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Name_Here
2013-10-01, 01:01 PM
So recently I've found myself with a group of PCs who want to change the focus of the plot to the place I always intended it to go. And I'm wondering how much I should allow them to change the plot and how much I should have them fight against a plot that seems all but inevitable.

So this is the plot:

Magic has disappeared except for the elves who still maintain their ability to use magic. The elves have used this military edge to invade the other races. The orcs have been enslaved, the Dwarves have been driven out of their mountain homes, Gnomes have been all but exterminated and Humans are the only race left with the power to withstand the Elves but even then the outcome of the fight is inevitable the power levels are just too lopsided.

Enter the PCs who are a special operations group for a General. The General has a plan to harness old fashioned magical ritual to wipe out every elf and half elf in existence. PCs don't like that but some go along with the plan because it's the only plan that has any hope of working others because the general has agreed to help them with their own projects in exchange for their help with this.

GM's plan: The plan is for the ritual to go off but instead of eliminating the Elves it instead gives magical powers back to the humans. The why of it isn't important the general made a mistake in the preparation, the group doing the ritual couldn't harness the power necessary. It doesn't really matter. Eliminating the Elves was never in the cards but I wanted the players to know that they made the choice to go forward with possible genocide.

The twist: The ritual is drawing close the General almost has everything necessary to complete the ritual and wipe out all the elves and the players are having second thoughts about their part in it and are desperately trying to find some way to taint the ritual so that it instead strips the elves of their magic or grants magic to the humans.

The Question: So the players and I actually want the exact same thing. But I'm not sure about the right way to go about it. But these are the ideas I've come up with

Option 1: Have the guys they paid come up with another ritual that would drain the magic and allow the general to be convinced of the wisdom of this.

Option 2: Have the guys they paid come up with a ritual that "might Concivably work" Stress that they are really unsure if it will work and force them to choose between the two.

Option 3: Have the guys come back with nothing. Force them to choose to either go through with the ritual or stop it in it's tracks possibly withholding the Paladin's and ranger's spell gaining.

Rama
2013-10-01, 01:05 PM
Option 3 needs to be avoided at all costs. It's liable to irritate players and harm the game to just tell them 'no'.

If they want to do what you're planning to do anyway, change your story to allow them the chance to taint the ritual. The story proceeds as you want anyway, and they feel more invested/less railroaded.

Rhynn
2013-10-01, 01:34 PM
So recently I've found myself with a group of PCs who want to change the focus of the plot to the place I always intended it to go.

That's your problem right there. You're not writing a short story, you're running a game; create situations, set-ups, worlds, characters, etc., not "plots." The interaction of the PCs with these elements are what create the story.

As to your specific case/example, I'm not quite getting the problem. You say you want the PCs to do what the players want them to do - so let them do it?

You shouldn't change the general's personality for no reason at all. The players get to make a choice and see its effects: they taint the ritual, things either go as they planned or go horribly wrong (that should depend on a die roll or, better yet, on specific decisions made by the PCs based on information they have gathered; the harder they work, the more complete their information), and the general is presumably furious.

Jacob.Tyr
2013-10-01, 01:34 PM
As a player I'd be pissed if this happened accidentally, the way you initially planned it to happen. Not only do they have no agency in doing what you strong-armed them to doing using the plot, but they also would have had no say in what actually wound up happening. Making a huge moral decision has an impact on my characters, and pulling a God/Abraham on them sort of defuses any drama that would be built by going through with that decision. Be glad they decided to de-railroad your plot while keeping it completely on the tracks.

I like option two, but what happens if they go through with the genocide ritual? Same thing as if they sabotage it? Or does the genocide actually happen?

I'd go with option one, and design an encounter where they actually have to go through a set of skill/combat challenges in order to sabotage the ritual in progress. Maybe some NPC they need to position near where it's happening to do a counter-ritual and get the desired effect. You can fudge the required rolls, keep the suspense, and give them a complete sense of agency in your world.

Delwugor
2013-10-01, 01:34 PM
If they want to do what you're planning to do anyway, change your story to allow them the chance to taint the ritual. The story proceeds as you want anyway, and they feel more invested/less railroaded.
Absolutely correct.

Name_Here
2013-10-01, 01:52 PM
As a player I'd be pissed if this happened accidentally, the way you initially planned it to happen. Not only do they have no agency in doing what you strong-armed them to doing using the plot, but they also would have had no say in what actually wound up happening. Making a huge moral decision has an impact on my characters, and pulling a God/Abraham on them sort of defuses any drama that would be built by going through with that decision. Be glad they decided to de-railroad your plot while keeping it completely on the tracks.

Well I didn't see it so much as pulling a god/Abraham as the fact that the general is trying to recreate a ritual he saw the elves doing 16 years before with less resources and very little knowledge of the "science" going on him being a rogue. It's a hail Mary and I've never painted it as anything but.


I like option two, but what happens if they go through with the genocide ritual? Same thing as if they sabotage it? Or does the genocide actually happen?

As I said killing the elves isn't really an option. But your point is one of the reasons why I put the option forward. A couple of the players are up in the air about where they might land when the time comes for the ritual. So it might be entirely possible for the group to fracture and one guy foul the ritual and the other "fixes" it.

Which of course might lay the entire shadow play bare.


I'd go with option one, and design an encounter where they actually have to go through a set of skill/combat challenges in order to sabotage the ritual in progress. Maybe some NPC they need to position near where it's happening to do a counter-ritual and get the desired effect. You can fudge the required rolls, keep the suspense, and give them a complete sense of agency in your world.

Definitely is the most conservative way to play it. Which is always good when dealing with players.

Mastikator
2013-10-01, 01:52 PM
If you really want to punish them for not following your plot then let them stop the ritual if that is what they want. The elves then swoop in and massacre everyone involved (even remotely). They then witness the elves go from town and massacre other races with cold brutality while letting the PCs live for stopping the ritual.
*Eventually* they'll discover they were in the wrong to question the ritual, then let them restart it.

Or just let the PCs decide whatever outcome you want, if you want a collaborative storytelling game then you should be upfront to the players about that. Collaborative storytelling is great, but it's not quite the same as roleplaying.

Name_Here
2013-10-01, 02:08 PM
If you really want to punish them for not following your plot then let them stop the ritual if that is what they want. The elves then swoop in and massacre everyone involved (even remotely). They then witness the elves go from town and massacre other races with cold brutality while letting the PCs live for stopping the ritual.
*Eventually* they'll discover they were in the wrong to question the ritual, then let them restart it.

Or just let the PCs decide whatever outcome you want, if you want a collaborative storytelling game then you should be upfront to the players about that. Collaborative storytelling is great, but it's not quite the same as roleplaying.

I'm not really looking to punish them I'm actually super happy that they've landed on the "right path"

It's just that them searching for another way to do it is making me rework the flow of the story and makes me wonder how best to include that in the story.

I wanted it to be a hard choice for them to choose whether to go through with the ritual or risk the possibility of their entire race being wiped out but maintain the high ground. Giving them another ritual that is designed fully to not wipe out the elves takes away quite a bit of the difficulty in that decision. But steamrolling them and saying that no that money you spent on sages was worthless and your mother dresses you funny seemed very mean and making tainting the ritual to not kill the elves seemed extremely risky because what if they choose that it's too risky and don't taint the ritual?

Rama
2013-10-01, 02:20 PM
making tainting the ritual to not kill the elves seemed extremely risky because what if they choose that it's too risky and don't taint the ritual?

It is a risk, and yes you do need a fail-condition. But it shouldn't be the same as they intend; that ruins the mood of the story and just makes it feel like a railroad.

I'd suggest that you offer them the chance/quests/etc to taint the ritual. Then have three conditions:

1) Complete success by players. Magic returned to humans

2) Partial success by players. Maybe certain aspects of magic are returned (spontaneous casters only as an example), but at a cost (which could become another plot hook - maybe the ritual mutates into something else, a horrible plague that kills humans and elves alike. Or a tear in the fabric of space-time that allows a demon entry into the world. Something like that)

3) Complete failure by players or refusal to taint ritual. It goes off as planned, but I wouldn't personally go for total genocide being the final result, even if that is the intent. I'd have the default be something like... all elves within 50 miles of the ritual site die horribly, all elves 50 miles beyond that are tainted/twisted.

Frozen_Feet
2013-10-01, 03:07 PM
Make it so there's a chance of failure. Somewhat counter-intuitively, you'll have to introduce a factor that causes the ritual to fail if the players succeed in their plan (tainting the ritual), while the players failing their plan leads to the outcome they desire.

Your players' jaws will drop (and they might be a bit angry) when this screwball is revealed to them. But it's the most logical route to go. This is the sort of thing that happens when all in-game parties are working with incomplete information and unknown unknowns.

TheStranger
2013-10-01, 03:22 PM
It is a risk, and yes you do need a fail-condition. But it shouldn't be the same as they intend; that ruins the mood of the story and just makes it feel like a railroad.

I'd suggest that you offer them the chance/quests/etc to taint the ritual. Then have three conditions:

1) Complete success by players. Magic returned to humans

2) Partial success by players. Maybe certain aspects of magic are returned (spontaneous casters only as an example), but at a cost (which could become another plot hook - maybe the ritual mutates into something else, a horrible plague that kills humans and elves alike. Or a tear in the fabric of space-time that allows a demon entry into the world. Something like that)

3) Complete failure by players or refusal to taint ritual. It goes off as planned, but I wouldn't personally go for total genocide being the final result, even if that is the intent. I'd have the default be something like... all elves within 50 miles of the ritual site die horribly, all elves 50 miles beyond that are tainted/twisted.

I would do this, and I suggest turning elves into really pissed-off drow as the failure condition.

You really want to give your players agency. Rewrite your plot accordingly, and burn all your notes that say something different.

The Oni
2013-10-01, 03:40 PM
How about this as a failure condition: the spell kills all elves and half-elves.

As a caveat, all the pure Elves come back as mindless but powerful undead. Complicating matters, all the half-elves only half-die and come back as free-willed undead, who can sort-of command the zombie elves.

Suddenly things get very, very confusing due to the half-Elves' various allegiances.

Blackjackg
2013-10-01, 04:10 PM
If you ask me, Name_Here, you're in an enviable position as a DM. Your players have taken control of your railroad campaign and started driving it exactly where you want it to go. Let them do their thing, and then have the spell go as you always intended it to. They're going to feel like they made it happen, and their fun will be maxed.

There really is no failure condition necessary-- if your players genuinely think that they're solving the puzzle and beating the odds, it doesn't matter at all that they actually had no chance of failing. It's supposed to be about fun. Sometimes fun is better served by surprise plot twists, and sometimes it's better served by actually letting the heroes win the day.

veti
2013-10-01, 06:14 PM
There really is no failure condition necessary-- if your players genuinely think that they're solving the puzzle and beating the odds, it doesn't matter at all that they actually had no chance of failing. It's supposed to be about fun. Sometimes fun is better served by surprise plot twists, and sometimes it's better served by actually letting the heroes win the day.

I thnk you need something that looks/feels like a failure condition. If the players "succeed", then the ritual works the way they were expecting/hoping it to. If they fail, then it still misfires, but it misfires in a different way. Perhaps it rips a hole in reality and sucks the PCs through (to a world where magic works 'normally'), so they have a whole quest to get home (I assume there's something they'd want to go home for?) and they won't even know, until they get back, what effect it had in their own world.

If you're up for radically changing your setting (maybe fun), consider what happened to the Dwemer in the Elder Scrolls universe. Short version: they just vanished, all at once, leaving behind no obvious explanation, so that now there are half a dozen different theories about what became of them, but no definitive evidence. (Could be they were unmade, snarl-like; could be they accidentally transformed themselves into their own secret weapon; could be they were transported to another dimension, where they're still living and active. No-one really knows. But clues, pointing one way or another, could form the basis of entire campaigns in future.)

genmoose
2013-10-02, 07:13 PM
I recently saw two articles on Extra Credits that might be relevant. It's written towards video game developers but there's a lot of similarities to your situation:

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/how-much-agency-do-games-need
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-illusion-of-choice

In a nutshell there are techniques to give people the feeling of choice without actually giving them infinite freedom.

Mr Beer
2013-10-02, 07:26 PM
If they want to do what you're planning to do anyway, change your story to allow them the chance to taint the ritual. The story proceeds as you want anyway, and they feel more invested/less railroaded.

This, it's a total no-brainer. They did exactly what you wanted but also achieved it on their own merits. This is what the best games are made of, why are you fighting this?

icefractal
2013-10-03, 04:27 AM
I think the only stumbling block is the case (unlikely, but possible), that the players succeed in their research, discover the change that would make the ritual restore magic to humans instead, but then don't or can't execute it. Having the exact same thing happen would seem pretty weird and semi-railroady, even though it's technically what was always planned.

So - you need a different result for "the ritual happens in its original form". If you don't want something like the Elves all dying, maybe a partial form - like the curse stays hovering around, and now casting a spell is dangerous (for Elves at least, maybe for anyone). Or it turns them into Drow, and they're forced underground but plot revenge.

Which is not to say that you should prevent them from finding or using the modified ritual they seek. That outcome is still the best. Just something to have in your back pocket in case it fails.


Edit: If you still want a bit of a dilemma, the modification to the ritual could be reversing it - channeling extra life to humans, instead of removing it from elves. Ideally, this gives magic and/or other benefit to humans. But it's never been done, and the worst case scenario is that some (maybe even most) humans explode from an overload of life energy. IMO, I'd have it definitely work if they pick it - not a random roll. But they don't know that.

Which gives them a third option, actually - channel the energy to dwarves instead. If it works, try to ally with the magic-having dwarves against the elves (don't mention there was a chance of the ritual killing them). If it fails - at least it wasn't your own people.

Tengu_temp
2013-10-03, 05:30 AM
What Rama said is absolutely correct, so instead I will focus on something else:


That's your problem right there. You're not writing a short story, you're running a game; create situations, set-ups, worlds, characters, etc., not "plots." The interaction of the PCs with these elements are what create the story.

I disagree with this. If you want a truly interesting story-driven campaign, not just a series of random, loosely connected adventures, you write a plot for it. This plot is what happens if the PCs always act the way you expect them to do. But if they do something unexpected, if they derail the plot? Let them. The plot is not set in stone. It's just what you assume will happen by default.

Rhynn
2013-10-03, 05:38 AM
I disagree with this. If you want a truly interesting story-driven campaign, not just a series of random, loosely connected adventures, you write a plot for it. This plot is what happens if the PCs always act the way you expect them to do. But if they do something unexpected, if they derail the plot? Let them. The plot is not set in stone. It's just what you assume will happen by default.

That inevitably (not every time, but eventually) leads to problems where the players "act wrong," because you can't ever reasonably predict their actions in n situations each with x possible choices, with both n and x being unreasonably high numbers you can't really even guess at.

If you want a story-driven campaign, you should write out what happens if the PCs don't act at all, and a cast of NPCs you know well. Then you unleash the PCs into the environment, and start adjusting the world and changing the NPCs' actions according to what the PCs do.

This difference is important, because a great number of GM problems stem from planning things out on the level of "then the PCs do X/think Y," which inevitably goes wrong and causes a problem that derails the rest of the game. This leads many GMs into railroading, which is, indeed, a very fundamental sin in a medium defined by the players' ability to shape the story.

Lorsa
2013-10-03, 07:05 AM
Basically Rhynn has said everything I would want to say so I'll just add:

Players that can affect and influence the game and with their decisions shape the large scale outcome of events are happy players.

Tengu_temp
2013-10-03, 07:59 AM
What you describe as problems I describe as mandatory elements of this DMing style. Players going against your plot are not "wrong" or "derailing the game". They're doing what they're expected to do as players. Adjust the plot to accomodate the differences in actions they took, and move on. Sometimes that means scrapping it entirely and writing a completely new one - but that's the risk of running a story-driven game. What you're never supposed to do, on the other hand, is push the players towards the railroad you planned for them. You can gently nudge them towards it, but if they want to stay off the rails, they stay off the rails.

valadil
2013-10-03, 08:12 AM
Let the game go where the players take it. If they dismiss or half ass a world changing event, you have to follow through with it. Make the players' choice matter. Giving them a safety net so your plot can go in only serves to invalidate the choice they made.

I ran a two year long campaign before my son was born. A few months after the game I was at a BBQ with the players and some other friends. They were telling war stories. I backed off because I wanted to hear what they took away from the game.

Without fail, all their stories were times they went off rails and took the game in a direction they chose. At first I was pissed. My carefully crafted plots weren't worth sharing, but that poorly improvised season was? Then I stopped being a pessimist and congratulated myself for giving the characters motivation to go off rails and supporting those decisions in game.

The point is, you have to honor the choices the players make. It may tell a story that isn't quite as optimal as the one you scripted, but it will be their story and that's more important.

Alabenson
2013-10-03, 10:12 AM
Alright, let me see if I understand this correctly;
Your plan was for the ritual to do X, while the players thought it was going to do Y.

The players want to secretly alter the ritual to do X instead of Y.

Why don't you just let them accomplish what they want to, since it would effectively move the story in the direction you were planning anyway, and would also give the players a much better sense of agency in the process?

The Grue
2013-10-03, 12:48 PM
I'm sorry if I come off as rude, but why is this even a question? Typically, when people play a (pen and paper) RPG, they expect their actions to have a measure of impact on the story and the larger game setting. Axing player agency is not a thing you do as a GM, EVER.

The question of "Player Agency vs Plot" is best answered with "Are you running an RPG or writing a book?"

Ravens_cry
2013-10-03, 04:11 PM
The best railroads are obscured because they are things the PC would naturally want to do. It's when the tracks lead to a place the PC would not go or do that things become an issue.

kyoryu
2013-10-03, 07:57 PM
I like to think of the players and the NPCs as taking turns. The players take a turn and try to accomplish something, then the NPCs get a chance to do the same, which may or may not be visible to the PCs.