but heres what happened my group just got back from my first dungeon and went back to town for some supplies and booze. the 3 normal members of the group go to get ammo and potions the bard went to the bar to entertain and make some money rolled a nat 1 when he drank ale so I rolled for severity and he had to cast 1 random spell because hes drunkly playing his drums and he casts heat metal on all the silverware and burns the bar and half the town down and instead of staying and helping the party dipped and never came back
I’d say that you created that with a house rule about what happened when the bard rolled a 1. But I would have a lot of fun with that! I’d have the bard roll a charisma check in every town for the next few levels to see if they heard about him burning down a tavern or not. Make the DC 15 minus the bard’s level so that as he levels up the story dies down until it’s impossible to fail it even if he rolls a natural 1. Then work with that. I imagine that sooner or later the bard might become a popular entertainer so that the original town invites him back not knowing that he’s the one who burned the tavern until someone recognizes him while he’s performing.
yes it was a house rule if you got drunk and had magic stuff would happen
but the town hired an assassin that is now hunting the party and trying to bring them back or kill them who knows but I do like they idea about other towns knowing him lol
My bard tried to seduce literally everything he had so many bonuses because he was sum what high level and other stuff I don't remember but would always roll some crazy number like 36 or40
Ok, so picture the scene. The party has assembled for the first time, start of a campaign. They travel to the town of Steepfield.
The plan is:
find them a tavern to stay the night in
they meet the local inventor who asks for their help
tour his facilities and be shown the new slaughterhouse he was making
be asked to look after his daughter on the Cattle Drive
they head out of town toward the cattle drive
maybe even find the cattle.
Fairly basic start-of-the-game stuff.
Except that one of the characters was from the oneshot I ran in Steepfield, and the player had made a backstory that his parents owned a tavern. So, naturally, this was the tavern they went to. No great shakes, change the landlords, everything else remains the same.
Except that "dad runs a fighting pit in the back".
The session took 4-5 hours, saw the monk almost get beat down by the paladins dad, and I had to improvise an entire fighting pit sequence which kept the other players involved, with ropes to pull that dropped things into the pit. By the end of the session, they had:
my player used broken homebrew mechanics (which i was fixing) to basically become immortal and all powerful (yes i have already spoken of this in a thread)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"A sentient pineapple, now why should i add that?" -Me
Second edition Spelljammer. First adventure. Party starts already together and the paladin has their first quest ready. They're doing a job for the mayor of a spelljammer port town outside a larger city. The idea was to give them another hook during the quest, that hook leads them into a ship for evidence, it takes off with them inside, fun ensues.
So they meet with the Mayor's Second Vice-Assistant for Misfit Bands of Adventurers or whatever. He gives them the exposition hammer and explains spelljamming along with the quest details. He shows off the docks. The thief has a lot of questions.
Thief wants to go do some "shopping," and that's cool, he's a thief. He borrows the wizard for help. He has a plan. It is not the plan I thought it would be. Paladin goes off to help little old ladies cross the road and get cats out of trees.
The thief's plan is to steal a spelljammer ship. The thief's questions were about the security he would be facing. I had planned for them to sneak into a ship not long hence, so security was less "elite planetary guard" and not so much "tough stevedores with a percentage" as it was "Keystone Kops."
Thief and wizard succeed. They now possess a spelljammer ship, which they quickly relocate. They collect the paladin, explaining that the thief and wizard had signed a contract that gave them title to the ship for later payments. He believes them. The thief would collect the paladin's share of the payments for the remainder of the campaign. The first quest was remarkably straightforward from an aerial position with shipborne weapons. They somewhat daringly snuck back into town to collect the reward, then off they went, into an insane campaign that ran for over three years.
I've found that players never "derail" a campaign, they just change the direction. :) ... Rails only exist for the DM who has planned out what the characters WILL do rather than what they actually do :) which at times is completely different from what the DM expected would happen.
However, in this particular case, I'd have to say that it was the DM and the dice that "derailed" the campaign. The player actually had no decisions to make in this except having a beer at the tavern then deciding to skip town. All the rest is on the dice and the DM.
Running LMoP for my family. They had poor interactions with both Wester and Thornton, and so they decided, upon taking the Wyvern Tor sidequest, that they would ally with the orcs against the two town officials, and use the their new friends/political bargaining weapons to seize power in Phandalin, hoping to fix it to their liking. Unfortunately/fortunately, the session in which they returned with the orcs was the last session we ever played just because of scheduling and stuff. It was really a shame, because at that moment i knew my family were really starting to understand how ridiculous this game can be...
I once had the party let the entire adventure hook literally hop past them, and then ignored the other source of clues and went into town.
The setup was that the party witnessed a bullywug and a lizardfolk cross blades out in the wilderness only a few miles from town. The party decided to hide and watch what happened since they were all 1st level and squishy (this was 2e, when the Wiz only got 1d4+Con mod HP at 1st level, and “Cantrip” was a 1st-level spell that did no damage) and there were only a couple of them. The bullywug won the fight and killed the lizardperson and then limpingly hopped past the hidden party. They could have attacked the half-dead bullywug and captured it and interrogated it. They could have followed the bullywug from a safe distance to learn about what was going on. They could have searched the dead lizardperson for clues. Heck, they could have brought word of the incursion of monstrous demihumans operating so close to town and asked about it. What did they do? They completely ignored the entire adventure hook and went shopping instead.
I once had the party let the entire adventure hook literally hop past them, and then ignored the other source of clues and went into town.
The setup was that the party witnessed a bullywug and a lizardfolk cross blades out in the wilderness only a few miles from town. The party decided to hide and watch what happened since they were all 1st level and squishy (this was 2e, when the Wiz only got 1d4+Con mod HP at 1st level, and “Cantrip” was a 1st-level spell that did no damage) and there were only a couple of them. The bullywug won the fight and killed the lizardperson and then limpingly hopped past the hidden party. They could have attacked the half-dead bullywug and captured it and interrogated it. They could have followed the bullywug from a safe distance to learn about what was going on. They could have searched the dead lizardperson for clues. Heck, they could have brought word of the incursion of monstrous demihumans operating so close to town and asked about it. What did they do? They completely ignored the entire adventure hook and went shopping instead.
And just to be clear, that is absolutely fine on the part of the players. Never “expect” them to do anything, other than the unexpected. Just apply whatever consequences their actions have to the game, and adjust the plot line accordingly. That’s the definition of player agency. In this case, perhaps the town will be invaded or infiltrated by the monsters.
I once had the party let the entire adventure hook literally hop past them, and then ignored the other source of clues and went into town.
The setup was that the party witnessed a bullywug and a lizardfolk cross blades out in the wilderness only a few miles from town. The party decided to hide and watch what happened since they were all 1st level and squishy (this was 2e, when the Wiz only got 1d4+Con mod HP at 1st level, and “Cantrip” was a 1st-level spell that did no damage) and there were only a couple of them. The bullywug won the fight and killed the lizardperson and then limpingly hopped past the hidden party. They could have attacked the half-dead bullywug and captured it and interrogated it. They could have followed the bullywug from a safe distance to learn about what was going on. They could have searched the dead lizardperson for clues. Heck, they could have brought word of the incursion of monstrous demihumans operating so close to town and asked about it. What did they do? They completely ignored the entire adventure hook and went shopping instead.
And just to be clear, that is absolutely fine on the part of the players. Never “expect” them to do anything, other than the unexpected. Just apply whatever consequences their actions have to the game, and adjust the plot line accordingly. That’s the definition of player agency. In this case, perhaps the town will be invaded or infiltrated by the monsters.
As it happened, the town was under threat because the lizardfolk and bullywugs were in conflict due to the one encroaching on the land of the other, and some dark forces both sides were allying with for the expected conflict. The proximity of the disputed territory to the town being the threat as the town and its citizenry would likely have been collateral damage.
You have to understand two things:
This was way back in 2e. The game was different then and it was fairly commonplace for things to start of “at the door to the dungeon.” Back then there was less emphasis on character and narrative. The game was still very much one in which the general objective was to kick in the door, kill the baddies, steal their stuff, and use it to kill more baddies. Characters were developed as the game played because the vast majority of them didn’t survive long enough to hit 3rd level, and narrative was often whatever the DM cooked up to string things together. A certain degree of buy-in on the part of the players was expected because they were playing as “adventurers,” so it was expected that they would take up the call to adventure. In this case, the dungeon was the nearby swamp, and that witnessed conflict was the proverbial “door” to this particular adventure.
It was my absolute, very first time behind the DM’s screen. I didn’t know then what I know now after almost 30 years of experience. I literally had no clue what to do other than to let things develop how they were going to. So when open armed conflict broke out between the warring factions and that conflict started threatening the town, things started happening rather abruptly.
It was actually an invaluable learning experience for me. It taught me that “players do the darndest things,” so I could never count on anything I planned on to ever happen. So I stopped planning. By that I mean I stopped trying to “write” an adventure completely since there was absolutely no point in that it could all go pear shaped on me in an instant. Instead I populate my world with characters and simply give them goals and motivations and let them have all the plans. I look for where any areas of friction or opposition are likely to happen when one character’s goals and motivations start bumping into the goals and motivations of someone else and I find ways to drop some of those clues in front of the party. Then I do two things: 1) I react appropriately to whatever the players decide their characters do, and 2) I let the plans of those other characters play out however they play out.
Yes, that makes for a bit more work in the beginning because I have to populate a world with characters who have goals and motivations, many of whom the party likely will never interact with. But on the flip side it means less work in between sessions, and it means I’m better able to adjust and deal with things on the fly which is important because, as we all know, players do the darndest things. 😉
This was way back in 2e. The game was different then and it was fairly commonplace for things to start of “at the door to the dungeon.” Back then there was less emphasis on character and narrative. The game was still very much one in which the general objective was to kick in the door, kill the baddies, steal their stuff, and use it to kill more baddies. Characters were developed as the game played because the vast majority of them didn’t survive long enough to hit 3rd level, and narrative was often whatever the DM cooked up to string things together. A certain degree of buy-in on the part of the players was expected because they were playing as “adventurers,” so it was expected that they would take up the call to adventure. In this case, the dungeon was the nearby swamp, and that witnessed conflict was the proverbial “door” to this particular adventure.
It was my absolute, very first time behind the DM’s screen. I didn’t know then what I know now after almost 30 years of experience. I literally had no clue what to do other than to let things develop how they were going to. So when open armed conflict broke out between the warring factions and that conflict started threatening the town, things started happening rather abruptly.
It was actually an invaluable learning experience for me. It taught me that “players do the darndest things,” so I could never count on anything I planned on to ever happen. So I stopped planning. By that I mean I stopped trying to “write” an adventure completely since there was absolutely no point in that it could all go pear shaped on me in an instant. Instead I populate my world with characters and simply give them goals and motivations and let them have all the plans. I look for where any areas of friction or opposition are likely to happen when one character’s goals and motivations start bumping into the goals and motivations of someone else and I find ways to drop some of those clues in front of the party. Then I do two things: 1) I react appropriately to whatever the players decide their characters do, and 2) I let the plans of those other characters play out however they play out.
Yes, that makes for a bit more work in the beginning because I have to populate a world with characters who have goals and motivations, many of whom the party likely will never interact with. But on the flip side it means less work in between sessions, and it means I’m better able to adjust and deal with things on the fly which is important because, as we all know, players do the darndest things. 😉
I loved your story :) ... it is the type of thing players do all the time since what seems like an obvious adventure hook to the DM can often seem like a somewhat meaningless event with possibly deadly consequences. Why should my adventurer do anything except watch and then continue into town?
However, I just wanted to comment that your experience with the game as one where characters killed things to get loot, knocked down doors, started at the door of the dungeon etc, may not have been related to do the version of D&D you were playing but more with the players, DM and their experience with the game.
When I first started playing with friends with the box set or AD&D, the play was very similar. However, years later, we were creating characters with backstories, and doing far more than just knocking down doors looking for bad guys to kill and treasure. The version of the game didn't change, we changed as players/DMs. Characters advanced to higher levels, became involved in politics, established keeps or groups of followers. Having characters not survive past level 3 has more to do with the DM and the challenges they present the characters than it does with the game system (though it was much easier to kill off 1e,2e characters than 5e).
I also agree with your approach to world building - you put the world in front of the players/characters with several moving parts in the background and then as the characters interact with the world they obtain information and interact with the moving pieces which allows the party to decide what to do and enables the DM to decide how the interactions affect the other story lines going on in the world. The DM doesn't need to fully detail the story lines until the players begin to engage with and affect that story line.
This was way back in 2e. The game was different then and it was fairly commonplace for things to start of “at the door to the dungeon.” Back then there was less emphasis on character and narrative. The game was still very much one in which the general objective was to kick in the door, kill the baddies, steal their stuff, and use it to kill more baddies. Characters were developed as the game played because the vast majority of them didn’t survive long enough to hit 3rd level, and narrative was often whatever the DM cooked up to string things together. A certain degree of buy-in on the part of the players was expected because they were playing as “adventurers,” so it was expected that they would take up the call to adventure. In this case, the dungeon was the nearby swamp, and that witnessed conflict was the proverbial “door” to this particular adventure.
It was my absolute, very first time behind the DM’s screen. I didn’t know then what I know now after almost 30 years of experience. I literally had no clue what to do other than to let things develop how they were going to. So when open armed conflict broke out between the warring factions and that conflict started threatening the town, things started happening rather abruptly.
It was actually an invaluable learning experience for me. It taught me that “players do the darndest things,” so I could never count on anything I planned on to ever happen. So I stopped planning. By that I mean I stopped trying to “write” an adventure completely since there was absolutely no point in that it could all go pear shaped on me in an instant. Instead I populate my world with characters and simply give them goals and motivations and let them have all the plans. I look for where any areas of friction or opposition are likely to happen when one character’s goals and motivations start bumping into the goals and motivations of someone else and I find ways to drop some of those clues in front of the party. Then I do two things: 1) I react appropriately to whatever the players decide their characters do, and 2) I let the plans of those other characters play out however they play out.
Yes, that makes for a bit more work in the beginning because I have to populate a world with characters who have goals and motivations, many of whom the party likely will never interact with. But on the flip side it means less work in between sessions, and it means I’m better able to adjust and deal with things on the fly which is important because, as we all know, players do the darndest things. 😉
I loved your story :) ... it is the type of thing players do all the time since what seems like an obvious adventure hook to the DM can often seem like a somewhat meaningless event with possibly deadly consequences. Why should my adventurer do anything except watch and then continue into town?
However, I just wanted to comment that your experience with the game as one where characters killed things to get loot, knocked down doors, started at the door of the dungeon etc, may not have been related to do the version of D&D you were playing but more with the players, DM and their experience with the game.
When I first started playing with friends with the box set or AD&D, the play was very similar. However, years later, we were creating characters with backstories, and doing far more than just knocking down doors looking for bad guys to kill and treasure. The version of the game didn't change, we changed as players/DMs. Characters advanced to higher levels, became involved in politics, established keeps or groups of followers. Having characters not survive past level 3 has more to do with the DM and the challenges they present the characters than it does with the game system (though it was much easier to kill off 1e,2e characters than 5e).
I also agree with your approach to world building - you put the world in front of the players/characters with several moving parts in the background and then as the characters interact with the world they obtain information and interact with the moving pieces which allows the party to decide what to do and enables the DM to decide how the interactions affect the other story lines going on in the world. The DM doesn't need to fully detail the story lines until the players begin to engage with and affect that story line.
Thanks. I appreciate it.
I don’t want you to have the wrong impression though. We always wrote brief backstories for our characters, but we went through them pretty quickly for a while until they really started to level up. Once they started to hit 3rd and then 5th level we naturally had developed more character to our PCs. But in the 1e days it was still a very adversarial game of DM vs. Players, and it was very much a game focused on dungeon crawling. By 2e it had only moved a little bit from that type of game by comparison to the way the game is now. As time went on and older players started to evolve in their expectations of the game and as new players with different expectations joined the game, it became more about RP and narrative and the edition changes have continually reflected that evolution all the way up to 5e.
So, while yes, my experiences were inevitably shaped at least in part by the people I was playing with, the edition of the game also contributed to the style of play too.
This was way back in 2e. The game was different then and it was fairly commonplace for things to start of “at the door to the dungeon.” Back then there was less emphasis on character and narrative. The game was still very much one in which the general objective was to kick in the door, kill the baddies, steal their stuff, and use it to kill more baddies. Characters were developed as the game played because the vast majority of them didn’t survive long enough to hit 3rd level, and narrative was often whatever the DM cooked up to string things together. A certain degree of buy-in on the part of the players was expected because they were playing as “adventurers,” so it was expected that they would take up the call to adventure. In this case, the dungeon was the nearby swamp, and that witnessed conflict was the proverbial “door” to this particular adventure.
It was my absolute, very first time behind the DM’s screen. I didn’t know then what I know now after almost 30 years of experience. I literally had no clue what to do other than to let things develop how they were going to. So when open armed conflict broke out between the warring factions and that conflict started threatening the town, things started happening rather abruptly.
It was actually an invaluable learning experience for me. It taught me that “players do the darndest things,” so I could never count on anything I planned on to ever happen. So I stopped planning. By that I mean I stopped trying to “write” an adventure completely since there was absolutely no point in that it could all go pear shaped on me in an instant. Instead I populate my world with characters and simply give them goals and motivations and let them have all the plans. I look for where any areas of friction or opposition are likely to happen when one character’s goals and motivations start bumping into the goals and motivations of someone else and I find ways to drop some of those clues in front of the party. Then I do two things: 1) I react appropriately to whatever the players decide their characters do, and 2) I let the plans of those other characters play out however they play out.
Yes, that makes for a bit more work in the beginning because I have to populate a world with characters who have goals and motivations, many of whom the party likely will never interact with. But on the flip side it means less work in between sessions, and it means I’m better able to adjust and deal with things on the fly which is important because, as we all know, players do the darndest things. 😉
I loved your story :) ... it is the type of thing players do all the time since what seems like an obvious adventure hook to the DM can often seem like a somewhat meaningless event with possibly deadly consequences. Why should my adventurer do anything except watch and then continue into town?
However, I just wanted to comment that your experience with the game as one where characters killed things to get loot, knocked down doors, started at the door of the dungeon etc, may not have been related to do the version of D&D you were playing but more with the players, DM and their experience with the game.
When I first started playing with friends with the box set or AD&D, the play was very similar. However, years later, we were creating characters with backstories, and doing far more than just knocking down doors looking for bad guys to kill and treasure. The version of the game didn't change, we changed as players/DMs. Characters advanced to higher levels, became involved in politics, established keeps or groups of followers. Having characters not survive past level 3 has more to do with the DM and the challenges they present the characters than it does with the game system (though it was much easier to kill off 1e,2e characters than 5e).
I also agree with your approach to world building - you put the world in front of the players/characters with several moving parts in the background and then as the characters interact with the world they obtain information and interact with the moving pieces which allows the party to decide what to do and enables the DM to decide how the interactions affect the other story lines going on in the world. The DM doesn't need to fully detail the story lines until the players begin to engage with and affect that story line.
Thanks. I appreciate it.
I don’t want you to have the wrong impression though. We always wrote brief backstories for our characters, but we went through them pretty quickly for a while until they really started to level up. Once they started to hit 3rd and then 5th level we naturally had developed more character to our PCs. But in the 1e days it was still a very adversarial game of DM vs. Players, and it was very much a game focused on dungeon crawling. By 2e it had only moved a little bit from that type of game by comparison to the way the game is now. As time went on and older players started to evolve in their expectations of the game and as new players with different expectations joined the game, it became more about RP and narrative and the edition changes have continually reflected that evolution all the way up to 5e.
So, while yes, my experiences were inevitably shaped at least in part by the people I was playing with, the edition of the game also contributed to the style of play too.
That's kind of the point I was making. I played 1e with neither the adversarial DM vs players approach nor the 100% dungeon crawl/loot/treasure style of play. How D&D is role played whether original, OSE, 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5e, 4e, 5e - the amount of role playing, style of play and DMing style were always choices that specific groups of players/DMs made.
Yes, a lot of people, maybe even most started off playing the game with more of an adversarial DM approach and dungeon crawls but I played a lot of campaigns through 1e over a period of 15 years or more and some of those were more strongly focused on role playing. We also moved away from the adversarial DM fairly early since we found it was more fun if the DM was creating a cool story rather than pushing to kill the characters - though killing characters did happen but more dependent on character decisions than adversarial encounters.
In some ways, the greater fragility of characters at low level encouraged role playing since the characters would more often consider discretion to be the better part of valor and run away since the characters generally didn't want to die - and just due to the game system, death was much more often a consequence of poor choices :) (It can be much more difficult to threaten 5e characters).
Anyway, in my experience, the style of game has much more to do with players and DM and every version of D&D can be played with open worlds with multiple story lines, where character decisions matter, the mechanics of 1e/2e/etc don't require adversarial DMs or instant dungeon crawls - those have always been player/DM choices mostly unrelated to the version of the game (though the books themselves mostly used dungeon crawls as an example).
1e awarded experience for monsters killed/defeated and gold pieces found - 1gp=1xp - the easiest way to do this was with a dungeon but it was far from the only way. The gp awarded to the players for a contract/task translated directly to xp. Defeating creatures in a town, the thieves guild, monsters in the sewers, the evil noble and his minions trying to subvert the crown, the strange cult growing in the local villages - all the storylines work in any version of the game.
P.S. I am not trying to invalidate your experience - your group played the game and had fun which is what ultimately matters. Later versions of the game may have changed the focus a bit and included examples of wider styles of play but the style of play in my experience was pretty independent of the game system, whether D&D, GURPS, Rolemaster, Traveler, etc .. and more dependent on the people playing the game.
I dunno, go back and take a look at those older DMGs and they actively had tips to DMs on how to mess with PCs and players. That type of thing is absent in the newer editions of the game. And the earliest iteration of the game had absolutely no content whatsoever for anything outside of a dungeon and told people to pick up a different game and use that for traveling between dungeons. I think the context of edition has a bit more to do with how the game was played then to now than you’re giving credit. 🤷♂️ Either way, the past is the past.
"You get on the sky ferry and it moves off to start the mile-long descent from The Tower."
Should have been a moment of pause. Instead, the Warlock tried to steal a puppy from an old woman, almost killed her with a handbag, then got arrested, and it turned out the woman was smuggling contraband in the bag with the dog, and "Flopsie" was a dirty dward druid in Wildshape.
Then the party caught an interrogated a thug, where the Werebear barbarian broke out of the mounts section on the ship (mounts were cheaper than people so he pretended to be a bear to save money) and bit him on the leg. The stable boy rushed in with a cattle-prod and sent the level 11 barbarian flying with it, left him stunned for 3 rounds. Then the party convinced the same cop who arrested the Warlock that the boy had attacked them, and there was no bear (him having transformed back).
It was supposed to be a brief moment. It ended up being a 45 minute string of derailment, losing a stableboy his job, making enemies in the Thieves Guild, adopting a Thug into their group after he told them he would be killed now for helping them, and becoming disturbed by having cuddled a filthy dwarf when she thought it was a cute puppy. Not to mention (avert your eyes, cheese chasers in my campaign, or you will spoil little bits of the plot:
I'm a new DM only 2 months or so
but heres what happened my group just got back from my first dungeon and went back to town for some supplies and booze. the 3 normal members of the group go to get ammo and potions the bard went to the bar to entertain and make some money rolled a nat 1 when he drank ale so I rolled for severity and he had to cast 1 random spell because hes drunkly playing his drums and he casts heat metal on all the silverware and burns the bar and half the town down and instead of staying and helping the party dipped and never came back
My Real life stats
Str)10 Int)19
Dex)9 Wis)15
Con)14 Cha)16
I’d say that you created that with a house rule about what happened when the bard rolled a 1. But I would have a lot of fun with that! I’d have the bard roll a charisma check in every town for the next few levels to see if they heard about him burning down a tavern or not. Make the DC 15 minus the bard’s level so that as he levels up the story dies down until it’s impossible to fail it even if he rolls a natural 1. Then work with that. I imagine that sooner or later the bard might become a popular entertainer so that the original town invites him back not knowing that he’s the one who burned the tavern until someone recognizes him while he’s performing.
Have fun with that! It’s a great setup!
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yes it was a house rule if you got drunk and had magic stuff would happen
but the town hired an assassin that is now hunting the party and trying to bring them back or kill them who knows but I do like they idea about other towns knowing him lol
My Real life stats
Str)10 Int)19
Dex)9 Wis)15
Con)14 Cha)16
My bard tried to seduce literally everything he had so many bonuses because he was sum what high level and other stuff I don't remember but would always roll some crazy number like 36 or40
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Ok, so picture the scene. The party has assembled for the first time, start of a campaign. They travel to the town of Steepfield.
The plan is:
Fairly basic start-of-the-game stuff.
Except that one of the characters was from the oneshot I ran in Steepfield, and the player had made a backstory that his parents owned a tavern. So, naturally, this was the tavern they went to. No great shakes, change the landlords, everything else remains the same.
Except that "dad runs a fighting pit in the back".
The session took 4-5 hours, saw the monk almost get beat down by the paladins dad, and I had to improvise an entire fighting pit sequence which kept the other players involved, with ropes to pull that dropped things into the pit. By the end of the session, they had:
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my player used broken homebrew mechanics (which i was fixing) to basically become immortal and all powerful (yes i have already spoken of this in a thread)
"A sentient pineapple, now why should i add that?" -Me
Second edition Spelljammer. First adventure. Party starts already together and the paladin has their first quest ready. They're doing a job for the mayor of a spelljammer port town outside a larger city. The idea was to give them another hook during the quest, that hook leads them into a ship for evidence, it takes off with them inside, fun ensues.
So they meet with the Mayor's Second Vice-Assistant for Misfit Bands of Adventurers or whatever. He gives them the exposition hammer and explains spelljamming along with the quest details. He shows off the docks. The thief has a lot of questions.
Thief wants to go do some "shopping," and that's cool, he's a thief. He borrows the wizard for help. He has a plan. It is not the plan I thought it would be. Paladin goes off to help little old ladies cross the road and get cats out of trees.
The thief's plan is to steal a spelljammer ship. The thief's questions were about the security he would be facing. I had planned for them to sneak into a ship not long hence, so security was less "elite planetary guard" and not so much "tough stevedores with a percentage" as it was "Keystone Kops."
Thief and wizard succeed. They now possess a spelljammer ship, which they quickly relocate. They collect the paladin, explaining that the thief and wizard had signed a contract that gave them title to the ship for later payments. He believes them. The thief would collect the paladin's share of the payments for the remainder of the campaign. The first quest was remarkably straightforward from an aerial position with shipborne weapons. They somewhat daringly snuck back into town to collect the reward, then off they went, into an insane campaign that ran for over three years.
I've found that players never "derail" a campaign, they just change the direction. :) ... Rails only exist for the DM who has planned out what the characters WILL do rather than what they actually do :) which at times is completely different from what the DM expected would happen.
However, in this particular case, I'd have to say that it was the DM and the dice that "derailed" the campaign. The player actually had no decisions to make in this except having a beer at the tavern then deciding to skip town. All the rest is on the dice and the DM.
Running LMoP for my family. They had poor interactions with both Wester and Thornton, and so they decided, upon taking the Wyvern Tor sidequest, that they would ally with the orcs against the two town officials, and use the their new friends/political bargaining weapons to seize power in Phandalin, hoping to fix it to their liking. Unfortunately/fortunately, the session in which they returned with the orcs was the last session we ever played just because of scheduling and stuff. It was really a shame, because at that moment i knew my family were really starting to understand how ridiculous this game can be...
:)
I once had the party let the entire adventure hook literally hop past them, and then ignored the other source of clues and went into town.
The setup was that the party witnessed a bullywug and a lizardfolk cross blades out in the wilderness only a few miles from town. The party decided to hide and watch what happened since they were all 1st level and squishy (this was 2e, when the Wiz only got 1d4+Con mod HP at 1st level, and “Cantrip” was a 1st-level spell that did no damage) and there were only a couple of them. The bullywug won the fight and killed the lizardperson and then limpingly hopped past the hidden party. They could have attacked the half-dead bullywug and captured it and interrogated it. They could have followed the bullywug from a safe distance to learn about what was going on. They could have searched the dead lizardperson for clues. Heck, they could have brought word of the incursion of monstrous demihumans operating so close to town and asked about it. What did they do? They completely ignored the entire adventure hook and went shopping instead.
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And just to be clear, that is absolutely fine on the part of the players. Never “expect” them to do anything, other than the unexpected. Just apply whatever consequences their actions have to the game, and adjust the plot line accordingly. That’s the definition of player agency. In this case, perhaps the town will be invaded or infiltrated by the monsters.
As it happened, the town was under threat because the lizardfolk and bullywugs were in conflict due to the one encroaching on the land of the other, and some dark forces both sides were allying with for the expected conflict. The proximity of the disputed territory to the town being the threat as the town and its citizenry would likely have been collateral damage.
You have to understand two things:
It was actually an invaluable learning experience for me. It taught me that “players do the darndest things,” so I could never count on anything I planned on to ever happen. So I stopped planning. By that I mean I stopped trying to “write” an adventure completely since there was absolutely no point in that it could all go pear shaped on me in an instant. Instead I populate my world with characters and simply give them goals and motivations and let them have all the plans. I look for where any areas of friction or opposition are likely to happen when one character’s goals and motivations start bumping into the goals and motivations of someone else and I find ways to drop some of those clues in front of the party. Then I do two things: 1) I react appropriately to whatever the players decide their characters do, and 2) I let the plans of those other characters play out however they play out.
Yes, that makes for a bit more work in the beginning because I have to populate a world with characters who have goals and motivations, many of whom the party likely will never interact with. But on the flip side it means less work in between sessions, and it means I’m better able to adjust and deal with things on the fly which is important because, as we all know, players do the darndest things. 😉
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I loved your story :) ... it is the type of thing players do all the time since what seems like an obvious adventure hook to the DM can often seem like a somewhat meaningless event with possibly deadly consequences. Why should my adventurer do anything except watch and then continue into town?
However, I just wanted to comment that your experience with the game as one where characters killed things to get loot, knocked down doors, started at the door of the dungeon etc, may not have been related to do the version of D&D you were playing but more with the players, DM and their experience with the game.
When I first started playing with friends with the box set or AD&D, the play was very similar. However, years later, we were creating characters with backstories, and doing far more than just knocking down doors looking for bad guys to kill and treasure. The version of the game didn't change, we changed as players/DMs. Characters advanced to higher levels, became involved in politics, established keeps or groups of followers. Having characters not survive past level 3 has more to do with the DM and the challenges they present the characters than it does with the game system (though it was much easier to kill off 1e,2e characters than 5e).
I also agree with your approach to world building - you put the world in front of the players/characters with several moving parts in the background and then as the characters interact with the world they obtain information and interact with the moving pieces which allows the party to decide what to do and enables the DM to decide how the interactions affect the other story lines going on in the world. The DM doesn't need to fully detail the story lines until the players begin to engage with and affect that story line.
Thanks. I appreciate it.
I don’t want you to have the wrong impression though. We always wrote brief backstories for our characters, but we went through them pretty quickly for a while until they really started to level up. Once they started to hit 3rd and then 5th level we naturally had developed more character to our PCs. But in the 1e days it was still a very adversarial game of DM vs. Players, and it was very much a game focused on dungeon crawling. By 2e it had only moved a little bit from that type of game by comparison to the way the game is now. As time went on and older players started to evolve in their expectations of the game and as new players with different expectations joined the game, it became more about RP and narrative and the edition changes have continually reflected that evolution all the way up to 5e.
So, while yes, my experiences were inevitably shaped at least in part by the people I was playing with, the edition of the game also contributed to the style of play too.
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That's kind of the point I was making. I played 1e with neither the adversarial DM vs players approach nor the 100% dungeon crawl/loot/treasure style of play. How D&D is role played whether original, OSE, 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5e, 4e, 5e - the amount of role playing, style of play and DMing style were always choices that specific groups of players/DMs made.
Yes, a lot of people, maybe even most started off playing the game with more of an adversarial DM approach and dungeon crawls but I played a lot of campaigns through 1e over a period of 15 years or more and some of those were more strongly focused on role playing. We also moved away from the adversarial DM fairly early since we found it was more fun if the DM was creating a cool story rather than pushing to kill the characters - though killing characters did happen but more dependent on character decisions than adversarial encounters.
In some ways, the greater fragility of characters at low level encouraged role playing since the characters would more often consider discretion to be the better part of valor and run away since the characters generally didn't want to die - and just due to the game system, death was much more often a consequence of poor choices :) (It can be much more difficult to threaten 5e characters).
Anyway, in my experience, the style of game has much more to do with players and DM and every version of D&D can be played with open worlds with multiple story lines, where character decisions matter, the mechanics of 1e/2e/etc don't require adversarial DMs or instant dungeon crawls - those have always been player/DM choices mostly unrelated to the version of the game (though the books themselves mostly used dungeon crawls as an example).
1e awarded experience for monsters killed/defeated and gold pieces found - 1gp=1xp - the easiest way to do this was with a dungeon but it was far from the only way. The gp awarded to the players for a contract/task translated directly to xp. Defeating creatures in a town, the thieves guild, monsters in the sewers, the evil noble and his minions trying to subvert the crown, the strange cult growing in the local villages - all the storylines work in any version of the game.
P.S. I am not trying to invalidate your experience - your group played the game and had fun which is what ultimately matters. Later versions of the game may have changed the focus a bit and included examples of wider styles of play but the style of play in my experience was pretty independent of the game system, whether D&D, GURPS, Rolemaster, Traveler, etc .. and more dependent on the people playing the game.
I dunno, go back and take a look at those older DMGs and they actively had tips to DMs on how to mess with PCs and players. That type of thing is absent in the newer editions of the game. And the earliest iteration of the game had absolutely no content whatsoever for anything outside of a dungeon and told people to pick up a different game and use that for traveling between dungeons. I think the context of edition has a bit more to do with how the game was played then to now than you’re giving credit. 🤷♂️ Either way, the past is the past.
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"You walk into a village and see a democratic debate being held on a stage in the city square."
"I want to run up on stage and try to kill the debaters."
They got knocked out and sent to prison.
"You get on the sky ferry and it moves off to start the mile-long descent from The Tower."
Should have been a moment of pause. Instead, the Warlock tried to steal a puppy from an old woman, almost killed her with a handbag, then got arrested, and it turned out the woman was smuggling contraband in the bag with the dog, and "Flopsie" was a dirty dward druid in Wildshape.
Then the party caught an interrogated a thug, where the Werebear barbarian broke out of the mounts section on the ship (mounts were cheaper than people so he pretended to be a bear to save money) and bit him on the leg. The stable boy rushed in with a cattle-prod and sent the level 11 barbarian flying with it, left him stunned for 3 rounds. Then the party convinced the same cop who arrested the Warlock that the boy had attacked them, and there was no bear (him having transformed back).
It was supposed to be a brief moment. It ended up being a 45 minute string of derailment, losing a stableboy his job, making enemies in the Thieves Guild, adopting a Thug into their group after he told them he would be killed now for helping them, and becoming disturbed by having cuddled a filthy dwarf when she thought it was a cute puppy. Not to mention (avert your eyes, cheese chasers in my campaign, or you will spoil little bits of the plot:
The Thug failed his save against Lycanthropy.
So yeah, lots of derailment!
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