If the bad guy dupes the partly fully, then you're just teaching them that they can't trust anybody, because they'll never know who's good or bad.  If you do it the way I suggest, you teach the party that they will figure it out in time, to prevent a bad guy from winning.  All of this reinforces the good parties doing good with good intent will win most of the time.  Only later, when things are their shiniest, do you add layers of division, betrayal, and lies to break from the pattern.That's the second step, don't make every quest a lie to trick the players into making things worst.From there, the consequences of "failure to do good" should vary in how far you want to take it.  At the safest, another NPC party saving the day, puts things back to right, and can have the least damage.At the darkest, having the villain get stronger, and sucessfully making the game world harsher is usually not where the GM actually thought the game was going.  But none of this means the party can't turn the tide, and restore order.I suggest the OP have some other NPCs save the day on some quests.  SInce he's made a point that the PCs aren't special, than that means ANYBODY can do it.  It's not like the world only has 5 special heroes (because the DM said it doesn't).  It'll clean up the mess, and take some stress of the party.</blockquote>

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