Session 20D: The Talk of the Town
They headed over the Temple of Asche. Unfortunately, Mand Scheben wasn’t there. They made plans to come back the next day. They also tried to meet with Lord Zavere, but he was also out (Kadmus told them that he had gone out with Lord Abbercombe and was not expected back until the next morning).
This sort of “the person you went to go see isn’t available right now” moment is actually a really great way to make sure that your world feel like it’s actually a real, living place with a persistent existence beyond the PCs: The NPCs aren’t just video game characters with yellow exclamation marks over their heads.
Although it’s a very minor technique, in practice it’s actually a fairly sophisticated one and I honestly wouldn’t recommend it for beginning GMs. That might sound crazy for something that seems to incredibly easy to execute: When a player says they want to go see Person X, you just say, “No.” Simple.
But the fact that you’re saying “No” is actually what makes it tricky to pull off well. Remember that you generally want to Default to Yes when you’re GMing. So if you’re doing this, you want to make sure that you’re not just doing it in order to stymie your players (i.e., that you’re not preventing them from seeing Person X because you want to railroad them onto a different path).
In this case, the unavailability of Lord Zavere was actually something that I had plotted out in my campaign status document, and it self-evidently had nothing to do with Tee’s specific desire to see him here (since I’d had no idea that any of this was going to happen before we started play). For Mand Scheben, there’s an indicator of my good faith in making the decision in the fact that the PCs actually manage to catch up with him a little later.
But it’s actually a little trickier than that: It’s not enough for you not to be intentionally blocking a player choice, you also need to make sure that the players don’t perceive you as having intentionally blocked their choice. These usually go hand-in-hand, but sometimes that’s not the case. This technique is a particular quagmire in this regard: Any time you say “No” to the players without a clear explanation for why the answer is “No” you risk them interpreting that decision as capricious and, therefore, that they’re being railroaded; but the entire point of this technique is, in fact, to establish that the game world exists beyond their perceptions and does not owe them answers!
How do you square that circle? Largely by earning the players’ trust. And you do that by being earnest and forthright in how you’re running your game. If you establish – repeatedly and consistently – that your decisions are coming from the game world and that the players can trust you to roll with their ideas and to follow them to the most unexpected places, then when they’re met with the inexplicable and the frustrating they will identify that frustration as coming from the game world and not from the Game Master.
And that’s valuable well beyond the confines of this simple little technique, because when your players stop trying to keep one eye on the wizard behind the curtain it allows your game world to truly come alive.
BEGINNER-LEVEL TECHNIQUE
A much easier version of this technique can be done by inverting the approach: Instead of having an NPC unavailable when the PCs want to talk to them, have the PCs unavailable when an NPC wants to talk to them. The PCs return to their office and find a note slipped under the door (“It is urgent that we meet at once!”) or come home to find a message on their answering machine.
If you schedule NPC approaches to the PCs in the campaign status document, you’ll find that these moments arise completely organically. (The sheet says Person X is coming to see them at their office at 3pm on the 10th, but at 3pm on the 10th they’re fighting xorbloids from Aldebaran.)
Because you’re not blocking a player-chosen intention, pulling this off without negative side-effects is fairly trivial. (Although you’ll probably still want to avoid overdoing it.) But it achieves a similar effect by asserting that the other characters in the world have lives and schedules that are not completely centered on the activities of the PCs. With that being said, when the consequences for missing a meeting turn bad (their would-be client gets killed before they can contact her, for example), it will nevertheless be much more effective if you’ve established trust with the players (because they’ll blame themselves for the bad outcome and not you — you didn’t arbitrarily choose to have them miss the client, they could have been there; they could have saved her).
