D&D 5E We Don't Need Magic Shops!... or How My Players Continually Confound Me.

[werecorpse]

I run campaigns for my 13-y-o and his friends.
Every one of them will try to buy pets in any market we go to; it's like a traveling circus with dogs and cats, a monkey, a gecko, a gold fish...
They spend close to 1/2 of each encounter defending their animals; one started crying because while he could breath underwater, I reminded him after his fight with a shark that the ferret in his pouch could not.

That's brutal, not letting him know the ferret in his pouch was struggling & drowning during the fight. Couldn't the ferret escape the pouch & swim away during the fight?

I find that there are two types of pets people want. Those that have some mechanical benefit (ie a fightin dog, a spying rat) and those that are really there just for the fantasy of having a cool pet. The latter ones are largely character description & fluff, like a blue cloak or red hair, they have some plot immunity.

 

[Storyteller Hero]

Well, they probably just want to be the very best, like no one ever was.

To catch them all is their real test.

To train them is their cause.

 

[aco175]

There is a new Disney cartoon princess Arleena or such where there is a spirit animal that comes and goes. In the cartoon it talks and offers guidance but can be simply reskinned to a simple animal that can come and go. I also had magic collars that allowed animals to disappear to an extra-dimensional space akin to a bag of holding. It solved the problem of them dying all the time.

On the other hand, we had animals in that past, mostly horses or donkeys since they are cheap, where they would be sacrificed to allow the PCs to escape. These animals never had names though.

 

[plisnithus8]

Oof. Am I a bad person because this made me laugh a little? Not so much the IC thought of a ferret dying. More at the young player forgetting about its existence and subsequent drowning. Although I guess, to put an even finer point on it, its really that you waited until *after* the fight to break the news to him, and his subsequent reaction. That made me chortle. I'm going to heck, aren't I?

Would you laugh even more if you knew that they stopped to have a funeral service on their ship for the ferrets thus not seeing the giant vulture swooping down to attack and eventually take out a couple of the other pets.

 

[Willie the Duck]

What did they go in search for? Animals! Totally took me by surprise

Well, let's be clear. A lot of people heard that this edition was going to be lower magic item, and that people wouldn't be decorated like Christmas trees, and took it to heart.

 

[akr71]

^ True enough, except these 3 have only ever played 5e. They did stumble upon a magic shop in Baldur's Gate, but before that I didn't really go out and tell them there would be magic items for sale either.

 

[TallIan]

One of the most frustrating things as a DM is to create all sorts of NPC's and Experiences in one area only to have the Players decide to go off in a completely different direction. Its cool and all, and lets the games be very fun and spontaneous...but its literally the equivalent of a cat ignoring the brand new fancy toy and just playing with the box it came in.

You mean you're players do anything other than go off in a completely different direction?

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[Willie the Duck]

One of the most frustrating things as a DM is to create all sorts of NPC's and Experiences in one area only to have the Players decide to go off in a completely different direction. Its cool and all, and lets the games be very fun and spontaneous...but its literally the equivalent of a cat ignoring the brand new fancy toy and just playing with the box it came in.

Yes, but if the PCs never met the NPCs or experienced the Experiences, you can always repackage them and have them show up later in some other place. That's what I do with wings of dungeons that the PCs never get to.

 

[jaelis]

I run campaigns for my 13-y-o and his friends.
Every one of them will try to buy pets in any market we go to; it's like a traveling circus with dogs and cats, a monkey, a gecko, a gold fish...

Tell me about it they could do a whole splat book on pets

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I tend to be pretty good at guessing the sorts of things my players might want to do...but I don't really plan assumed adventures, or at least not long ones. I've had them half finish a short adventure I downloaded, and give up before really starting a really short sidequest I designed. Neither of those bothered me, because I didn't put too much prep into them or base some sort of ongoing plot around the party interacting with them.

That's the key, I think. Make few assumptions, and certainly don't put a lot of time into designing something that may never come up.