When you write aDungeons & Dragonsadventure, you naturally develop favourites. Quests that feature characters you find more interesting, twists you think will shock your players, or items you really want them to get ahold of. You can’t railroad your players into paying attention to these though - that just makes the characters annoying, the twists telegraphed, and the items not worth the hype.
It’s all about trust. If you build it, they will come. Only instead of baseball ghosts, it’s your players having fun. The current game I’m running with TheGamer gang isan open world sandbox, and that involves a lot of trust in both directions. They trust me that things will connect and work out, and I trust them to hunt out every corner of the world. The only problem is they tend to get fixated.
You Learn From Your Mistakes When Writing D&D
This is the second full adventure I’ve done with the editors at TheGamer, and if I do say so myself, it’s better. It has more depth, a more compelling central problem, more freedom, and is more reactive. My first adventure with them was alsomy first homebrewed adventure ever. We had a nice time, but inexperience shone through.
The world was shallow and the goal at the heart of it never offered much motivation, and thus there was never much reason to do anything besides ‘we want to play D&D so I guess we’ll do this’. The side quests were obviously fairly empty distractions and the main quest was constantly pausing to verify they swept up all this emptiness anyway. It didn’t trust the players. This second adventure does. That brings its own pitfalls.
The idea is that, hopefully,this game feels less restrictive than the first one we played. It features two major cities, and within these cities are a range of storylines. Some long, some short. Some challenging, some easy. Within these, ideally, the party won’t knowwhich quests end up unfurling across hours of playuntil a milestone level up, and which ones end up resolving themselves pretty quickly. That means taking on multiple quests at once, figuring out which ones they (as players and characters) care about as they go.
It’s A DM’s Job To Guide Players
Part of this is my fault. That first, desperately imperfect adventure is the only experience many of the group have with D&D. They didn’t know any better to know the parts that stunk, stunk. In a way, they’re still being led by their noses, chasing a familiar stink. I also wanted the party to be Level 3 before reaching either city so the odds wouldn’t be entirely against them if they ended up on a combat-heavy quest, which meant the start of the adventure was very linear.
Though it offered a little more choice, there was still a succession of smaller locales to visit and a clear goal (to kill a giant snail). They would progress in sequence, and once they killed the snail and levelled up, the world would be their oyster. At least, so long as oysters were the first thing on the menu.
They arrived in one of the cities and were immediately accosted by a group of spider folk cast out of the city by the new governor. Having only experienced my extremely obvious first adventure, they seem to believe this is the A-plot of the city. But there is no A-plot. It’sallB-plot. The A-plot is that they need to earn renown (however they choose to) to be invited to a tournament for the region’s greatest champions. They do this by wrapping up B-plots.
Any character they meet is asked about the spider folk. Any response that does not progress this narrative is discarded. I don’t want to railroad (or anti-railroad) by telling them to do other things, because at some point, they will get a relevant answer about the spider people, gaining information needed to move the story forward. But most people in town won’t know, or won’t care. I’ve trained them to think the first quest they hear is the main quest, and all the other stuff is just silly entertainment where they might meet a meme character or get a fancy shield.
It’s me, hi. I’m the problem, it’s me. It’s not that we played D&D wrong originally, necessarily, but the first adventure benefitted from a one-track mind. This one aims to be more likeBaldur’s Gate 3, with a central story that develops naturally as they sweep up whatever interests them in the city. But it needs to be what interests them, not whatever they stumbled on first and think I secretly need them to do as a load-bearing quest.
In the new year, when we pick up again, the side quests will suddenly rain down on them, and maybe that will rattle them out of this fixation on the first quest they happened to get. Then again, maybe they’ll ask the right person the right question and the obsession will pay off.
