Expect the Unexpected

One of the first things you learn as a GM is that the players will absolutely wreck all of your plans at the first opportunity.  You can never make a plan that takes into account every possible action by your players.  This is part of the beauty of tabletop roleplaying games.  This freedom is simultaneously one of the best things about being a player and one of the most difficult things about being a GM.  As a GM, how are you supposed to deal with it?  How can you expect the unexpected?  Today, we're going to look at just that.

We'll start with an anecdote:

My sister recently prepped and ran the first session of an urban adventure for two players.  The party's mission was to recover a valuable statue from the house of a wealthy merchant on behalf of its rightful owner.  She made it a very open-ended adventure with lots of room for the party to make and enact their own plans.  She expected the party might attempt to pull of a stealthy night-time burglary, try to bribe one of the guards, or simply rough up and intimidate the merchant.  She mapped out the merchant's house and came up with a system for determining where the guard would be at any given time during his nightly rounds, and where the merchant would be in town or in his house at any time throughout the day.  She made a list of DCs for all the different ways they might sneak into the house.  While carrying the statue, the DCs are increased by 5, and failure by 10 or more means the statue gets dropped.  All in all, it was a pretty solid set-up for a heist.

The players, of course, had different plans.  In broad daylight, they bluffed their way into the house to discuss tapestries, then cast a spell that let them search a room without being inside it and immediately found the safe in which the statue was hidden.  They bluffed their way into the study and accidentally disabled the alarm.  The skald summoned a dire rat in the streets as a distraction while the inquisitor disguised himself with magic, and they walked right out of the house with the statue.

I'm pretty sure adventurers would rule the world if they didn't have that nasty habit of getting eaten by dragons.

What can we humble, god-like GMs do in the face of creative PCs and their outside-the-box plans?


1. Encourage It
If a player comes to you with a crazy plan that you know will totally throw a wrench in what you had planned, don't just say "No."  Say, "Yeah, try it."  As I said above, radical freedom is one of the most fun parts of being a PC in a tabletop roleplaying game, and as the GM it is your job to enable fun.  Players are used to being able to act creatively to solve problems.  When their options are taken away by the whims of the DM, they know their freedom is being artificially restricted and they resent it.

When the players come up with a creative plan, even if it isn't one you were prepared for, they are playing the game right!  Reward them for it.  Sometimes, that reward is just giving them a chance to enact their plan and watch it hilariously fail.  Sometimes their plan will be better than what you thought of, and the reward for their cleverness is a swift and memorable victory over what should have been a much harder challenge.  After the session wraps, tell them about how you ran roughshod over your plans and have a good laugh over it.

2. Discourage It
What?  Discouraging is the opposite of encouraging!  How can you say both are good options?  Don't you have a dictionary?

Calm down, imaginary reader.  I'm not about to advocate for the opposite of what I just said above.  When I say 'discourage it', I mean in a more subtle way.  You often want to reward and encourage creativity, but sometimes your players will come up with a plan that just doesn't make sense, or makes things harder for themselves than they should be.  In that case, you may want to show them through the way they interact with the world that they are taking the path of most resistance.  Describe how the path they are taking seems to have an unusually large number of guards.  Make them feel how hard it is to sledgehammer through that thick stone wall they are trying to get past.  Have them uncover the skeleton of an adventurer who died horribly trying to do just what they are now attempting.

Let's take a look at a room I had prepared for a dungeon my players recently delved into.

The room featured four large elven statues, three of them with grotesque heads and one with a missing head.  The missing headed statue was standing in front of a handle-less door - the only other door out of the room.  There was a pile of broken statuary in the middle of the room.  The party had been given a password at the beginning of the dungeon by a helpful faerie dragon, but they didn't yet know what the password was for.  The party entered the room, noted the statues, and attempted to use the password on the statue blocking the door, to no effect.  They then realized that they would have to assemble the head and use a mending spell to put it back on the body before they could give it the password.  They began sorting through the pile of broken statuary and realized that there were enough pieces to make several heads, and they all looked far less grotesque than the heads on the statues.  At this point, they heard a leathery flapping sound, looked around, and realized that one of the heads had moved to the headless statue.  Then the heads (actually vargouilles) attacked.  Or at least, that's what I hoped would happen.  

Here's what actually happened: The party entered the room, examined the statues, and examined the broken statuary enough to realize it included pieces of head.  One of the party, on a whim, climbed one of the statues to punch it in the face.  This provokes the vargouilles into attacking.  The party barely fought them off.  Then they tried to pull down the statue in front of the door, but it proved to be too heavy.  The cavalier came back with his horse.  They tied the horse to the statue and pulled it down with a natural 20.  Then they tried to open the stone door, but couldn't make it budge.  The alchemist used up the rest of his daily allotment of bombs blowing a crack in the door, and the cavalier opened up the crack some more with his spiked gauntlets.  They crawled through the crack into the next room, the pile of broken stone heads untouched behind them.

Generally, when faced with a puzzle, the easiest way to get around it should be to try to solve the puzzle - there's not much point to the puzzle being there if you can just walk past it.  Just breaking through the room is still possible, it just requires a greater expenditure of effort.  In the above example, the party expended the alchemist's last four bombs for the day and one of the players' Plot Twist Cards to get through the door, and even then only after the horse had toppled the statue with a natural 20.  Busting through the door was decidedly harder than solving the puzzle, but I still let them do it.  And they had fun trashing the room.  

3. Don't Plan Hard: Plan Smart

There are four main ways to solve a problem in D&D: brute force, skill, cleverness, and magic.  Brute force is the best way to solve combat encounters, cleverness is applied to various degrees to all problems but especially when solving puzzles, skill solves everything else from disarming traps to interacting with NPCs, and magic can be used for anything.  The most direct way to solve a puzzle is with cleverness, but you could also disable the puzzle mechanism with a good Disable Device roll, bypass it entirely with gaseous form, or brute force your way through it as seen above (or in this Order of the Stick comic).  A room full of enemies can be confronted with brute force, but you can also use skill to bluff or sneak your way past them, magic to put them to sleep or bypass the room, or cleverness to find some way to use the environment against them.

When planning an encounter, don't just try to think of every different thing the players might do and plan accordingly.  Plan for the most obvious brute force, skill, cleverness, and magic solutions to the problem you are presenting them with, so when they do something crazy you'll at least be partially prepared.  For brute force, know the strengths and abilities of the monsters or NPCs in the encounter, and familiarize yourself with the rules for breaking inanimate objects in case they decide to destroy your puzzle room.  For skill, know the DCs for climbing or disarming things, consider what might happen to your encounter if the players just snuck past, and use these alternate rules for Diplomacy to keep the party bard from sweet-talking his way through every situation.  For magic, familiarize yourself with the party casters' spell lists and the magic items they've been hoarding; be aware of all the spells that might bypass the encounter, and try to find a way to mitigate their effects.  For cleverness... well, as I said before, you can't anticipate every clever plan the players will come up with, but maybe if you think of one particularly clever plan just as a thought exercise.  If you've prepared for brute force, skill, and magic, you'll be more prepared to deal with cleverness as well.

Let's wrap things up with an example:

Say you want the players to get into a walled city where they are all wanted criminals (thanks to a heist they pulled on the duke that went hilariously awry).  Brute force would be the worst thing for the party to try, so you are sure to describe how many guards there are manning the gate and lining the walls.  Just in case they do try it, though, you have the stats for the city guards and watch captains.  When it comes to skill, Bluff and Diplomacy are equally unlikely to work, because all the wanted posters ensure that the guards aren't going to sit and listen to the party members.  When the party scopes out the city gates, you make sure to describe how the guards are looking at everyone's faces and checking them against the wanted posters.  Disguise is the obvious skill solution, but none of the players have put ranks in Disguise, so while doable, it will be difficult.  You decide on a DC for that.  You also expect they might try to scale the walls at night, and you familiarize yourself with the rules for climbing and write down a list of DCs.  Magic is more of a problem.  Your wizard has disguise self and your rogue has a hat of disguise, so they could easily use those to get in while your druid wild shapes into a bird and just flies into the city, but that would leave the fighter and the ranger stuck outside.  The wizard also has teleport, but you've already established that this city is warded against teleportation spells.  Even so, you are confident that, because 3/5ths of the party can get into the city with magic, they'll be able to find a way in for the other two eventually.  Finally, you think of a clever way for them to do it.  You just watched that episode of Firefly where Mal wears a bonnet, so you think of them sneaking in with a wagon.  To encourage it, you leave an abandoned wagon on the side of the road, expecting that the rogue and wizard will disguise themselves and drive it, the druid will turn into a horse to pull it, and the others will hide inside barrels.  

The session starts.  Your party comes up with a plan.  They wait until nightfall, when both of the gates are closed, then they set the wagon on fire and ram it into the main gate.  The wizard casts gaseous form on the rogue, who flies into the opposite gatehouse.  If you were mean, you might say that more guards are rushing to that gatehouse because the flaming wagon at the main gate is an obvious decoy, but you'd rather reward your players for being clever, so you say that half the guards there are running to the main gate to deal with the fire.  The rogue, now solid again, dons his hat of disguise to look like a watch captain, then bluffs the two men guarding the portcullis winch, telling them to leave.  Because you had prepared for bluffing and disguise, you are ready to deal with this - the guards fail their Sense Motive checks and head out of the room.  The druid, meanwhile, has snuck into the gatehouse as a rat, and he is carrying a bag of holding that the wizard has stuffed himself into.  He returns to human form, pulls the wizard out of the bag, and the wizard casts deep slumber on the remaining guards.  Because you were prepared for a brute force attempt, you know the stats for the guardsmen - all but one of them fails their save, and the druid takes out the last one with a flaming sphere.  Together, the rogue, druid, and wizard raise the portcullis and let the other two party members in.  Your preparation paid off in unexpected ways, and the party had a blast enacting their daring and overly complicated plan.  

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The post was late this week because I went to PAX this weekend!  What did I do there?  Mostly, I bought a bunch of sweet dice.  Check it out:

Yes, that is a d6 where each face is a different dog.

-your overly prepared d20 despot