D&D Nov-13-2003

[ralphmelton]

I've got two snappy opening lines for this post:

The best-laid plans of GMs and men fizzle into INCANDESCENT STEAM upon contact with the players.

and

Perhaps I should be doing NaNoWriMo after all. All this seems to be so much better when it's going on in my head.

The big point of today was for the players to learn the identity of the Emperor's assassin. This did come to pass. But I had plans, such as them contacting Elyssisoriel who would say, "I don't want to leap to conclusions, but you should know that Garrett had vibrant purple eyes." These plans fell through--they suspected Garrett well before contacting Elyssisoriel.

My own personal goal was to really do a good job of portraying all the NPCs. To this end, I assigned each of the NPCs to one of the players, with the directive that whenever that player said something, they should remind me to say something for their designated NPC.

This plan sank like a lead balloon. Most of the players showed no interest in the NPCs' reactions, and the NPCs were just too overwhelmed by everything they were told to really have interesting reactions. So I've shortchanged the campaign by this. For example, I'd wanted to establish Karameikos as a cocky glory-seeker, which might add a note of emotion later if his hubris leads him to catastrophe--but there's not much room for that now. And I think the campaign is the worse for it.

I do feel, though, that this experiment indicates more strongly that I'm really not going to be able to portray vivid NPCs within this campaign--at least, not without a lot more help from the players. This is a very bitter pill for my story-oriented side.

Then the PCs decided to go looking for a fight, and they found one. This was reasonably exciting, even though it was a heavily unbalanced fight, because the fight started with Turok fighting alone against the ferocious hell-hound.

Then, the players neatly out-played me. Instead of waiting to take on the vampire (which I had thought wouldn't be for a while yet), they decided to scry on him and teleport directly to him. This is, in many ways, a very good plan--in particular, it neatly subverts a lot of the defenses I had been planning for him for the past month. Fooey.
The other reason it's a good plan is that there's a fair chance that the PCs might get lucky, because they only have to get lucky for a moment.

And we've established that the PCs are all expecting vampiric domination, so I don't get any surprise with that.

Not sure what I'll do yet. Maybe I'll just stew in my juices for a while.

Darn it, I want to feel happy about the results of the game more often.

Comments

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

Many of these don't work, for reasons I won't go into. Some of them might.

Blocking a scry turns out to be surprisingly expensive. nondetection costs 50gp and a 3rd-level spell, and it lasts only an hour per level. (Do you see cheaper options?)

More generally, I view it as y'all's right to make this choice--you know that it's very risky, and that's your option. And my plan was that in the third arc, the PCs would have even more choice and agency than before--and, well, this is one of the things that can happen when y'all have a lot of agency. :-/

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

You could make it into an item. If he's been around 500 years and has the ethics that he appears to, he should have accumulated enough money to block scrying if he cares. Depending on what you want in the campaign, you might want to tune the item specifically to him or something so the PCs don't end up with it.

Either that or he could have an item that complicates scrying. Maybe it doesn't make it impossible, just more difficult.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

There's not such an item currently, but I like the idea of something that can be overcome.

[cellio]

We've created magic items that aren't in the book; why can't Garrett? (Well, through agency if he's not a spellcaster.)

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

He might well. I wouldn't want him to have any magic items that I wouldn't let y'all have (especially since it's not impossible that you might end up with them), but something less effective that nondetection wouldn't be objectionable.