Two encounters at once: what would you do?

[cmbarona]

Any plot should be player created.

You are not in control of the story.

(etc.)

You know what? I've had it with this. It's my game, and you can all shove your pretentious notions that I'm somehow doing it wrong. I'm the one who knows what my game world contains, and most importantly, I'm the one who knows who my players are and the fact that they are enjoying my game. I refuse to swallow your cockamamie idea that it's railroading to make antagonists whose actions are so far-reaching, they sweep the players into the resulting consequences. I've never forced a player to do anything, thank you very much. And having hopes for the players' actions is a far cry from the tyranny you seem to think I'm running here. You want to play in a sandbox-style campaign, where every single detail is dreamed up on the spot by you, the apparent gods of improvisational role-playing? Fine, go and make one, and I hope you reach the pinnacle of whatever gaming ecstasy you seem to think you can make. But stop telling me my game is flawed when you frankly know nothing about it.

[/RANT]

 

[JRRNeiklot]

You know what? I've had it with this. It's my game, and you can all shove your pretentious notions that I'm somehow doing it wrong. I'm the one who knows what my game world contains, and most importantly, I'm the one who knows who my players are and the fact that they are enjoying my game. I refuse to swallow your cockamamie idea that it's railroading to make antagonists whose actions are so far-reaching, they sweep the players into the resulting consequences. I've never forced a player to do anything, thank you very much. And having hopes for the players' actions is a far cry from the tyranny you seem to think I'm running here. You want to play in a sandbox-style campaign, where every single detail is dreamed up on the spot by you, the apparent gods of improvisational role-playing? Fine, go and make one, and I hope you reach the pinnacle of whatever gaming ecstasy you seem to think you can make. But stop telling me my game is flawed when you frankly know nothing about it.

[/RANT]

You ask for advice, but then raise hell when that advice isn't what you already decided you want it to be. If you've already made up your mind, why post at all?

But to answer your first question, you weren't, but now you are.

 

[billd91]

I want them to win, of course, so they can continue exploring the plot I've created for them.

This is anathema to any sort of game I'd want to play in. Any plot should be player created. Here's a novel idea, they took on too much at once, let them learn from the consequences. They might surprise you.

Diff'rent Strokes for Diff'rent Folks. No need to threadcrap on someone else's game.

 

[evileeyore]

You know what?
...
[/RANT]

What Celebrim means is this: "No plan ever survives an encounter with the players."

He was responding directly to your disbelief that the players would do something you hadn't counted on. Always expect this. The players will always think of something you didn't.

To counter this, remain flexible. Know your plans well enough to adapt on the fly. Do the players trigger two encounters at once? Adapt to it. Do they miss an encounter entirely? If it was really important, switch it out for one they are approaching, or inject the important elements into the next one. Etc. This skill will take time to learn to do easily, so don;t sweat it if occasionally things feel clunky to you, it's probably the players won't notice, remember they don't have all the details, they see only the picture as you present it, and even then through their own filters.


The most important thing is this one: Are you and the players having fun? If yes, you're doing it right.

If no, then something is broken and needs to be fixed.





And my last piece of advice: When dealing with people online whom's opinion differ radically from yours the easiest thing is to just ignore them. Specially on the internet. It's not like they're sitting at your table making those noises at you.

 

[skotothalamos]

I think you and I have a similar style. I love to have a story ready to tell, and I really want my players and their characters to experience it. The trick is to make it seem like it happened organically and was all their idea in the first place. With my players, I've pretty much accepted that I'm going to prep about 3 times what I need, and then improvise for half the session to cover the insane schemes they come up with, and re-use stuff in different contexts so they still get the cool story bits, but on their own terms.

I tend to run about 80% pre-made adventures, and that can be worse in some cases because the author makes assumptions about what the typical group will do, then I make assumptions for what my players will do, then I learn (over and over again) that they will surprise me every time. In four Zeitgeist adventures so far, the final outcome has not matched the author's expectations four times.

I ran my group through the 4e Scales of War path, all the way from 1 to 30, with a few self-made side adventures sprinkled in. There are entire dungeons that got cast aside in the wake of "I'll just Spider Climb the tower and drop a rope down, and we'll start from the top. Oh, the boss is on the top floor? sweet!" Who am I to say that's an invalid answer?

In another adventure ( [MENTION=1288]Mouseferatu[/MENTION]'s excellent Last Breaths of Ashenport), after we'd left the "investigate creepy happenings" portion of the adventure and moved into the "cultists will kill your face off" part, the group triggered two encounters at once by sneaking around to the evil altar encounter, borking up that fight up mightily, and then trying to flee through the encounter that was supposed to be a warmup. What happened? Two characters died (one dramatically in the bard's arms the turn after he rolled a 1 on his Heal check) and they left that town, never to return, adventure uncompleted. What really happened? I leveraged their characters' fear of that level 8 adventure to make my own level 18 sequel a year later, and they loved it!

What I'm trying to say is let them fail. Let them fail mightily, but let the story continue. I'd probably go with the simple "kobolds capture everyone" setup that everyone has mentioned, but I wouldn't hand-wave it. The dying characters are still dying and need to be stabilized. The 10hp guy is in trouble. None of the kobolds want to die either, so they'll ask for his surrender and then start making crappy healing checks to keep everyone else from dying. Dead PCs are just meat, but live PCs can be ransomed or sacrificed, so they want them alive. If someone dies, they die and can start up a new PC in the cages. It keeps the drama up, even for the players whose characters who can't take actions. Heck, let them make their own kobold-powered healing checks if you want.

The beauty of point buy is you can make an exact duplicate of the character who just died if you don't want to take the time to make a new character mid-session and really liked that build you were looking forward to trying out.

 

[evileeyore]

... I've pretty much accepted that I'm going to prep about 3 times what I need, and then improvise for half the session to cover the insane schemes they come up with, and re-use stuff in different contexts so they still get the cool story bits, but on their own terms.

I tend to run about 80% pre-made adventures...

You and I have completely opposite DM styles.

I barely ever do prep work, I run 90% by the seat of my pants, if I draw inspiration from a published adventure or AP it's always heavily altered, etc.

For me the two hardest session are the first and last of a campaign. In the first I have no Player driven plots to play with and in the last I'm needing to get everyone onboard the train to "Last stop, wrap everything up-ville".






Granted I ignore meddlesome things like "Encounter Balance" and "leveled resources" and such, so improvising is far, far easier for me. I've also only ever run one 3e and one 4e campaign... I prefer GURPS (my current game I'm trying to get going is FATE's Dresden Files). So my preferred systems lnd themselves more easily to ignoring those things I find "meddlesome".

 

[skotothalamos]

You and I have completely opposite DM styles.

er, sorry, yeah... I posted right after you, but my comment was for the OP.

 

[pemerton]

I allowed them to trigger them simultaneously, but how else was I supposed to address it? I don't mean that flippantly, either, I really wasn't sure what to do when they started talking about opening both doors at once. I guess I could have warned them, but that starts getting into metagamey territory

I know you said upthread you don't really like improvising - but it probably is worth considering how important it is to you to hold backstory constant that hasn't yet seen play.

Eg in your example, as far as I can tell the contents of both rooms were, from the players' point of view, unknown - the relevant backstory (that room 1 containt X kobolds, room 2 contains Y dragonlings, etc) was known only to you.

So one thing you can do is change it.

And in fact a really easy change, which often won't require any change at all to the story elements but is purely mechanical, is to sub in minions in lieu of NPCs/monsters that you intended to be standards.

I'm giving them the option of a TPK or to be captured and taken as sacrifices. And for those that want to stay in the same plot line but don't like their character, I'm offering to either swap them out with one of the other prisoners there (essentially making a new character)

When my group TPKed at 3rd, this is pretty close to what I did: the ones who wanted to keep playing their current PCs woke up in a goblin cell, together with a strange drow (the new PC) and able to smell the roasting flesh of half elf (the old PC of the one player who wanted to change characters, now goblin fodder).