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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zerovoid" data-source="post: 52631" data-attributes="member: 283">What peril are the players risking if they ignore details?  Will an unstoppable foe simply descend on them and kill all the PC's if they don't discover his plan first, or will the results of their failures simply be used as further plot hooks.  While it seems like they deserve firery death for their insolence, somehow killing them for something in the past doesn't seem the same as having them die because of bad battle tactics.At some point, it seems like their should be real absolute consequences for missing things like this, but I don't know how that should be worked out.  If the players don't know enough to figure out what's going to happen to them, they probably won't figure out the situation even after they suffer the consequences.  Once again, the DM is left with a dilemma.  Let them think their deaths were pointless and arbitrary, and have the PC's learn nothing, or else offer up an explanation, which will probably make them more upset.I really like the group of people that I play with.  We used to meet twice a week under another DM, who did a great job, and I think is probably better than me.  He got burned out by being the DM all the time, so since I've got a fair amount of experience DMing, I started running another game once a week, and he DM's on another day.  I think the problem is that my style is alot different than his.He makes up alot of things on the fly, and is very good at coping with the PC's wierd and unpredictable decisions.  Also, there's more social interaction in his campaigns than in mine.  The thing is, except for about three or four major NPC's, most of this interaction was with people that quite literally had no names.  There were alot of towns and inns with no names also.  The PC's were very much in control of the direction of the game, so in one sense it was very non-linear.  OTOH, from the perspective of time, it was very linear.  The party was always moving forward, and never really revisited any old NPC's or situations, so it didn't matter that they didn't have names to be identified by.I run more combat heavy games, and I do more prep work ahead of time.  Its funny that I run a less social game, but have alot more named NPC's and locations.  After being dissatisfied with all the nameless NPC's in the other DM's game, I made a secret vow to try and introduce more consistency into the plot.  I'm also trying to run several plot arcs at once.  The problem is, the party always just grabs onto one plot, and keeps trying to move forward fanatically on that one front.  To keep the game moving, I usually let them, and just start making stuff up.  While they're doing this, they seem to lose all knowledge about what else might be happening in the campaign world.  They don't seem to realize that I intend them to be gathering clues for a variety of paralell storylines, and it might not be possible to advance on any given story arc and every given time.The players do seem to getting the hang of my style as we play more, at least a couple of the more knowledgable and involved players.  And actually, typing all this up indicates that these are things I probably should explain out of character to the players, so they a better idea of what I expect.</blockquote>

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