Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 46 - When Your Story Goes Off the Rails

Episode Date: November 8, 2020

You're a DM and you have a story you'd like to tell but the darn Player Characters won't follow the story.  What do you do?  How do you handle the campaign that's not going as planned?  Jeremy pulls a major piece of advice from a song from 1980s band 38 Special.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Taking 20 podcast, episode 46, when your meticulously crafted story goes off the rails. This week's sponsor is Bound for Your Pleasure on Adams Street. Are we a bookstore or a bondage shop? Stop in and find out. But do it on your knees, wretch. So you're a DM and you like storytelling. You've spent weeks crafting a story for the PCs. There's laughter, sadness, death, and rebirth. It's Gilgamesh meets Harry Potter meets Cabin in the Woods and it's a damn

masterpiece. The problem is your freaking PCs won't go where they're supposed to. They go up when you want them to go down. They go left when you want them to go right. They attack when they should negotiate. They diplomatize when you want them to be all stabby-stab. Nothing is going according to plan. Now, your ludicrously handsome podcaster advocates improvisation, so you try to keep the PCs following your story, but it's just gone too far. Now your Gilgamesh meets

Harry Potter meets Cabin in the Woods is closer to The Other Guys meets Ace Ventura meets Sesame Street on a cocaine bender. That's okay. It may even be a good thing. There's a now-ancient song, 1981, by a group called 38 Special that sums up how you should control the plot of your RPG campaign. Hold on loosely, but don't let go. If you cling too tightly, you're going to lose control. Now what does that mean? RPGs are collaborative storytelling. Keyword, collaborative.

It's not your singular story. It's your plural story. English is weird. The same word your meaning singular and plural possessive. I've heard it's because English isn't one language, it's three languages in a trench coat. I mean, the southern United States at least uses y'all meaning you plural. But then again, large numbers of them still think they didn't lose the American Civil War. We're just in an extended halftime at the moment. Anyway, campaigns are a collaboration between you, the GM, and the players.

The PCs have their own ideas about what's important, and they should. They're telling this story as well. Let them run things to ground. It's your job to take the story where it may, provide challenges to them along the way. Hey, that rhymed. Maybe I should put more thought and planning into these. What do I mean by provide challenges to the player characters or PCs? Provide plot hooks, opportunities for adventure, and temptations for the PCs to go where you would like. Get the PCs to do something, but don't demand they do a certain thing. If it's a sandbox adventure, you've done what you need to do. If it's a more linear adventure,

you'll eventually have to get the PCs to take the plot hook that advances the story. You can do that by making it the most tempting, offer the biggest reward for that one. Allow the PCs to clearly see the good that would come about if they took that plot hook. Or if all else fails, gradually reduce the number of open threads and open plot hooks offered until they go the required direction. Hold on loosely, but don't let go. Be warned, you can't force the players to take exactly the plot hook you want. Pay attention to what the players want and what's important to them, and base your next gaming session in the campaign around that. Another warning, you can't force the

players to solve a problem the way you want it solved. That's the bad kind of railroad. If you cling too tightly to the plans, plots, and PCs, then you lose control of all three. Another warning, you can't require the players to play the game the way you want it played. Yes, you are the DM, but this is why session zeros are so important. Make sure you and the players want the exact same type of adventure. Damn, I need to make a more thorough session zero episode. I know what I'm doing for next week's episode now. DMs and GMs, I want to give you two words of advice and I want you to take them to heart.

Chant them like a mantra to you until you understand what they mean. Stop over planning. I generally now plan one session ahead, maybe two if I feel confident I know where the party's going. one session ahead, maybe two if I feel confident I know where the party is going. Frustration builds for GMs when they try to plan three, four, eight, ten sessions ahead, do all of this reading, get miniatures, have terrain made, and the players make a hard left turn all of a sudden. Makes the GM feel like she wasted her time. The players are the ones who chose to go a different direction. And to the GM, it consciously or even unconsciously builds frustrations at the players for not following what they had planned. Stop that level of planning. Just stop it. Learn to Improvise, episode 26 of a well-known podcast, can help you with that.

Adapt to what the players are doing on the fly. Change your pre-planned story based on the directions the PCs want to take it. Reuse assets when possible. Episode 11 can help you with that. Modify next session's plan to deal with the repercussions of the PC's actions and the next step of the story. Overcome your fear of failure and fear of improvisation and collaboratively tell a story with your players. Look, I used to be very guilty of this. I'd plan three, four, five sessions in advance, but I discovered it made me more railroad-y. It tended to make the adventure not what I wanted if trying to force the players to make a certain choice.

So now, with one very specific exception that I'll talk about in a minute, I only plan one session in advance. That's plenty. Have hooks to advance the plot here and there. Have side quests ready to go as needed. As we talked about in the John 4 episode, have pocket adventures that you can throw in that are kind of self-contained. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. If your players are having a good time, and you're having a good time DMing, nothing else matters. Stop overplanning, even if the resulting story is ludicrous and makes no sense.

Because of a weird set of choices that are made by you or the players, for some reason the tavern owner is a doppelganger now with an alien egg implanted in his brain. He's asked the party to find some sort of lost self-aware tuba. Why not? If the party's bought in, just start thinking about

what kind of personality that tuba has. I'm thinking John Goodman maybe with a thing for feet. What if all you could come up with was that the big bad evil guy left a bomb in Star Federation headquarters

and when your PC tried to disarm it, he was sprayed with glitter and ham juice while pop music played at 50% speed. Alright, that sounds like a pretty fun adventure. Or at least the beginnings of one. In the town of Tombstone, the donkeys have formed a union and have gone on strike. The PCs are trying to placate them with 24-hour access to the bank vault so they can build up their savings and open up a donkey-themed casino.

Sometimes the goofiest plots we can come up with, or the random things that the PCs decide and you make choices in the moment that send it in weird directions, those are sometimes the best adventures you can have. Stop over-planning even if the NPCs, businesses, and the overarching plot is done completely by the seat of your pants and you're making it up as you go. Maybe all of your female NPCs look and sound like Kelly Clarkson. Maybe all of your male NPCs look and sound like Jeremy Clarkson. The Big Bad Evil Guy winds up being based on Clark W. Griswold of National Lampoon Vacation fame. All shops have their inventory randomly created by an online generator because you don't make it up in advance. If the players are smiling at the end, it's a win.

Now the exception. I do plan boss fights ahead of time. If I know, and I mean know with a capital K-N-O-W, the PCs will ultimately have a boss fight with this particular boss, I will take an extensive period of time to plan how the boss will react to the PCs. What tactics do they use? What minions are available? See the previous episode for more on that. What powers he or she will use? The terrain of the area and how it can be used to make combat more interesting. In one of my campaigns, the party just fought an 18th level spellcaster, and if you've ever GM'd one of those, it takes forethought and planning. I prepared for

that combat off and on for the better part of six months, researching spells, looking at what tactics he would take given the situation that he knows to be true. Chances are if you're dungeon mastering, you've seen movies, you've read novels, you've heard numerous stories. Various types from sci-fi to mystery to harlequin romance novels I have called bodice rippers. As in, he rips off her bodice,

exposing them both to the cool night air. She never thought she would fall in love with a rapscallion like Jardavius Flint, but here he was, in her boudoir, unbuttoned shirt flowing in the autumn breeze. Or, um, so I've heard that's how those books go. Borrow and steal from your favorite stories, historical figures, movies, TV shows, documentaries. Even if you're stealing from an episode of, I don't know, Rick and Morty. Borrow from it, steal from it, and use it in your campaign.

Hell, a great step of an adventure would be, um, I actually went and looked this up, Season 2, Episode 2 of Rick and Morty. The PCs are riding along with an NPC who turns out to be an arms dealer who sells a weapon to another NPC. That NPC could be from a rival faction, plotting to kill someone the PCs are close to, plotting to kill a PC, plotting to murder another NPC that the PCs want to save, as a hell of a plot hook lifted directly from a cartoon.

Granted, a funny cartoon, but still. If you are homebrewing a campaign, the best thing you can do is provide opportunities for the PCs. Threads that they can pull on, mysteries to solve, places to go, people to see, adventures, quests, and goals. If the player has given a character backstory, tie a side quest to it. Resolve something from that character's past. Don't demand the PCs take a specific action, like fight or flee or negotiate or befriend, that's only going to lead to your disappointment. Oh, they'll definitely work with this sheriff and they just shot him in the back in a dark alley to rob him. Well, okay

then. Don't plan the PC's choices. The planning you should do revolves around providing those opportunities, not exactly what the PCs need to do every step of the way. Have five or six of those opportunities ready to go and a loose idea of how they'll tie into the greater narrative. Hold on loosely, but don't let go. You're never going to have complete control of other players in an RPG campaign. They are capable of self-determination and can make choices of their own, and it may not be the choices that you would make.

So if the PCs frustrate you by not staying on script, then go write a novel or a movie or screenplay where you have complete control of the protagonists. I'm sure we'll all love your novel titled Gilgamesh's Pot in the Woods or whatever. Thank you again for listening. Another fairly short episode. I apologize for that. I have a feeling next episode is going to be a lot longer if I'm covering Session Zeroes. I want to thank our sponsor again, Bound for Your Pleasure.

10% discount if you can read an entire page of Kierkegaard while sitting in the chair. This has been Taking 20, episode 46, when your meticulously crafted story goes off the rails. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.