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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeNotCharles" data-source="post: 4981932" data-attributes="member: 79945">You seem to think "big payoff" means "congratulations, you caught him".  By "payoff" I mean anything at all interesting.  Anything.  An unrelated encounter.  The kickoff to an unrelated adventure.  A colorful NPC who tells them how badly they screwed up in entertaining terms.  Anything but wandering around doing nothing for hours!  (He described a bunch of stuff that sounded like it could have worked - the dwarf minion could have been that colorful NPC - but he sounds like he found it boring and frustrating so I guess they just weren't very interesting?)My first example was some sort of clue they could use to pick up the priest's trail.  I guess that was a bad example, because you seem to think I'm arguing they must be given another chance to catch the priest.  I just picked that because it was the first thing that came to mind as a satisfying way to continue - making the priest's getting away a setback rather than a total loss.  But if the DM wants this to be their only chance to catch the priest, that's fine - but for the game to remain fun, he should then replace the catching of the priest with something else that grabs the players attention and isn't total frustration.It sounds like in this case the players honestly thought they were mere minutes behind the priest and had a chance to catch up - and if that was so, the DM should have given them some sort of interaction.  If not, he should have made it clear somehow.The point is that's not what happened.  They rode around thinking they had a chance to catch him and eventually realized that they didn't.  They didn't definitively lose, it just petered out and they came to the conclusion that they must have lost, because if they'd won something would have happened by now.No, I'm still working under the assumption that you're not getting what I'm talking about, because by taking the position opposite mine you're arguing that the appropriate response to the characters losing is to bore them for the rest of the session.  That can't be what you mean by "consequence", can it?</blockquote>

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