Comment on “Non-linear D&D”

I meant to reply sooner and it just got away from me. I just ran a session tonight, though, so now is the time.

I tell you, I’ve re-read this post at least four times since you made it. I even printed out a (condensed) version of the list of tactics To go with my other materials before tonight’s running. I didn’t manage to introduce anything strictly along the lines of any of these, but I did at least manage to offer the players something that they really wanted, in a manner that they really didn’t want* — and they tied themselves into knots over it.

Baby steps toward coherent strategy on my part, I suppose — but man, just running the game takes all my concentration and I’m still not yet doing it at the level that I want. Players arrive boisterous and I’m being asked to program prostitutes and manacles into my trade table, field questions about sage abilities, clarify drunkenness rules. It’s all I can do to try and think ahead to what they logically ought to find at the very next step of their plan — Trying to think of it in terms of explicit tactics still beyond me.

I’m going to have to play a lot more chess…

* [last sesh: parleyed with a tribe of kobolds and impressed them by Speaking With Animals to a giant frog they feed. Frog said there were “shiny things” nearby, deep in the swamp, and it would swim to retrieve them if party fed it something it had never tasted: a live human. This session, they seek audience with an allied baron to ask if he would let them dispose of a prisoner. They hoped for “a murderer or other shithead” — but got awful cold feet when the jailer presented them with “a sugar smuggler, responsible for 56 silver of lost tax revenue”!

I’ve got them in debate about whether they should take the smuggler, keep trying to whack someone who deserves it, kidnap a shepherd, try and pass off a halfling as a human child, maybe even sacrifice one of the agents entrusted to the PC in the Illuminati… it’s no Zwischenzug but its something.]