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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ulorian - Agent of Chaos" data-source="post: 9771422" data-attributes="member: 16668">I've recently subscribed to Lao Tzu's newsletter, but Helmuth von Moltke the Elder had his hand on my shoulder in those days.I mean... I remember one 1E game. The party was pretty low level... maybe 2 or 3. There was a planned encounter with some equivalently levelled villains; a milestone on the path to the next phase of the plot. One of them was a gnome illusionist (because 1E). On the spot, I decided that he cast some illusion of a black dragon ominously popping up behind his crew, without thinking through the consequences. Mostly because I was 13 years old, but partially based on the way these guys and girls had previously blown through encounters, I was sure I had achieved DM nirvana: added tactical challenge that these murder hobos would ultimately solve and blow through, followed by high-fives, cuz BLACK DRAGON.Well... they surprised me and responded as actual human beings would: WTFBBQ BLACK DRAGON!!! To their credit, it was a tactical retreat instead of a reenactment a horror movie trope ('hiding in the closet' or whatnot). But my railroad had suddenly gone completely off the rails. This was my first experience with off-the-cuff DMing. The campaign had started as one party, navigating a section of the maps of my copy of the Greyhawk boxed set. I had carefully expanded and exhaustively detailed the immediate starting area (a couple of villages in the Grand Duchy of Geoff). In the previous session, my group had suddenly expanded to a dozen players for I can't remember what reason. I made a call to split this crew into two groups that I would DM in separate sessions. They both decided to roam... let's call this 'accidental West Marches'. It was pretty awesome... but my Grand Duchy of Geoff villagers never had their story arcs completed sadly.This encounter with the gnome illusionist was the first one outside of my curated world. What a punch in the face.My off-the-cuff response by the way was to have them run across a stray bandit on their escape route. After tucking their tail between their legs, their gander was up, so I used my newly minted DM improvisitonal skills to detect this and present them with an easy challenge: a lone bandit who was late to the ambush. Spilled the beans on the location of the bandit camp/next campaign objective. Crisis averted.</blockquote>

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