Ever have your players mess up your story by winning when they weren't supposed to? Here's a trick I learned in my pirates campaign, so your game can feel a little less like it's you vs. them.
The Principle
The principle I got to use this session was: don’t let the
party’s decisions interrupt what you have to do in this session.
Now, I’m all about letting players innovate and surprise you
by taking you off script. That’s one of
the things that makes roleplaying such a wonderful hobby. However, you always want to treat player
innovations in a way where you’re not at a loss for what comes next.
The Context
So they’re on this mystical island of catgirl priestesses, and
theyr’e hunting for a witch who’s waiting to hijack a lunar ceremony – it’s
tonight – so she can open up a protal to let Pluto through into our world.
The party’s snooping around the witch’s secret laboratory,
she catches them, and the room gets catastrophically blown up in the
confrontation that follows (spellbooks and potions being the volatile things
that they are). They manage to escape
out a back door, down some stairs, and into some catacombs. That’s where I wanted them to go, since it
had clues for them to find, fights for them to get into, and was sure to delay
them until the last minute before the ceremony.
Well, then they decided they wanted to go back out the way
they came in, hoping the fires would be out and the witch would be gone. I didn’t want them to go that way, so when
they open the door again there’s nothing but a void – the laboratory was a
magical construct and it completely collapsed when the explosions went
off. This was basically a Bsy way for me
to trap them in the catacombs so they could burst out in the nick of time and
take the witch by surprise.
Well, they figured out a way around it.
The Players’ Move: Taking
us Off-Script
One of the players has, from a previous adventure, a fire
demon incarcerated in his soul. And he had
gotten my permission at the time to be able to let it out as a one-time
supermove on some future date. Second,
they have a bunch of mummified skeletons down in the catacombs beneath them –
pretty long skeletons too: they were Ophidians. So like a necromantic MacGyver, this player
says, “I summon forth my fire demon, inject him into one of the skeletons, and
have him carry us across the void!”
That was so priceless I pretty much had to let him do
it. So the party grabs on to this
monstrostiy and flies across, all in time to warn the high priestess and avert
the witch’s casting.
Well, now I have a problem because I still want them to
burst out in the nick of time while the witch is doing her thing. Not only is that cooler than averting the
whole thing, it’s what I have notes for.
For that very reason, a lot of Game Masters wouldn’t allow the
players to fly across the chasm on a ridiculous demon bone creature. That chasm was supposed to be an impassible
plot device! But I took a step back and realized that them
being trapped in the catacombs wasn’t the important thing – them getting a
nick-of-time, save-the-day ending was.
So the question was: how do I bring that about after they escape the
catacombs and manage to warn the high priestess?
The GM’s Move:
Revising the Script
Easy! The witch’s
plans simply accelerate: as the party’s warning the high priestess, hundreds of
those skeletons wake up and take the temple by storm. (I was easily able to rule that they were
buried all over, and the place the players had seen was only one burial spot). The temple is occupied, and the party and the
high priestess are forced into the secret passage – whence they can sneak
around a bit and then burst out in the nick of time.
This way the player got to do his cool idea, the group got
to feel like they triumphed over an obstacle, but my notes went basically
undisturbed. And this shouldn’t be seen
as a have to lose kind of conflict, where no matter what the players do I'm
still going to bring about the same result.
No, players succeeded in a way that forced my plan to be bigger and
louder and more over the top – more skeletons, sooner, everywhere! All it did was make the stakes higher. And when players succeed at forcing you to
raise the stakes, they’re making the game more exciting.
So that’s my technique for the night: players succeeding
over an impassible obstacle doesn’t have to mess you up. Really look at why you had that obstacle in
place, and find another way to do that.
