Text book DM conundrum

[Kaun]

Ok here is my issue (and be for i start let me say please excuse my horrible spelling, murdering the english laungage apears to be a subconcious hobby of mine)

Running a bit of 4th ED for some mates at the moment and im waorried about rail roading. I know its the big taboo of the roleplay world but what im finding is when i loosen the reins they either wander aimlessly about waiting for something to happen or if they have a goal and are trying to get closer to complete it they pick the most inane ways of going about it so that you can posibly throw them a bone for it and still look your self in the mirror (example: trying to find a lower power necromancer in a city of over 300k people by simply wandering around to random grave yards and seeing if there is anything suspect.) I mean the players dont seem to mind the fact that i sort of lead them from encounter to encounter so much but some times i get the feeling that if they just want combat after combat with no real drive or reason maybe we are beter of just playing 40k or something?

Anyway any thoughts are similar experiances to this would be much apreciated.

[Satyr]

Railroading isn't a particularly good form of mastering a game, but it is far, far from the worst. There are players who expect to be reined and are overburdened when they are expected to take the initiative and form the plot themselves.
It is certainly not bad to make some considerations about this, but giving it all up because your group expects ypu to railroad a bit seems to be a slightly exagerated reaction to me.

I would recommend you to get a module to play to earn your spurs and get a grip on how to spin a narrative. Try to focus less on encounters (as a rule of thumb: It is better to have only one combat within a whole campaign when this one is completely awesome and get anecdote honors than having three to four trivial encounters per session) and more on the interaction between the characters and their environment. Try to establish some basic notions in the characters (one of the simpler ideas here is to establsih a hometown. All characters feel at home in the same place and feel very fondly of it, so that they are willing to fight for it, if necessary). The emotional binding is more important than being proactive, but more important it is the first step for it. When the players have a strong impression on how their characters act and appear, they have the chance to act in the mind of the characters.

[caden_varn]

The aim of the game is for everyone to have fun. If that is happening, then you don't need to worry. So I'd suggest you talk to the players and see whether they are happy, or if they do feel rail-roaded.

If you want to encourage them to be more pro-active, reward it when they are, even if their plans are not exactly the greatest. OK, so wandering around random graveyards in a large city to try to find a specific necromancer may not be the best plan, but I have heard of much worse. If you want it to succeed, then let them find a clue there.

To be honest, I wouldn't say that is a terribly bad plan, especially if they don't have much other information to go on. I might try something similar - talk to the grave-diggers etc. and try to get some more information to go on, find out if and where suspicious activities are happening, then stake out some of the more promising areas. Now, if I did that looking for demons, it would be a bit silly, but necromancers? They need dead bodies, so why not?

I'd say that even if a plan sounds inane to you, have a really good reason before you say 'No.', especially if your players are new to that sort of thing. And remember that the players have much more limited information than you, so it is very easy for them to miss the 'obvious' route you can see.

[Nightson]

Railraoding is when you curtail player plans because they don't mesh with what you expected them to do. What you're doing sounds much less like railroading and a lot more like throwing the players a bone.

[Grail]

these other posters have said pretty much it all, spot on.

There is only 1 real Taboo in playing, and that is not having fun and not letting your players have fun. DM's and players alike must share the responsibility for making the time roleplaying entertaining (for all). If these players like being led by the nose, then bait those nostril hooks and go fishing.

[Kurald Galain]

Recommended reading material:

DM of the Rings (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612).

Aside from being hilarious, it is full of excellent advice on now not to run a campaign, and includes a few severe (and funny) instances of railroading.

[hamlet]

The solution is simple.

1. If they go about pursuing goals in the most inane and non-sensible manner imaginable, let the consequences speak for themselves.

They go out hunting graveyards for low power necromancers? Oh, the possibilities here are ripe.

Local townsfolk report them as doing something strange themselves. Authorities pursue the PC's and ask them what they're doing and would they kindly shove off.

The local mages' guild and necromancers' college get wind of it and the PC's have just made powerful enemies. Perhaps enemies annoyed enough to put prices on their heads.

If they insist on doing this kind of thing, the bad guy continues to do his thing in the meantime, killing more innocents. Perhaps even blaming the PC's when he catches wind of their involvement with the law and the local guilds. Nothin' like a villain with good PR.

2. If they insist on just wandering aimlessly and waiting for something to happen, merely remind them that you're not playing "Farmer the RPG" and that unless they take an active hand in the game, they might as well find a plot of land and settle down to plant turnips.

The game is about slaying dragons and monsters, saving the princess, fighting off the endless forces of evil. Not plowing the back forty.

[caden_varn]

The solution is simple.

1. If they go about pursuing goals in the most inane and non-sensible manner imaginable, let the consequences speak for themselves.

They go out hunting graveyards for low power necromancers? Oh, the possibilities here are ripe.



I'd be a bit concerned about taking this approach in this situation. If you are trying to encourage your players to be more proactive, don't smack them on the nose every time they try. That will quickly condition them not to bother thinking for themselves, as every time they do it ends badly for them. Instead, encourage it by rewarding them. If they try something kinda stupid, give them a small reward, if they try something clever, give them a big reward. But as a DM you need to be receptive to different ways to approach a problem. As a rule, try to think of at least two DIFFERENT approaches they could take. This will encourage you to be more open-minded to the groups plan, which will probably be something else entirely. If there is only one route thay can take, or a very narrow range of possibilities, you are straying into rail-roading territory.

On the other hand, if the problem is more that they are coming up with lots of ideas, most of which are bad, then bringing some consequences down on their actions is fine, especially if they are doing it deliberately. But I don't think that this is the problem you have at the moment. Once you have got them to be proactive, then start to punish stupid actions. One step at a time.

[Canadian]

If your players are that dopey then they won't even know they are being railroaded. In that case hitch up the engine and stoke the coal. Woo! Woo! Who want's to ride the pain train?!?

Or...

How would you go about finding one person in your city without the aid of a phone book or the internet or a car? Let's say I asked you to find a person of a particular profession (mortician) in your city. You had to find the exact person. All you know is their name and profession. In a large city this would take a very long time. Without a phone book or internet connection how would you even find the locations of all the funeral parlors? How would you get to them without a car? Walk across the whole city? How fast can a horse really go?

I think the task you assigned them is so far outside of their normal problem solving routine that I couldn't blame them for not coming up with a killer solution right away. Maybe you're judging them a little harshly. I'd have a hard time finding that guy.

[hamlet]

I'd be a bit concerned about taking this approach in this situation. If you are trying to encourage your players to be more proactive, don't smack them on the nose every time they try. That will quickly condition them not to bother thinking for themselves, as every time they do it ends badly for them. Instead, encourage it by rewarding them. If they try something kinda stupid, give them a small reward, if they try something clever, give them a big reward. But as a DM you need to be receptive to different ways to approach a problem. As a rule, try to think of at least two DIFFERENT approaches they could take. This will encourage you to be more open-minded to the groups plan, which will probably be something else entirely. If there is only one route thay can take, or a very narrow range of possibilities, you are straying into rail-roading territory.

On the other hand, if the problem is more that they are coming up with lots of ideas, most of which are bad, then bringing some consequences down on their actions is fine, especially if they are doing it deliberately. But I don't think that this is the problem you have at the moment. Once you have got them to be proactive, then start to punish stupid actions. One step at a time.

I'm not talking about punishing them at all! It's not the GM's place to punish them. He's not their daddy.

I'm talking about consequences.

Going to a graveyard where you suspect a necromancer might be raising the dead to slay the living and looking for him is actually a good, proactive thing to do.

Going to every random graveyard in town hoping to stumble upon a random necromancer and hoping he's low enough level that he can be killed is just . . . well . . . silly.

Locals and authorities won't get in a snit over a bunch of PC's going after somebody who is obviously breaking the law. Hell, they'd probably thank them for sparing them having to risk their lives over the issue. But if they are just prowling graveyards with no apparant goal in mind, the locals are going to notice and they probably won't react well.

This is about common sense, really. If the PC's suspect that there's a necromancer raising the dead in one of the graveyards, but have no idea where he's at, why aren't they chatting with the captain of the guard and asking for his help? He can send out his 0-level functionaries to search the area for clues, knock on doors near the cemetaries, and generally perform the scutwork that hack-happy players hate. At the very least, he can give the PC's permission to go snooping around.

Not only that, the local authorities are a great resource for the DM to drop clues and to add spice to things. Hey, maybe the guards are in league with the necromancer? Maybe the guy's raising zombies from the graveyard and the guards are putting uniforms on them and using them to bolster their numbers recently heavily reduced by a particularly active local theives' guild.

It's not about punishment or smacking a player on the nose. It's about making sure the world is alive. A lively world is more likely to get the players involved beyond just looking to wade into a pool of blood.

[Kaun]

Hey guys alot of good points made in there.

To Satyr:
My problem isnt so much coming from inexperiance, this year will be about my 14th year behind the screen give or take and most of my current players i have played with on and off for over half that time.

I think as a role player most people seem to go through a fair few diffrent stages (this theory is based on if the people that you start playing with are mostly new to the game too.)

Generaly alot of peoples earlyer games are all about fairly mindless combat. You get fairly simple mission you kill bad guys you get loot you go up levels. You dont put alot of thought in about right and wrong of your actions, the world is more then not black and white and if it came out of the MM then you can stick a sword in it with out looseing anysleep over if what you did was the right thing to do.

After that from my experiance alot of people slip into what i call the "NOTES OF HELL!!"stage of playing.
It builds from a slow progression of one up manship over who kills the most monsters does the most damage ect to the point of all out cold war between players. Everybody wants to be one step ahead of all the other players and there is always a fair amount of paranoia building every time a note gets handed to the gm/dm. It eventualy culminates in a point where the GM looses his mind as declares from that point on notes are outlawed after the 5th time he recives a note saying "im secretly checking to make sure all my stuff is there!!!"

After this alot of people slowly ease into the more golden days of roleplaying as i see them, generaly they are well past there teenage years by this stage and the game becomes alot less focused on mindless combat. The players start takeing alot more interest in why there doing something and the back story behind it, they start to think about there actions a bit more and the ramifications of them. More or less your worlds gain more depth that the players are keener to take advantage of and explore then previously and in my mind it gives you the enviroment to build a much beter game.

P.S. This is from my experiance, i doubt everyones has or is the same but alot of people i have spoken to and played with have experianced alot of these similer things.

Now my point is. Some of my players not all butt some seem to have gone from stage 1 too stage 2 and then rather then moveing slowly onto stage 3 they seem to have reverted back to the most primitive form of stage 1.

Im fairly sure a couple of them would be happy if i just numbered all my npcs so it would be easyer for them to remember who they had to kill and who had there reward once they had finished the job. Npc 1 rushes you from his house. "Go hero's" he say's "and do not let your shadows grace my step aggain till npc 7 has drawn his final breath!!!. In return you shall recive 2x rolls from the medium treasure table and two level 6 magical items to be chosen at random!"

hehe i have kind of forgoten my point now.

Also when they make stupid choices alot i dont want to smack there noses every time cos as sombody stated i belive there more likely to stop makeing any choices at all and find less enjoyment in the game, but rewarsding there choices has doomed me to recieving the same level of stupidity every time because it worked last time. Its sort of a damned if you do damned if you dont kinda thing..

Ow and about the whole necromancer grave yard thing.. The necro is rather inteligent and by mythinking in a masive city if you wanted to get a supply of fresh bodies with out it being noticed by the authorities the grave yard is the last place you would go. I simple stroll through the back alley's of the slumy districts or under the boardwalks and jetys in waterfront district are a veritable treasure trove of unwanted corpses by my thinking!

anyway this post is getting rather long and im not sure it really amounted to much so i might leave it for the moment, give it some thought and post aggain later. Thanx mucho for the replies btw!!!:smallsmile:

[caden_varn]

In the end, different people want different things out of roleplaying. So long as everyone is enjoying themselves, I wouldn't worry - but everyone includes the DM (something that seems to get missed a lot...).

Out of interest, what information does the group have to find this necromancer? What sort of strategies did you think they could have used?
I don't really know about finding a lot of corpses in slum areas etc., unless you mean finding people who wouldn't be missed to murder. Even in the poor areas, bodies are likely to get buried or at least moved away from other peoples residences/work places, due to concerns about vermin and disease if not any kind of religious conviction.
Would the necromancer want to go out murdering? That's a more serious crime than stealing corpses, and the victims are likely to fight back, or maybe escape, making it riskier, even using accomplices/previous creations. So people guard graveyards that well, or frequent them after dark? Unless there is a known issue with graverobbing I would doubt it, and corpses tend not to fight back (not until the necromancer is done with them anyway).

[Yakk]

Going to every random graveyard in town hoping to stumble upon a random necromancer and hoping he's low enough level that he can be killed is just . . . well . . . silly.
First, if very powerful and hostile necromancers hang around in a city graveyard, jumping anyone who looks around, then the city has a serious problem.

A problem that is on such a large scale, that areas near the graveyard will be deserted, wards (even if ineffective) will be put up to attempt to seal the graveyard's deziens out, and possibly guards placed around it.

Looking in graveyards for evidence of necromancy, when you think there is a necromancer in the city, seems not that silly. Unless graveyards are in your world places you only enter with the local high priest holding the hordes of undead at bay...

---

It is really easy to smack players down for not doing what you expected. It is really hard for a player to come up with a plan that happens to align with your plan.

To avoid railroading, one option is to provide multiple hooks that are both effective, but orthogonal (there is no need, or opportunity, to do both).

Looking for a necromancer? Looking at graveyards? They could meet up with a priest or two as they move between graveyards, who they can talk to, which can feed them more plot hooks.


Ow and about the whole necromancer grave yard thing.. The necro is rather inteligent and by mythinking in a masive city if you wanted to get a supply of fresh bodies with out it being noticed by the authorities the grave yard is the last place you would go. I simple stroll through the back alley's of the slumy districts or under the boardwalks and jetys in waterfront district are a veritable treasure trove of unwanted corpses by my thinking!
Cleaning up corpses is a very important bit of public health -- corpses breed disease, and poison water. Death rates have to about match birth and immigration rates for a city, or the population collapses. Corpses won't be that common -- and wandering around collecting corpses that fall for no reason would generate rumors...

[Kaun]

To Yakk:
Yes corpse removal is an important part of a citys day to day ritual. A corpse in the wealthier or even lower class areas would strugle to spend more then a couple of hours with out being delt with. This city is large and sprawling and a decent section of it has fallen into decay and is now mostly inabited by thugs and the homless and outcasts. People in these areas have generaly sunk to as low as is posible and dont overly care about the state of the city on a whole nor are they that willing to put them self out if some other homeless guy has died near the kip. At most they just drag them a bit further away from where they sleep or if thats to much effort find some place else to sleep. Yes the local authorites have men hired to go colecting bodies from these areas but its not the safest part of town and they are dobutfully as keen to check every nook and cranny as they are in the safer parts of the city. A silly lord might offer reward for boides brought forth so as to keep the city cleaner but it dosent take a rocket scientist to figure out what would end up happening there:smallamused:.

As to there investigation they have a few break and enters that have been commited around town that are linked to him to investigate. They however are not attached to the city gaurd and there for have no real jurisdiction and have been apon simply terning up to rather wealthy estates to ask questions simply been terned away with naught and givin up on that lead on the spot. I figured they might turn to some of there contacts in the local guilds or gaurd for info, or maybe press some coins into some of the servants hands who work on the estate or even do a little cloak and dagger recon themselfs. Alas no, couldnt get there questions answered right of the line so it was to hard.

hehe now im just venting.

[LibraryOgre]

The bad guys have a time table. If the players do nothing, that time table goes off as planned. On the other hand, as it gets closer to 0 hour, the bad guy's plans become more and more apparent... harder to stop, but more apparent.

[Kaun]

Yeah Mark i have already basicly been doing that.. Though the last couple of times i have left it up to them to persue the main plot line they have ignored it completly in favour of random wandering hehe.

At the moment im trying to formulate a few solid solid plot points and then coming up with many basic paths/hooks that can get the pcs to them in the hope that they latch onto something and actualy get involved in the main story.

I know some players like to flat out ignore the main plot to piss of the dm.. Butt i dont think my guys are quite that crule... mainly cos if they made a habbit of it i would just had the job over to one of them which they all hate doing heh.

[Tsotha-lanti]

example: trying to find a lower power necromancer in a city of over 300k people by simply wandering around to random grave yards and seeing if there is anything suspect.

Wait, how is this inane? Sounds like a sensible tactic - inane would be looking in bars or brothels. If there's a necromancer, there's going to be missing corpses. Why aren't you rolling with it? "Blocking" is never a good idea, and a GM shouldn't let the PCs' ideas be a waste of everyone's time.

If you don't know how to improvise and make something of the initiative the PCs show and the ideas they pitch at you, it's no wonder you're having to railroad. It sounds like you've already done the railroading by laying down the tracks beforehand - creating plots and problems with only one solution. That never works. The odds that the PCs will do the one single thing you've decided will work are vanishingly small - indeed, even if you tried to think of everything they might do, they'd still do something you didn't think of.

If you're not "rewarding" the initiative they do show, they're sure as hell not going to start showing more of it.

[Kaun]

Wait, how is this inane? Sounds like a sensible tactic - inane would be looking in bars or brothels. If there's a necromancer, there's going to be missing corpses. Why aren't you rolling with it? "Blocking" is never a good idea, and a GM shouldn't let the PCs' ideas be a waste of everyone's time.

If you don't know how to improvise and make something of the initiative the PCs show and the ideas they pitch at you, it's no wonder you're having to railroad. It sounds like you've already done the railroading by laying down the tracks beforehand - creating plots and problems with only one solution. That never works. The odds that the PCs will do the one single thing you've decided will work are vanishingly small - indeed, even if you tried to think of everything they might do, they'd still do something you didn't think of.

If you're not "rewarding" the initiative they do show, they're sure as hell not going to start showing more of it.


Have already responded to this with my theroys a few times ... read past first post for more info but to sum it up breifly "I" think that falls into the stupid evil catagory and if the necro has a decent int then i think he should act like it.

P.S why are bars and brothels inane? is there a necromancer code that disalows that or something?

[caden_varn]

I don't really buy the slums leaving corpses around thing - I don't think that is a particularly likely thing to happen, and certainly not something that it would be fair to assume people would think of. People do not normally sink THAT low.
In the slums there are people around who can spot you, whereas normally graveyards are quiet at night (assuming you are careful). It's also a bit random finding corpses elsewhere - you are sure the graveyard will have some, but wandering around the slums hoping to find one? Ho wlong will that take? How many people randomly die or get murdered each night in a city of 300K, and are left to lie there?
And remember all the thugs you said inhabit these areas, who may try to rob this well-off looking stranger who wanders round every night?

Compare this to a well-stocked grave-yard without people living nearby, no or few guards - I know which route I would take. This is the main way that body-snatchers who supplied illiegal corpses for medical researchers worked - I'd say necromancers are their D&D equivalents, and medical researchers are by definition reasonably intelligent.

My point here is that your view of what is a more sensible route for a clever necromancer to use looks really stupid from a different point of view. Neither point of view is necessarily right or wrong - but you have to accept that what you think is sensible will seem very stupid from other peoples point of view.

Finally, even if you think it is stupid for the necromancer to take corpses from the graveyard, that does not mean it is stupid for the players to check it out. They don't know whether the necromancer is stupid, or has bribed the guards, or anything like that. It may not work (as the necro isn't using it), but checking for that it is fair and reasonable (even if it does not work).

[Inyssius Tor]

P.S why are bars and brothels inane? is there a necromancer code that disalows that or something?

Are you serious? Are you actually trying to imply that looking for a necromancer by searching all the graveyards in a city would not be more logical than looking for a necromancer by searching all the taverns?

What?

You know what a smart necromancer needs? Dead bodies that no one will miss. Where do you find dead bodies that no one will miss?

You could start nuking whole taverns, but that would be incredibly stupid and pretty much equivalent to declaring war on the entire city. No one could possibly miss something like that. If your idiot necromancer is seriously breaking and entering--sending his undead legions across city streets and into people's homes to murder and collect lowlifes one at a time... this is the internet, I should expect this sort of thing, but...

Good Lord, that's ridiculously bad tactics. No city, no matter how large or callous, could possibly hide something that ludicrously high-profile. A city populated by nonsentient weasels could not fail to catch on to that.

People
Do not.
Die.
That.
Much.

And when they do, their bodies are missed. At the height of the Black Death, in a city more profoundly stricken by the plague than any other, this might possibly have gone unnoticed. Your population is probably not shrinking by half every year, though. If you want your necromancer to do this, there will be rumors about him all over the damn place, and he still won't have more than ten or fifteen undead minions. Unless he is incredibly skilled in the art of mind-influencing arcana, to the point where he could control the whole city without any minions at all.

If he wants to keep a lower profile, he should work with people that are already dead, and--even better--corpses who don't have any surviving friends or relatives.

And where do you get people that are already dead?

Any guesses?

If he was smart, like your players appear to be, he would find a graveyard. One that has been in business for a while, so that A) it has a lot of really old graves, owned by people whose descendants have long since stopped caring about the great-great-great-ancestors who are buried there (no one to care! Good idea!); and B) have been around long enough to have underground crypts, holding quite a lot of those ancient and long-forgotten dead I was just talking about in a much smaller space--one that very few people enter.

Your necromancer then finds the caretakers of the graveyard. He suborns them, or kills and reanimates them. If their main thing in life is maintaining crypts, they won't be missed and they're expected to be a little corpse-y and reclusive and weird anyhow. They can keep people out of the crypts, and do things like dig up bodies and replace the dirt over the now-empty graves, without anyone thinking anything about it.

If the graveyard has underground crypts, that is an incredible boon for your necromancer. They're a great place to find tons of dead bodies. No one goes into them. They're naturally creepy anyway; if a guy goes down into the catacombs and is scared ****less by three angry wraiths, and comes up gibbering about it, that's a spooky story. But no one is going to send the City Watch down there!

In addition, they are a great place to hide your undead minions. No one really goes down into them anymore. And, if they're extensive (they often are!), they're a marvelous way to move your hordes around the city without anyone knowing.

IF he really has this utterly stupid graveyard-phobia, he could lean on the mortuaries. They are a reliable source of bodies. Except, see, people who end up in mortuaries have relatives. Who will want to attend the funeral and visit the grave. Who care what happens to a stiff. Who will visit the mortuary, at least once, and notice if your employees are actually members of the living dead or loony necromancer-acolytes. You'd have to pay a bunch of real sane people a lot of money to act as your public face, and they would still blab all over the place if you want to get any real amount of corpses out of the deal--and hey, masquerade over, here comes the Watch and the Angry Mob behind it. Even if you pulled that off, you've still got to produce a grave (if not a funeral); you'd have to pull some sleight-of-hand when you're burying the body, and to do that you would have to... what?

Yes, that's right, you'd have to suborn the gravedigger and the graveyard's caretaker. And if you're going to do that, why the hell would you bother with the whole risky, expensive, doomed-to-fail "mortuary-as-a-front-for-the-dark-arts" business anyway? Just stick with the graveyard!

[Tsotha-lanti]

I don't really buy the slums leaving corpses around thing - I don't think that is a particularly likely thing to happen, and certainly not something that it would be fair to assume people would think of. People do not normally sink THAT low.

Seriously. That's a great way to start a plague and destroy the whole city. It's way cheaper and a lot easier to collect and bury corpses at the city's expense ("pauper's graves" and such) than to get enough clerics to cure disease all the victims. Your typical necromancer is analoguous to the medieval physicians who robber graves for corpses to study (because it was an obscene thing to study dead bodies, and thus obtaining them legally was hard). They didn't go around slums looking for corpses.

It's irrelevant, though. No matter how it's justified and rationalized, ignoring the PCs' completely logical (or even illogical) attempts and then railroading them to your chosen one and only right option is terrible GMing. As a GM, your job is to keep things moving and fun for everyone, and sitting there going "No, that doesn't work" at everything the players try that's not your one and only right option is contrary to that. Actively bad or stupid ideas - "Let's attack the king!" - can be dealt with by having the world respond realistically, but player initiative and ideas should be used, not repelled.

It doesn't even matter if they were doing something inane. Serendipity is the essence of being a PC or a hero in a story. If they were to insist on searching bars and brothels for a necromancer, you could just drop rumors and hints that might lead them to the right place. If you really get tired of them deadending themselves, having them randomly walk into the necromancer coming out of one of those bars would still be a better option than just stonewalling and then railroading them!

All of caden_varn's points are freaking excellent, especially the subjectivity. As the writer of the background of an adventure, you can never, ever, ever tell what is obvious and what isn't, because your view is from the inside. You're a dude standing in a room, wondering why the people on the other side of the door can't guess what the paintings on the walls look like. That's why you can never have one set solution, but must instead roll with the PCs' ideas and weave them into the story.

Like Inyssius Tor points out, probably one of the best possible places to get remains is an old graveyard. I'd have a necromancer go for the charnel house. One crypt with dozens and dozens of sets of skeletal remains, possibly arranged by type of bone. You won't get zombies, but it's easy pickings. For zombies, definitely the mortuary. A patient and clever necromancer would become the mortician or gravekeeper, in fact.

Logic aside, when people think "necromancer", they think "graveyard at night". That's "story logic". If your players were sleuths and mystery buffs and enjoyed complex, multi-tiered, intricately woven webs of deception, false assumptions, twists and surprises, and endless challenges of deduction, you'd be well advised to provide such, with whole cans red herrings and countless expectations defied, but if they're just regular players, you should make use of the expectations (all the better to shatter that one in ten or twenty; if you don't establish normalcy, you can't ever break it).

[Kaun]

made a long reply to this but it screwed up when i posted it and i cant be f'ed writing it aggain.

But to sum it up ..

I apoligise that i want a smart non cliche' bbeg..

he is working with but a handfull of undead minions his main goal is to complete some research he is working on, he knows he has alot of people out to find him and as this thread has confirmed for me the first place there all bound to look is a graveyard. So in some outlandish moment of self presivation he decided not to go anywhere near them due to the fact that he is at least makeing a half arsed effort not to be found and killed.

The pc's have been feed a fair few leads to start with which my plans where to react to how ever they went about following them.

[Canadian]

What's the point of holding up the game for such a minor snag?

It would get boring pretty fast. I'd hook them with some plot or the players will get bored and decide to do something else. Then you'll have even more trouble getting them back on track. Just let them find him already. Otherwise they'll start talking about breaking into the wizards guild or something.

Keep it moving. Keep it fun. You're in charge. If they don't have fun they're going to blame you.

[Kaun]

ok i surrender more mindless hack and slash for everybody!!!!

[Canadian]

The whole point is to have fun. If they are all having fun you just need a way to make it fun for you. Then everyone is having fun. That's the ideal situation.

[Kaun]

i love killing monsters and getting loot as much as the next guy but if thats all your game is about why not just play wow or diablo or something?

I Just want there to be a bit more of a story and i want my worlds and plots to seem like more then just an old western movie town set (decent looking from the front but if you have a look inside there nothing more then a flat painted building front being held up by a couple of poles)

[Canadian]

Since you're the DM you're in charge of the sets. You can give it all the depth you want. The players are there to interact with the world you create. Keep the story light and turn it up slowly. Let the players ease into your style.

Maybe you should get some feedback from your players. Actually ask them what they want and how you're doing as DM.

[Kaun]

yeap .. will do where playing to night i shall post the responses i get.

[Yakk]

Does the necromancer deal with anyone who deals with the graveyards?

Does anyone in the graveyards know anyone who would know anything about necromancers, or where they would get supplies (not just corpses)?

The necromancer might want to hide and not deal with graveyards. But if everything went according to plan, the necromancer is unbeatable (as his plans won't include 'getting beaten'.... probably)

[kjones]

Whether searching the graveyards is a reasonable plan or not is clearly a matter of some contention. Let me weigh in on another aspect of the problem you have.

When your players start trying things that seem inane to you in order to solve some problem, don't immediately disregard it as silly. Instead, ask them why they're doing it - try to figure out what their plan is. It may be that they have a decent plan, but no idea as to how to go about implementing it. If this is the case, nudge them in the right direction - you're doing them a favor.

For example, my party recently came across some lizardmen huts in hostile territory and spent some time discussing how they could enter the huts unnoticed. I couldn't figure out why they would want to do this, since they could just kill the lizardfolk (who were hostile, after all) - turns out the party wanted to try to negotiate with them instead. After I realize that this was their goal, I started describing in more detail the comings and goings of the lizardfolk in the huts, and they managed to pull it off. (The negotiations went south very quickly, but that's another story...)

For another example, the party was trying to defend an underground arcane sanctum of sorts from an impending attack, and started asking me all sorts of questions about Transmute Rock to Mud. It seemed silly until they explained that they wanted to use it to strategically collapse portions of the ceiling, creating a barricade.

If your party seems at loose ends, ask them what their goals are, and help them achieve them. Don't give them the answer - help them find it themselves.

[Kaun]

Ok... played last night and asked my players about there thoughts on the game and how it was going. From there responses they all seem happy, on a serious note we have set a new house rule that in combat you have 20sec after it becoming your turn to declare your action or you forfit your turn. This was due to the fact that combats where takeing to long cos often players wanted a full battle recap befor each action they took and it was draging combats out way to long, It worked well and forced the players to pay much more attention as things were happening.

I also got told that they wanted the amount of magic items and gold per session found increased and also that the game was a bit of a susage fest and i needed to ad more women.

Just incase anybody was interested a couple of players decided to do some thinking on the stuff that had already been stolen and then make some guesses at what might be stolen next and then stack out the most likely target. They managed to catch the necro mid theft and a fair battle broke out in which many of his minnions were killed. The necro managed to dupe the PCs though using his strongest minion as a distraction while he grabed the item he came for and used an exodus knife to hide from the pcs.

It wasnt till later and some more research that they realised that he had used the exodus knife and now they are dead keen to hunt him down just because he made them look like fools.

A side note now that he has exahusted most of his minnions he will need to restock aggain. I guess by popular demand i shall have to include a grave yard in there some place.:smalltongue:

Ow and Kjones in general thats what i try to do. It seems the grave yard thing was a bad example mnetioned in passing which seems to have derailed the thread somewhat hehe.

[Canadian]

See. Now you just need a treasure room overflowing with gold and magic items with scantily clad halfling women and 10' poles with grease and permanence cast upon them.

Your players will say it was the best adventure ever.

Thundercats Ho!