DMDC 05 - The Guided Tour & Decision Paralysis

I realize now I am guilty about stringing my players along through scripted scenarios. I don't know if that's good or bad, but I sure do talk about it a lot this episode. Plus when players get some decision paralysis, so hopefully one of those will prove useful in hindsight.

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Transcript

Hey! This is the DM Discourse, a podcast about D&D, focused on the experience at the table from behind the screen. I'm your host Darrell, and today I’m talking about the guided tour of your setting and how I’ve handled decision paralysis at the table.

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Between being shipwrecked, hounded by a giant shadow, trudging through tunnels and monsters, Olrune had been having a rough week. His troubles didn’t even stop there - after finally reaching an inn to rest, recuperate, and procure a vessel to sail the swamp to their destination, they were accosted by sinister agents of the Prism Wizard only to later be ambushed by snakefolk. Although unrelated, there was a certain illfate the sorcerer had found in this land.

His current situation wasn’t much better.

They had finally made it to Fenskeep and marched straight up the hill to meet with Baron Tervin Blackshield to deliver their package and be free of its burden. Of course, in the life of an adventurer, nothing is so simple. The baron opened the chest in front of them, revealing an emerald gemstone that immediately pulsed sending a wave of energy that paralyzed the party’s other two members, and the baron, leaving the Olrune alone to deal with this situation.

And he didn’t seem to know what to do.

For all his tutelage under the sage Rajanakant, the sorcerer found himself dumbstruck even without the spell paralyzing him. This enigmatic stone resonated with a strange glow and sound, as if absorbing and manipulating the world around it. His party members and the baron were both trapped in limbo against this spell, but as if paralyzed by fear, Olrune was not sure what to do. His spells? None proved effective against it, the energies fizzling against its surface. His doldrum continued as he fumbled amidst his pockets, trying desperately to look for an answer where there were none.

As the agonizing moments moved forward, Sq’Gee broke from the spell and, thinking instinctively, threw one of the cushions from baron’s furniture upon the stone. Its spell receded and the natural state of the room returned to it. The winded baron took a seat and a brooding mood came over him.

Olrune picked up the cushion, and the stone lay dormant beneath it. “Wait that’s all it took?”

The cleric patted Olrune on the back. “Don’t think too hard next time - the simplest solution will likely prove the best.”

“Well, I was hoping that maybe one of my spells or something could take care of it, see if that could’ve snapped you out of whatever was going on.”

“True, magic can be useful,” the priest nodded. “Oolmund’s blessings have proved useful countless times - but it is a mistake to rely too much on a good thing.”

“Speak for yourself,” Pedwar said as he took a drink from his hip cask. “Let’s never do that again.”

As the group confirmed their recovery, the baron studied a letter that had come along in the parcel bearing this stone. His brow furrowed the more he read, and when he looked upon the party again it was with paranoia he had not felt since the first days of taking Fenskeep for his own.

He threw the letter into the fireplace where it burnt to cinders - the baron swore he heard someone laugh at him as if in the outer darkness of the swamp surrounding his keep. He turned back to the adventurers, each whispering. Was it them? Did they laugh? He could have them killed easily and be done with this whole affair of the gem but… no that would not do. The letter had become nothing but its words still burned into his mind like a warning beacon. He would not dare deny the demands of its author.

“I have a job for you three,” he said. Perhaps they would perish along the way.

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Alright - quick disclaimer. The events I talk about in this backlog actually happened before the previous episode, but I was out of town and didn’t get a chance to work on this one prior so it’s coming out after that episode. Not a big deal but just wanted to give you guys a heads up.

So going back an extra session, it ended with the party regrouping with the Dawn Guard NPCs on the other side of the tunnels. The last enemy they fought, a maw demon, showed them one more bit about my setting, that demons were cursed in some way to become demons depending on their actions. I imagine it as something like a morality system from World of Darkness, but thankfully none of my players have played an elf so I haven’t actually had to homebrew any mechanics. And that’s great too - you don’t need to fully bother with something unless you want to or need to! For now just “elves turn into demons” proved a good lore twist and kind of important as the campaign goes on and focuses on demons.

But more on that later - for now we’re still in the early stages of the campaign and in what I’ve started labeling as the “guided tour.” It’s kind of like at a theme park where on the ride it’ll take you through an entirely planned route while you get to ogle at poorly aged animatronics, or at a museum where someone informs you of the exhibit so you don’t have to bother reading the plaques, but my intent is never to make it feel like a strict railroad without player input. It’s more like I’m just trying to show my players things to gauge how interested they are in something.

Take the next encounter: after they hop on a boat to go into the swamp with the Dawn Guard, they run into a band of hobgoblin haghunters. I made hobgoblins a major race in my setting as a recent change because I wanted to start working with traditional monster races past them just being typical villains, and I hadn’t really done anything with hobgoblins so they seemed like a good pick. In my setting they’re distant, genetic cousins of humans, and the reasons for the divergence differs depending on who you ask, but they have their own culture and identity separating them from traditional humans. Specifically, they are more “innately” magical than humans and have found a racial enemy in hags, who seek their young in the gross way that hags usually do.

So the group gets to meet these haghunters, which alone clues them into one of the aspects of their culture. I don’t force the NPCs to just volunteer information to the players during these moments - instead it’s a chance for them to ask things. The cleric, for instance, asks about what deity they worship only to find out that the hobgoblins are atheists. What he does with this information is up to the player, but it still gives me something to go off of depending on how interested they are. The other NPCs, the Dawn Guard, take a backseat so the players get to drive the encounter as much as they want.

After this the players proceed to an inn called Lij’s Crossing, and there’s no shortage of good stuff you can put in a tavern. At this point they parted ways with the Dawn Guard to look for a rider further into the swamp, to their destination of Fenskeep. I like to give each tavern in my game a distinct feature to remember it by, so the Crossing is built on a bunch of raised platforms with the best rooms being smaller cabins off to the side on their own platform. The inn proper has two floors, the upper of which has an open view to the lower kitchen and docking area. It’s also not the safest rest stop but nothing in this part of the world is.

It just so happens there’s a set of dangerous individuals here: Obfuscators, who are the agents of the Prism Wizard serve as the antithesis of the Dawn Guard. They’re infamous and far from home, for the Obfuscators are gathering information in order to conquer the Drifting Isles and assimilate it back into the Kingdom of Ro’Elnar. For now, though, they’re there to cause a ruckus and attempt to provoke the players. The one they run into, Pedwar the dwarven monk, shows there’s no end to his sass though and returns a taunt back - a memorable moment the player got to make on his own.

Outside, Sq’Gee and Olrune are up to something a bit more important - acquiring a ride to Fenskeep. Unfortunately none of the merchant ships are heading that way, but they do end up acquiring their own vessel, something I had planned for a while. A seemingly benign fisherman, Kof Nizosk, sells them a small boat for fifty gold pieces. I don’t want to spoil anything here, but Kof comes around as a sinister force for the players to deal with much later in the campaign, so do yourself a favor and take some simple NPC that your group meets and trusts early on, give them a reason to be a bad guy, and have them show up further down the road as an antagonist for the party. 

I did give them one friendly NPC though - a dragonborn merchant who ended up becoming part of their crew, Xichtanil. One of the players brought up how they were expecting a different event to happen, perhaps becoming part of a crew for an established ship of a merchant. So I tried meeting them halfway. I made a clumsy, four-armed dragonborn who goes around selling trinkets and treasures that has ended up becoming the most popular NPC of the table by far. He’s from the area and can inform them about the kingdom’s history when needed, has his own insights and opinions about the party’s actions and the political climate, but he never is strong enough for the group to rely on or discredit player agency. He’s enough of a tag along companion without making the story about himself.

Their trip out on the boat had a couple encounters along the way - both planned, both furthering the idea of the guided tour. There definitely would’ve been merit to just have sped them along their way to the destination, cutting it short with a “you’re here” but I felt that their maiden voyage deserved something a little special. There would be plenty of traveling down the road to just gloss the overcast days of path walking drudgery.

The first was a trio of kenku, adorable little crowfolk that can only speak by mimicking sounds and voices that they’ve heard. They’re like tape recorders with infinite storage. Rather than having the players roll their History or Nature checks, I had them repeat the things the party was saying back to them. Should they have been nice to these vagabonds they would’ve understood they were being warned about the next encounter with some yuan-ti, snakefolk, but in an interest of moving things along Sq’Gee essentially shoved them off the boat. This proved to be a learning point for the other, two, newer players - they didn’t have to wait for one player to finish their “turn” in order to do their own thing. Had they known that, they would’ve stepped in and stopped the cleric from harassing what could’ve been some new friends.

The second encounter was straightforward - a “crashed” ship needed some help with repairs, and its crew seemed human enough. Of course that’s the thing about yuan-ti, the purebloods always seem human enough until you get too close for a look. The party did fall for it the first time, but it’s always fun to bring back yuan-ti as a recurring villain to get that fear going again whenever the party starts trusting me too much. They ended up besting the broodguard and two purebloods, and made their way to Fenskeep.

The final encounter of the night was marching right up the hill of the town. They docked their boat at one of the side ports surrounding the central keep that gives the town its namesake, and made their way right up the lane to have their job all done and finished. They met little resistance at the door and were brought before Baron Tervin Blackshield, current ruler of the town. The recap gave a pretty good idea what happened. They presented their parcel to the baron, only for the gemstone within it, which is actually the heart of a slumbering giant that lies beneath the keep, to paralyze all of those present in the room - except for one of the new players.

I think this came about because my friend is from a video game background, but when we talked about it later he said that he was trying to find an answer to the solution on his character sheet. The decision paralysis, which I’m quite familiar with myself especially with board games, can definitely kill the mood at the table if it all comes screeching to a halt because a player is unsure what to do. However, I’ll take the opportunity here to say I think I could’ve helped him figure out what he could do, what the possibilities were. It’s easy early on to think of D&D as just your character sheet and only think about solving problems by numbers or spells or attacks, but the honest truth is that the opportunity to flex your creativity is what makes D&D so unique compared to its digital contemporaries. So maybe I was wrong to just expect that behavior to come instinctively, but I know going forward that it’s always good to encourage your players if they’re struggling - it’s good to check in on your friends. And that’s not table advice, just life advice.

Alright that’s it for today. As always, thanks for listening, I really appreciate it. If you have any questions you can reach me by email at dmdiscoursepodcast@gmail.com or on Twitter @dmdcpodcast. I hope this stuff is proving useful/interesting but I’m definitely having fun making it. Also next time will be me discussing the party actually in a dungeon, so I hope you’ll come back around for that. Take care and have a great week.