They are approaching the adventure and plot so sloooooowly

[Quasqueton]

I'm a DM. After the PCs' last adventure, some plots were set in motion and one of the PCs was given a mission. That PC brought in the other PCs who agreed to go along with him to complete the mission.

I'm excited about the plot set in motion, and the PCs only barely have any understanding of it (and half their understanding is misunderstanding). When the group agreed to go on the mission to the adventure site (which I will from here on call the "dungeon"), I fleshed out the details of the dungeon.

I expected the PCs would travel to the base town by ship (~15 day voyage, probably uneventful), and travel to the dungeon by land (

Spoiler

~7

day journey [number hidden in case any of my Players read this]). I figured this would take 1-2 game sessions -- the 2nd session would have them in the dungeon, either early or late in the session.

The PCs decided to travel by land. This became a 60+ day journey through unmapped wilderness over 5 weekly game sessions to get to the base town. There was one break in there, so the Real World time was 6 weeks. Then we had to take a two week break for a Player's Real World plans. (That break was expected and planned around.) And this week, one of the Players has a flu bug, so we're holding off getting back in again.

So I've been sitting on this dungeon and plot for 9 weeks now, and it will be 10 weeks before we actually get into it. I was excited about the dungeon and the plot two months ago, and I was excited that they decided to go along with it. But now having 9+ weeks for it to stew, I'm going crazy in anticipation. Oh my god. This is torture to a DM.

To make it worse, time is dulling the Players' memories on some subtle points that may make them miss plot points or interesting notes they may discover. <whimper>

Have you ever had a situation like this?

Maybe from now on I'll have plots ambush the PCs immediately. Kind of: Bring the mountain to Mohammed. [/joking]

Quasqueton

 

[Rel]

I feel your pain and I've been in similar situations in the past. This is why I try not to plan more than 1-2 sessions into the future. I've had situations where I statted out the adventure area and then things got sidetracked to the point where the PC's were a couple levels higher than I anticipated by the time they got there and I had to bump everything up again for it to be challenging.

 

[sniffles]

I've only GM'd once, but I totally feel your pain. I was running an adventure from Dungeon with experienced players, one of whom was playing an impulsive PC personality. Yet they all became extremely leary of a certain area of the dungeon and started avoiding it like the plague - and this was the area they needed to reach to complete the adventure!! What was intended to be a one-shot adventure still did not finish up in two sessions, even with the addition of another player.

GMing is like herding cats.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

If you want them to go ahead and get there, why not just do it? Seriously. Did they tell you they wanted to play out the whole overland journey?

I'm not being snarky; maybe your group's not comfortable with aggressive scene framing, and that's fine. But man, I would not know how to deal with waiting around that long. I'd take a half-hour to let them figure out what they were doing during the trip, and frame to the new area.

I'd go nuts. Last session my players had their PCs sit around talking for an hour, and I was itchy. It's only the second session, and they wanted to do some characterization, but I was dying to get back to aggressive scene framing and jumping to the good stuff.

 

[Grimstaff]

Railroading, 1E style!

When i want my players into the meat of an adventure without a long ardous trip, I do it 1E style:
"After a long ardous trip, you find yourselves standing before the imposing gates of the Black Vault of Kerarn. What do you do?"
Nuff said!

 

[Thunderfoot]

As I've stated before on a couple of different threads, I run a campaign with a nother DM and 11 players. The worst thing that can happen is when the party leaders decides to let the party choose the next course of action. I've seen Congress resolve issues faster; I usually just go to the bathroom or fix lunch during those points.

 

[Kealios]

I often find myself in the same boat, as a DM. I envision things long before the PCs get there, and often have to come up with subplots to occupy some time until the players get to where theyre going.

Part of it is making sure the players are heading in the right direction, and if theyre not, feed them enough info through events and/or NPCs to get them back on track. The players dont always know exactly what theyre supposed to do, even if they semi-understand the plot, so letting them "wander" as they take their time getting there is ok.

I've had this come up recently in my game--the players have talked about heading "south" to deal with a threat for about 2-3 months Real Time now, but keep finding things to occupy themselves in the North. Its been ok, even though Ive had the adventure in the South planned for nearly this whole time, because storyline and plot development has still been occuring despite the delay.

Hang in there, and make the side plots as interesting as you can without derailing the whole adventure. Give plot hooks inside the side plot hooks to bring them back to the original if you need--that's always fun, too.

 

[Ashrum the Black]

HaHa! Now my job and my hobbey have both been compared to herding cats! I love it!

Yes, this happens all the time. I had a small section of an adventure that I read through and figured it should take no more than a night. A simple smash and grab of the dungeon and they'll be out right?

Wrong!

It ended up taking four nights and since they gave the villains so long to prepare it almost resulted in a TPK. The BBEG (a dragon) they ended up running from instead of fighting.

I think the problem with the PC's not meeting our expectations is that they don't have the ability to see everything that's going on around them. They feed off our unspoken ques and sometimes jump to eroneous conclusions about the opposition.

Thus they tend to get scared of things they don't need to, and get cocky to things they shouldn't. We sit back and shake our heads because we have the benefit of all the information. Maybe we as DM's need to make sure that we do a better job of passing along information to the PC's.

(shrug)

Of course sometimes their paranoia is so much more devlish and fun than what we've dreamed up to run. Which is why I try to let them have their head unless they are straying to far afield.

-Ashrum

 

[Sammael]

I've been sitting on a plot hook for two years, ever so slowly increasing the ELs so that when the players finally get around to doing it, they won't find it a disappointment. I do make a point to remind them of it (in-game) every once in a while. I think they'll finally get around to doing it in about 10-12 sessions.

 

[Janx]

I'll have to agree with GrimStaff and Sweenytodd. Don't play out traveling. In fact, that's almost one of the biggest time wasters in RPG design.

D&D's encounter frequency concepts are a bit biased towards making lots of encounters happen.
This has the following side-effects:
unlike a book or movie which sums up the journey or snapshots into memorable parts of the journey, it encourages doing hour by hour encounter checks, as if you were exploring a dungeon in a straight line
walking to the dungeon generates more XP than riding a horse, teleporting, or sailing, which further skews the level the party will be when they get there.
With a 1 in 10 chance of wilderness encounter (roughly), PCs will encounter something once, every 10 hours, or twice a day. Is the world really that hostile? People who live in slums have lower chance of "random encounter with thugs" in the real world.

I'd propose a new way to abjudicate travel (well, not that new):
figure out how long it will take
figure out the terrain
Roll on the "# of interesting things that happen during trip" table
Then roll on the "what interesting thing happened in the relevant terrain" table per the first result

From there, either summarize, or play out ONLY those interesting bits, with summary text to make it flow from scene to scene.

For the "How many" table, I'd try to keep it simple, it should range from 0 to 3 things. Figure a really long journey doesn't really have all that much interesting encounters, in that, they would just keep repeating, and thus, not be so interesting after all. Heck, a 1d4-1 roll would do the trick.

For the "what happened" table, it could have weather, accidents, bandits, interesing NPCs, rare wildlife encounters. Some of those encounters could occur while on the road, or while stopping at inns and camping.

Consider my own 1500 mile trip back from Minnesota. I drove it in 20 hours. During the way back, there was the ice storm in southern MN/northern IA to keep things interesting. Then there was the almost falling asleep in the last hour of the drive. The former is worthy of a summary statement, but not RPing. The latter, might be useful to do some die rolls to see if I fell asleep and resulted in an accident, but it too isn't worth actually playing out, if your goal is to get me to the dungeon of Texas.

I think in general, we use encounter tables to try to simulate interesting things that happen while traveling to point B, but this method isn't producing the effect we really want. We need a new methodology for handling travel.

Janx