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View Full Version : The players solved your problem and the adventure ends way too soon



nrg89
2016-08-23, 03:16 PM
So, you had a whole session planned out. The players had to go through all these encounters to reach a goal and there, you surprise them with a twist; a twist to make sure there's a second session to intrigue your players!

You start to play, your players are having a good time and they ... what? They do that? But, that bypasses all the encounters you laid out for them, the adventure is over. You didn't even get to show off your shiny new villain!

What do you do?

I'm of the opinion that a DM's job is to make the players happy. That feeling of "oh ****" when they see a particularly scary threat, the laughs of joy and high fives when they beat it, the fact that they argue from the world's logic thereby treating the world as it was real ... that's my reward, first and foremost. That we get to show off our creativity is just an added bonus but by and large, where there to make sure it's fun.
I've played with DMs who asks for too much suspension of disbelief (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?363545-What-was-your-worst-DM-ever-This-thread-is-impervious-roll-to-disbelieve!&p=18684491#post18684491) to make the adventure go exactly the way they want it to and it never fails to piss me off. My agency has just been taken from me, I'm only allowed to do stuff the DM wants me to do and nothing else, even if it is totally in line with the way I described my character.

When something like that happens, I try to wing it but make it half obvious out of character that "haha, you got me, I'll see if I can turn this into something else" and see if I can salvage at least one of my encounters. But it's never as fun for me as when the adventure just works and everyone's happy, because in the end, I could be happier.

What do you usually do? How do you make sure everyone around the table still has fun, including you?

Kid Jake
2016-08-23, 04:38 PM
Step One is simple, I call a bathroom break. It gives me time to regroup, I do my best thinking on the can and we usually gorge ourselves on something one of us made before/during the session anyway so it's not suspicious. Step Two, I try to think of a way to tie their shenanigans to an encounter I've got prepped further down the road or just a little something that I've tossed around just because the idea sounded cool and never actually intended to run.

If Step Two is a success, then we resume the game; I act as though everything is going exactly to plan and file away the large swathes of adventure that they bypassed for potential later use and we continue playing with a very loose plot and me pulling ideas out of my ass the rest of the session; at the end of which they marvel at how detailed my plans are (spoiler: usually not very). If Step Two is a failure, then we resume the game; I act as though everything is going exactly to plan and ask how they intend to capitalize on their sweeping success; I then spend the rest of the session reacting to the ideas they pull out of their asses (also acting as though all of this was part of THEIR plan the entire time) and they walk away (rightly) feeling like they have real control over the story.

Of course if they've completely stumped you and they themselves don't have an idea of where they want to go, it's always fine to just shrug and go play Tekken. I've had to do it a time or two myself and it's always preferable to end a game on a high note and then go hang out with friends than to just keep running in circles for the hell of it.

Darth Ultron
2016-08-23, 06:06 PM
What do you usually do? How do you make sure everyone around the table still has fun, including you?

I just keep the game running. Sure they did ''x'', but they still have ''y'' to do, so there is still plenty of adventure left.

It would never really happen, my adventures are not so easy, but if it did it would just be like ''you might have killed villain A, but he had a partner/brother/whatever''.

And if somehow it was really a very simple adventure A, well we would just start ''adventure B''.

Pugwampy
2016-08-23, 06:42 PM
You didn't even get to show off your shiny new villain!

You can easily rehash him into a random encounter or some such .

Its the same theory when you have a nice dungeon prepared but players run into the bushes in the opposite direction . The dungeon just "happens" to be there now .

Mastikator
2016-08-23, 07:09 PM
I've had this actually happen a few years ago, sort of. It wasn't an end-of-the-world thing and was local to where they were. I gave them a hundred plot hooks and even pulled one of the players aside and all but told them "follow this road for adventure".
They dipped their toes into the adventure and then left the country without resolving anything.

I later told them that there was a huge epic adventure planned out for them and now there was nothing left because they had left.

And yes I am still a bit salty about it. I spent several hours crafting a dynamic and interesting adventure for them and they left.

AMFV
2016-08-23, 08:20 PM
So, you had a whole session planned out. The players had to go through all these encounters to reach a goal and there, you surprise them with a twist; a twist to make sure there's a second session to intrigue your players!

You start to play, your players are having a good time and they ... what? They do that? But, that bypasses all the encounters you laid out for them, the adventure is over. You didn't even get to show off your shiny new villain!

What do you do?


Well it depends, the key thing is to figure out why they bypassed all of the encounters? Were they being clever and trying to avoid things that might harm their characters or were they being bored and trying to get things over with as quickly as possible? Or are were they lucky or brighter than you?

The answer to that tells me what I should do:

In the first case, then you know that they believe that your shiny new villain and whatever he/she/it represents is a believable threat. Whatever was about to happen, the artifact that was potentially going to be stolen, the mayor or princess who was due an assassination. They believed that the threat was credible enough to devote serious brainpower to it. Which means... you're still in play! Now I wouldn't magically reverse what the players did, since that cheapens innovation, but now they've caught the attention of your shiny new villain, all the monsters in the encounters are still unaccounted for, and it's probably a good time to drop some cryptic clues. Even if you were only originally intending the villain to be a temporary threat, you've now got license to turn them into a more serious threat since your players are concerned enough to do serious thinking about it.

In the second case, if the players solved it through some kind of bored indifference. I would pay attention to what they are actually talking about. What they are concerned about happening in the world? What are they trying to accomplish? Make the whatever your original plan was into a side-quest, rather than the main event and refocus the main event on whatever the players are giving time and attention to.

In the last case. This is probably the hardest to deal with. You have a couple options: A.) Wing it, as you said. B.) Call a mulligan, let the players know that they've outsmarted you, that'll make them feel good, and as long as it's not on the regular they'll probably be okay with it. "Hey guys, I didn't expect you to do blank, that's a really good solution, I don't have anything else planned, do you want to play Catan or run a one-shot, or have some random encounters that might lead to more stuff?" Here as with the second, you can ask them what they want, let them guide the plot a little bit. Maybe they have some side-quests they're interested in, does the fighter type need a weapons upgrade... does the rogue/face/what-have-you want to make some underworld contacts? This is a perfect time to work in some not so large scale things.

Thrudd
2016-08-23, 09:40 PM
Just keep on going, improvise, roll on some tables. Don't let them see you sweat, absolutely don't tell them or even hint that things have gone "off track" or that you're out of material or that you are now improvising. They don't need to know this and it will only break immersion to refer to any such thing while the game is in session. It won't improve their experience at all. If you absolutely must talk about it, wait until the adventure or this part of the campaign is over with before you tell them how different things went compared to what you had planned in the beginning.

The lesson that should be taken from this is that certain types of plans/plots rarely work and are usually inappropriate for rpgs. More often than not you end up abandoning them for improvisation anyway.

Jay R
2016-08-23, 11:08 PM
Just because they completed the "quest" doesn't make all those threats go away.

So there are all kinds of monsters and tribes and villains out there that suddenly lost their ruler, and have no source of income?

There will be raids all over - there's plenty of work for the party.

Tohron
2016-08-23, 11:20 PM
Darths and Droids has a lot of good examples of the DM reacting to oddball decisions by the players.

There are several good examples in the sequence starting here (http://darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0051.html).

Lorsa
2016-08-24, 09:15 AM
What do you usually do? How do you make sure everyone around the table still has fun, including you?

I will give a very simple answer to a very complicated question.

I make a new adventure.

My worlds are generally full of adventures, if one fails a new one will take over. A simple answer, yet perhaps not helpful to you.

shadow_archmagi
2016-08-24, 09:23 AM
Personally, this sort of behavior is why I stopped treating prepwork like Harry Potter (and in Chapter Three, they'll visit the fire temple, where Gjarl betrays them....) and started just writing scenarios. "So there's three lords who want the Eye of Thoth, and one's really rich and friendly, one is a ruthless great general, and one is an evil cultist..."

Focus on prepwork that gives you a good enough sense of the world that you can figure out how the situation responds to any input. If I'd been thinking about having my shiny new villain show up this adventure, he'll show up the next, it's fine.

Yora
2016-08-24, 09:37 AM
The adventure ends when the adventure ends. There is no too soon.

OldTrees1
2016-08-24, 10:28 AM
The adventure ends when the adventure ends. There is no too soon.

This^ (both meanings)

If the PCs manage to solve all the problems their opposition represents then they succeeded and interacted (perhaps indirectly) with most of your adventure's core material. This is merely a desired result arriving earlier. So you move on to the next adventure.

If the PCs only "solved" the problem but left 90% of the problem as loose ends, then those loose ends are the rest of the adventure.

hymer
2016-08-24, 10:51 AM
I'm not above simply telling my players that they've gone through everything I had prepared for the session. Then we can talk about what they'd like to do. We can go on to have an improvised session, or we can start talking about the campaign's politics (always soaks up time), or we can start talking about what the PCs want to do in the long run, e.g. Or we can call it a night, or break out a board game, or something else.

Airk
2016-08-24, 12:24 PM
This is why I, much like shadow_archmagi, don't prep "adventures"; Just situations. So there's always something that can happen.

Also, it's usually a good idea to tell your PLAYERS in advance that "Hey, this game is being set in <location> and it's going to be about you guys doing <thing>" so that you don't have the "And the PCs left the country because it seemed like a good idea at the time." problem.

kyoryu
2016-08-24, 01:23 PM
Yeah, I'm with the whole "prep situations, not adventures".

If your villain hasn't shown up, they're still there. They still want whatever bad thing it is that they want. So there's still conflict, and still adventure.

DrewID
2016-08-26, 04:42 PM
The GURPS adventure Harkwood had a decent section on this. Under "When Things Go Wrong" they had "Too Much, Too Soon". It was a neat adventure to start with, because there was a plot afoot, but you got to pick one of six different Masterminds, each of whom had a Go-Between, and a hideout in the Old Dungeon. When the characters figure things out too soon and stop the Mastermind dead in his tracks, they suggest:
1. Is the Go-Between still at large? If so, he/she might carry out the rest of the plan on their own behalf.
2. Did the Mastermind have a patron? They might go ahead with their invasion, or the PCs could take it upon themselves to expose them?
3. Was the Old Dungeon discovered? If not, there are still the hired mercenaries who would see no reason not to put this excellent opportunity for raiding and plundering to waste.

Basically, whatever things were put in place before the PCs took out the Big Bad are still in place, and it's still an opportunity for the PC's to act in a vaguely heroic style.

DrewID

Reaper34
2016-08-26, 05:14 PM
for short adventures where the characters are just around for a session or 2. let it happen. call a break and regroup, reskin, and then react. even if it's not that well planned.

for longer campaigns or linked adventures. build your world. populate it. when something unexpected happens. call a break. think about how different power groups respond. what effect did these actions have on the local area, country, world. how do the groups in the missed encounters respond. have every action have a logical in universe response.

both methods call for calling a break. this gives you time to think about your next move. players realize that sometimes they suprise you and most understand you need a few minutes to respond and make the game good instead of having it fall apart.

Hopeless
2016-08-27, 04:38 AM
I was about to say that even if they skip multiple encounters to confront the Mastermind before they're ready... in itself just surviving facing a BBEG just means your PCs have all those underlings just waiting to fill in that empty seat the fighting because of that power vacuum can fulfill an entire season before a replacement is able to settle the chaos that led to their succession and guess whose top of their list of people they don't want hanging around?!
Then there's the likelihood that Mastermind is actually answering to someone else all in all this can go on as long as you want!

tombowings
2016-08-27, 10:48 AM
Simple: You move on to the next adventure.

Dragonexx
2016-08-27, 12:52 PM
There are plenty of ways you can use the defeat of the villain to segway into a new adventure. Fallout of the villains defeat creates a power vacuum, or his armies scatter and become renegade raiders or warlords.

Heck, in the campaign I'm planning the villainous couple are expected to have a few encounters before a final conclusive battle. However, they are merely agents of a much larger organizaton, so if by luck or skill they are defeated in one of the earlier encounters then I just move into the organization plot there.

GrayDeath
2016-08-28, 06:17 AM
It depends.

As you describe it you had the end of the adventure planned as introduction/Bridge to the new Villain/Adventure, which you can still do in a different way.
Let them be oblivious to the new threat until they, later maybe after their victory binge, start to encounter the results of the new undisturbed villains plan.

On one hand they are lauded for their quick success, on the other there is this new threat that, unbeknowst to anybody, said success made more problematic/e3nigmatic.

Should prove more than motivating if your players are as smart and "into the adventure" as it seems.



Or, as others have said, tell them. "Well, you beat everythi9ng I ahd in away i did not expect, kudos, you win. However I ahve nothing more prepared. Lets play munchkin/make a Shadowrun oneShot/etc).

:)

FlumphPaladin
2016-08-30, 10:38 AM
My very first time behind the screen, this happened. My old high school buddy (who'd played a lot more than me) had rolled a half-dragon, something something, special bond with Draconic goddess, something something, and so he got the idea that the aforementioned goddess could handle the key-to-Erythnul's-evil-plot Macguffin better than the PC's could, and trying to be a permissive DM, I said okay.

This arc was from then on known as the "we take the key to heaven" arc.

From then on, it was just random nonsense as I could come up with it. What I SHOULD have done was say "very well, you've foiled the plot for now, but you still have Erythnul's cultists to deal with, and now it's personal!"

Chimera245
2016-08-30, 12:02 PM
This reminds me of a time I DM'd a published adventure I found online. It had something to do with a tower with a glowing crystal on top. At night, it resembled a lighthouse, and ships were getting mixed signals and crashing into rocks everywhere.

Anyway, the tower-dungeon was the whole adventure, (except where the party returns to town to get paid), and was full of rooms, monsters, loot, a boss battle, you know... a dungeon.

...

The party's druid cast Transmute Stone to Mud at one side of the foundation, and knocked the whole thing over.

I just stared a moment.

I even double checked the math, the amount of stone he could transmute at his level, the area of the base of the tower, etc. but it all checked out.

I stared for another moment.

Then I decided, (after assigning reasonable falling damage) that ALL of the monsters in the tower were very pissed, and that they were all pissed at once, against the same group of PCs that wrecked their house, all in the same combat.

HidesHisEyes
2016-08-30, 03:04 PM
You should definitely read this article if you haven't: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots

The gist of it is that you shouldn't allow any ideas about what the PCs actually do into your planning. Instead you create a situation or scenario and drop the PCs into it. If you create it properly and know every element of it, especially NPCs, well enough, then you'll be ready for whatever the players do. If you KNOW the innkeeper, the orc, the spy, the lost child, then you know how they react to the PCs' words and actions. You role play the NPCs in other words. You don't run the game, you play it, just as much as the players do, and the it runs itself.

Of course in practice it's not always so easy, but it's a good ideal to aim for.

JAL_1138
2016-08-31, 12:30 PM
You should definitely read this article if you haven't: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots

The gist of it is that you shouldn't allow any ideas about what the PCs actually do into your planning. Instead you create a situation or scenario and drop the PCs into it. If you create it properly and know every element of it, especially NPCs, well enough, then you'll be ready for whatever the players do. If you KNOW the innkeeper, the orc, the spy, the lost child, then you know how they react to the PCs' words and actions. You role play the NPCs in other words. You don't run the game, you play it, just as much as the players do, and the it runs itself.

Of course in practice it's not always so easy, but it's a good ideal to aim for.

Agreed with this as a design goal, and very definitely agreed that it's not always easy in practice. And even if you do it really well, it still sometimes doesn't work to prevent "players go off somewhere you hadn't prepped" or "players do something that, logically, really would solve things that quickly, because they read the situation right and came up with something amazingly clever." Or "players looked at the scenario and said 'nah,' and ignored it this session."

Prepwork is never truly wasted. Reskin statblocks for later use, break up and rearrange and use piecemeal the dungeon and town layouts the players never saw, and for this session you can crack out, say, the hexcrawl rules and random encounters (have a few generic encounters ready to go at all times). Or yoink a quest wholesale out of a module as filler for the session (Adventurers' League material from Seasons 1-3 is really useful for this in 5e, for instance). Be prepared to spin off your filler stuff into a scenario all its own, such as if you throw a gang of thugs at the players in the city's port district and they decide to track down the gang's hideout and leader. It might be fodder for material for a scenario about a major organized-crime ring that the players have now made an enemy of, or something like that. Try to let the course of the campaign develop organically from player choices, and never prep anything solid too far in advance.

If the players dispose of one major faction too early, consider who stands to gain from it in the subsequent power-vacuum. The Orc raiders may not be harrying the villages anymore, but maybe now a neighboring country--who were also under pressure from the raiders--can now turn their full attention toward annexing territory since they don't have to keep their forces so spread out. Or maybe the players just won that particular scenario flat-out, and now they have some measure of fame or at least a reputation as problem-solvers that can help hook in the next conflict.

kyoryu
2016-08-31, 01:53 PM
Another useful trick is to take the idea of fronts from Apocalypse World - pending and worsening threats. Prepare three or so different fronts, and throw them at the players. You can pretty well guarantee that one will get resolved quickly, but that means that the others are festering in the background and getting worse.