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<blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 1514933" data-attributes="member: 2"><p>Regal worm of Slopp (great name, by the way!), the trick is never to worry if the PCs don't do what you intend. You think about the consequences and adjust on the fly. That's one of the things that makes it so much fun; it's like an improvisational jazz riff.</p><p></p><p>Here's a great example from last night's game. The group is on the outer planes, and they run up against a champion of chaos who is trying to get the villages in a halfling community to attack one another. If they do, the whole area will turn chaotic and get pushed into Limbo.</p><p></p><p>I'm readying for a cool fight: slaad antipaladin mounted on a froghemoth, psionic cohort, all kinds of bad guy fun in a big battle. And what do the PCs do? They <em>refuse to fight.</em> They figure that any fight will add to chaos, so instead the organize the halflings into an ultra-lawful defensive militia and arrange things so that each village can't be turned against the others.</p><p></p><p>I sat there for a few minutes and just blinked. No chaos meant the bad guy was going to fail no matter what he did. By exploiting the outer planes' capacity for "belief equals reality" the group won anyways. They foiled the bad guy's plans, and no one lifted a sword. I was totally caught off guard. It was wonderful; I live for moments like that, when my group outsmarts me.</p><p></p><p>So now I'm deciding what the bad guy will do instead. Will he seek vengeance, or go elsewhere? What will happen to the PCs' fame for doing this, and what sort of attention will it attract? Any action that they do has consequences... this just has some that I hadn't already thought of. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></p><p></p><p>And that's one of the things I love about DMing. If you know your world, you don't have to make your group "do" anything, because they'll follow the paths that seem to be the most fun and I'll get to change the world as a result of their actions.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Piratecat, post: 1514933, member: 2"] Regal worm of Slopp (great name, by the way!), the trick is never to worry if the PCs don't do what you intend. You think about the consequences and adjust on the fly. That's one of the things that makes it so much fun; it's like an improvisational jazz riff. Here's a great example from last night's game. The group is on the outer planes, and they run up against a champion of chaos who is trying to get the villages in a halfling community to attack one another. If they do, the whole area will turn chaotic and get pushed into Limbo. I'm readying for a cool fight: slaad antipaladin mounted on a froghemoth, psionic cohort, all kinds of bad guy fun in a big battle. And what do the PCs do? They [i]refuse to fight.[/i] They figure that any fight will add to chaos, so instead the organize the halflings into an ultra-lawful defensive militia and arrange things so that each village can't be turned against the others. I sat there for a few minutes and just blinked. No chaos meant the bad guy was going to fail no matter what he did. By exploiting the outer planes' capacity for "belief equals reality" the group won anyways. They foiled the bad guy's plans, and no one lifted a sword. I was totally caught off guard. It was wonderful; I live for moments like that, when my group outsmarts me. So now I'm deciding what the bad guy will do instead. Will he seek vengeance, or go elsewhere? What will happen to the PCs' fame for doing this, and what sort of attention will it attract? Any action that they do has consequences... this just has some that I hadn't already thought of. :) And that's one of the things I love about DMing. If you know your world, you don't have to make your group "do" anything, because they'll follow the paths that seem to be the most fun and I'll get to change the world as a result of their actions. [/QUOTE]
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