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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Paul Farquhar" data-source="post: 8337621" data-attributes="member: 6906155">He saw some shifty looking customers hanging round his shop and didn't trust the local guards to be able to protect him. It's no wonder he did a runner!Of course, the truth is, the DM didn't have the skill to create a jewellery store heist adventure on the spare of the moment. And given that most DMs are draftees who only do the hardest job in the game because no one else will, it could be you had unreasonable expectations of their ability?Which is why Keep on the Borderlands is a bad adventure. It doesn't give the PCs any motivation to adventure, beyond a vague "get rich quick". In which case knocking over the jewellery store is at least as sensible a decision as to go into a hole in the ground and kill some monsters. Yet the adventure only provides the DM with guidance for dealing with PCs who make the irrational choice to go monster hunting.Running a story driven adventure isn't about dictating to players what to do, it about creating a situation and then predicting the most likely path the PCs will take. Because people don't choose at random. Some options are clearly better, and some are clearly worse, and PCs are most likely to choose a better option than a worse one. If the world is about to be destroyed by a giant asteroid, then trying to stop the asteroid is clearly a better decision than ignoring it.If you start from the idea that player characters are heroes* then provide a call to adventure (help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you are my only hope) then the PCs are most likely to heed the call, because that is what heroes do. You then provide a breadcrumb trail that the can choose to follow - not because they have no choice, but because it is the most sensible thing for the PCs to do in the circumstances, and because the players want to find out what happens next. Of course that doesn't entirely free the DM of the need to create stuff on the spare of the moment (or perform major rewrites between sessions) since the players can often come up with better ideas that the DM hasn't thought of, in which case you just roll with it, and remember to reward players for cleverness, not punish them.*other, non-heroic options are also available.</blockquote>

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