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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8773368" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I have given this example in some threads in the past, so I apologize if anyone here considers this a broken record.Couple years ago now, my players went on a Perilous Journey to investigate some very bad Druids (the "Shadow Druids," ecoterrorists who want to change the arid Tarrakhuna region into a swamp and merge with the process of death and decay so they can "live" outside the cycle of life and death.) In prior adventures, they had learned (due to the Druids being very bad at hiding their paper trail) that the stuff they were trying to bring into the main city to destroy it was coming from a distant northern area, routing through the trade highways to a spot near the headwaters of the major river, and then routing back to the main city. They chose to go to the headwaters first.Unfortunately, they missed or got partial success on multiple rolls on their Perilous Journey, so things were in a bad state when they arrived...the marsh was on fire. With the help of a strange Druid who could take the shape of a deer made of flame (yet which did not burn the land she walked), they were able to contain the fire and summon a storm to put it out. They then descended into the secret druid site, hidden beneath the marsh, where the Shadow Druids had been.It was a mess. They realized that some other force (later learned to be the Raven-Shadow assassin cult, which the party knew has a beef with the Shadow Druids) had attacked and intentionally tried to burn out the druids residing there. However it was also clear that the Shadow Druids had been corrupting the place themselves, and the party did what they could to cleanse the corruption, even saving a nest of basilisk eggs from it (not without complications, but still.)As a sort of "final set piece" for the place, which my players affectionately named the "Charred Marsh Grotto" in imitation of MMO-style dungeons, I had put together something I thought would be really fun and interesting. Trying to stay light on detail, the Shadow Druids practice a horrific form of semi-necromancy where they can bind the soul of a (usually tortured) living person (it doesn't work on the dead) into specially-prepared blood obsidian sand, creating an obedient and dangerous bound spirit that they can use to further their goals. This grotto was used to take obsidian quarried at the other, northern site and turn it into obsidian spirits. The Raven-Shadows, meanwhile, attacked with soul-bound (likely the souls of their assassination targets) "spider-bot" clockwork devices, which used an alchemical fuel to burn the grotto in hopes of destroying the fungal tissue and spores that the Shadow Druids infect the world with. The final chamber they visited was the room where the obsidian spirits were made. However, because of the conflagration and the similarities between the obsidian spirits and the soul-bound clockwork, the intense heat of the fire instead caused the two things to merge into a horrible abomination, a molten obsidian golem with mithril claws and fire attacks.However...my players got the better of me. See, I had had a pit trap full of water (due to the marsh, right?) in the hallway connecting to this room. So the players asked, very reasonably, "Can we just draw it out here toward the pit trap?"I was, to put it mildly, a bit crestfallen. They were right. That plan made total sense and shouldn't even require a roll to attempt. For a brief moment, I considered doing something to force the fight, like having the golem refuse to leave its little hidey-hole, but that wouldn't have comported with how I described the thing behaving. So their plan worked. The water partially solidified the golem, and they shattered it with a couple well-timed blows.The fiction overrode me as DM. I wanted to have that (hopefully) awesome fight. The fiction said that didn't make sense, so it didn't happen. My players were actually very happy, not disappointed, because they appreciated that I had enough respect for their actions to not force things to happen simply because I thought it would be cool.</blockquote>

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