DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 43A: Scouting Porphyry House
They knew that Porphyry House was engaged in illicit as well as salacious trade, and they doubted the cultists were bringing their other business brazenly through the front door. There had to be a second, surreptitious entrance somewhere.
Probably underground.
Probably in the sewers.
So what’s happening at the beginning of this session is that, after giving up on the idea of finding an entrance to Porphyry House through the sewers at the end of last session, the players almost immediately worked their way back around to the same conclusion: There must be an entrance through the sewers!
There isn’t.
Whereas the PCs’ scouting in the last session was still taking them interesting places (because they were following paths to interesting things, even if their reasons for doing so were erroneous), we’ve now reached the point where they’re really just ramming their faces into a wall. It’s like searching a dungeon room you’ve already searched three times and hoping you’ll find something new, only at a slightly larger scale.
So, as a GM, what do you do about this?
Well, I actually have an article about this: Random GM Tips — Driving Past the Dead End.
They eventually found their way to the right area beneath Porphyry House… but found nothing except a few impassable pipes which might (or might not) lead into the House.
By the time they re-emerged from the sewers, evening was settling in and they were reminded that they had an appointment with Rehobath in the not-too-distant future. They decided to leave and try again the next day, and on their way back to the Ghostly Minstrel laid out a plan to magically tunnel their way into the house from below (if they could figure out exactly where they should be digging).
What you’re seeing reflected in the campaign journal here is a very hard frame — the time spent at the table is minimal, while the time that passes in the campaign world is significant. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it would have been along the lines of, “Okay, going down into the sewers you begin exploring. You’re right in the heart of where the older sewer systems in the Warrens meet the newer systems of the Guildsman District and it’s all a chaotic jumble. You eventually find your way to the area right under Porphyry house, but there’s nothing there except drainage pipes.”
To break this down, there are four key components:
- I’m shifting from Now Time to Abstract Time. (There’s no reason to, for example, play out a tunnel-by-tunnel exploration of the sewers because there’s nothing meaningful to find and no meaningful choices to be made during that exploration.)
- The PCs are still doing the thing that the players want them to do. (I’m not saying, “No, you can’t search the sewers.”)
- The passage of time is significant. (I’ve talked about handling the passage of time through a mental model of Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Overnight. In this case, they spent their afternoon on the sewer search, thus the frame of, “By the time they re-emerged from the sewers, evening was settling in…” This is further reinforced because they have an evening appointment.)
- Their action has a concrete conclusion. (They didn’t just “not find an entrance to Porphyry House.” Their efforts resulted in them finding the point closest to Porphyry House. The distinction is subtle, but distinct: The former says “maybe you missed something, so you could look again.” The latter says, “you succeeded in your search and this is what you found, even if it isn’t what you wanted to find.”)
We have, thus, spent only a couple minutes of our valuable table time on this interaction. And while the players feel that they’ve been allowed to do the thing they wanted to do, they’re also been pushed away from the idea of “let’s just search again” because (a) the result has been framed as a definitive answer to their query and (b) we’ve also established that it will cost them a significant resource (time) to continue pursuing this.
Now, as you’ll see in the journal entries for the rest of this session, the players nevertheless did continue masticating this idea, intermittently discussing their options while pursuing other agendas. They really wanted a discreet entrance to Porphyry House. But rather than just boiling away table time fruitlessly searching the sewers, they instead turned their thoughts to more creative solutions: First by hatching the idea of drilling up into Porphyry House from the section of sewer they had identified as lying under the whorehouse, and then by refining that idea into stoneshaping through the rear wall of the building.
So, in short, I’m making a note here, “Huge success.”
Campaign Journal: Session 43B – Running the Campaign: D&D is Educational
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
