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It happens to everyone eventually. You have this big grandiose adventure planned out, all these maps, all these subtle hints, this big elaborate set piece battle all planned out... and the PCs somehow skip it all. All that hard work on stuff they're not going to see, and they're basically down a whole level's worth of XP and loot. Now what?
First off, it's worth bearing in mind that this sort of thing is, generally, totally on you. Pay attention to what spells and abilities the PCs are picking up as they level. If they have flight, teleportation, and the ability to disintegrate/burrow through/melt walls, expect them to use those abilities at every opportunity. If you don't want them doing that, make sure to start making any dungeons you're throwing at them spell-shielded underground complexes with indestructable walls... and make sure to let the players know you're going to do that so they don't waste slots on those spells.
That said, it's a tricky situation. Personally, as a GM, I try to approach things as a fan of the PCs (I am happy when they come up with clever ideas and outwit enemies), and an impartial arbiter (I don't fudge die-rolls or tweak monsters on the fly), so I'm fine with it. If you manage to bypass everything and cut directly to the end of the adventure, fine. They might fight the big bad boss at the end a level or two down, but they'll be at full strength, and presumably they can escape the way they snuck in if things get too rough. If that and maybe some plot token in a treasure wad is all they were there for, that's fine, I'll just end the session early. I find usually it's more just a question of wanting to deal with the biggest/most urgent threat first though, and groups I play with will usually work their way through the place backwards anyway.
Worst case scenario, if I'm running something I wrote myself, they skip the whole thing and never come back... I can just recycle elements here and there for future stuff. No big deal.
Worst case scenario for an AP, I've actually had come up. Book 5 of Legacy of Fire, party basically skipped the whole adventure, which is something of a prison break situation. No reason to backtrack, time pressure to move on, truckload of experience and loot left on the table. There, I roughed out how much XP they missed out on and just gave it to them as a lump sum to keep them on par, left the loot to rot (APs tend not to leave people hurting for cash, and there wasn't really a place to go shopping before the end of the campaign, so hey).
I'm somewhat curious how other people handle this though.
On homebrews I tend to make sure I know my BBEG�s intimately, I know how they react, I don�t create plans, they do and when their plans go awry, I know how they�d react. I know what they�re plans are, I know the dungeons and if the players are smart enough to find a way to skip all the content that�s suppose to prepare them for the BBEG they�re usually smart enough to figure out how to either A, defeat him even though they�re underpowered or B realize they should cut and run and do so, sometimes when they really mess things up I call lunch/dinner break so I can rustle through my folder of bad things past for some filler. Anything they bypass gets put in said folder for future use.
On homebrews I tend to make sure I know my BBEG�s intimately, I know how they react, I don�t create plans, they do and when their plans go awry, I know how they�d react. I know what they�re plans are, I know the dungeons and if the players are smart enough to find a way to skip all the content that�s suppose to prepare them for the BBEG they�re usually smart enough to figure out how to either A, defeat him even though they�re underpowered or B realize they should cut and run and do so, sometimes when they really mess things up I call lunch/dinner break so I can rustle through my folder of bad things past for some filler. Anything they bypass gets put in said folder for future use.
Okay... I swear those were apostrophes when I copied it from word...
It happens to everyone eventually. You have this big grandiose adventure planned out, all these maps, all these subtle hints, this big elaborate set piece battle all planned out... and the PCs somehow skip it all. All that hard work on stuff they're not going to see, and they're basically down a whole level's worth of XP and loot. Now what?
First off, it's worth bearing in mind that this sort of thing is, generally, totally on you. Pay attention to what spells and abilities the PCs are picking up as they level. If they have flight, teleportation, and the ability to disintegrate/burrow through/melt walls, expect them to use those abilities at every opportunity. If you don't want them doing that, make sure to start making any dungeons you're throwing at them spell-shielded underground complexes with indestructable walls... and make sure to let the players know you're going to do that so they don't waste slots on those spells.
That said, it's a tricky situation. Personally, as a GM, I try to approach things as a fan of the PCs (I am happy when they come up with clever ideas and outwit enemies), and an impartial arbiter (I don't fudge die-rolls or tweak monsters on the fly), so I'm fine with it. If you manage to bypass everything and cut directly to the end of the adventure, fine. They might fight the big bad boss at the end a level or two down, but they'll be at full strength, and presumably they can escape the way they snuck in if things get too rough. If that and maybe some plot token in a treasure wad is all they were there for, that's fine, I'll just end the session early. I find usually it's more just a question of wanting to deal with the biggest/most urgent threat first though, and groups I play with will usually work their way through the place backwards anyway.
Worst case scenario, if I'm running something I wrote myself, they skip the whole thing and never come back... I can just recycle elements here and there for future stuff. No big deal.
Worst case scenario for an AP, I've actually had...
Pretty much what you said. I certainly don't feel personally affronted that the players have wasted all the "long hours of hard toil" that I've spent planning encounters. As you say, it's on the GM to understand the party's abilities and powers and plan accordingly.
Or, don't play games that depend on a linear plot line. In a sandbox game, if the players decide to bypass a conflict, well fine-just follow and see where they go.
Okay... I swear those were apostrophes when I copied it from word...Yeah, Word's "smart quotes" become very stupid when run through most forums' editors. :-P
Yeah, they just need to install a spell checker in the forum entry box so I can stop with the copying and pasting from word.
If you build a railroad plot, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It can still be fun. But you have to do it carefully. If the players jump your track, they don't stop at the stations you need them to and the game breaks down. So you have to keep building the adventure with a mind to nerf any abilities they have that bypass your obstacles and/or make your obstacles impassable. That part isn't so hard. The hard part is doing that while letting your players feel they actually have agency instead of just hearing a series of GM stories while moving from preset battle to preset battle.
If it's an official AP, your hands are tied and it's up to the players to realize that an elegant solution of cutting the knot leaves them with a broken piece of rope for a treasure.
If if's a sandbox games, you just know your NPCs and their resources and have them adapt, with the world adjusting to the PCs success.
You can often re-use encounters later, too, so the prep time isn't wholly wasted.
My campaigns are open ended and sand boxy... I have a general plot and the PCs usually have a mission, quest or goal to complete and we sort of work together to get there.
My NPCs interact with the same world the PCs interact with and they change their plans based on what the PCs do. I rarely have a specific encounters planned more than a session or so in advance of the actual likelihood of the encounter happening. And even then my encounters are mostly outlined, not drawn out in detail. I'll know in advance what NPCs the party will encounter, generally where the encounter is likely to occur (although that can change fairly significantly due to player actions) and what sort of information or clues the party is likely to gain from the encounter.
Right now the party in my campaign is in an underground cavern deep in the underdark. They just completed an encounter. They have a general idea of where they are going, but they could take one of several routes. Each of those routes takes them through a different part of the underdark and depending on which way they go, they'll encounter different inhabitants, some of whom will fight them on sight, some of whom will attempt to question the party and some of whom might even ally with the party if they succeed in attempting to gain an alliance.
I know at a high level how these will go, but I have yet to actually lay out any single encounter until the party makes a decision and heads in a particular direction.
In the meantime, the BBEG's spies are watching the party and making their own plans based on whether the party succeeds in their quest or not.
Yep - I often move adventure elements to places where the PCs want to go :)
Yep - I often move adventure elements to places where the PCs want to go :)
Ditto.
I tend to come up with an idea of what I want to happen ultimately, with some sense of the major points along the route (literally or figuratively), and then make up a handful (or more) of encounters that can get stuck anywhere, along with a couple of more "scripted" scenes. Then I kind of let the players go, with some direction, and put things in their path, or give them a little nudge, if they're way off of the "map."
For example, my players recently went sewer delving with an idea of where they needed to get to (south and east), but hadn't asked for a map, and didn't know the layout of the sewers. I had drawn them up with branching paths, and had made up around 12 encounters that I placed around the map. They could take several different routes to arrive at their destination, but all were fraught with SOME perils.
Sometimes you just have to roll with them skirting everything you've planned and let them "win" easily, and at other times, you roll with it by dropping the stuff they would have avoided back in front of them.
I've been on the other side of the screen when this has happened, too. Some published adventure through an abandoned underground city...the route to the end was supposed to be fairly long and elaborate with much fighting along the way, but there was a series of secret doors that, if you found all of them (this was 3.5 and we had an elf with high Spot and Search) and continued going left after every juncture, lead directly to the end of the adventure with almost nothing to contend with along the way. My friends now tend to favor going left when options are presented, as it seems a lot of adventures are written assuming players will go right.
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1) The PCs have a goal. "Retrieve the stolen [MacGuffin]!"
You'd think that the PCs would now want to take a nice, direct path to the MacGuffin; if possible, avoiding obstacles. If the goal is really important, why fight with monsters you can bypass?
2) The MacGuffin is held by a BBEG who's beyond the PCs current power level.
3) The BBEG is hiding at the bottom of a dungeon that will level the PCs sufficiently to stand up to the BBEG.
So if the PCs wade through the dungeon, everything is fine. However, if they're the clear-thinking people from point 1, maybe they want to go directly to the BBEG to get the MacGuffin? What if they actually find a shortcut, avoiding all those encounters?
Options...
a) They get slaughtered, because they made reasonable IC decisions instead of following the railroad. They should have metagamed.
b) They happen to know how powerful the BBEG is, and that they're no match for him (yet). So they ignore the shortcut. But do they enter the dungeon?
I would think they won't. In the absence of other information ("the ancient chronicle says that a sword of BBEG slaying was dropped in that dungeon") it makes little sense to enter a dungeon when you KNOW you can't win the end room.
Assuming that you'll get enough loot and XP in the dungeon to face the BBEG at the end smells of metagaming, although it may be GM-sponsored metagaming.
Now, what may happen is that they take a note to go back there later, once they've gotten more powerful; maybe they'll go looking for some items that will help them take on the BBEG. But they'll try to do that OUTSIDE the dungeon in question.
c) They don't know they couldn't take on the BBEG; the GM rescales the BBEG's power level in secret. Have a nice end battle, and players feel smart for circumventing the "needless" combats earlier in the dungeon.
d) They bypass the monsters and the GM decides they've earned XP for "winning" those combats by circumventing them. This is technically true: the point of those monsters was to block the PCs way to the end room, and the PCs got past them, defeating the monsters' purpose. However, getting XP for "defeating" monsters you didn't even know existed might feel weird.
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I prefer options B and C. They're both good. Note that B is tricky if time is of the essence.
I think it's important to respect the players' wish to go straight to the end goal. This is what people do in movies too: if you want to blow up the death star, you don't go in through the front hangar, kill every storm trooper for XP, and only then try to blow up the reactor. You have a goal, and that goal isn't exterminating every lead-up encounter.
So I think it may be better design if you build a dungeon so that the majority of the rewards are for goal-completion, not room clearing.
Also, don't build the dungeon so that you have to clear all the rooms for XP; take a BBEG at the upper end of what the PCs can handle, and let them level AFTER the dungeon, so that they'll be ready for the next dungeon.