DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 24C: The First Hound of Ghul
Returning to the tunnels beneath Greyson House, they proceeded carefully past the point where the pit of chaos now lay entombed. The stone above it was now visibly warping and buckling, making it clear that the effort to seal away the pool would not last for more than a few more days at most.
But, soon after, their fears regarding the unknown intruders were laid to rest: Drawing near to the former bloodwight nests, Tee could easily distinguish the distinctive sound of elvish voices. Stepping into the open, she confirmed that this was a party of workers and scholars from House Erthuo.
In this session, the PCs return to the Laboratory of the Beast. They’ve been here before. In fact, depending on how you count, this is their third or fourth foray into this section of Ghul’s Labyrinth. (It won’t be the last.)
What’s pulled them back this is the desire to wrap up some unfinished business. There are a couple particular examples of this I’d like to draw your attention to.
First, in this week’s campaign journal, Tee obtains a set of magical lockpicks which allow how to open doors which had previously thwarted their efforts to open.
Second, in the next installment of the campaign journal, you’ll see them figure out how to haul some of the larger treasures out of the labyrinth.
Some GMing advice will tell you to fear failure: Your players couldn’t open the door? Didn’t find the secret passage? Missed a clue? You’ll find plenty of people who will tell you these outcomes aren’t “fun” and shouldn’t be allowed.
But this is myopic advice.
Failure is rarely the end of the story. It is an opportunity for the players to use their ingenuity to find a different path to success. And often the stories we discover along these paths are the most memorable and enjoyable.
Partly this is due to the sense of accomplishment and progress: When you discover that you can achieve a goal that was previously impossible, that’s satisfying. And when you figure out how to find a success that overcomes failure, that’s a success which you own. The context of failure gives meaning to the eventual triumph.
Also, the consequences of failure are usually fascinating and far more interesting than the consequences of success. This can be particularly true of roleplaying. As Admiral Kirk says of the Kobyashi Maru, “It’s a test of character.” How we deal with failure is far more revealing – and meaningful – than how we deal with success.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE DUNGEON
The other reason the challenges of failure often result in great stories is because they force you to re-engage with a situation.
You can see that in a pretty pure form in this session: There’s nothing inherently amazing about picking the lock on a door, but it motivates the PCs to come back to this dungeon. Which, in turn, allows them to see how the dungeon has been transformed as the result of their actions.
The Laboratory of the Beast is a fairly sterile complex, inhabited primarily by the remnants of technomantic and necromantic experiments from the distant past. But even here, the PCs encounter the researchers from House Erthuo: The things which they have done in the past are having a tangible effect on the game world.
This makes the game world feel real. It also gives meaning to the actions of the characters and the choices of the players. The first engagement with something is often scarcely removed from exposition — it establishes the basic facts, but can rarely delve deep in exploring them. It is in the re-engagement that story happens.
Of course, there are other ways that you can motivate players to, for example, revisit a dungeon. But simply allowing failure to exist in your campaign will see this behavior emerge organically from the events of play with little or no effort on your part.
LOGISTICAL CHALLENGES
Much like failure, you’ll often see GMing advice which suggests that logistical elements like encumbrance are “boring” and should just be skipped over.
There are certainly times when the logistical hurdles of a situation are clearly manageable and, therefore, the trivial details of exactly how they are managed are best skipped. And there are certainly, for example, encumbrance systems which are so burdensome that it’s better to find an alternative.
But that’s really no different than, say, an overly complicated combat system or the fact that you don’t need to bust out the initiative rolls to let 15th level PCs intimidate and rough up some street thugs. And I think it’s a mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
D&D, in particular, is a game of expeditions. When you remove the logistics from an expedition, you remove most or all of the challenge from that expedition. And I don’t just mean that in a mechanical sense. When you remove adversity from a narrative, it generally doesn’t improve the narrative!
In the current session, you can see how the logistical problem of getting bulky-yet-valuable items out of the dungeon forced the players to come up with alternative solutions. That includes bringing the House Erthuo researchers to the dungeon (“if we can’t move the orrery to sell it somewhere else, we can sell access to it where it is”). It also created a failure state which, once again, brought the players back to the dungeon.
You can see another example of this in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, actually. Once the players have found the huge cache of coins which is the ultimate reward in that campaign, the question of how they’re going to get that gold out when there are potentially multiple factions looking to steal it out from under them is really interesting.
(With minimal spoilers, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is a mind-bending look at a similar conundrum.)
NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 24D – Running the Campaign: Magic Item Wish Lists
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
