Yo /tg/,
I'm a relatively new DM, and I'm having a hard time writing my campaign. Last session, my players pulled some shit I didn't expect and I had to improvise a ton. I know that's not even remotely a bad thing, but I'm having trouble making more stuff and I keep second guessing myself because my players might pull some more shit I dont expect and I have to scrap other encounters I had prepared.
Basically, I dont want to make a whole dungeon only to have the players decide to not go down into it. Currently they're motivation is an offer of 10,000 gp for a gem they found that may or may not be the heart of a "dead" god. An NPC will tell them they gold they seek is in the dungeon but I dont know if they'll take the bait.
Any advice/suggestions?
Also genaral new DM thread
I have general ideas for regions and places, have several plot hooks per session. And use dungeon tiles for generating dungeons on the fly. Have a few encounters planned, mainly the big ones, and leave the rest up to generators and the dice gods.
P.S. Nice pic OP, did your mom take it for you?
>>44567965
Make encounters that works independently, so you can reuse them at will.
PLayers didn't go into the fungeon ? Then the bandits on the road will be reskinned versions of the goblins guarding the first room...
Also, apparently you've got a basic dunjon-crawler with no real incensive for the players to go in. That's very old school.
If you don't want them to go everywhere, give them an endgoal and a cadre for their characters.
>>44568085
Yeah, dungeon generators are pretty sweet, I just dont know if they'll say "Fuck the 10000 gp lets go whoring, or to a library or something"
and yeah she took it on our trio to maui
>>44568218
I know its not super original, I'm banking more on their curiosity about the gem than anything. They stole it from some thieves who stole it from an archive, and im planning to have it play a significant role later on
>>44567965
You can't force players to go into dungeons; what you can do is file the serial numbers off dungeons and call them something else.
What's the difference between a dungeon in the ground and a palace cemetary?
They're both measured in 5 foot lengths and have monsters in them, and they both for some reason have traps.
Just rename the dungeon whatever the building the players choose to loot and rename the monsters appropriately, and there you go, job done.
>>44568292
That's some solid fucking advice, thanks my man
>>44568282
>Currently they're motivation is an offer of 10,000 gp for a gem they found that may or may not be the heart of a "dead" god. An NPC will tell them they gold they seek is in the dungeon but I dont know if they'll take the bait.
Same rule applies; just keep throwing various offers for artifacts retrieved and the one they choose to get is the heart of the dead god.
"Please fetch the Sacred Jewel/Holy Tiara/Scourge of Light/Dragon Dildo buried in the Ancient Dungeon/Terrible Ruins/Blighted Tower/Porn Shop on Fenkem Road and I will give you 10,000/8,000/23,000 GP/a good hot dicking."
The item they choose to pick up? BAM it's your dead god's heart.
>>44568323
Further to this, here's some copypasta about how to deal with players and their cleverness:
Basics of GMing:
As the GM, it's your job to put a series of obstacles in the way of your players and adjudicate how well they do in doing that.
As long as you have a steady supply of obstacles and a way of linking them together then you'll be fine.
"But how do I link them together?" you might ask.
Well, when it comes down to it, players deal with obstacles in 4 ways:
They destroy it, they avoid it, they make friends with it or they are defeated by it.
Make links from one obstacle to the next using the results of those links -
Bashing down the DOOR will bring GUARDS for example, and bribing or INTIMIDATING the GUARDS means they can get to the BAD GUY.
Or the party might AVOID the DOOR and GUARDS and go in over the ROOFTOPS but that's its own obstacle. If the BAD GUY then beats down the party they are thrown in a CELL guarded by GUARDS.
And so on and so on.
Don't plan for HOW your players will succeed. Leave the details as to how they beat the obstacle up to the players - assume all obstacles will be overcome (or the party loses) and simply plan for what happens after.
>>44568416
That sounds like it may be some stuff from the Angry GM. I've read a good chunk of his shit and he's great. Good advice abounds.
I guess I need to just fucking go for it and be adaptable and less autistic
>>44568507
Nah, it's just my own brand of GMing copy and pasted from the archives.
It's the players job to work out some cool way of getting past an obstacle, it's your job to say if it succeeds or not. Depending on the game, either you pull out some rulebooks and put together some difficulty margins, or just wing it if it sounds cool and have them roll a d20 and if it's high, sure, they ace the fuck out of whatever they were doing. If they put lots of ranks into it you might just give them the success anyway or give em a partial, just because.
>>44567965
I'm going to go against the flow and recommend that you do not just put the PCs through whatever content you've made. The reason for that is that you're replacing meaningful choice ("that place sounds too dangerous for the rewards we believe lie within, let's skip it") with pseudo-choice ("we managed to get the name of the location changed").
So, rather than lie to your players, how about you be honest with them? Just explain that setting stuff up is a lot of work and you would rather not prepare stuff that doesn't get used. These are people you enjoy gaming with, so I'm sure they'll understand. A good compromise is for you to lay out some options at the end of a session and get the players to tell you what they have planned for next time, so that you can prepare for it.
>>44568614
Still good advice, friend. I appreciate your help.
I think my flaw here is that I'm way overthinking everything
>>44568713
Yeah, i've talked with them about it in the past and i dont think they'd just say "fuck this dungeon he spent time creating"
Honesty is the best policy............
>>44568713
That's shitty DMing advice. The illusion of choice is much better than making the players feel guilty for not taking your bait.
If you want players to do what you want then go write a novel.
OP, plan situations and events which exist independently of the party, NOT scenes. That way the party will have actual agency over their actions, and the outcome of an encounter will be both a surprise for them as for you.
Also stop avatar fagging, it's against the rules and frowned upon.
>>44568976
>making the players feel guilty for not taking your bait
How do you get that from:
> lay out some options at the end of a session and get the players to tell you what they have planned for next time, so that you can prepare for it.
>>44569069
In telling them "I don't want to prepare stuff if you guys ain't using it" you are basically telling them to follow the paths you lay down for them.
That's not how you deal with this. If they have no interest in following the informant into the Evil Cult's Lair which you spent hours creating, you're not going to tell 'em "get in the fucking lair", and neither will you throw away hours of planning; That's where good DMing will come into play: you will now find a way of leading them into that lair, or making the encounters from that lair show up in different locations.
>>44569290
He's not saying "go down the Evil Cultist's Lair", he's asking the players as the end of the session "After considering your options, are you going to attack the Evil Cultist's Lair, or are you going to go after the Evil Pirate's Hideout, or even perhaps raid the Evil Thieves Guild? Or are you going to do something different? Please decide now so I can prepare something for the next session!"
>>44567965
Recycle. No, seriously, if they want to go off on their own, then you just reuse parts of what you had planned.
You're wanting them to go to an old, dilapidated castle to forward the plot, and they want to bugger off into the mountains and see what's up there? That castle is now a set of ruins up in the mountains, and the encounters inside it don't even really need to be changed, though, if you intended for there to be quest-specific loot inside, you might need to swap that out for other stuff.
This is the secret to improv. Have a bunch of(maybe three or four) rather generic ideas that you can move around as you need. As much as I dislike FFTA, the way its map worked is a good example: you got pieces that represented towns, combat areas, etc, and could place them as you saw fit. Your general ideas are those pieces, and whenever your players go off on their own, you just plonk whichever one makes the most sense down and roll with it.
>>44569367
We're talking about mid-session decisions. The players decide not to go a certain way and avoid something you'd planned halfway through your dungeon, and you really wanted them to have that encounter because it was important to the plot or simply really fun. So you adapt.
>>44569446
You can do that, but not once the players have seen it unless it's a moveable encounter.
If they see the same dude in three different dungeons they're going to find it funny.
>>44569730
Well, duh.
ITT: Shit DMs give advice to someone not smart enough to know it's shit advice and thinks it's perfect.
Heaven forbid new DMs ever put in effort and learn from their failures.
>>44567965
>I had to improvise a ton. I know that's not even remotely a bad thing
This is the gem to take away. Get better at the improv. Still go in with a general plan of what to do if the players won't drive the plot forward themselves in unexpected ways, because a floundering situation can be the touch of death, but in general, plaers WILL drive the plot forward in weird and unexpected ways that force you to imnprov, so that's where your focus should go. In certain games, this is harder, because making up encounters on the fly is more difficult in certain games, and a breeze in others: that's one of the things that makes a game easy to DM.
Think of your plan as a backup plan, rather than as the main plot. Have a lose framework of what you'll do to light a fire under the players' asses if they don't keep moving forward, but it's your fallback, not your first option.
>>44567965
>Currently they're motivation is an offer of 10,000 gp for a gem they found that may or may not be the heart of a "dead" god. An NPC will tell them they gold they seek is in the dungeon but I dont know if they'll take the bait.
My suggestion, if you want to get them into a dungeon, using the gem, is have the people they gave it to start some weird ritual with it and ghead and pay them the money. Upon completion of the ritual (idk, like 2 hours later or something) the world starts to go wonky, and everyone who's touched the gem gets sucked through a great hole in the sky into a weird alien jiggsaw-style deathtrap made by the dead god... that also happens to be filled with treasure. If they can find a way out, they'll be rich. If not, all the treasure is useless.
>>44569446
>We're talking about mid-session decisions
Are we?
OP wrote:
> I dont want to make a whole dungeon only to have the players decide to not go down into it.
That doesn't sound like a mid-session decision.
>>44569894
>ITT: Shit DMs give advice to someone not smart enough to know it's shit advice and thinks it's perfect.
Tell us where the shit advice touched you and what should be done better, oh grand master of good DMing.
>Heaven forbid new DMs ever put in effort and learn from their failures.
Why do they need to learn from their failures when they can get some guidance right here? Why don't you fuck off and build a computer from scratch to talk on the internet instead of complaining about DMs not wanting to give their players a bad time?
