Plan vs Improv

[Pippa the Pixie]

So I have always been a plan type DM for D&D. I write or adapt an adventure with a set timeline and series of events. The PCs can change things sure, but I always like having the frame work.

And then I had a game last weekend.

So it was me as DM, with only one other player I knew, and three new to me players. So I put together a simple adventure: Save Daydale. The basic plot is a war in the background, and a band of goblin raiders has been spotted moving towards the town. The goblins sack a couple of villages, and with everyone focused on the war...there is no one to stop them except the PCs. As DayDale is their hometown.

So the game starts on June 1st, and I set June 3rd, at dusk, is when the goblins plan to attack. The goblins are still gathering their forces south of the town at some old ruins, and specifically the worg riders won't reach the main force until the morning of June 3rd.

The players don't know the above, of course, and they choose to dig in and be ready to defend the town. So June 1st and 2nd roll by as the PCs just wait...and noting happens. Then on the morning of June 3rd, the PCs all agree to stop waiting and go find the goblins. They pick north as the direction to go and head off. So they have a couple random encounters for a couple days, then on June 5th they get worried that they have left the town unguarded and head back. Of course when they get back to Daydale, they find it destroyed. As per my plan, at dusk on June 3...the same day the PCs left town and headed north....the goblins attacked from the south.

And this is where we stopped playing. The three new to me players were all upset: they wanted a fun adventure game. So at first it was all directed at me, as I should have done something different...but no one could tell me what that was. And it really hit the fan when I mentioned my timeline with the attack date and time. This is where they really jumped on that a DM should not plan ahead for stuff like that and the DM should just improv all the time.

I was a bit taken back by that, as it was so odd. The whole point of a timeline to me, is so the DM can resist the temptation to just do whatever they want. After all, A DM could just wait for five minutes after the PCs say they will defend the town and say here come the goblins. To me though, that is kind of shaky ground. The players seemed to think it was a great idea though. I guess the idea was that no matter what the PCs did, the action and adventure would just come right to them? So the complaint is that I let the Pcs sit around and do nothing, while I knew the goblins would not attack for days. And I guess the answer was that as soon as the players decided to make the stand, I should of just had the goblins attack.

So, I wonder why even make a plan, if the idea is just toss it out the window if the players want? And that leads to the shaky ground. So if I have no plan, just know there are goblins, then I can have anything happen at any time. This seems great to have a plot, as I can just make things happen around the PCs. No matter what the players do, the adventure will be right in front of them. Take the goblins location for example, in my plan they were in some ruins south of town. The Ccs headed north, and so did not encounter the goblin forces. It sounds right to me, but they complained that the goblins should have just been in the north when they went north. My counter was that the PCs did not gather any information in game, and just headed north. I had prepared plenty of signs of more goblin activity to the south, but the players never even looked.

So that leaves me with what is the way to go? Have a plan or do improv? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[Gnoman]

Here's how I do it:


First, come up with a start point.

Second, create a number of endpoints - this is where any "campaign after the campaign" would start. You should have more than just "good end" or "bad end", but there shouldn't be too many of these - I currently have about a dozen, most of which feed into various settings I've been theorycrafting.

Third, make several goalpoints for each endpoint - this is the state of the "board" at the end of the campaign. Again basing this on my current game, Endpoint 8 is "vampire apocalypse". There are about a dozen goalpoints which specify the details of the vampire apocalypse - what kind of vampires are eating everybody, how much of the world they've already converted into "farms", and what forces remain to oppose them. Meanwhile, Endpoint 23 is "immortal utopia", where the dozens or so endpoints revolve around the exact method of immortality, how it is recieved by the world's population, and how many people are refusing to become immortal.

This same situation can be applied in miniature to resolve adventure paths. Using your specific scenario, I would have drawn up three endpoints - Goblins destroy Daydale on June 3, Goblins sack Daydale on June 3 but are driven off before they destroy it, and Goblins attack on June 3 and are kept out of Daydale completely.

Each of those would have three goalpoints: "Destroy" would have "PCs don't fight", "PCs are defeated but survive", "TPK"; Sack would have "PCs are forced to fight in the town, and can't evacuate it", "PCs evacuate the town and make a stand in it" and "TPK, but the goblins are hurt bad enough that the villagers drive them off"; "Saved" would have "No PC losses", "Some PC losses", and "TPK, but the goblins don't attack the town"

What I do NOT do is minutely plan the details of how we're getting from startpoint to goal point - these points exist so that I can see which way things are going and channel the player's actions in a way that fits into something that I've planned. Once the players are committed to their action, I move things along, eliminate goalpoints that are no longer possible, and we play out the results.

In your given example, the PCs had committed to defending the town by fighting them off. I would have simply eliminated the "PCs don't fight" and "PCs evacuate the town" options and told them "the goblins attack on Day 3. You have two partial days worth of activity, as long as it could reasonably be done while waiting for the alarm - how do you use these actions."

[Thrudd]

Plan, and also improv when you need to. You're not wrong in this scenario, keeping to your timeline and locations is a valid decision. They need to know that their actions, or inactions, have consequences, and that they are meant to be proactive, not reactive. They do need ways to gather information to make good decisions, though. Why did they wait so long to scout for the goblins? You might have made suggestions or given them prompts through npcs, especially if they are new players. What you should never do is to have nothing happen during session time- if they are sitting doing nothing, ask them how long they want to wait, don't play it out in real time. So if they said "we wait for the goblins to arrive", you should have said "two days pass. On the third night you hear the howls of wargs..." or something like that.

[LoneStarNorth]

It's good to have a plan, but keep the details loose so you can adjust them on the fly. Or if you're determined to keep the details in place for the purposes of verisimilitude, you'll have to do a little railroading.

In this adventure, two of the major options are "PCs fortify and defend town" or "PCs attack goblin camp". They decided to fortify, so you should have the goblins attack the town. You can still stick to your timeline if you want, but skip the time in between, don't drag it out asking them over and over what do you do, what do you do. Say "You stand guard for two uneventful days. Tensions are high among the militia as the quiet begins to unnerve them. Suddenly, you see smoke on the horizon..." or something to that effect. They made their choice, proceed to the adventure.

If they decide instead to search for the goblins, have them find the goblins. If they didn't gather information on where exactly to look or go in the wrong direction, instead of having them miss the camp entirely, have them take a long time to find it, so the worg riders have arrived and they have an extra challenge to deal with. If they gather info, go the right way, or roll really well on survival checks, have them get there before the worg riders and have that advantage.

The takeaway is that missing the entire adventure shouldn't be an option, certainly not one the players can stumble into by accident. Having a fun adventure is the entire point of playing!

[Koo Rehtorb]

I don't see anything wrong with anything that happened. Town burned, but maybe the goblins took captives. Maybe a survivor hiding in the ruins begs the PCs to rescue the goblin prisoners and points them the direction they headed.

You do need to be able to improv to be a good GM, though. PCs will do things you didn't expect, and being able to cope with that instead of the session breaking down is a required skill. You also need to know how to move quickly along through unimportant things and keep the focus of the session on things that matter.

[Kaptin Keen]

So that leaves me with what is the way to go? Have a plan or do improv? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

What's more important - the plan or the game?

With precisely zero effort or cost of any kind, you could have moved the goblin camp, or the date of the invasion.

Here's what you did: You left what some like to call 'agency' with the players - then punished them for it. They made a series of solid, reasonable decisions, which you at no point acknowledged. They decided to stay and defend - which is very reasonable, chosing a defensible position against a larger force. When you clearly showed them that that wasn't going to work, they decided to go out and search, and you let them go in the wrong direction.

Then you showed them both decisions were wrong and futile by destroying the town in their absence.

In principle there's nothing wrong with any of that. Events happen as they will, and that's fine - but only if the players have information to work with. If you just keep them in the dark, you're basically trolling them, and ... they wont like that. Also, it isn't fun. It's a game, it's meant to be fun.

[Satinavian]

I would probably have done the same.

Improv has its place. That place is to fill out stuff you never thought relevant during preparation that somehow still comes up during the game.

But the world should not retroactively change when PCs do stuff you didn't anticipate. If the plot always comes to the PCs whatever they do that makes the players' decisions quite meaningless.



Sure, some people do this strange pure improv style where nothing really matters and all focus is on the events as they unfold on the table and in this very moment. But i really really would neither play nor GM that kind of game.


That said, there are ways to put subtle hints of bad consequences that might happen when the PCs do what they are about to do. It is good to plant those hints so that the consequences don't feel unfair and unforseeable. It is also a good thing to skip uneventful time. A part of what has happened might have been a communication issue. It is easy to say "you didn't look where i prepared stuff to find", but it is mostly a sign of having too obscure a plothook/ a hint. Usually that comes up with failed crime investigation plots but the rest is not immune to it either.

[Erloas]

Without knowing more specifics it is hard to say for sure. Like how long each day of waiting actually took at the table, what sort of hints were given, the capability of the characters, and experience of the players.

I wouldn't just change things to fit their whims, but if they're just not thinking of basic things like scouting I would probably give them a few more strong hints. Maybe have them hit a scout from the goblins the same day to hold them back or redirect them. But at some point I agree that things just have to take their course.

[Glorthindel]

I would say in principle, sticking to your timeline was fine.

Where I have slight issues is how were the players able to go quite so wrong? Did they ignore clues and hints towards the direction the goblins were coming from, or did they never get any? If they knew goblins were coming, also knowing from which vague direction would be part of the basic information (how do you know goblins are coming at all if no one had seen them, or the destruction they have left behind them - the someone who told them of the goblins in the first place must have had that information). At the point where they seemed to be just picking a compass point and heading off, I would have injected a reminder (either from an NPC or just out of game) which way the goblins actually are (since if the party were riding off in exactly the opposite direction that the goblins were known to be, people would assume they were fleeing, not scouting!)

That said, personally, I am fine with the principle of the quantum ogre, particularly if the players are trying to find that ogre. Sure, if they were trying to avoid the goblin horde, then its fine to miss them, but given that they wanted to find them, I would have no issues with relocating the goblins into their path. If they were experienced players, and they made no attempt to find out the direction, again it is fine to miss them (since it is their fault for just running aimlessly off into the wilderness), but given they were mostly newbies, they likely didn't know the tools they might have at hand to find their goblins, so I would have been a bit more lenient. But you weren't wrong to make the choice you made either.

[Mordaedil]

I don't see anything wrong with planning things ahead of time, but there's a certain disatisfaction that comes with a time limit, especially one the players are unaware of, that you need to contextualize better.

When I want to think of ways to do it right, I usually go back to the waterchip quest from Fallout 1, mind you, people really really hate that, but it's a generous amount of time, clearly states, with clear consequences for failure and a believable reasoning for why it is as long as it is; its their renewable water resources that is in danger and they'll run out of reserves after three months. There is another time-limit in the game that ticks down in the background that the player is unaware of and is never explicitly told about, but that isn't relevant.

If you have a quest where the players need to defend a town from attack, but are somehow aware of it, have an NPC clearly state to the players "we expect to be attacked within the week, and frankly we're woefully unprepared. We cannot evacuate in time and frankly, most of our townsfolk refuse to leave and would rather die defending their homes, useless as it is. We need you to help secure our city as best you can and help repel the goblin threat. Sadly, we don't know where they will be striking from, so we can't recommend you go out and try to fight them, but we can't stop you. An old tribe was discovered a day or two inside the swamp ruins, not a bad place to start I think, if you plan to head out." The goblin tribe is not at the swamp ruins, and the goblins attack before the week is up.

But now you have given them motivation to stay in the village and give them a task instead of leaving them expecting an attack that doesn't appear to arrive.

Also it doesn't hurt if you plan more stages into your plans. Maybe the goblins attacks at the third day, but only if their hunters aren't attacked. Oh would you look at that, the goblin hunters got interrupted by the players exploring early. I guess the attack is delayed a day. Maybe the disappearance of the hunting party causes the goblins to get more cautious and circle the village, making the attack harder but delaying the attack a day further.

As a DM, don't be afraid to have plans, but also plan for the PC's to do stupid **** and throw them a bone for not sitting still three days in a row, I know I'd suspect something odd was going on if the DM didn't throw the attack at me or provide hints that staying put is the smart play.

[Cazero]

I was a bit taken back by that, as it was so odd. The whole point of a timeline to me, is so the DM can resist the temptation to just do whatever they want. After all, A DM could just wait for five minutes after the PCs say they will defend the town and say here come the goblins. To me though, that is kind of shaky ground. The players seemed to think it was a great idea though. I guess the idea was that no matter what the PCs did, the action and adventure would just come right to them? So the complaint is that I let the Pcs sit around and do nothing, while I knew the goblins would not attack for days. And I guess the answer was that as soon as the players decided to make the stand, I should of just had the goblins attack.
Well, yes. You should have just skipped to the attack. And you don't have to trash your timeline to do that.
If on the 1st of June your players decided to make their stand in the village, and on the 2nd of June you narrate that a new day begins and ask your players what they want to do for that day, they might think that the goblins aren't going to show up until they do something outside. Especialy if they decide to stay in the village and you describe the dawn of the 3rd of June similarly.
Skipping straight from the players decision to make a stand to the dusk of the 3rd of June when the attack happens won't cause that miscommunication. Ask them for a long term plan and not a daily one, look on your timeline at wich point it gets interrupted, and establish the vulnerabilities of their defenses based on that.

[Pleh]

I think both you and the players are right and wrong.

You are right to avoid *sloppy* improv by avoiding improv as much as possible. But they are right that you are also supposed to be actively supporting them, taking time to consider threats to their success that they might deserve some hint about.

In this case, I'd argue that you shouldn't have to alter your timeline, but you should be aware of how your PCs are reacting to your plot hooks.

If you set them in town and they say, "we dig in and wait in ambush," that's probably when you should have said, "two days pass uneventfully, with the commoners growing more agitated with anticipation. Then on the morning of the third day, people begin to hear dogs howling. The town spends a harrowed day indoors and, as dusk approaches, the howling stops."

If you say, "the day passes uneventfully, what do you do?" and keep saying that each day, you are hinting they should be doing something more than what they are doing. At best they could scout, but they don't know when or wherethe goblins or assault will be, so they've already decided to stay where they know the goblins will eventually be. But after wasting two days with the DM suggesting there were other things to do, they decide the DM wants them to go looking for the goblins.

My point being that you don't need to improv the plot, but you might need to occasionally improv the plot hooks (e.g. hearing the worgs howling) and it's all about helping the players have the right expectations about what could possibly happen next.

[Pelle]

Mostly an expectation mismatch I would say. Following a strict timeline is ok, but that needs to be clearly announced in advance so the players are aware and can act accordingly. Only then will it be acceptable that you have 'washed your hands' and can't be blamed if something bad happens. Few people are that ultra-simulationist by default, and most people expect you to adjust somewhat to their actions unless you make it clear you don't.

The problem here seems to be confusing player actions having consequences with player agency. When players are making decisions blindly, they have no agency, even though their actions matter.

When DMing I also used to establish timelines and the state of the world as detailed as possible. With my group however, that frequently leads to unsatisfying play, especially if it does not make sense to heavily telegraph info. So now I instead mostly prepp a lot of stuff that might happen, deliberatly waiting to finalize the state of the world, and then improvise in the session. If for a scenario I have decided in advance the layout and number of enemies, like in exploring a dungeon, I am sure to tell the players that it's up to them now.

[Quertus]

So, it sounds to me like you ran the game exactly the way I'd like a GM to run a game for me. Kudos!

Well, to be fair, when I say "exactly", I mean that at a high level - you ran it in my preferred style. There are some subtle details we're missing for me to know if it's exactly my kind of game. So let's get into those - in a moment.

First, let's discuss something else - your players. See, unfortunately, there is no one "correct" style. Your players expected one style, you delivered a second. And they need to learn the very important lesson that they are wrong - that their expectations are not the "right" way to play.

So, back to the question of whether you made a good example of your style of game. It's largely a matter of delivery.

Others have suggested that when the PCs indicate that they want to defend the town, the correct answer is to skip three days ahead, to them defending the town. This is... the least interesting, lowest agency, and most successful version of this style. It's not BadWrongFun, it accommodates the largest swath of player expectations reasonably well, it hardly ever has table flip meltdowns. But it's lacking in the more subtle details of agency.

What are the PCs doing during those three days? What are they learning (aside from or even including the fact that invasion hasn't happened yet) that might have them reconsider their actions?

So, whether I'd consider you a great GM is based on the subtle details. Some would ask if you did a good job giving sufficient hinting and foreshadowing - should it have been obvious to any player with half a brain when the attack was going to occur, or what the correct action(s) to take were? This, too, is not BadWrongFun - it's a great way to get the players to railroad themselves without realizing it, to let them make the correct informed decision.

But, myself, I will only ask if a) you gave them realistic amounts of information to work with, and b) if you honestly believe that this scenario, with this amount of information, should have been fun. If you can honestly answer "yes" to both a and b, then I say you're my kind of GM.

Don't retcon the world to make the PCs plans work - keep the world exactly as it has always been. But never stop thinking about how you can improve your skills.

A great GM - one well beyond my skill - can improvise their delivery. The PCs, who initially wanted to defend the town, decide that they want to head north? This makes no sense. Clearly, I've sent the wrong signals, or they've metagamed to a wrong answer. At this point, I'd love to be able to change my gaming style to let them see their mistake. I've seen GMs who can improvise their style on the fly, when they realize that their players aren't playing the same game.

I can't. Best I can do is break to an OOC conversation, and try to do damage control, and see what we can salvage.

This is part of why I prefer things like session 0, and a series of one-shots to establish such style questions, before moving on to anything bigger.

-----

So, how could the PCs have known when the date of the attack would be? How could the PCs have known where the goblins were gathering? How could the players have made use of the agency you have them by not just skipping straight to the attack?

Answer these questions, more for yourself than for us or your players, to see what level of agency and what level of difficulty that scenario entailed.

[Cluedrew]

So that leaves me with what is the way to go? Have a plan or do improv? Anyone have any thoughts on this?I think the ideal is to do both, have a plan but use improvisation to fill in details. Or flat out scrap the plan and improvise a new one if it doesn't work.

Having a plan is good, it provides structure, lets you stretch out the work and sanity check things before you bring them to the game. However any time that following the plan would lead to less fun than not following the plan: throw the plan out.

I don't think you did anything wrong (in the sense of a particular mistake you should feel bad about) but I do think the game would have been more fun if the PCs had actually gotten a chance to fight the goblin raiders. So an adjustment to "the plan" (even the out of game information you provide the players) probably would have been better.

Those are my thoughts.

[Quertus]

I think the ideal is to do both, have a plan but use improvisation to fill in details. Or flat out scrap the plan and improvise a new one if it doesn't work.

Having a plan is good, it provides structure, lets you stretch out the work and sanity check things before you bring them to the game. However any time that following the plan would lead to less fun than not following the plan: throw the plan out.

I don't think you did anything wrong (in the sense of a particular mistake you should feel bad about) but I do think the game would have been more fun if the PCs had actually gotten a chance to fight the goblin raiders. So an adjustment to "the plan" (even the out of game information you provide the players) probably would have been better.

Those are my thoughts.

Because you're usually fun / sane / whatever to discuss with, and you seem to enjoy these metagame concerns, I'll throw these half-thoughts at you, and see if you can take them somewhere meaningful. Hmmm... apparently, I'm writing at least half of this as though I'm talking to the OP, so my style is random and confusing. So, um, since it's hard to pretend that I'm doing less telling and more asking, maybe pretend that I'm asking you to edit this for sanity before I post it? (I think you get the idea)

-----

So, there's several different layers here. And, thus, several different ways that one can plan, improvise, or throw away plans. I'll doubtless fail to address all of these, or all the layers at which they can occur.

So, one layer of "planning" is commonly known as Railroading - the plot is going to go exactly this way, dagnabbit, no matter what the players try to do. Most people on these boards are rather against Railroading, but consider: how is throwing away planned facts when they are inconvenient different from Railroading?

Another layer involves planned facts - the goblins are to the South. How is throwing away such facts different from a Quantum Ogre? However, it is very common to need to improvise unplanned facts - one of the PCs lost his luggage to your airport Table of Doom. Fine, but this PC took a flaw, and needs his insulin injection - do any of the other passengers have insulin? There's always going to be details that you didn't plan out, and need to improvise. This is, IMO, where improv skill really shines / where games can most easily stall if the GM completely lacks improv skill.

Another layer is planned plans. The goblins planned to attack in 3 days, when their reinforcements (worg riders) arrived. OK, what if the PCs delay those reinforcements? Will the goblins stick to their timetable, or reevaluate the scenario? What if the PCs eliminate the worg riders? Flood the battlefield? Summon visible reinforcements? Will the attack go off in the days, as planned, no matter what? Why / why not?

Another two that I'll mention together are planned information, and planned PC responses. When creating the scenario, you planned to tell the players X, and expected that it would be a fun game with them responding with Y or Z. But what if they don't? This is where things get really tricky.

IMO, the first layer here is, "did they respond with something fun?". If the players respond to the goblin invasion with Scorched Earth tactics, burning down the town before the goblins can claim* it, and they're having fun with the idea, great. If their plan is to kill some goblin scouts, use Speak with Dead to gather Intel, then, once they know what's going on, harass the Worg Riders**, and they look like they're having fun? Great.

But what if they're not having fun? What if there's some way of approaching this that they'd enjoy pursuing, but they're not taking that path? Most likely, the reason is information - they don't know that the path exists, they don't know that the path is viable, they don't know that you'd be open to them taking that path.

IMO, the safest thing to change - without risking Railroading, or Quantum Ogres, or inconsistencies - is the information you give. Now, whether that's the information you give the PCs, or the information you give the players depends a bit on your style, and why you believe that they aren't taking what you believe would be a more fun path for them.

How open you are to metagame communication will influence the odds that your beliefs about their fun and their reasoning are correct.

* Admittedly, these goblins apparently aren't trying to seize civilization, and burnt the town down themselves, so apparently this wouldn't help in this particular scenario.
** Oh, and why is it that the Worg Riders, presumably the fastest troops, are the last to the party? Was this a Gamist, "goblins are easiest to fight, and I want the PCs to fight the goblins, so the Worg Riders aren't here yet", a Simulationist "the Worg Riders were busy with task X (bringing food? Hunting survivors from the last village?), whereas the goblins marched straight here" or "Goblins can hold positions / move unseen better than Worgs"? A Narrative concern like "the players get to choose to tell the story of fighting goblins, or of fighting Worg Riders"?

[DMThac0]

You did absolutely nothing wrong.

-You planned out an adventure with a clearly defined goal: Defend the city because an attack is expected in the next few days.
-The players were given full agency over their characters to do whatever they desired, in this case going out to find the goblins rather than staying put.
-You resolved their decision, as the DM is supposed to do, by having the natural course of action occur.
-The players were able to see that their actions had consequences.
-You allowed for a failure condition that was not bound by the fight alone.

You handled that scenario exactly as a DM should, you were a neutral party that resolved the decisions that the players made. Instead of trying to railroad the players into doing what you had planned you gave them the freedom to fail or succeed. Rather than have them magically show up to save the town, you showed them that they made a mistake and it caused them to have a very real and visceral response. That should bring you joy, to have the players buy in to the game that deeply is a win even if it's hard.

As to the players being upset and telling you that you should have improvised a solution to allow them to win, simply explain action and consequence to them. They're upset, it's natural, they lost. They expected to win because they came up with a solution that was pro-active rather than reactive. Not all solutions will guarantee a success. If I want to score a point in a game and I head the opposite direction of the goal...I'm not going to score.

The only thing that may have helped, and this is assuming you didn't, is to be a bit heavy handed on the hints that there are no goblins. Players are dumb, granted it's usually because the DM doesn't tell them anything, but players are dumb. What we feel are obvious clues are easily missed by the players. What we feel should be a blinking neon sign that says "Don't do that thing", they're going to see as an invitation to touch it. The more you do this type of thing, the more you'll be able to relax the reigns as they start to recognize it.

---

The modules you buy from WotC have clearly defined goals and timelines, some even tell you how to resolve improvised actions in places. You are just fine playing the way you did.

[Pelle]

You did absolutely nothing wrong.


I disagree. The OP should have told the players about the style of game in advance, and that they would be responsible for what happened. If that had been done, everything would be fine as you say. If the players aren't expecting that style however, it can be very frustrating when it turns out to be the case.

[DMThac0]

I disagree. The OP should have told the players about the style of game in advance, and that they would be responsible for what happened. If that had been done, everything would be fine as you say. If the players aren't expecting that style however, it can be very frustrating when it turns out to be the case.

You are to defend this town. Players are informed of their responsibility.
Your actions have consequences. The players are informed of their responsibility.
You are playing D&D where you can act/do whatever you want. They have been informed of the style of game they're playing.
You are adventurers sent to defend a city during a wartime era. They have been informed of the style of game they're playing.

You rolled up characters in D&D, a game where the players are in charge of the story, how the heck can they not be expecting their actions to have consequences?

[Tajerio]

As others have said, you haven't given us nearly enough information to judge how "fair" or not your actions were. We don't know what the players' expectations were, we don't know how experienced the players were, we don't know what their characters' capabilities were, and so forth.

But the biggest thing we don't know is what information the players had. In a situation like the one you've described, which doesn't seem to be dependent on a published setting, the players know nothing. All they can learn is what you, the DM, tell them. This may be where you've taken a misstep--and here I really strongly agree with Glorthindel. If goblin raiders have been spotted, somebody had to have spotted them somewhere. And the person who did the spotting knows what direction that somewhere is from the town. This is particularly the case if this band of raiders have already sacked a couple of villages--the people who live in DayDale will definitely know which direction the neighboring villages are in. And, since you say that DayDale is the PCs' hometown, it follows that the PCs would definitely know where those villages are.

Therefore, I think you owed it to the players to tell them the information that their characters would certainly have known. Either you didn't, in which case some blame attaches to you, or you did, in which case your players are monumentally stupid. But from the broad-strokes painting of the setting you gave us in your OP, the former seems more likely. If that's the case, then what we have here isn't so much a question of planning vs. improvisation, but a matter of enabling the player to know what the PC knows.

[Pelle]

You rolled up characters in D&D, a game where the players are in charge of the story, how the heck can they not be expecting their actions to have consequences?

They obviously didn't. The game would have been much smoother if they did.

[Lord Torath]

My main question is what clues you gave the players about the impending attack. Several other villages/towns had been sacked. Did the players have a map showing where these villages were in relation to Dayville? Did the players know about the ruins a short distance to the south? Did they know which lands were more civilized and which lands were wilder and more likely to be inhabited by goblins?

Essentially, what clues did you offer that heading north was the wrong way to go to intercept the goblin raiders? Remember the Three Clue Rule (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule). You need a minimum of three clues to tell the players where to go, and preferably each of those should be available from more than one source.

So your planning was great. But if your players are missing your clues, you may need to "improv" ways for the party to find them. I assume they were leading the defense of the village? If so, someone should have noticed them heading north and asked why they were going that way. Even out of character, you could ask them if there's a particular reason they're heading north.

[JBPuffin]

So I’ve DMed three campaigns recently, and both my 5th edition games were entirely improv. I’d set up a premise, get the characters together, give them a direction, and then just...things would happen. Right now, my party’s fighting a half-elf necromantic empire because a) there’s a half-elf samurai in the group who hates other half-elves and necromancers, b) my players wanted something they could kill remorselessly, and c) the Tiefling vault beneath the bone-sand needed a reason to exist. The party’s living aboard an artifact-level pirate ship crewed by freely-transforming wood golems, which they usually take a couple of with them on shore trips; they have a shardmind who acts as a collection of all of their knowledge (as he’s a conglomeration of all of their memories...sort of); the Sorcerer has an angel of a death god as a mentor/romantic interest; and all of this is before they’ve gotten their first ASI. Admittedly, I hand out gifts to my players’ characters like candy, and they openly know and joke about the fact that I walk into a session really only knowing what will happen for the first fifteen minutes or so, if that, but we’ve had a blast so far and will until we have to stop meeting due to our current lifestyle.

All that to say I can’t plan to save my life as a DM, but if I don’t have anything, everything works; other DMs can work with plans really easily. Your new players sound like they read too many threads or listened to too many podcasts with DMs of one type and assumed that was the OTP of role playing. Hopefully, they’ll be mature and let you have another shot now that you know they don’t like the idea of a time table and you know you need to be sneakier about using one, since let’s be honest, it was a great plan, just maybe not perfectly executed ;).

[ExLibrisMortis]

I think that your plan went well. The players should've gone scouting (or employed NPC scouts) on day one and two, seized the initiative whilst they had it, get an advantage before the attack. I personally consider it bad role-playing to "defend the town" without considering things like intel, supplies, morale, etcetera (unless you're role-playing peasant levies, but that's another matter). I mean, if you give real-life me a town to defend (I cannot stress enough how bad of an idea that would be, but say), the first thing I'd ask is "who's attacking what, how, and from where?". Get a picture of the situation, and all that.


As for the reaction of your players: I think this is a fairly typical "but it wasn't a happy ending!"-reaction. You learn to appreciate bitter endings over time, but if you're expecting things to turn out all Hollywood Happy in the end, they can be a bit of a shock, and then you go looking for a justification, one of which is that the ending was just "bad".

[Mordar]

What's more important - the plan or the game?

With precisely zero effort or cost of any kind, you could have moved the goblin camp, or the date of the invasion.

Here's what you did: You left what some like to call 'agency' with the players - then punished them for it. They made a series of solid, reasonable decisions, which you at no point acknowledged. They decided to stay and defend - which is very reasonable, chosing a defensible position against a larger force. When you clearly showed them that that wasn't going to work, they decided to go out and search, and you let them go in the wrong direction.

Then you showed them both decisions were wrong and futile by destroying the town in their absence.

In principle there's nothing wrong with any of that. Events happen as they will, and that's fine - but only if the players have information to work with. If you just keep them in the dark, you're basically trolling them, and ... they wont like that. Also, it isn't fun. It's a game, it's meant to be fun.

While I agree with the heart of what you're saying - a change could easily have been made and the game would have proceeded without a hitch. Barring missing information (scouts, direction of the other sacked villages, was there intentional misdirection) your change is probably what I would have preferred. Of course, the people I played with were generally experienced enough to have gotten reasonable intel on the goblins prior to abandoning the town, so it isn't likely (barring the misdirection I mentioned) that we would have gone the wrong direction.

That being said, the OP didn't punish players for using agency. That is the very nature of "player agency" in the discussions here I have seen - the players decided what to do, there were no quantum ogres/goblin war parties, players chose the wrong direction. They didn't get the adventure they wanted, but they got the one their choices determined. Now, it could have been handled better (see below for what I think was the best response, and one I had to learn the hard way) but the agency wasn't punished...it was "rewarded", and that's the primary reason I am much more in favor of quantum encounters.

Quick aside: I want quantum encounters to be used as seldom as possible and to (as a GM) to provide enough proper evidence/clues/incentive to the characters so quantum ogres are exceedingly rare and (as a player) to pick up on the proper evidence/incentives and make good decisions so that quantum encounters are exceedingly rare...but in both cases fun.


It's good to have a plan, but keep the details loose so you can adjust them on the fly. Or if you're determined to keep the details in place for the purposes of verisimilitude, you'll have to do a little railroading.

In this adventure, two of the major options are "PCs fortify and defend town" or "PCs attack goblin camp". They decided to fortify, so you should have the goblins attack the town. You can still stick to your timeline if you want, but skip the time in between, don't drag it out asking them over and over what do you do, what do you do. Say "You stand guard for two uneventful days. Tensions are high among the militia as the quiet begins to unnerve them. Suddenly, you see smoke on the horizon..." or something to that effect. They made their choice, proceed to the adventure.

If they decide instead to search for the goblins, have them find the goblins. If they didn't gather information on where exactly to look or go in the wrong direction, instead of having them miss the camp entirely, have them take a long time to find it, so the worg riders have arrived and they have an extra challenge to deal with. If they gather info, go the right way, or roll really well on survival checks, have them get there before the worg riders and have that advantage.

The takeaway is that missing the entire adventure shouldn't be an option, certainly not one the players can stumble into by accident. Having a fun adventure is the entire point of playing!

This really is, in my experience, the best solution. The players seemed to have been on a good track (again, missing information for us about scouting, direction of previous attacks, etc) and I think it should have been rewarded by a nice "building trenches" montage followed by the narrative you outline and the attack. Fun had by all.

I learned a similar lesson the hard way...there was a fixed timeline (because of a special dark magic ritual/event) and the players had time to kill. There was a small chance they could find the special clue ahead of time, and I overplayed it...so they spent a couple table-hours searching and failing (looking in the wrong place), and that sucked all of the momentum out of the story and the game. It could have been handled much better - given the low-probability of success, they make the attempt and I narrate the hours they spend looking...then back to the building tension. They got the shot at short-circuiting the bad guy plan, failed, but didn't lose the momentum and fun of the game.

Anyway, in my opinion, excellent advice LoneStarNorth.

- M

[Silly Name]

My general style of DMing is to mix planning and improv: there are things I plan carefully, and then there are things I leave vague in my notes; there are times when I only plan the premise of the session, and then just wing it, and there are times when I write everything down, with timetables and heaps of notes. I don't think either style is better or superior, I simply mix and match them depending on many factors (sometimes I just wing it because I've had classes and didn't get time to write down stuff, for example).

But one thing I think must always be kept in mind is that when we play a game, we play to have fun. If what I've planned doesn't seem fun (or the players are stuck, or are going completely off-road), then it's time to improvise, even if it means I have to scrap fives pages of planned events*. And I think that's why your players were upset - not necessarily because they failed to defend the town, but because they didn't have fun. Maybe if they fought the goblins and lost they would have been a bit disheartened, but at least they would have go to try. What happened, however, was that in their eyes they wandered off and then found out they missed on the climax of the adventure.

So, I'll join the chorus of people asking why did the players go north, when the goblins were camping south? Did they just pick a random direction? If yes, why? Why didn't they have any idea about where the goblins had set camp? Was it a failure on their part, or did you not communicate information clearly**?

You could have moved the goblin camp, but that might reek too much of Quantum Ogres. So, perhaps instead you could have the players run into a group of goblin scouts, which could have clued them in, or even have them meet the worg riders, weakening the goblin tribe and wrecking their plans! Yes, it would have meant not following your plans, but it might have been more entertaining than just random encounters, no?

*And, hey, maybe I'll get to use them in another occasion!
**And if you did communicate clearly that the goblins were south, yet they went north... Well, then there was some miscommunication.

[Knaight]

So it was me as DM, with only one other player I knew, and three new to me players. So I put together a simple adventure: Save Daydale. The basic plot is a war in the background, and a band of goblin raiders has been spotted moving towards the town. The goblins sack a couple of villages, and with everyone focused on the war...there is no one to stop them except the PCs. As DayDale is their hometown.
So far so good - but it sounds like communication doesn't hold up well.


The players don't know the above, of course, and they choose to dig in and be ready to defend the town. So June 1st and 2nd roll by as the PCs just wait...and noting happens. Then on the morning of June 3rd, the PCs all agree to stop waiting and go find the goblins. They pick north as the direction to go and head off. So they have a couple random encounters for a couple days, then on June 5th they get worried that they have left the town unguarded and head back. Of course when they get back to Daydale, they find it destroyed. As per my plan, at dusk on June 3...the same day the PCs left town and headed north....the goblins attacked from the south.
There's a few things that went wrong here. To start with part of what the GM should be doing is managing the pacing in game - the scenes you handle slowly versus gloss over and the ones that merit inclusion and don't merit inclusion say a lot about the game, and this sounds poorly handled. The PCs made an initial decision (wait for the goblins) at the expense of other possible decisions (search for the goblins, evacuate the village, go seek help), and speeding up the pace until that decision is resolved is entirely reasonable. Going slowly instead is effectively a way of asking "are you sure?". Then we get to the PCs leaving to the north - and it sounds like this got no response from the villagers. Nobody asked the PCs to stay and defend their homes, nobody questioned why they were going north when it's pretty clear that the goblins are coming from the south, I suspect nobody even asked the PCs where they were going in case they needed to send someone after them if the goblins came. Which then didn't happen - the PCs were slowly searching northward, the villagers presumably have some self preservation instincts and could set up a tall guard tower to watch for a goblin army and send someone after them on a horse. Not to mention smoke signals, or just the smoke signal of the village currently being on fire.

Then there's the waiting. At the very least the villagers know there's a war on, know that they're undefended, and know goblins are coming. Why aren't they building fortifications? Why aren't they improvising weapons out of farm implements (or at least sharpening some stakes for simple spears)? Why isn't there concrete defensive activity going on independent of the PCs that suggests ways they could be involved in the defenses beyond just waiting. If "nothing happens" gets replaced with a tense scene of the PCs standing guard while the villagers cut down trees for a palisade as a wall begins to form the players are much less likely to just go off in a random direction in search of adventure, because there's no glaringly obvious "adventure not here, go elsewhere" signal.


I was a bit taken back by that, as it was so odd. The whole point of a timeline to me, is so the DM can resist the temptation to just do whatever they want. After all, A DM could just wait for five minutes after the PCs say they will defend the town and say here come the goblins. To me though, that is kind of shaky ground. The players seemed to think it was a great idea though. I guess the idea was that no matter what the PCs did, the action and adventure would just come right to them? So the complaint is that I let the Pcs sit around and do nothing, while I knew the goblins would not attack for days. And I guess the answer was that as soon as the players decided to make the stand, I should of just had the goblins attack.
The DM could just have whatever they want happen whenever they want, but in practice that's not what improvisation usually looks like. Instead it looks like understanding your setting and having it respond. You've got a village of scared noncombatants trying to deal with impending goblins, what do they do? How do they interact with the PCs? You've got a goblin raiding force hiding amidst the wreckage of war, what do they do? How do they react to what happens?

Importantly there are usually several good answers to many of these questions. That leaves the GM leeway to pick an answer not only good, but fun for the players.


So, I wonder why even make a plan, if the idea is just toss it out the window if the players want? And that leads to the shaky ground. So if I have no plan, just know there are goblins, then I can have anything happen at any time. This seems great to have a plot, as I can just make things happen around the PCs. No matter what the players do, the adventure will be right in front of them. Take the goblins location for example, in my plan they were in some ruins south of town. The Ccs headed north, and so did not encounter the goblin forces. It sounds right to me, but they complained that the goblins should have just been in the north when they went north. My counter was that the PCs did not gather any information in game, and just headed north. I had prepared plenty of signs of more goblin activity to the south, but the players never even looked.
Sure, the players never looked - but why did none of this information come to them. You've got a village full of scared peasants and a small group of highly effective professional warriors who can handle the goblins capable of wiping out the village by their lonesome. Why aren't these villagers more forthcoming with information? Why aren't they more insistent that the warriors at least stay nearby?

As for moving the camp north, that communicates two things to me. One is player side - they're definitely not the most proactive players, and I sympathise with you as a GM there. There's ways of encouraging more proactivity, which I'll get back to, but it's annoying not to at least have a couple of proactive players in there. The other is GM side though - wandering off in a random direction expecting to find something makes sense if the GM seems like they're just waiting for you to find the adventure and is having nothing happen until then.

As for encouraging proactivity, this is one of the places where a metagame level of table talk can be really helpful, especially with new players (or those adapted to different GMing styles). Some of this is just repeating players plans back to them in ways that suggest their stupidity, which here would be "You're planning on wandering off in a random direction hoping to find the goblins before a suspected imminent attack?". Some of this is providing encouragement to act, by providing example options when they're freezing up, preferably making sure you get a lot of them and make a point of it being an incomplete list. Both of these should generally be toned down once players start getting the hang of things.


But the world should not retroactively change when PCs do stuff you didn't anticipate. If the plot always comes to the PCs whatever they do that makes the players' decisions quite meaningless.

Sure, some people do this strange pure improv style where nothing really matters and all focus is on the events as they unfold on the table and in this very moment. But i really really would neither play nor GM that kind of game.
A pure improv style doesn't necessitate retroactive changes, or nothing really mattering. On top of that plot of some sort coming to the PCs doesn't mean the players' decisions are meaningless, particularly as an improv style by definition doesn't have a planned out plot that can come to them and thus the action shape of that plot essentially has to be based on player decisions.

[Koo Rehtorb]

I think in the end I'd say, don't bring the PCs to the adventure, bring an adventure to the PCs. If they leave town at the wrong moment then suddenly the adventure isn't about protecting the town any more, they're failed at that. Now maybe the adventure is about tracking down the goblin raiding party and rescuing the goblin captives once they realize they've made a terrible mistake. Don't bend reality to match what the PCs do, just get good at making whatever the PCs decide to do interesting.

[Haldir]

Your players plan was garbage, and they deserved to be punished for it. That being said, you should have improvised an NPC or called for some kind of check to help them not have such a garbage plan.

"Everyone roll INT" Anyone higher than 8 realizes "Oh, sh**, we should have scouting parties because that's like the basics of warfare!"

You were right to let them face the consequences of their choices, but you neither planned nor improvised properly to give them the tools to succeed.

Planning properly would have included some way to keep them from sitting around uselessly for two days- someone who could provide them with an action plan if they didn't come up with one. Or perhaps would have included some method to keep them in touch with the town when they left.

Improvising properly could have included any number of things others have mentioned.

If I had to assign blame, I'd say everyone involved screwed the pooch.

[Man_Over_Game]

Give hints. If it was an obvious mistake, it was their fault. If it wasn't obvious, it was yours.

You can improv all you want, but you're still going to make mistakes. The main issue here is that DnD is more of a game of choice vs. chance. More Chess than Battleships.

The game is fun when you can blame a problem on your own faults. You decided not to take Feather Fall, you blew too many spells early on, you jumped ahead into a crowd of badguys; these can end a character, but you know what you could have done to prevented it.

In this case, if there weren't apt enough clues available to the players as to the correct choice of action that scaled with the risk of failure, then that was your bad. Otherwise, if those clues were available (like with possible scouting, messengers, a pattern of the direction the goblins were seen, etc) and they ignored those clues, then they made a fatal error.

But from the sound of it, 2 days went by with no clues, so they took the "hint" and started playing the game. You can be as accurate as you want for determining how the world works, but DnD is still a multiplayer game, one that people prefer be dictated by skill over random chance.

[1of3]

Have a plan or do improv?

This is not the issue. The problem was: How would your players know how long to wait? How would they know where to look for the goblins? - You can plan all you want, but to your fellow players that doesn't matter unless you communicate what you are doing. It doesn't matter if you pulled that invasion out of your... brain, of if you had an exacting plan, if your folks can't tell the difference. Your problem is not the content but the presentation.

[Cluedrew]

Because you're usually fun / sane / whatever to discuss with, and you seem to enjoy these metagame concerns, I'll throw these half-thoughts at you, and see if you can take them somewhere meaningful. Hmmm... apparently, I'm writing at least half of this as though I'm talking to the OP, so my style is random and confusing. So, um, since it's hard to pretend that I'm doing less telling and more asking, maybe pretend that I'm asking you to edit this for sanity before I post it? (I think you get the idea)That is high praise in today's world. And quite the responsibility too. Well {rolls shoulders} let me see what I can do...

As an editor I will pull out: What is the point of your post? Or the main point(s) your post. Is this "layers" classification something you want to hammer out or is it just a tool for getting at some other points? Actually everything beyond this point is really based on guesses about that answer... or just more questions.

On Layers: From what I can tell we have the following: planned events, planned facts, planned plans (I say this is a subset of planned facts, the facts are just what people are planning), planned information and planned responses (which might just be a type of planned event). Of the non-redundant ones here is how I read each:

Planned Events: Things that are planned to happen but haven't happened yet. From anyone's perspective the difference between a planned event and a planned reaction is who will be stating that the event occurred, you or someone else. That thin divide is why I combined them, although maybe that is an important distinction.
Planned Facts: Things about the world or characters in it that are true but have not been revealed yet. Hence, in a tree falling in the forest kind of way, they are subject to change without notice. Hin.
Planned Information: Things you plan to reveal, as well as when and how you plan to reveal them. The builds off of planned facts, but also brings in a lot of game-concerns about, as an example, planned content (which would be "where are the planned facts").
That might be a useful system... but first what exactly are we talking about?

The other point I will address is the one that I feel has the best chance of being your main point.

IMO, the safest thing to change - without risking Railroading, or Quantum Ogres, or inconsistencies - is the information you give. Now, whether that's the information you give the PCs, or the information you give the players depends a bit on your style, and why you believe that they aren't taking what you believe would be a more fun path for them.

How open you are to metagame communication will influence the odds that your beliefs about their fun and their reasoning are correct.Yes. A quick "but you know the [towns raided by the] goblins are south, why go north" may have rescued this entire adventure. Another thing that may have helped is (going off some other posts) getting rid of the accidental bit of information that the adventure is somewhere else.

If this is your main point, I think we could hear more about the types of information that could used (we seem to have missing in-world and out-of-world facts in this example) and how to communicate it. For the record I think that saying "Hey guys, [thing]" is a fine way to inform the players about [thing], especially when the thing is out-of-world or is something characters know, but the players forgot.

And then there is knowing when the piece of information did not get across. Rule of thumb, if people do something that doesn't make sense, maybe they missed something.

OK hope that helps. I ended up adding some stuff, but maybe that will add some useful perspective.

[_Zoot_]

I think in the end I'd say, don't bring the PCs to the adventure, bring an adventure to the PCs. If they leave town at the wrong moment then suddenly the adventure isn't about protecting the town any more, they're failed at that. Now maybe the adventure is about tracking down the goblin raiding party and rescuing the goblin captives once they realize they've made a terrible mistake. Don't bend reality to match what the PCs do, just get good at making whatever the PCs decide to do interesting.

I like this approach, when I DM I make sure I know what my NPC's are planning, and unless the PC's do something, how those plans will go. If the PC's weren't there to help defend the town, it will fall to the Goblins. That doesn't mean that there's no adventure, it just means that there is a different one. Maybe some of the milita fought their way free, maybe there were survivers hiding among the ruins that can point them in the right direction, maybe it's time to go all 'three hunters' from LotR and track the Goblin war party and either rescue the villigers, or avenge them!

Either way, I'd have played it at least a bit like OP did, in that I'd know when and how the attack would come about, and would have changed it depending on what the PC's did.

[Florian]

Plan vs Improv

That's actually not the issue here.

Roughly speaking, we have three main directions when it comes to playing styles:
- Simulation
- Action game
- Story game

With direction, I mean that this is the main focus of concern that will dictate how the rules are used, how content is used, the basis for pacing, flow of information and how the players are supposed to have their characters act and so on.

It´s important that this should be communicated between all participants and cleared up, else a mismatch happens and at least one side of the table will be pretty unhappy. I say this because it really ready like this is what happened on your table, you created a simulation and your players want an action game type of D&D experience instead. Neither side is right or wrong here, but that doesn't have anything to do with "improv" at all.

[Pippa the Pixie]

So, how could the PCs have known when the date of the attack would be? How could the PCs have known where the goblins were gathering? How could the players have made use of the agency you have them by not just skipping straight to the attack?

Answer these questions, more for yourself than for us or your players, to see what level of agency and what level of difficulty that scenario entailed.

Well, I did have a couple ways for them to learn of the attack date: there is a spy in the town, a double agent to plays both sides..naturally his goblin ally told him. There is the goblin spy, disguised as a halfling fishing in the river just south of town. and the five goblin advance raiders east of the town know too.

But a big part of the problem was the players did not want to explore the town or talk to any NPC. They were just set on doing the attack.


Another layer is planned plans. The goblins planned to attack in 3 days, when their reinforcements (worg riders) arrived. OK, what if the PCs delay those reinforcements? Will the goblins stick to their timetable, or reevaluate the scenario? What if the PCs eliminate the worg riders? Flood the battlefield? Summon visible reinforcements? Will the attack go off in the days, as planned, no matter what? Why / why not?

There are more forces. The goblin force spread out to attack all the small villages. I though this would have been a good idea myself, but the players wanted to stick with the fight the whole force at once idea.



Another two that I'll mention together are planned information, and planned PC responses. When creating the scenario, you planned to tell the players X, and expected that it would be a fun game with them responding with Y or Z. But what if they don't? This is where things get really tricky.

They might be the first players I've met that did not seek out any information about anything.



IMO, the safest thing to change - without risking Railroading, or Quantum Ogres, or inconsistencies - is the information you give. Now, whether that's the information you give the PCs, or the information you give the players depends a bit on your style, and why you believe that they aren't taking what you believe would be a more fun path for them.

That is the tricky part though? If I just say their are goblins at spot x, that is the same as having the goblins be whereever they are, right?

How open you are to metagame communication will influence the odds that your beliefs about their fun and their reasoning are correct.



** Oh, and why is it that the Worg Riders, presumably the fastest troops, are the last to the party?

They were simply coming the farthest away.


I think in the end I'd say, don't bring the PCs to the adventure, bring an adventure to the PCs.

Hummm...food for thought here.


Your players plan was garbage, and they deserved to be punished for it.

I did not like it....but really I don't often see such bad plans. I was thinking they had something up their sleeve....but they did not. Even when they decided to leave town I was thinking they might want to patrol around the town or something.


A quick "but you know the [towns raided by the] goblins are south, why go north" may have rescued this entire adventure.

I try to avoid asking questions like this, is that wrong? I feel players get the wrong idea from DM questions. I want to give answers, not ask questions.

[Knaight]

I did not like it....but really I don't often see such bad plans. I was thinking they had something up their sleeve....but they did not. Even when they decided to leave town I was thinking they might want to patrol around the town or something.
...
I try to avoid asking questions like this, is that wrong? I feel players get the wrong idea from DM questions. I want to give answers, not ask questions.
Both of these sound like communication issues - really bad plans often come from people having different understandings of the situation, which is only exacerbated when the GM won't ask any questions to try and rejoin these understandings. Remember that the characters have full sensory perception of the world in its details, and the players are getting a single descriptive stream and nothing else - there's a lot of room for critical information to be lost, and a second pass can help here.

[Astofel]

To me this isn't a question of whether to plan ahead or improvise, but a question of how much information the players got from you. Something as simple as 'Farmer John saw a band of goblins approaching from the south. He guessed they were a week's march away from here. That was four days ago,' from an NPC when the PCs arrived would have solved the issue. You said that your players weren't interested in talking to NPCs, but you have to remember that D&D NPCs are not video game NPCs: they don't just stand around with exclamation points over their heads waiting for the players to come to them. Town leaders will likely be asking the PCs about their plans, and wanting to provide information so the plans are as well-informed as possible.

Even if the players couldn't know when the goblins were planning to attack, if I was running and they told me they wanted to wait for the attack to come to them my response would be "all right, how long are you willing to wait for, and what will you be doing in the meantime? How are you preparing the village for the attack?" And then, rather than just saying 'the day passes uneventfully', I'd have a bunch of mini-events in the days leading up to the event. Maybe on day one the local cowardly barkeep is caught trying to flee the town. On day two the PCs could have to deal with an upset villager who doesn't like that a bunch of strangers from who-knows-where have shown up and are basically running the place. Having things like this happen makes the players feel like they're supposed to be there, while 'nothing happens, what do you do next?' makes them feel like they're doing the wrong thing.

I actually had a similar situation myself in my game a while ago. My players had managed to seize a village from a hostile force, and had found out that the villain was planning to do 'something' on a particular (un)holy day. Initially they wanted to hunker down and wait for the bad guy to come to them, and while they did that I had a few events happen; a villager had a dispute with the paladin about the paladin's unpopular deity, and the barbarian got to train some villagers who wanted to fight like he does. The players were hunkering down because they thought the villain's plans involved retaliating against them, so I had their scouts come back with information that, in fact, the villain was planning to do whatever it is he's planning long before the PCs were on the scene. That made them have an 'oh damn' moment so they got together and headed out to beat up the villain before the day he was preparing for came around. Good thing, too, because if they'd remained in place the villain's plan would have made things much harder for them.

[Aneurin]

So, if it helps any, I quite like the sound of this set-up. Feverishly building defenses, trying to guess if they have time to spend on special projects and, above all, the tension ratcheting up every hour the goblins don't appear.

It sounds pretty awesome.

I just don't think your players quite bought into it - or, maybe, didn't see it was there at all. Which isn't necessarily your fault, or theirs. People do just misunderstand things sometimes, and depending on what your players are used to, the idea of dramatic tension or doing much of anything other than killing things and taking their stuff could be entirely alien to them. Hence they just wander off and start looking for things to kill and loot.

I also think that your time line and fixed locations were fine, and would do the same thing.


If there's a mistake you made here, it's probably not clearly telegraphing that the goblins weren't to the north, and making it clear that if they kept going they were going to be too far from the village to help if the goblins attacked. Tell them, clearly, there's no sign of the goblins in the direction they've chosen - if you don't want to tell them that directly OOC (and there's nothing wrong with that), have them find a farmstead that's untouched and the farmer tells them that there's been no sign in these parts. Or there is a sign of the goblins - forage parties and small bands that have obviously skirted the village and gone south.

What's obvious to you isn't necessarily obvious to the players. Don't be afraid to hit them over the head with it if it becomes apparent they've missed something. And if you're not sure what they're up to, always, always double check they're not working on flawed information.

I also think you could have done more to get them involved in building the defenses - if they're supposed to be in charge, then have people come to them with questions. We can make more spears, but that means leaving the village to cut spear shafts from the woods and there might be goblins, is it worth the risk? The blacksmith needs more coal, but going to get more will take several days and require an armed guard for the carts, should they go? Should they try and dig a defensive ditch? Barricade the streets? Do they have the people available to finish those tasks in time, and if not, where should they focus their efforts? What do they do about the crops and livestock in the fields?

Ask, challenge, make them think and get them involved. I might not work - heck, it might be exactly what you did - but at least you tried, and you'll know the biggest problem was just that they didn't care for the set up you presented them. Which is a crying shame.

[Cluedrew]

I try to avoid asking questions like this, is that wrong? I feel players get the wrong idea from DM questions. I want to give answers, not ask questions.Why do you avoid them? Or why do you feel players- get the wrong idea from GM questions?

I use them because knowing what someone else knows is pretty important to giving them information. It keeps you from uselessly repeating large swaths of information or leaving gaps in important background. And if you are the one on the learning side, it is really hard to ask the right questions. It is hard to know what you don't know, because you don't know it.

For instance I was able to whip off my reasons for these questions because they are familiar to me. On the other hand my commentary on your reasons amounts to rewriting your statements with question marks at the end. Because that is all the information I have right now.

[Haldir]

I try to avoid asking questions like this, is that wrong? I feel players get the wrong idea from DM questions. I want to give answers, not ask questions.

Undeniably yes. It is your job to give them important context and help them know what kind of decisions need to made to successfully navigate your adventures. Giving them agency does not include simply watching them fail without making an effort to direct or aid them in their goals. If you don't ask them questions about their thinking or asking them important questions about their actions, you are denying them important context that their characters would readily be able to do.

As I said, they definitely had a horrible plan, but you completely and totally failed to properly direct or contextualize their actions. Failing to do so was probably a form of tacit consent for their horrible actions.

This is not a question of planning or improv, this is a question of your willingness as a DM to utilize both properly.

[Thrudd]

Well, I did have a couple ways for them to learn of the attack date: there is a spy in the town, a double agent to plays both sides..naturally his goblin ally told him. There is the goblin spy, disguised as a halfling fishing in the river just south of town. and the five goblin advance raiders east of the town know too.

But a big part of the problem was the players did not want to explore the town or talk to any NPC. They were just set on doing the attack.

They might be the first players I've met that did not seek out any information about anything.

That is the tricky part though? If I just say their are goblins at spot x, that is the same as having the goblins be whereever they are, right?

How open you are to metagame communication will influence the odds that your beliefs about their fun and their reasoning are correct.

I did not like it....but really I don't often see such bad plans. I was thinking they had something up their sleeve....but they did not. Even when they decided to leave town I was thinking they might want to patrol around the town or something.


Now that you know these players didn't understand how the game works, you will need to prompt them. You need to help them learn how to play D&D, and that will require out of character communication from you.
Not just give them answers, but prompt them to ask questions and seek the answers with their characters.

Also, unless there is some prompt or some motive for doing so, there's no reason to expect them to wander around talking to everyone in town. So there was a disguised goblin fishing south of town? Did they have any clues that there were spies they should be looking for? Even if they saw him, why would they stop to have a conversation with a random fishing guy, unless there was something specific they were looking for?

In the scenario you described, you could have prompted them by asking things like:
"How will you all prepare for the attack? Do you know the size of the force or where it's coming from?"
Or, have an NPC or two approach them, since I'm assuming it was obvious that they were there to help defend the town- who could have offered a rumor about spies or tell them that there are shady people about, or otherwise given them the idea that they need to gather info about the invading force.

There was clearly not enough or clear enough information about the scenario to prompt them toward useful action. Even if other players in the past might have been more proactive or made logical use of less information, these guys will need more guidance, at first. They might think that the game is just a series of combats that happen to their characters. Even if you need to speak to them out of character, you need to encourage the right type of thinking.

[Rhedyn]

Sounds like your players were invested but do not know how to play yet or are too use to story/plot protection.

I once killed half a party because they attack the Tarrasque. This killed that campaign and some players were upset that their story ended and I responded that I wouldn't care if my hero completed their personal struggle if failure wasn't an option. So that is the kind of game I run. Failure is always an option.

That won't always work with every group. It sounds to me that your players need an easier campaign to get warmed up before they start thinking.

[Quertus]

So, Cluedrew gave me an awesome reply (one of 2 I've gotten in the past week) but I've been battling migraines, and haven't felt up to giving the type of response something that detailed deserves. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Until then, back to the OP.

First and foremost, your players are wrong - this is not an issue of improv being the "one right way", and planning being wrong.

There is, however, an issue of a right and a wrong way to implement any given style.

There was a thread on these forums about the role of the GM. My stance is that anyone can host, anyone can handle rules adjudication, anyone can handle dealing with problem players - up to calling the police if necessary. But only the GM can serve as the eyes and ears of the characters, only the GM knows what is going on in the game world and can serve as the interface between the players, their PCs, and the game world.

It is that reasonability that the GM must shoulder alone, and that responsibility that you are shirking when you say, "I try to avoid asking questions like <but you know the [towns raided by the] goblins are south, why go north>, is that wrong? I feel players get the wrong idea from DM questions. I want to give answers, not ask questions". The GM is, IMO, uniquely positioned to be the only one to tell players what their characters perceive the world, the one responsible for distilling the input of a while party full of characters' senses and instincts into brief, actionable items, and who can notice when players' statements don't seem to match what they would believe to be reasonable, can inquire as to whether something has been misunderstood, and fix the disconnect.

So, high level, there's nothing wrong with a "Planning" style. But there are plenty of Playgrounders who will be more than happy to give you critiques of various levels of usefulness on your particular implementation of that style.

My advise? Change your focus to asking about the specifics of your style - perhaps in this thread, perhaps in a new one. Also, consider telegraphing your style to your players, if your area has as table-flip indoctrination of "Improv or BadWrongFun".

[ImNotTrevor]

I have to agree with Quertus. The problem has been misdiagnosed.

The issue appears to be that you don't want to ask leading questions. Well enough.
But your players' actions fully indicated they had too-little information. When my players do something that is blatantly the opposite of a good idea, I need to stop and make sure we're all on the same page. More often than not, they aren't idiots and I just described badly or they missed a single crucial word among the deluge of description.

(Which, by the way, when it comes to describing scenes it is often better to describe like Hemingway rather than Tolkien. Just the important bits plus a light sprinkling of flavor.)

YOU should not have a problem telling the players things their characters would reasonably know. If this is their home town, they know who the town priest is. They know who the blacksmith's boy is. They know the rumor that Old Man Bjern cut up his wife with a hatchet and hid her in his taxidermied bear. They also know that's just a story he spreads to keep the children away.

If they live in this town or have a basic understanding of the local geography, they know what way to go if they want to see the ruined towns. It's ok to remind them that their characters would know all the attacked towns were South of here, not North.

Also just skip time if nothing meaningful is going to happen in that time. Don't jerk your players around like that. Just go to the time when things are happening, and signal escalation in small ways:

"Last night, a town guard claimed to see a goblin scout."
"We haven't heard from Farmer Tom down south since yesterday."
"Young Bill could hear howling as the sun rose in the distance."
"You see lines of smoke from the goblin camp, and hear their warchants on the wind during the night."

That's a lot more tension-building and indicative of a "tense calm before the storm" than saying:
"Nothing happens on day 2. What do you do?"


If all the above still fails to help them make good decisions, run a megadungeon and populate it with whatever comes up when you google "puzzles for toddlers."

[LordCdrMilitant]

I have my enemies written out, and I know what their objectives and methodologies are.

That way, I can determine what the enemies should do in reaction to the players, or what advances they should make if the player do nothing.



However, that doesn't seem to be the problem:
The problem seems to be pacing and information.

First off, I am inferring, based on the players actions, that they organized their defenses and then waited. More specifically, they waited one day too long and nothing happened. If nothing is happening and there's no signalling that the battle is coming, you assume that you should be doing something, or you do something because you're bored of waiting. If you don't want to disrupt the timeline, an entirely viable course of action is, one the players have organized their defense, to say "after several days of tense waiting, your scouts report the Goblin army moving over the fields and into range. *being siege*"

Second, it seems that information was lacking. Given their actions, I'm an inferring that they were given no real intelligence on the enemy force's actions, position, and capability. If you wait around and nothing happens, that telegraphs to the players that waiting around is the wrong course of action. While they're waiting, how long they need to wait at the very least should be telegraphed. Smoke on the horizon, refugees from previous battles, scouts reporting on enemy movement, etc. are all good indicators to the party that they're doing the right thing, and provide information to allow them to make informed offensive decisions.

To the party, it sounds like they left the railroad and got smacked for it, which is doubly frustrating because they couldn't see where the railroad went so they didn't even intend to leave it. "Bad things happened because we didn't do what the GM wanted, but the GM didn't tell us what she wanted."



Improvisation definitely would have helped, and presented many opportunities for a fun game here.
For example, if the party ventures north, they can encounter a group of goblins trying to encircle their position and cut their road to resupply in advance of the siege. Or they find that the goblin army bypassed their prepared strongpoint, and that they're now surrounded and under siege.

Alternatively, they return, and find their town under siege. The defenses they prepared held, but only barely, and now the goblins are preparing for the second assault, and they arrived just in time to attack from the rear, or bolster the failing defense.

It may be useful to listen to your players conversations. If they think the enemy's done something [IE: is trying to outflank them, or has a spy in their midst] and act against it, even if you didn't plan on it, sometimes its useful to make the enemy have done just that. It makes the players feel clever, their efforts not wasted, and may lead to an exciting encounter.

[Earthwalker]

To reiterate what a lot have already said this isn’t about improve v planning its about handling of information. I can’t see anything wrong with what the OP has done, and with experienced players this most likely would have gone differently.
I would change the entire starting concept for new players to try to help them understand what they can do and what is being asked of them….

As you walk into the main room of the town call you see Durus bend over a table the mayors chain hangs loosely around his neck banging against the table. On the table is a map of DayDale (Player handout 1) as well as several wooden figures representing the townsfolk or goblin units. Durus mumbles to himself as his checks against a list of names (player handout 2) and moves figures around the map. As he hears you approach he looks up. You have never seen your old friend look more tired.
He smiles in relief as he sees you “Thank the gods you have come; I need your help. The sheriff is off in the war with the main force of our militia. The true Mayor is off with them and the head priest. We are all that is left…” He pauses looking at your faces “I should explain… a goblin war band is headed our way. I don’t know how long before they get here but I do know it will be soon.” Durus looks towards the fighterist character “You were always more gifted than me with this kind of thing. I need all your help, I haven’t a clue where to even start….”


The players have a nice map of the town.
The players have a simple list of NPCs in the city with some notes by Durus with his thoughts (as a way to give hints)
2 Capenters – Could possibly get barriers build. Funnel goblins into kill areas.
2 game wardens – Great with bow, can use as scouts? Should I risk losing them?
1 Blacksmith – currently under a sleeping curse (needs potion from witch of the woods) – Do I send a scout to get this, or two. What happens if I lose them ?
3 Merchants – Need to check if they have anything to help.
20 people capable of fighting – Only improvised weapons ?? Where can I get more ?
Lay Preist - trained in healing cant cast spells.
Etc etc

Hopefully Durus will be a help to the characters. He cares about the town and wants to save it, he is in over his head and needs help. He will do as the PCs say and help them arrange defenses. Talk over plans and provide a way for the GM to ask questions of the PCs.

[Quertus]

@Cluedrew - Thanks! In short, I was combining trying to create a nomenclature and give advice. I think your comments helped me see where I was going. Whether this has any further value or not depends largely on where the OP goes from here.


That is high praise in today's world. And quite the responsibility too. Well {rolls shoulders} let me see what I can do...


As an editor I will pull out: What is the point of your post? Or the main point(s) your post. Is this "layers" classification something you want to hammer out or is it just a tool for getting at some other points? Actually everything beyond this point is really based on guesses about that answer... or just more questions.

Good call. At the time, I wasn't sure where I was going. I think that it felt to me like there was some confusion regarding what "planned vs improv" meant, because different people were hitting it at different layers maybe? Really, I think my later post told the OP what they most needed to hear, so hashing out the "layers" idea will probably either be academic, or maybe an aid to further communication.


On Layers: From what I can tell we have the following: planned events, planned facts, planned plans (I say this is a subset of planned facts, the facts are just what people are planning), planned information and planned responses (which might just be a type of planned event). Of the non-redundant ones here is how I read each:

Planned Events: Things that are planned to happen but haven't happened yet. From anyone's perspective the difference between a planned event and a planned reaction is who will be stating that the event occurred, you or someone else. That thin divide is why I combined them, although maybe that is an important distinction.
Planned Facts: Things about the world or characters in it that are true but have not been revealed yet. Hence, in a tree falling in the forest kind of way, they are subject to change without notice. Hin.
Planned Information: Things you plan to reveal, as well as when and how you plan to reveal them. The builds off of planned facts, but also brings in a lot of game-concerns about, as an example, planned content (which would be "where are the planned facts").
That might be a useful system... but first what exactly are we talking about?

So, I don't generally like to GM. When I do GM, I hate looking at an encounter, and knowing exactly what will happen. I prefer to generally have a guess that maybe the PCs will do one of 4-10 different things, and sometime be wrong. My favorite moments are the "stump the GM" moments, where I have to stop and figure out how to deal with the players' plans. So, while there's this gear grinding and smell of smoke when players do something completely outside anything I've planned, "unplanned responses", and the subsequent improv I have to do after that, are something I enjoy.

On a related note, this is why my least favorite PC in combat (from a great player) was a grapple monk, who I knew, every combat, exactly what he would do. Out of combat, however, he had a unique perspective, that often stumped the NPCs, so it kinda made up for it.

Anyway, that's one reason why I have "planned events" and "planned responses" separated out - because of the value of planned vs unplanned vs stump the GM responses, to me.

But perhaps there's little difference between the "this is what would happen if the PC's didn't exist"-style of Planned Event, where you adjust what actually happens based on how the PCs manipulate the world, and how much you plan for the PCs responses. Two sides of the same coin, perhaps?

---

Planned facts - I generally discuss as though I'm a huge fan of never changing your planned facts. The reason for this is, telling a twisted web of lies, and getting them all consistent, is hard. Most people, most GMs lack the appropriate skills. It's oh so much easier to just tell the truth. And, if it's easier, it eats less of the GM's precious headspace. So don't tell lies. Just present the world as it is.

Now, that having been said, sometimes, the players think of something that the GM didn't, and the GM decides, huh, yeah, I should retroactively add that in.

So perhaps the GM just had 2 groups of goblins - the ones in the ruins, and the worg riders 3 days out. But then the PCs start talking about goblin scouts. It is, IMO, fine (for most GMs, at least) to say, huh, you know, it would be reasonable for the goblins in the ruins to send out scouts, and it doesn't contradict anything I've said, so, sure, I'll add some scouts in because it enhances the believeability of the world. OTOH, it's not OK if they do it because it helps/hurts the PCs. As long as their motives are pure (ie, pure Simulationist), it's fine.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :smallwink:

Oh, right, relevant to this thread - yes, the GM/OP could have just randomly changed the facts of the game, like the players apparently wanted. Yes, that would have resulted in them engaging "the game". But I think Koo said it best (and I'll paraphrase, perhaps poorly, here) - give them a game, not the game (I hope that's true to Koo's intent).

So, um, I think that, like me, the GM/OP wants the game to stay true at this layer, and I think my point is that one can absolutely run a successful game while keeping facts Planned. However, to do so, one may need to improv at other layers if the players behave in ways that you did not expect.

Which is not entirely unlike what I eventually said. However, I think that someone more coherent than me could have used the layers concept to explain that much more clearly and concisely than this rambling reply. :smallredface:

---

Planned Information is the layer where the Rule of Three (did someone rename that?) comes up. That is, if you're going to plan how to give players information, the "best practices" way is to plan three sources for any given bit of information, and three bits of information that lead to any desired action/conclusion. I'm not saying this well.

Anyway, point is (well, relevant to this thread, at least), that the OP only planned one style of information, as evidenced by reading between the lines of these excerpts: "but the players never even looked", "But a big part of the problem was the players did not want to explore the town or talk to any NPC."

Some of this information could easily still have been imparted to even the most antisocial of characters - from knowledge they had before the start of the session (like, how Townsville and Thorpville and Villeville a) had all been sacked by goblins, and b) were all to the South, or a map of the area, that includes both the town and the ruins (and as much other "red herring" information as appropriate for your style)), or from overhearing NPCs talking to one another ("I hear that the goblins have wolves with them, but I've not seen or heard anything with 4 legs around here", or even, "I can smell the goblins from here - why haven't they attacked yet?"), even if the PCs are somehow so scary that the NPCs don't approach them directly.

This is where I advise GMs who care about the adventure (ie, unlike me or Koo) to Improvise their delivery - to find a way to make sure that the required information (or, at the very least, hints that the information is out there, and that maybe the PCs should look for it) makes it to the PCs, no matter what they do.


The other point I will address is the one that I feel has the best chance of being your main point.
Yes. A quick "but you know the [towns raided by the] goblins are south, why go north" may have rescued this entire adventure. Another thing that may have helped is (going off some other posts) getting rid of the accidental bit of information that the adventure is somewhere else.

If this is your main point, I think we could hear more about the types of information that could used (we seem to have missing in-world and out-of-world facts in this example) and how to communicate it. For the record I think that saying "Hey guys, [thing]" is a fine way to inform the players about [thing], especially when the thing is out-of-world or is something characters know, but the players forgot.

And then there is knowing when the piece of information did not get across. Rule of thumb, if people do something that doesn't make sense, maybe they missed something.

OK hope that helps. I ended up adding some stuff, but maybe that will add some useful perspective.

Yeah, I think you've hit on what my main point would be, if what I wrote were taken as having a point (since it could also be taken as a guide to communication about this issue - my "layer (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html)" discussion was, I suppose, hitting this discussion at several layers (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html)). That bolded bit is, I believe, quite related, and is, itself, looking at the issue at a different layer (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html) than my "layers (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html)" explanation. So, you know, since yours is more concise, if it gets people to the same place, use that.

[Pippa the Pixie]

Why do you avoid them? Or why do you feel players- get the wrong idea from GM questions?

As soon as the DM asks a question to a player like "Are you sure you want to do that?", it's a huge red flag to the player that they should not do it. If a player is doing something within the rules and fine, the DM has no questions. But anything else, like crazy stuff, and the DM asks a lot of questions.


If you don't ask them questions about their thinking or asking them important questions about their actions, you are denying them important context that their characters would readily be able to do.


I think that should work both ways, don't just put it all on the DM.


Update Game two went much better. I was ready to go with the idea of hunting down the goblin raiders, but all the players just wanted to do an Do Over. I'm not a fan of that, but it's what the players wanted.

So same adventure. I did not even change the three days before the goblin attack...but, of course, the players did not know that. The players were much more open to talking to the NPCs and trying to learn more about the town and area. They fortified the town a bit, but never considered the idea of just sitting their and waiting for the goblins to attack. They found the spy and the advanced raiders, and when right for the goblin army. They moved around in circles using gurella(sp?) warfare against the larger force. We left off where they had learned of the worg riders, and decided to go intercept them.

I'm not really sure what changed. The only thing I did a bit differently was to have NPC just say stuff without being asked directly.

[Astofel]

I'm not really sure what changed. The only thing I did a bit differently was to have NPC just say stuff without being asked directly.

Bingo. It might not feel like much to a DM, but there is a huge difference between being dumped in a city as a player and told go without much to actually go on, and being dumped in a city where you meet an NPC who can tell you what's going on and give their own thoughts and opinions about how the party could achieve their goal.

[Pauly]

I'm not really sure what changed. The only thing I did a bit differently was to have NPC just say stuff without being asked directly.

You mean that their childhood friends, people they’ve known all their lives and are now trusting everything they have to the party have finally decided to speak up?

The party have lived all their lives in Daydale. They would know when smoke from cooking fires is coming from the wrong direction. They would notice birds and animals being flushed out by activity. They would know that person [X] is completely untrustworthy. They would think it strange no one has come down the path from [next village] for 2 days.

What you’ve done is give them the information that would have been available to them in a realistic manner. Maybe if they were an unknown bunch of dangerous strangers the townsfolk could have been shy, but this party are people the townsfolk can and should be talking to.

[Mordaedil]

It sounds to me like your players also spent the time in between sessions reflecting on what they did wrong as well and decided to approach the game slightly differently.

And yes, having the NPC's be a bit more proactive does help the players out a lot, it's the difference between navigating the sea with no cloud cover and having the stars to navigate by. If the NPC's aren't taking initative, it's a clouded sky, but by having them approach the players, tiny gaps in the cloud cover can be spotted and the more experienced they are at navigating, the faster they'll be able to steer accordingly. Just be aware you don't need to be a clear sky, most players still appreciate some clouds for the challenge (also prevents the game from feeling like it is on rails)

[Pelle]

I'm not really sure what changed. The only thing I did a bit differently was to have NPC just say stuff without being asked directly.

I think the fact that you now have actually informed them in advance that you run a different playstyle than they initially expected might be a small factor as well.

[Knaight]

I'm not really sure what changed. The only thing I did a bit differently was to have NPC just say stuff without being asked directly.

That's a pretty critical difference right there, which is why about half the thread before this post was people saying that the NPCs should have been more proactive. You didn't withhold information they should have, and that made the difference.

[MrSandman]

As soon as the DM asks a question to a player like "Are you sure you want to do that?", it's a huge red flag to the player that they should not do it. If a player is doing something within the rules and fine, the DM has no questions. But anything else, like crazy stuff, and the DM asks a lot of questions.


There's other questions that you can ask besides "Are you sure you want to do that?" Things like "Why are you doing this?" or "What's the logic behind that action?" tend to communicate that you're not on the same page rather than they are about to do something they shouldn't. Even "Are you aware of this?" doesn't immediately tell the players that you want them to do something different (unless you always use it to direct them to one clear, specific action).

[Knaight]

There's other questions that you can ask besides "Are you sure you want to do that?" Things like "Why are you doing this?" or "What's the logic behind that action?" tend to communicate that you're not on the same page rather than they are about to do something they shouldn't. Even "Are you aware of this?" doesn't immediately tell the players that you want them to do something different (unless you always use it to direct them to one clear, specific action).
I get a lot of mileage out of "what is the goal here?" and "what are you actually trying to do?", which lets you contextualize their action in the results they're hoping to achieve with it.

[Koo Rehtorb]

I get a lot of mileage out of "what is the goal here?" and "what are you actually trying to do?", which lets you contextualize their action in the results they're hoping to achieve with it.

God yes. This is practically mandatory for GMs everywhere, imo.

[Haldir]

I think that should work both ways, don't just put it all on the DM.


My apologies if you think I was implying otherwise. The response you quoted was a direct answer to the question "am I wrong for not asking questions?"

It's just a fact of the hobby that responsibility for making a functional game rests on the DM. The posters above me have given you some great suggestions of questions you absolutely must be asking.

My only addition would be a slight variation on MrSandman's suggestion of "What are you trying to do?"

If your players aren't taking initiative, you should outline their stated goals again and ask "What can your character do to achieve X?" Or "What are you gonna do to achieve X?"

If you've outlined goals adequately by bringing the world to life, this is not a leading question- It's the Socratic Method of D&D where you're prompting actions out of your players.

[RazorChain]

I think in the end I'd say, don't bring the PCs to the adventure, bring an adventure to the PCs. If they leave town at the wrong moment then suddenly the adventure isn't about protecting the town any more, they're failed at that. Now maybe the adventure is about tracking down the goblin raiding party and rescuing the goblin captives once they realize they've made a terrible mistake. Don't bend reality to match what the PCs do, just get good at making whatever the PCs decide to do interesting.

This is probably one of the best advices.


I usually populate the world with NPC's with an agenda and their plots don't revolve around the PC's unless the PC's choose to get involved.

If the PC's want to ignore evertything and tell me they want to go dungeon crawling then that's what happens.

But in case of the OP this may be about presentation or giving the PC's enough information. In either case heading out for days in one direction was monumentally stupid on the PC's part if they wanted to protect the town. Maybe they just have to be weaned off their computer game expectations that everything exists in stasis while they are gone.

[Pleh]

Maybe they just have to be weaned off their computer game expectations that everything exists in stasis while they are gone.

That seems unfair. Based on the OP, it seems more like they expected Quantum Adventure, where something would happen because they went that way.

They clearly demonstrated that they were uncomfortable being gone so long, thus proving they were not expecting the town to be static while they were gone.

Rather, it seems obvious they interpreted the, "two days pass uneventfully" as a prompt to be more proactive, thus making them feel yanked around when they only had to wait one more day.

For a mindset that expects the DM to bring the adventure to the heroes, hearing that nothing is happening HERE feels like a suggestion to go elsewhere. Lacking any other input, they picked a direction.

The fault can't be entirely theirs.

[Knaight]

But in case of the OP this may be about presentation or giving the PC's enough information. In either case heading out for days in one direction was monumentally stupid on the PC's part if they wanted to protect the town. Maybe they just have to be weaned off their computer game expectations that everything exists in stasis while they are gone.

On the other hand everything seemed to be existing in stasis while they were still there, which reinforces that expectation.

[Darth Ultron]

That seems unfair. Based on the OP, it seems more like they expected Quantum Adventure, where something would happen because they went that way.


I find this all too common, and have for years. Lots of players are used to the Improv Quantum Adventure: The DM just makes up random stuff right in front of the PCs no matter where they go or what they do.

After all, if you don't do that or have a Planned Adventure game....the game goes nowhere, just like the OP's did.

[Pleh]

I find this all too common, and have for years. Lots of players are used to the Improv Quantum Adventure: The DM just makes up random stuff right in front of the PCs no matter where they go or what they do.

After all, if you don't do that or have a Planned Adventure game....the game goes nowhere, just like the OP's did.

I wasn't saying they should or shouldn't have the expectation, just that the DM was equally at fault for not communicating expectations.

The DM was expecting the players to play like grognards, despite evidence that they weren't playing in that state of mind, just like the players expected the DM to ad lib the adventure, despite evidence to the contrary.

Neither is wrong, they just needed to be more consicious of the table dynamic so they could identify the problem before it sucked all the fun out for everyone.

[Cluedrew]

After all, if you don't [make stuff appear in] or have a Planned Adventure game....the game goes nowhere, just like the OP's did.That's the thing though, the OP had a planned adventure and didn't communicate it to the players. There is a whole scale of planning to improv. and I have seen many points along that scale here.

This seems to be more about communication. Communication about how the game works, communication about what the characters (and their players) know. The gap seems to be what caused the problems.

[Pauly]

On the other hand everything seemed to be existing in stasis while they were still there, which reinforces that expectation.

From my reading of the OP that seems to have been the cause of the breakdown between players and GM.

Compare-

End of day 1: Nothing happened
End of day 2: Nothing happened.

With-

At the end of Day 1 . Your training of the villagers goes as planned. The defences are 1/4 built. You notice what could be some smoke from cooking fires somewhere beyond the South Woods.

At the end of Day 2 The defences are now 1/2 built and the villagers have learned what positions to take in case of an attack. You notice that no travellers have come from the South road today. Your ranger hears more animal alarm calls than usual.

The first one suggests that it’s a quantum adventure. The second says something is happening in the world without telegraphing the who/what/where/when of it.

“nothing happens” is only really useful for a DM if you’re playing a quantum adventure. Nothing wrong with that, lots of people enjoy DMing/playing those campaigns. If you’re playing in a dynamic environment then the players are entitled to a minimum of feedback suggesting the world is changing even if they aren’t causing it to change.

[LordCdrMilitant]

From my reading of the OP that seems to have been the cause of the breakdown between players and GM.

Compare-

End of day 1: Nothing happened
End of day 2: Nothing happened.

With-

At the end of Day 1 . Your training of the villagers goes as planned. The defences are 1/4 built. You notice what could be some smoke from cooking fires somewhere beyond the South Woods.

At the end of Day 2 The defences are now 1/2 built and the villagers have learned what positions to take in case of an attack. You notice that no travellers have come from the South road today. Your ranger hears more animal alarm calls than usual.

The first one suggests that it’s a quantum adventure. The second says something is happening in the world without telegraphing the who/what/where/when of it.

“nothing happens” is only really useful for a DM if you’re playing a quantum adventure. Nothing wrong with that, lots of people enjoy DMing/playing those campaigns. If you’re playing in a dynamic environment then the players are entitled to a minimum of feedback suggesting the world is changing even if they aren’t causing it to change.

I don't think the first suggests a quantum adventure. It suggests to me the opposite: this adventure isn't going to bring problems to you, you've misjudged the problem, go out and find the problem.

The key is telling the players that what they're doing is right. If they're sitting around doing nothing, that means to them that they should get off their asses and do something. If it's a quantum adventure, sitting around brings encounters to them.

Which is a problem, because a session like the first described one is a GM'ing disaster, and I don't think it's in any way the fault of the players.
The players have been punished for taking initiative, both in game and out of game. The out of game one is more important, because by doing anything they're punished with nothing happening. And this isn't "nothing happening in the world," this is "nothing happening for them to participate in". This makes it look pretty strongly as a railroad, with one true path forward, bringing me to point 2:
The railroad is completely clouded. There's been no communication to the players what the GM wants them to do; except getting thwacked with a in-game stick for leaving the path they can't see. It's like that card game where the rules are secret and you just call people whenever they break the rules they don't know.
This sort of thing will encourage player passivity, and create a loop where the players don't do anything because they don't know what to do and anything they do is met with "quest failed", and doing nothing is met with "quest failed" until the game dies.

Improv wouldn't have solved the problem, which is poor communication and poor pacing, but it could have salvaged it.


Anyway, it's good to see that the re-do went well, and it's important to note why.
NPC's talking to them means that they have indication that they're on the right track.
They already know that there will be an attack and that sortieing is bad. They already know it's a railroad, and they know what the GM wants them to do so they can follow it and have fun.

If you keep telegraphing what you want them to be doing, even if there's only one thing to do, it'll probably keep your game more fun for your players. Not every game needs to be sand box, but every game needs to have things to do. That's important, and if you're not going to have things to do whatever the players do, you should tell them where the things to do are.

[RazorChain]

That seems unfair. Based on the OP, it seems more like they expected Quantum Adventure, where something would happen because they went that way.

They clearly demonstrated that they were uncomfortable being gone so long, thus proving they were not expecting the town to be static while they were gone.

Rather, it seems obvious they interpreted the, "two days pass uneventfully" as a prompt to be more proactive, thus making them feel yanked around when they only had to wait one more day.

For a mindset that expects the DM to bring the adventure to the heroes, hearing that nothing is happening HERE feels like a suggestion to go elsewhere. Lacking any other input, they picked a direction.

The fault can't be entirely theirs.

Of course I can't really say, as I wasn't there during the session. That's why it may be a matter of clashing styles or presentation. I've made the mistake myself of making the days drag on while the PC's wait. Now after decades of GMing I know better and just narrate a timeskip and ask if the PC's want to do something special during the timeskip.

Or if there is nothing interesting happening then it's time for "in walks a man with a gun"

[RazorChain]

On the other hand everything seemed to be existing in stasis while they were still there, which reinforces that expectation.

True but on the other hand it can be said that the GM was establishing normality which is common in movies or books. This is how things are normally then BANG, poop hits the fan.


The whole case could have been easily solved with providing the PC's with some information. Like Timmy the farmer came into town as a refugee after goblins burnt down his farm. He is grieving the loss of his son Kenny, reporting a large force of goblins to the South while wailing "They killed Kenny, the bastards".

[Pauly]

I don't think the first suggests a quantum adventure. It suggests to me the opposite: this adventure isn't going to bring problems to you, you've misjudged the problem, go out and find the problem.

The key is telling the players that what they're doing is right. If they're sitting around doing nothing, that means to them that they should get off their asses and do something. If it's a quantum adventure, sitting around brings encounters to them.

Which is a problem, because a session like the first described one is a GM'ing disaster, and I don't think it's in any way the fault of the players.
The players have been punished for taking initiative, both in game and out of game. The out of game one is more important, because by doing anything they're punished with nothing happening. And this isn't "nothing happening in the world," this is "nothing happening for them to participate in". This makes it look pretty strongly as a railroad, with one true path forward, bringing me to point 2:
The railroad is completely clouded. There's been no communication to the players what the GM wants them to do; except getting thwacked with a in-game stick for leaving the path they can't see. It's like that card game where the rules are secret and you just call people whenever they break the rules they don't know.
This sort of thing will encourage player passivity, and create a loop where the players don't do anything because they don't know what to do and anything they do is met with "quest failed", and doing nothing is met with "quest failed" until the game dies.

Improv wouldn't have solved the problem, which is poor communication and poor pacing, but it could have salvaged it.


Anyway, it's good to see that the re-do went well, and it's important to note why.
NPC's talking to them means that they have indication that they're on the right track.
They already know that there will be an attack and that sortieing is bad. They already know it's a railroad, and they know what the GM wants them to do so they can follow it and have fun.

If you keep telegraphing what you want them to be doing, even if there's only one thing to do, it'll probably keep your game more fun for your players. Not every game needs to be sand box, but every game needs to have things to do. That's important, and if you're not going to have things to do whatever the players do, you should tell them where the things to do are.

I don’t think we’re that far apart in our views.

The players need feedback as to how what they’re doing is affecting the situation.

If they sit in a tavern drinking beer while waiting for the goblins to show up, have NPCs turn up demanding help/berating them for doing nothing.
If they go all 7 samurai and defend the village give them clues that the Goblins are approaching and their efforts won’t be wasted.
If they actively look for the goblins, play it out. It’s OK for the players to follow a red herring or get fooled by the enemy spy even if it leads to a sub optimal outcome.
If the players say I have no idea lets head out in a random direction, then having an NPC remind them of the general direction of where the goblins were last seen is a good idea.

However if the situations is players do [x] and DM says “nothing happens” the players will treat that as feedback that their actions are not affecting the situation, so they need to do something different.

Also the DM should assume that the characters are doing sensible things even if the players don’t explicitly state it. Rangers will be noticing changes in the natural environment, rogues will notice people behaving oddly, fighters will notice the state if defensive fortifications etc. etc. etc. The world will be giving the characters generalized feedback even if the player isn’t specifially and explicitly looking for it. This is important in situations where the players have chosen to wait and let things develop.

[Quertus]

Rangers will be noticing changes in the natural environment, rogues will notice people behaving oddly, fighters will notice the state if defensive fortifications etc. etc. etc.

This is one thing I don't like about 3e - many GMs replace this kind of "common sense" Intel with explicit Spot or Knowledge checks, and unrealistically set the DC too high for people who didn't max out the skill (and with their primary attribute, no less) to have a chance of noticing such obvious developments.

Just give the PCs what they anyone paying any attention would notice, especially if it helps them find an adventure.

[Haldir]

Also the DM should assume that the characters are doing sensible things even if the players don’t explicitly state it. Rangers will be noticing changes in the natural environment, rogues will notice people behaving oddly, fighters will notice the state if defensive fortifications etc. etc. etc. The world will be giving the characters generalized feedback even if the player isn’t specifially and explicitly looking for it. This is important in situations where the players have chosen to wait and let things develop.

This. So much this.

I think this is the main issue the OP is simply not understanding. For the game to work (buzzword incoming) and have verisimilitude you must realize that the Characters have a different knowledge of the world than the players. Pippa The Pixie seems dead set on making the Player absolutely be everything about the Character, and not having the characters exist as entities in any other way. By even framing the question in the terms he/she did belies a adherence to some philosophical hill that they allowed their game to die on, rather than do anything that might be construed as "helping" the players.

I often tell players to make checks with their skills that they did not suggest, but because the character has the ability, would believably be using it. I do not have the combat skills of a 5th lvl character, so we abstract that. I see no reason why we also shouldn't abstract other character actions/abilities.

[Pauly]

This. So much this.

I think this is the main issue the OP is simply not understanding. For the game to work (buzzword incoming) and have verisimilitude you must realize that the Characters have a different knowledge of the world than the players. Pippa The Pixie seems dead set on making the Player absolutely be everything about the Character, and not having the characters exist as entities in any other way. By even framing the question in the terms he/she did belies a adherence to some philosophical hill that they allowed their game to die on, rather than do anything that might be construed as "helping" the players.

I often tell players to make checks with their skills that they did not suggest, but because the character has the ability, would believably be using it. I do not have the combat skills of a 5th lvl character, so we abstract that. I see no reason why we also shouldn't abstract other character actions/abilities.

In the context described by Pippa the Pixie.
At the end of day one
Rogue: succesful perception test - gets some information that suggests there person X is behaving suspiciously, Failed test gets the feeling something is not quite right.
Ranger: succesful perception test - gets some indication of the general direction of the goblins, failed test there is something out there.
Priest: successful wisdom test, find out the goblins like to attack at dusk, failed test the refugees start getting close to him or her.
Wizard succesful intelligence test finds a detailed map of the area in the archives, failed test thinks that someone must have a detailed map of the area.
Fighter succesful constitution check when walking around the village he finds a weak spot that can be bolstered quickly, failed test he isn’t fully happy with the defenses.

Now this is much less information than the party would have got if they were actively looking for it, but it gives them some leads to work on for day 2 even if they fail all their tests. More importantly it gives the players an idea that something is happening in the world and they need to be more active.

This is also a good point for the DM to throw in some red herrings if they want.

[Pippa the Pixie]

Pippa The Pixie seems dead set on making the Player absolutely be everything about the Character, and not having the characters exist as entities in any other way. By even framing the question in the terms he/she did belies a adherence to some philosophical hill that they allowed their game to die on, rather than do anything that might be construed as "helping" the players.

I'm set on doing what?

A lot of the problem is all the players just did not do anything. They did not want to role play or make any rolls, that first time. Like I said, the problem is that the DM can't say anything without it being a red flag for the players. When the DM says that the woods are just normal looking......but to the south you see smoke. Well...geee, given that the smoke is the only thing around the players will fall over the table and say they go check out the smoke.

So, how do you stop that?

[Pauly]

I'm set on doing what?

A lot of the problem is all the players just did not do anything. They did not want to role play or make any rolls, that first time. Like I said, the problem is that the DM can't say anything without it being a red flag for the players. When the DM says that the woods are just normal looking......but to the south you see smoke. Well...geee, given that the smoke is the only thing around the players will fall over the table and say they go check out the smoke.

So, how do you stop that?

You have to separate the player and the character. Usually the problem is that the players have more knowledge than the characters, but as a DM you also have to recognize the times that the characters will have more knowledge than the players.

In your context this is the character’s hometown. One of the characters will notice that smoke from the south is unusual, maybe the wizard won’t because they haven’t been an outdoorsman but there’s a good chance a ranger or barbarian will. However if they are strangers in the locale then they won’t know or notice that smoke from the South is unusual - unless an NPC explicitly tells them that.

You don’t have to give the information to the party as a whole, you can pass a different note to each player and then get them to roleplay assembling that information to create a plan. So if the ranger spots the smoke, but doesn’t tell the other party members then that creates it’s own consequences.

You can give red herrings. The smoke might be from the South but the refugees say the goblins are coming from the West.

Also in the player’s minds they could have assumed the characters are preparing the village for defense, which is where the “what is your intention” question becomes important. If they were waiting in the tavern, playing cards and drinking beer then they get to miss all the clues, but the NPCs are going to voice their concerns.

Even if the players don’t want to interact with the environment, the environment is going to interact with the characters regardless (the goblins attack at dusk on June 3).

The adventure is the carrot, the failure of the mission is the stick. But if the players don’t see the carrot you can wave it around a bit and get them interested, not just whack them with the stick.

[Cluedrew]

So, how do you stop that?Better question: Why do you want to?

(The short answer to your question is put other interesting things in the landscape. But to avoid the original problem all over again, make sure many of them do hint back towards the goblins in the south.)

[Conaldar]

As GM, you need to bring the adventure to the characters. If they play aggressor, have them catch the enemy off-guard. If they dig-in & wait, bring the enemy to them.

Your players were waiting for something fun to happen that didn't. Then they went searching for adventure & missed what they wanted to do.

Plans are fine when they work. As a GM, the plan is making fun adventures. You missed that mark by keeping timetables that ignored what the players wanted.

The game is for the group, specifically the players. No plan should ignore this. You as GM need to make the characters the focus, or why would players bother with your adventure (?)

What's adventurous about the city they're protecting being razed? Nothing. Zero.

Sure, plan. But always be prepared to adjust your plan so the players have real agency, otherwise, you look like you're Playing against them. That's never fun.

[Darth Ultron]

Better question: Why do you want to?


I'd say because it ruins the Role Playing Game Immersion. You go from role playing a character in a fantasy world, to just being a person playing a game, just like say Monopoly.

My solution is information overload. I give the players a lot to know. So much, that they can't pick an obvious ''DM path". One of my favorite things to do for bad players is to give them something...and watch them do the typical Other Game thing of ''the DM has spoken and we must now do that". So I'll say ''you see some from the south" and they will hurl their characters over to it...as it is DM Adventure Point #1 in their mind...and then the smoke demon will kill their characters. And they will whine and complain ''but DM, I thought you wanted us to go towards the smoke".


As GM, you need to bring the adventure to the characters.

Well...this sounds a bit too much like the Quantum Adventure. I'd say more: Just have better or more complex plans.


OP: It seems like you had an adventure with a climax of the town attack. But you were going from Introduction to Climax directly? Sure, the adventure had other things to do, but you already set up the climax in the introduction. And too often, the players only focus on the climax.

As D&D is an action adventure game, this is why it's important to pack and adventure with lots of action and adventure. In a general sense, you should plan on action at least once and hour. It does not need to be combat, but it needs to be something engaging.

Things I thought to add:

Day One: The obvious one here is a towns folk, maybe even the mayor, opposing the PCs. This is a good spot for role playing or roll playing, but likely won't be combat. The encounter is more ''convince the NPC to change their mind" or "get the support of the people".

The monster attack is another classic. The goblin army has something with them...a big monster with teeth and fangs. They let it go (or summon it) ahead of the troops to cause chaos. Any monster can work too, and it provides some quick combat.

Day Two: Raiders. You did mention them. They should have more just directly tried to rob or even attack the city. It's very common for raider types to exploit wars.

If you plan to have the above encounters, then your adventure has much more action then just the climax.

[Pauly]

I'm set on doing what?

A lot of the problem is all the players just did not do anything. They did not want to role play or make any rolls, that first time. Like I said, the problem is that the DM can't say anything without it being a red flag for the players. When the DM says that the woods are just normal looking......but to the south you see smoke. Well...geee, given that the smoke is the only thing around the players will fall over the table and say they go check out the smoke.

So, how do you stop that?

I just realized there are distinct and different problems.

The first, which we’ve talked a lot about is the character problem. There’s been a lot of discussion about how to give the in game characters more reasons to be active.

The other problem is the player problem. Re-reading the OP, my interpretation is that you had a bunch of rookie players that you expected to behave like a well oiled adventuring machine. I understand they weren’t total newbs, but it was your first time DMing them. You don’t know their style of play, you don’t know how they were DMed previously, you don’t know their skill levels as players, you don’t know how well they co-operate. The way you describe the players it sounds like they were expecting you to be more forthcoming with the details and then misinterpreting your non-reaction. This is where an OOC discussion about your style and your expectations of them as players could have helped.

[Lorsa]

Hey Pippa the Pixie. Seems like you are experiencing the never-ending learning curve of GMing.

Most people have already touched on most issues, and how this really isn't about plan vs. improv. At least that's not where the main problem is coming from.


I'm not really sure what changed. The only thing I did a bit differently was to have NPC just say stuff without being asked directly.

Before I read this reply of yours, I was already thinking about one angle that wasn't touched on a lot.

Namely the difference between pro-active and re-active.

It seems to me that your DMing style is very re-active. You place all the set pieces on the board and then leave it up to the players to go and explore them. When you talked about there being a double-agent in town and a disguised goblin fishing that set me off to this point. This type of game can work if the players are extremely pro-active themselves. However, even so it has some verisimilitude issues as a world is usually moving about. But anyway, let's not get caught in a discussion about that.

If your players are of the more re-active kind, then you as a DM needs to be the pro-active part. In an ideal situation there should be a mix of both, but few players are perfect and far too many are on the re-active end of the spectrum.

What I mean with this is that when the players don't immediately engage with the world, you should have the world engage with them. Have NPCs approach them for conversation. Have someone mention that there's this guy at the bar that seems shady and is asking a lot of questions about the village defense. Another NPC might have seen a halfling fishing at the lake whom she's never seen before. The goal is to create a fun game, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with NPCs approaching PCs by their own volition. In normal life, very rarely do people just sit and wait for me to come speak to them, they come to me if there's something on their mind.

This is actually where improv comes into play. When your players aren't the pro-active kind, you need to be more pro-active yourself, which may require a lot of improvisation. Some events can even be minor, like a child asking the PCs to play hide-and-seek with her! Anything to make the players slowly become more engaged.



I'm set on doing what?

A lot of the problem is all the players just did not do anything. They did not want to role play or make any rolls, that first time. Like I said, the problem is that the DM can't say anything without it being a red flag for the players. When the DM says that the woods are just normal looking......but to the south you see smoke. Well...geee, given that the smoke is the only thing around the players will fall over the table and say they go check out the smoke.

So, how do you stop that?

So again, the players didn't do anything... but why didn't YOU do something as a DM? Also, if you are worried that the smoke will be the only thing around... don't make it the only thing around!

What I would do in a scenario such as yours is to write down a couple of things that can happen in the days leading up to the attack.

For example, a villager might approach the PCs asking for their help to stop his friend to try and leave the village with his family. He thinks they are much safer here under the PCs protection but his friend is really scared.

Or maybe there's a debate in the village about how young you can be and still be in the milita, and a boy who is too young is asking the PCs to train him anyway.

Another village might be really worried that he is waiting for a shipment to come from the south, but it's several days late now, and he doesn't know how to make do without it.

A mother might be worried about her children that ran off into the east woods and are asking the PCs to go search for them.

And lastly, another villager might say that she woke up late at night and looked out the window only to swear she could see some smoke run up towards the moon in the forest to the south.

If a lot of things are happening in the world, your arrow pointing "goblins are here" is a lot less visible. It's still there, but it won't be quite as obvious, and might not have the players immediately run off into the south woods. Just don't cover up the information too much. Players really don't see things as anywhere near as obvious as you do as a DM.

[Jay R]

It seems to me that a lot of people are saying that it has to be all one way or all the other. Human interactions don't work that way.

Here we have an OK plan that would work for some players, but these players aren't actively seeking intel. OK, minor player fault.

The DM didn't realize that she needed to provide more information until it was too late. Minor DM fault.

The result was an annoying game where nothing happened, because both the players and the DM were waiting.

There was nothing wrong with the plan except that it was incomplete. What are the contingency plans?


So that leaves me with what is the way to go? Have a plan or do improv? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Again, it's not all one way or all the other way. Have a plan, but with perfect willingness to adjust it as necessary.

The goblins are dug in and waiting and the PCS are dug in and waiting. That's no adventure. Since the PCs are waiting for something, make something happen. The Ranger gets information from the birds, or the only survivor of a caravan that went too close to the goblin camp. Possibly an old soldier in town talks about the fact that goblins always move in quickly when they are gathered together, and this wait means that more are coming.

There's nothing wrong having a plan when it works. When it doesn't work, do something.

General rule: When the players aren't going to the adventure, find a way to drop one on their heads.

Consider two opposite approaches -- chess and surfing. A chess game is composing a long, complex plan. Surfing is reacting instantly to the immediate changes in pressures under your feet, with no idea what you will react to a half-second later.

MY general approach is to separate preparing a game from running one. Preparing a game is like playing chess. Running a game is like surfing.

[And don't forget that this model is as incomplete as any other. Yes, of course you're still running your plan, just as the surfer has a long-term plan to get to shore while still on top of the board. But you can't do it without adjusting every second.]