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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 1752074" data-attributes="member: 63">This is mostly just me thinking out loud in text, to try to decide what to do for the next game.I had this session all planned, I thought.  The party was looking for a gnome who had a secret they needed.  He was hiding somewhere in an Orcish city, and so all they had to do was be discreet and not piss anyone off, and they'd be able to find where the gnome was hiding - a huge steelworks factory that had officially shut down after its human owner died mysteriously (the gnome is a little homocidal).The wrench that was going to be thrown into the party's path was that an opposing group was looking for the same gnome.  The party had crossed swords with this group before, but not these particular agents.  The idea was to introduce a group of villains as foes who would show up later, and to have one of those villains confront the party at the climax of the adventure.  The way I envisioned it most likely going, the party would see these mysterious foreigners at the city's docks, but would focus on the task at hand - namely finding the gnome.  Then, at the steel mill, while the party was trying to catch the fleeing gnome, one of the villains would make an impressive appearance, and we'd have a nice fight in the steelworks.Instead, the party got about halfway to figuring out where the gnome was, then decided to ask this group of villains for information.  They didn't know the villains were bad guys at the time, but the villains knew the PCs were their enemies, so of course they weren't helpful.  The party finally figured out that these strange warriors were also looking for the gnome, so instead of following the trail to the gnome, which they had almost completely figured out, they decided to stake out the villain's ship and wait to follow them when they went to get the gnome.Well, the stake out failed, because the villains were kinda hoping to follow the PCs.  But one of the PCs on stake out got impatient, and because they still didn't know the warriors were actual enemies, he went to talk to them, to offer to work together.  It was after midnight at this time, and the woman warrior he talked to unhappily agreed to let the PC on board to discuss things in private.  But the PC got a hunch that he was just being led toward capture and death, so he stopped, tried to weasel some information out of the woman, and then, when he knew the jig was up, he jumped overboard and swam back to the party's own ship.At the ship, though, the rest of the party decided to try to negotiate again.  They thought it was sort of a gentleman's agreement between fellow adventurers not to ambush each other while sleeping.  So they didn't take the threat seriously, and went to bed.Here's where I'm a bit unhappy.  I'm co-DMing the game with my friend Michael - he does a lot of side NPCs and sidequests while I handle main villains and combats.  I was about to do something like, the villains head out immediately to find the gnome, and so the party is just screwed over that they've failed.  But Michael suggests that, well, the villains are pretty confident in their skill, and they think they have the element of surprise, so the three warriors should attack the party.  Logically, he says, the villains should try to kill the party.Which works fine, except that the villains were, for reasons that will play into the plot later on, supposed to be fairly high level.  The party's a group of five 6th level characters - the three villains were 10th, 12th, and 15th.  They were gonna roll the party.One of our rules of DMing is "The villains can only capture the PCs a maximum of twice per campaign."  Another is "The villains can only beat the party then leave them alive once per campaign."  We used up one capture and one beatdown tonight.  The villains need to interrogate the party because the party has something incredibly vital to them, so I had a good reason to take the party captive.The fight was fun, but by the end of it three PCs were unconscious, two of which were captured.  One PC had had his hand severed by a sword of sharpness, and he and the last PC had barely managed to escape by swimming away.  One of the three villain warriors was killed.  The swift and violent response by the local orcish police force ensured that the villains couldn't pursue the party forever, but now we have a split party, and my really really nifty battle I'd planned for the climax will never happen.I guess the only thing that upsets me is that the party's been divided, and one of the PCs who got away is the guy who really doesn't want to be with the rest of the group.  It will be hard to plan next session.Thanks for listening.</blockquote>

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