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Trickquestion
2014-11-08, 02:45 AM
Do you ever present your players with story-influencing choices, moral or otherwise? If you have, did they respond how you expected them to, and did it mess with your plans much?

BWR
2014-11-08, 06:34 AM
All the time. Some games rely more heavily on player direction than others. My on-hiatus Mystara game has some player input but for the most part I've been running old modules and adventures, so they are rather railroady. My current Laundry Files game is pretty railroady too (in the sense that if the PCs fail to uncover and stop what I've planned Bad Things WIll Happen, not that I force them into any particular course of action). My players are pretty cool with the genre of the games and don't subvert expectations much, but should they choose to, I will take their choices into account.

My gf and I play a fair amount of 1 on 1 with powerful characters who really are on the top tier of political power (and sometimes martial or magical power) in the region, and the player's/characters' decisions have real consequences in the game and story. Whichever of us is the GM will create stiuations and whatever the PC chooses to do will bring the appropriate consequences. Sometimes there are obviuous goals, such as murder mysteries or conspiracies, other times the goals and consequences are unknown ("which of these following worthies will the PC Emperor choose as chancellor?")

Nagash
2014-11-08, 07:55 AM
Do you ever present your players with story-influencing choices, moral or otherwise? If you have, did they respond how you expected them to, and did it mess with your plans much?

I run very heavy sandbox games so yes NPC's and just the local news often present options for the players many of which wind up being moral choices, IE if they are just looking around a town for paying work both bad guys and good guys will offer contracts and its up to the PC's to investigate those jobs and the people offering them and decide whether to do the job or not. Either choice will have consequences for the campaign going forward.

Oh and they often surprise me. My current crop of players seem to like to tread a very grey moral ground so its hard to guess what they will do with any given hook. Which i actually love. Making it up on the spot to deal with their craziness helps me as a GM feel much more like a player then a referee because I get to adapt to situations and help to create an ongoing story just as much as they do,

Calen
2014-11-08, 07:58 AM
In short, Yes and Yes. I have had to quickly rewrite certain events or change plans to accommodate the whims of my players. The latest one involved a player choosing to sacrifice himself for an elemental demi-plane.

Kid Jake
2014-11-08, 10:21 AM
One of the more amusing examples that's happened to me, although it's not really a choice, per se. In an ongoing Pathfinder game I've been running one of my players came back to life as a ghoul to avenge his own murder at the hands of bandits (which was pretty hilarious in itself) and was trying to track them down in some backwoods trading post. He got a little pushy, the guards were called in and, panicking, he used the only weapon he could think of (his own being stolen by the aforementioned bandits.) He bit them. He bit them so bad that they called in reinforcements and then he bit THOSE people and ran. Some good samaritans tried to stop him before he got away, so he bit them too.

Now it should be pointed out that he didn't realize he was contagious, he just saw that he had a bite attack listed on his sheet all of a sudden and decided to make good use of it on everything he saw.

Flash forward a couple of weeks in-game and while him and his partner are giving a rousing speech on the docks of a neighboring village (which they scammed/murdered their way into becoming sheriff and mayor of respectively) about how they've re-opened trade from upriver; they see dozens of boats fleeing towards them. The people inside are telling horror stories of their neighbors trying to eat them and this guy realizes he inadvertently started a zombie apocalypse.

So now the campaign has shifted from a base-building game where they were accumulating power and prestige to overthrow a local duke that wants them dead to to a tense survival scenario where they're just trying to keep everything they've worked for from slipping through their fingers.

FearlessGnome
2014-11-08, 11:25 AM
There are choices, and then there are unintended consequences. My campaign right now has three factions: LN alliance of cities that want to be left alone, LE empire bent on world domination, and Mysterous Undead Threat. The third faction seems to be infesting people with some sort of evil parasite, though it does not appear to be influencing the victims' minds. My players have decided that the Mysterious Threat is the real enemy, and they make use of both other factions when they can. Thing is, they don't expect people in power to act on information they get. So when they demanded resources from the Evil Empire and told them about the infection, they did not foresee that the empire would try to wipe out infectees rather than wait for the PCs to find a cure. Their choice, but not necessarily deliberate or thought through.

The choices they actively make seem to mostly concern who should die and which NPCs should be put in charge in places where they have executed the previous leadership.

Milodiah
2014-11-08, 11:35 AM
I present my players with so many different decisions that I don't even realize all of them. You kind of have to as a GM without just saying
"You see bad guy in the middle of your party. Bad guy is attacking you and will not yield no matter what you say. You need to kill bad guy now. Oh, you want to choose your means of attack, do you? Did I mention you're fighting inside a greater anti-magic field against an enemy immune to crits and sneak attacks in a cross-shaped room just big enough for there to be one grid-square apiece for each of you, bordering the bad guy in the center square?"

Even at that point, you'd probably have to start stripping the PCs naked so they didn't try to sequence-break with a rope made out of the party's supply of trousers. If you tried to run a game with no player choice, that's literally telling them a story, and they'll start chafing hard against the reins by doing the off-the-wall stuff talked about in all the 'bad DM' threads.

I'll say that I give my players more choice than most DMs, though. Instead of forcefully hinting that the tavern gossip they're following up on was just set-dressing, had nothing to do with the plot, and will lead them to an area I haven't designed yet, I'll roll with it. This philosophy has, among other things, wound up giving an unhatched green dragon egg to the half-dragon warmage, because he wanted one. Plot be damned, if all the players at the table agree to the psychotic and poorly thought out tangent adventure, then the DM should provide it!


Edit:

See sig. Remembered it's half-relevant.

BeerMug Paladin
2014-11-08, 12:43 PM
I do sometimes give choices to the players. Usually they go the neutral route. Once a town was going to explode because of a fire cult, so the party left ASAP. I'm not even sure I remember them trying to warn other people about the town's imminent destruction, but they probably at least gave a token effort to it.

Another time a player got buried in rubble caused by the collapse of a partly built castle wall. Next session, I put the enemy soldier in there whom the player was fighting when the wall collapsed, alive but unconscious, just to see what the player would do (if they saved them, they would have gotten an alignment shift to good). The soldier was immediately forgotten once the player was out.

I ran a campaign once where the person they were working for was a low level noble who had the party gather up the pieces of an artifact that would grant great necromantic powers to the user. The noble's ultimate goal was stated to be reforming the kingdom, and how that was to be done was kept secret until the end. At which point, the party was to take part in one final quest after the artifact was collected.

Go kill the royal family, and every noble (and any children) who might oppose their benefactor's claim to the throne or have a more legitimate claim. They were to slay them whilst commanding teams of undead. And some collateral damage of civilians and guards caught in the crossfire would be slain by undead turned loose, no witnesses that could possibly counter the official story would be left alive. The whole thing would be blamed on one of the dead nobles.

I didn't know what the party would choose when they found out that was how the noble would take the throne in order to accomplish their goals. So I prepared for either outcome. I was actually kind of surprised they went along with it, but then I also made the person they were working for talk about the matter as an unfortunate, necessary evil needed to accomplish the greater good. They were an anti-villain, essentially.

And after that night, of course, anyone who knew about the plan was either killed, or made a noble (and expected to work as a special forces agent to keep the whole chain of events under wraps if it was ever discovered). I thought it was a pretty good ending for the campaign.

Frozen_Feet
2014-11-08, 01:43 PM
Do you ever present your players with story-influencing choices, moral or otherwise?

All the time. It's part of the point of the hobby for me.


Did they respond how you expected them to?

Sometimes, sometimes not. Unexpected responses are often greater fun to me than the expected ones.


Did it mess with your plans much?

I don't "plan" in the same sense as many other GMs. I generally have a really big area prepared that far exceeds the distance the player characters can traverse during one session, and they are free to go into any direction or do anything within their ability. I usually get in a game to see what my players will do, not to do something I already decided would happen.

Mastikator
2014-11-08, 02:13 PM
Do you ever present your players with story-influencing choices, moral or otherwise? If you have, did they respond how you expected them to, and did it mess with your plans much?

Yes I do.
No they did not.
Yes they messed it up completely every time.

The trick is to pull a mass effect 3 on them. If choice A leads to X and B leads to Y, and you want X, then make Y lead to X.

They don't know what's behind the curtain, they don't know that you just flipped the world upside down, for all they know Y was always meant to lead to X and A would've lead to Z not X.

It requires a lot of improv to pull it off, you'll have to make stuff up on the fly to make the necessary bridges between points so it's good to have scenario- & NPC generators at hand. (like a list of names and attributes, and list of pre-gen places with placeholder objects/obstacles in them)

CarpeGuitarrem
2014-11-08, 06:51 PM
My sessions are a constant wheel of controlled chaos. :smallbiggrin:

I never know how a session is going to wind up! Plans? Well, I certainly make plans regarding what shows up in the session, but as for what happens after that? It's anybody's guess.



The trick is to pull a mass effect 3 on them. If choice A leads to X and B leads to Y, and you want X, then make Y lead to X.

They don't know what's behind the curtain, they don't know that you just flipped the world upside down, for all they know Y was always meant to lead to X and A would've lead to Z not X.


To be frank, I never do anything like this, because it robs the players of their choice. They're just following the things that you want to see happen. I espouse a policy of honesty towards my players' actions and the consequences therein. I don't have a specific story or sequence of events that I want to see happen.

Thrudd
2014-11-08, 07:13 PM
Do you ever present your players with story-influencing choices, moral or otherwise? If you have, did they respond how you expected them to, and did it mess with your plans much?

Shouldn't pretty much every player choice be influencing the story? And it's best not to plan on players making any specific choice. Whatever choices they make, that's where the story goes.

Kelb_Panthera
2014-11-08, 09:23 PM
Do you ever present your players with story-influencing choices, moral or otherwise? If you have, did they respond how you expected them to, and did it mess with your plans much?

Do I? Check out the link in my sig on building a homebrew setting. My players are, at their discretion, a major driving force in the campaigns I run. Stuff happens whether they attempt to influence it or not. If they do, different stuff happens.

valadil
2014-11-08, 09:54 PM
Yes. That's the whole point of the game as far as I'm concerned. Usually I can predict where the players will end up, but I'm happier when they can surprise me.

Mastikator
2014-11-08, 10:55 PM
To be frank, I never do anything like this, because it robs the players of their choice. They're just following the things that you want to see happen. I espouse a policy of honesty towards my players' actions and the consequences therein. I don't have a specific story or sequence of events that I want to see happen.
If you're making a sandbox-y campaign where the players can do whatever they want and live with the consequences then it's not really the kind of scenario relevant to the OP's question. If you have a story you want the players to interact with and they're straying far off course then you can rob them of their choices without robbing them of their feeling of agency. You're the DM, you choose what their consequences are anyway, and as long as it seems plausible and fair they will buy it.

It's a matter of priorities, and I do personally agree with your approach generally, but if your priority is to have a predefined story play out and you want their choices to influence the story then you need to shift the story back under their feet when they inevitably fly off the rails, otherwise you're playing a different game from before-

Aidan305
2014-11-09, 12:57 PM
I've a good group of players so I can often get a very good amount of mileage out of a proper moral quandry.

Case in point: A recent western game I was running had the party encounter an assassin. They knew he was an assassin. He was perfectly up front with them about it. They knew that one of his targets was a person who they were travelling with. But his schtick was that he was, legally speaking, not a murderer as he only ever shot people in self defense. Prior to that he would spend time among his targets, intimidating them and breaking down their will to the point where they would feel that they had no choice but to try and kill him. The party knew this, but were (reasonably) moral people and so they stood aside and could do nothing but watch. Finally, one of the people they were with cracked and drew on the assassin in front of the party. The assassin shot him dead. And the party knew they couldn't do anything because the assassin had the law on his side.

Eventually, they decided they had to kill him. They set him up with a situation that he had to deal with due to his reputation, laid a trap, and killed him. And they knew that what they had done was murder a man in cold blood. Yes, he was a terrible person, a verifiable monster, but they had still committed murder. It remarkably fun to GM, and for my players as well.

I love my players.

Haldir
2014-11-09, 03:40 PM
My players are currently raiding a Fort City. In the 12 hours they've been on the shore they've
1. Cleared the Harbormaster's Tower and retrieved important enemy intel,
2. burned a major portion of the bazaar,
3. looted the brewery, nearly murdered a master alchemist, swindled samples from his personal lab,
4. killed several minor nobles and dozens of guards and policemen to take the cities northernmost fortification
5. Stole the Harbor Lords war vessel, using the Harbor Lords own slaves.
6. Using their first stolen vessel to steal another vessel with the express intention of crashing it into the Admirals flagship.
7. Thus, sinking the most powerful vessel in this phase of the campaign.

At each junction of adventure, I presented them with a detailed map of the target area. They were given an alchemical flare and complete freedom to choose their target. The flare would signal that their goal was accomplished, and that they were ready for extraction, resupply, or reinforcements. An NPC suggested the Harbormaster's Tower as a high value initial target, but also conceded to another plan of attacking the Island Fortifications that shielded and created the Harbor. The intel mission was deemed more appropriate by the players. The entire course of the story from that point has been directed by the players, not by me at all, other than to provide the social context of "you believe that it is your right to take this city, and the more you have taken before you use the flare will mean a greater share of the rewards."

Is it morally ambiguous? You bet your sweet rump it is, but what war isn't? What tabletop RPG isn't inherently morally ambiguous for the same reasons? I have gotten into discussions with my players over having used good-aligned bonus damage against them, and it looks like that will be a tool in my DM Kit for the foreseeable future as well.

Is all this kookiness going to have consequences later on? Well, I should very much hope so! Player Agency is what makes the game fun for the DM, because in a few hours the whole damn fleet going after the Lord of the Straits and his Big Ass Fort, and it's going to be wild. :smallbiggrin:

Bloody Peasant!
2014-11-09, 04:08 PM
I try to give my players a way to drive the plot by giving them the opportunities to make important decisions. For example, in my current campaign there are three primary political factions (or at least they could loosely be described as such) in the world.

-A vast imperial theocracy that has a vendetta against/regularly executes magic users and heathens and a vaguely human-centric tinge, but at the same time is generally beneficent to the common people and has overthrown monarchist/magocratic rule in favor of more direct and democratic self-rule.

-An alliance of Orcish tribes, Goblinoid petty kingdoms and Dwarven houses in open rebellion against the church and with a fairly evident anti-human tinge, as well as a semi-secret pact with an anonymous archfiend.

-An elven kingdom (well, an assortment of clans under the semi-formal rule of a noble clan) desperately attempting to remain neutral and autonomous, but with pretty significant internal conflict and questionable morals of its own (prejudice against the human and half-elven minority, fairly authoritarian and repressive of the peasantry).

Two of the players belonged to the nobility of their respective clans and through certain circumstances ended up becoming chiefs. The church threatened war with the elves when two elven clans joined in with the alliance and the elven leadership refused to persecute them. After a hell of a lot of bureaucracy the players ended up convincing the other clans (aside from one predominantly half-elven clan who seceded in spite) to join the orcish/dwarven/hobgoblin alliance in order to defend their territory rather than attempting to make amends with the church. Needless to say this has had some significant consequences on the plot.

Jay R
2014-11-09, 07:25 PM
Do you ever present your players with story-influencing choices, moral or otherwise?

All the time. Unless their choices can affect the story, they aren't playing a game; they are watching a movie.


If you have, did they respond how you expected them to, and did it mess with your plans much?

By definition, if I intended them to affect the story, then doing so didn't mess with my plans. That was my plan.

Remmirath
2014-11-09, 10:58 PM
Do you ever present your players with story-influencing choices, moral or otherwise?

All the time. Some choices are more minor than others, of course, but not a session goes by where they don't have some choices -- including all of those ones that I never even would have thought of as choices, but are nonetheless. They can do anything they want, or at least try to. That's part of the point, as far as I'm concerned.


If you have, did they respond how you expected them to, and did it mess with your plans much?

It doesn't always go as I expect, but that's fine. In fact, that is even what I expect. I tend to plan things in segments with a major choice lying at the end of the segment, so I can plan the next one depending on what they did at the end of the last one. More minor choices get worked in as well, just in other ways.