You've put in all the legwork. You made a campaign idea into a campaign; you might have developed a homebrew setting; you've worked on the setting for the campaign; you've populated the world with characters. You're playing, and your story ideas are going well. And then, suddenly, it all goes awry: the players come up with something you didn't anticipate, and now everything is threatened. What do you do?
I have faced this situation hundreds of times on a scale small to large. My favorite solution is to improvise. But it's a very specific kind of improvisation in these situations, and I want to devote a full guide to this exact situation. In order to show it in action, I'll share some times that I was foiled by players but refused to concede and kept the action going in fun ways.
The first example is a modest one. It comes from my mystery campaign. In the very first session, my players were tasked with investigating a murder. They went to the murder scene and found the body there. Montana, a bard, immediately cast "Speak with Dead" on the body. I hadn't really anticipated this. But I had already decided that the murder victim was mute, and so I ruled that she couldn't respond because she couldn't speak. But then Montana had another idea. He cast "Speak with Plants" on a dandelion in the alleyway where the victim was found. Derek the Dandelion gave a perfect description of the murderer. It was only fair. But I improvised; testimony from a dandelion would not pass legal muster, and so they would need to get another witness.
In this small moment, I had to juggle a few considerations. First, I had game balance to contend with. If the players solved the crime in the first scene, the whole campaign would be over before it began. I needed a way to change the situation (or our perspective of the situation) to allow the game to continue. My goal was to both reward the good idea and prevent the story from being compromised.
But I also had to consider fairness. If a GM is unfair, the fun of the experience disappears quickly. So I needed a really good reason that things would not work exactly as intended. Holding that Derek wouldn't completely satisfy the witness requirement was lightened by the fact that the questgiver had explicitly asked for two witnesses to begin with. The important thing, though, was that my players feel that "Speak with Plants" had been a victory even if I couldn't give them the outcome they imagined would come from such a good idea.
And finally, I needed something that was interesting. When I had decided that the dandelion tactic would work, I leaned into it. I had the dandelion be a colorful character, a young dandelion with little idea of his place in the world. The players loved him, and they named him Derek. Derek ended up being featured in our final session and epilogue as a beloved part of the campaign.
Of course, this is the kind of speedbump that we often have to deal with as GMs. But sometimes a situation might have larger implications. Long ago now, I was running my first serious campaign as a DM. The campaign centered around the party completing various assassination contracts, eventually taking out the entire royal government including king, queen, and princess. The big twist was to be that the contracts came from the princess herself, who was committed enough to her plan to overthrow the kingdom to lose her own life in the process. As it turned out, the campaign didn't really go like that.
My list of contracts was 20 targets. They completed one, kidnapped the second, and then turned on the questgiver before proceeding any further. The party split into pro-kingdom and anti-kingdom factions. Things got complicated, especially when one player on the anti-kingdom side broke into the palace late one night and assassinated the king. A pro-kingdom player procured a high healer, who cast "Resurrection" on the king. This created a huge issue: it placed the outcome of perhaps the entire campaign on a moment that only one player initiated.
I solved it by thinking about the above considerations. I needed to think about balance. How would this affect the game? It either meant the anti-kingdom team had effectively won, or that their efforts to kill the king were so easily undone as to be meaningless. This is incredibly delicate. I needed something that would be a good compromise between the two extremes.
I also had to consider fairness. The player who had assassinated the king had obtained an invisibility spell, passed dozens of armed guards, passed half a dozen stealth checks, and rolled a critical strike on the king. To deny success after all of this would be very unfair to that player. On the other hand, the player who got the cleric was using common sense to solve the problem, and of course the king would have a high healer around for just such occasions if he had already increased guard patrols. I couldn't deny any of this either. Again, I needed a compromise.
The true solution came when I thought about the interesting angle. I needed some compromise that would be memorable and make sense. When I first realized the gravity of the situation, I asked my players for a minute to think things over. I highly recommend you do this any time you think prolonged thought would be necessary to determine a situation's outcome. In the minute or so that I took to respond, I ended up with this: "Resurrection" works, but only for a few days, and it can't be cast on the same person again. This allowed the pro-kingdom party time to stabilize new leadership under the king and to have meaningfully responded to the assassination, and it also gave the anti-kingdom group a big advantage, but one which wouldn't be complete or immediate. I asked the group if they all agreed that my ruling was fair, and they all agreed. This is another thing I recommend you do with big decisions. A simple "Does that seem fair to everyone?" goes a long way.
But of course, these examples are specific to the situations in which they occurred. Someone with an almost identical problem could need to make entirely different calculations. I know from experience.
About ten years after I had to deal with "Resurrection" as a surprise in the kingdom-toppling campaign, I was running the mystery campaign I referred to above. At one point, I had planned for a main character in the campaign to be murdered. This character, an inventor, would die before completing an invention which could solve a huge problem in the city and potentially solve the mystery. I had planned for the players to complete the invention themselves from puzzle-laden clues left behind by the inventor. That's not how it went, and for a familiar reason.
Montana cast "Raise Dead" on the inventor. In my defense, most of my experience in D&D came from 3.5. In 3.5, you had to be a high level cleric if you wanted to resurrect someone. Those rules have since eased up a bit. In 5E, a 6th level bard can cast "Raise Dead." I thought I had accounted for this, but I hadn't. Once again, I had a dead NPC with a resurrection spell making narrative wrinkles.
But this time, it was different. I wasn't dealing with a split party. This meant that the balance of the situation was measured differently. I'm okay with the party occasionally having a boon that wasn't as earned as others. I can accept letting the party, using a creative and meaningful solution to a big problem, make a step bigger than I planned without compromising the game. It is, after all, only cutting out a few puzzles.
But there was an associated problem. In the act of finding the inventor dead, the party had encountered the one of the archvillains of the campaign: the murderer they had been seeking since session one. I had planned for the murderer to acrobatically escape the laboratory and have a real showdown later on. But the party used spells to bind the murderer in place. I rolled for her resistance, and it was pretty low. I had to either fudge the roll in the murderer's favor (which would take agency away from the players) or accept the roll and lose my dramatic showdown. For fairness' sake, I needed to lean towards accepting the roll.
And I needed something interesting. I remember that as those moments unfolded and it became clear that Montana would raise the inventor, I was searching for something dramatic to add. Some flair that was missing from the situation. But then I remember surveying the faces of my players. They were riveted. They couldn't wait to know whether the inventor would be alright. And I realized that I didn't need to add anything. They had stopped a robbery, captured their antagonist, and found an ally dead. I didn't need to spice the situation up. Because it honored all three considerations, I had the inventor revive and complete the invention. It proved to be one of the more memorable moments in the campaign.
So let's review the considerations and what they can do to help us come up with the best solution to unforeseen problems:
- Balance: Tabletop games are carefully calibrated for a specific distribution of powers and weaknesses to keep playing it rewarding and meaningfully predictable in terms of outcomes. When we try to resolve a situation that impacts the balance of the game, it's important to consider every consequence of a decision. This can require time to fully think about. Make use of time between sessions, and don't be afraid to ask your players for time to consider.
- Fairness: Your players want and need to feel like there's a real fairness to the game. If things are too easy or too hard, the players suffer. Ask yourself about whether or not your decision will inordinately punish or reward a player for something, and avoid situations where players are pitted against each other.
- Interest: The situations we're considering here tend to have a certain amount of contention around them. You are, after all, negotiating between the player's creativity and your own oversight in planning; to have them leave the situation happy, we need to include something enjoyable. But as noted above with the inventor/murderer situation, sometimes all a situation needs is already present. Strive for a satisfying feeling if you can.
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