I have a simple rule of thumb: If you’re designing a mystery for your PCs to solve, you should include at least three clues for every conclusion you want them to reach. More often than not they’ll miss the first clue and misinterpret the second, but the third will do the trick. (And sometimes they’ll spontaneously jump to a conclusion without even being given a clue, which is always a pleasant surprise.) If you further design the adventure so that they can complete it even if they don’t reach every single conclusion that you want them to, then your adventure is probably robust enough to withstand actual play design.
This design methodology not only sidesteps the common problem (where the PCs miss or misinterpret some vital clue), but it also leads to a more robust scenario: All those clues give you a much firmer and deeper understanding of what’s happening, making it much easier to improvise on your feet if the PCs suddenly go haring off in a random direction.
The classic adventure Death in Freeport doesn’t quite honor this design principle: When running the adventure out of the box there are a couple of choke points where PCs might find themselves facing a brick wall if they turn the wrong way or make the wrong assumption. But way back in 2000, when I first ran this adventure, I buffed it up with a few additional clues and alternate investigation methods. And I not only ran it with great success in 2000, but I ran it again in 2002 to launch a fairly successful mini-campaign, and then I ran it again in 2003 as a one-shot. It was pretty much foolproof.
Then, in 2004, I discovered that I had never known true foolishness.
This is the story of the worst experience I have ever had as a DM. I had gathered together a gaming group with the intention of playtesting a mega-adventure that, sadly, was never published. In order to lead the group into this adventure (which started at 6th level), I decided to go with some tried-and-true material: The original Freeport trilogy that I had run to such great success before. After five or six sessions of material I was completely confident about, I would have a firm baseline for judging the success of the original material in the mega-adventure.
Instead, the campaign lasted only three sessions and never got beyond Death in Freeport.
I say it lasted “only” three sessions, but the reality is that these sessions were grueling and painful affairs. It was not just that the party ineptly blew off, ignored, or blatantly misinterpreted even the simplest of clues — it was the inept bungling of their every attempt to carry through on a good intention and the utter incompetence of their exploits. A quickie adventure that generally takes about four hours to complete dragged out for more than twenty hours of gameplay, by the end of which I, as the DM, was struggling to find any way of bringing the scenario to a close.
Here are a few of the more memorable and (in retrospect and from a safe distance) hilarious exploits:
1. They were given a “To Do” list that the priest had apparently made the day before he disappeared. On the list there was a specific person mentioned. They tracked this person down and discovered he was a ship’s captain. They proceeded to concoct an elaborate scheme in which they would pretend to have a cargo they needed to ship and then offer it to the captain’s closest competitor! The competitor accepted the cargo. When this failed to elicit a response, they sat down with the captain and said, “Hey! We just gave your competitor some business! Whaddya think of that?”
The captain said, “He’s a liar and a cheat and a swindle, but who you choose to do business with is your own affair.”
They concluded from this that the captain had never heard of the priest they were looking for. (You’ll notice that they never actually asked the captain whether he knew anything about the priest. They never even mentioned the priest.) Then they spent about an hour of game time acquiring the cargo they had pretended to have so that they could actually give it to the competitor and pay him to ship it. (Why? I never found out.)
2. Assassins were sent to kill them. They killed the assassins and discovered a note on one of their bodies describing where and when they were to meet the person that had hired them. The party went to this location several hours before the meeting was scheduled to happen and discovered it was a tavern. They stayed there for about half an hour and then left… still several hours before the meeting was scheduled. The next morning they went back, broke into the tavern, and tried to kill the bartender.
3. After missing or blowing off several other clues, one of them finally managed to get himself killed. So a replacement PC was brought in, and I seized the opportunity to give this new PC a “clue” which basically consisted of him saying: “Hey, I know the guy who’s behind this. We should follow him and find out where their hideout is.”
So they follow this guy for a couple of minutes… and then one of them steps out of hiding and stabs him to death.
4. So the bad guys kidnap another priest, and this time I connive to have one of the PCs see it happen. (I’m getting desperate at this point.) The PC follows the kidnappers for several blocks and then… shoots at them with his crossbow. He’s outnumbered 6-to-1 and, after getting hit once, announces that he “only had 1 hp left” and is now dead.
This same group also had another memorable moment: At one point the party’s wizard was hit by a silver dart which had a note wrapped around it, “You die at midnight.” The party concluded, rightly, that this was a threat! So they head back to the inn where they were staying and resolve to all stay awake in the common room so that they can’t be surprised…
… all of them except the wizard, that is, who instead specifically gets his familiar drunk enough that it’s unconscious and then goes upstairs and falls asleep himself.
Oddly enough, when the rest of the group came in the next morning, they found the wizard dead with a knife sticking out of his throat.
And that’s basically what happened to the campaign, too. It was a mercy killing, really. The PC who had gotten himself killed by launching a “cunning” ambush with only 1 hp left to his name was revived inside the bad guy’s secret hideout while he was being prepared for a ritual sacrifice. With a little prompting he managed to escape, putting him in the perfect position to grab the rest of the party and lead them back to the secret hideout! This would start the straight-out dungeon crawl portion of the adventure, which would presumably negate much of their bumbling ineptitude!
… only that’s not what he did. Instead he fetched the city guard, who moved in and secured the hideout. This was almost certainly the most competent thing any of them had done in the course of the entire adventure, but it also assured that the PCs never actually managed to accomplish anything at all.
It may have ended with a whimper instead of a bang. But at least it ended.
ARCHIVED HALOSCAN COMMENTS
Gloomshroud
Ouch
Thursday, August 26, 2010, 11:16:03 AM
Capt_Poco
This left me with tears of laughter in my eyes. Thank you so much for sharing, now I know that I am not alone!
My favorite was how you tried to manipulate events to make it more and more obvious. It’s like, you want to show them who the murderer is, so you teleport the murderer into their living room as he is murdering someone.
It sounds like your PCs had a great time though.
Saturday, June 27, 2009, 12:14:12 AM
Badmike
“This is the story of the worst experience I have ever had as a DM”
This always means classic hilarity will follow. Thanks for not disappointing! Great story.
Just one question, though: did the group have a good time? I’ve been in similar frustrating situations where the entire adventure is epically off the tracks, yet afterwards the players all said they had a great time. Sometimes our expectations as GMs are so fundamentally different we fail to see the forest for the trees. One time running the classic D1, all the party really wanted to do was get into a bad ass total combat with everything in the caverns and loot their treasure afterwards. It wasn’t my idea of how the campaign should progress, but that had a grand time in the battle so who was I to judge?
Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 1:11:36 PM
Um, well at least you didn’t have to come up with a new scenario. I was doing a Doctor Who role-play with a group that not only ignored a number of clues (a white-hot key, a Skin-walker terrorizing a village, a species with elemental powers and a dance), but actually used to TARDIS to travel back several hundred years before the time of the adventure because they were curious about the ancient ruins the skinwalker was hiding out in and instead of trying to stop the monster from killing more people they decided to go back in time and see what they ruins used to be. They ended up studying how the society evolved, and rather than actually trying to save people they instead just sat back and watched a revolution and convinced the advanced civilization that existed to abandon their advanced technology and return to pre-industrial civilization. On the other hand it was fun for all involved, even if I had to keep doing world-building on the fly.
LOL, unfortunately that’s actually quite a normal thing to happen, which is why telling the players beforehand that they are free to engage the scenario in any way they can isn’t as obvious as one may think.
I have a story of this kind that happened to me as a player. I joined a forum-like one-shot MERP adventure, recommended by a friend of mine who also joined in. This friend recently tried GMing a Sci-Fi session(I was the regular GM), but because he prepped a rigid plot, the session lasted less one hour because we killed an essential NPC, that character was supposed to crash the ship in an abandoned planet, but I detected what he was trying to do and killed him fair and square before he could do it. Of course, my friend was very angry at me and accused me of being a bad player(we were 14 back then). I’m bringing this up because we both joined the MERP adventure as players.
The adventure was about being mercenaries escorting a wizard and his bodyguard to “visit an old friend”. We started on Minas Tirith. The wizard was being very vague about the location only saying it was “about two weeks travel in a (specific) direction”. I did the math and quickly realized we were going to pass through the dangerous Mouths of the Entwash and that no one really lived there. Since I knew that as a player, I asked the GM if I could use that information and he said it was ok. But then when I brought it up to the rest of the PCs I was berated by my angry friend for (again) trying to break the adventure and managed to convince the others that we were suppossed to follow the railroad. He even managed to keep convincing them even as the wizard acted more and more suspicious and acted very protective of a little box, a PC Thief caught him talking to what seem to be a weird little demon-like creature. He also seemed intentionally obscure about his “friend”. We were also attacked by an archer and several mercenaries, we killed the mooks, but the archer kept showing up like a deadly sniper. Everything smelled fishy.
Still, the rest of the group insisted that “we’re supposed to follow the adventure”. And I didn’t press on, probably because of my own teenage insecurites. Needlessly to say the entire party ended up getting killed at one point or another, one at the Mouths of the Entwash, my character with an arrow maybe from the archer or another of his henchmen afterwards, the others once the mad wizard released that demon at a cave(that’s where it turned out we were going).
The GM, who has a similar design philosophy as Justin, couldn’t believe that we never tried to turn around or something. He actually showed me the adventure notes. As it turns out, the entire adventure was supposed to be around the players finding out about the wizard and stopping him. LOL. From that on, I never again let myself to be convinced to follow a railroad, if the GM can’t handle a player making different choices, it’s his/her damn problem. But then again, once in a while it can happen that the players see they should be doing something else but restrain themselves because they’re convinced by bad GMs that it’s “bad gaming etiquette” to do so.
Hi! I’ve been enjoying your articles and posts, especially the 3-clue rule. Good work and very informative.
I myself will run Death in Freeport for some friends in the near future. Would you kindly elaborate the additional clues you’ve put into the adventure?
I quote you: “But way back in 2000, when I first ran this adventure, I buffed it up with a few additional clues and alternate investigation methods.”
I’d love it if you could share what you added in the module, to help prevent roadblocks!
Thanks a lot 😀
p.s. I hope you can answer here.
Oh my god!!! I laughed so hard at this
The first time i played a game (It was call of cthulhu) I felt quite dumb stumbling from place to place trying to find out any clue of what was going on at the cursed house, but I never reached those levels xD
So I now kind of feel better about myself lol
I’m wondering: Did you ever figure out what the players thought was going on in these scenarios? You’ve talked elsewhere about how this was the result of the players being conditioned to follow a railroad, but I can’t see what rails the players were trying to follow in any of these scenarios. Like in the assassin scenario (#2), it seems to me that the “rails”, insofar as any existed, pointed towards showing up at the place and time on the note. So why did they think you wanted them to show up early and then leave?
Some of it was looking for a railroad, like doing everything every NPC tells them to do because they’re expecting the GMPCs to tell them what to do.
But some of it is, in fact, just inexplicable.
Although, reflecting on it further right now, I wonder if part of it was also being conditioned to a mode of game play where you go where the GM tells you to go and then the GM tells you what you do there. So when they go to the tavern and I say something like, “What do you do?” they’re flummoxed by the question.
Like, they went to the tavern. The next “logical” thing out of my mouth should be, “Okay, so you set up a stake out outside the tavern and wait for the appointed meeting time. When it arrives you see yada yada.” Because the conception of game play is, “We get in the proximity of the GM’s next scene and then the GM tells us how that scene plays out.”
But what I’m actually thinking is, “How are they going to approach this? Watch from outside? Get a table inside? Ask the bartender questions?”
Similarly when they kill the guy they’re supposed to be following, it’s possible that their interpretation of what was happening was, “We haven’t done what the GM wants us to do, so he’s just going to keep waiting until we do. What could it possibly be? It must be killing this guy.”
It reminds me adventure I played in 4E.
Little Background first. Our group was in dwarf city, and we were accused of killing high priest. Because of contradicting evidence, presence of Queen, who had an affair with said priest, signs of mind flayer and persuasion of our noble dwarf cleric, we weren’t incarcerated. We could move freely through the city, but we were told in no uncertain terms that during investigetion we cannot leave and every sign of trouble will land us in jail.
While walking through city, we witness crime (i believe it was theft). So we start chasing criminals. One of us starts running on rooftops and gets attention of city guards.Somehow, the thieves think they manage to lost us and go to hidden entrance to theiur hideout. When we get there, city guards catch up to us. They know who we are and what we are accused of, so they are looking for excuse, but we have perfect escape, by going into thieves hideout. Our DM prepared it as a little dungeon of Thieves Guild with their head as the final boss. So what did we do? We explain that we were chasing criminals, they entered here and we were going to call for guard, so it’s good they are already here. It ended with succesfull police raid on criminal hideout while we were among the crowd, pleased with ourselves. Our DM’s face was priceless.
Lucius has a to do list in Death in Freeport that mentions turnips. My players spent most of our last session focused on turnips and understanding his interest in them – whether there was any sort of arcane turnip with mystical properties that was somehow involved in his disappearance.
Sheesh, that’s like an episode of “D&D: The Sitcom”. ;p
Only one question: besides the wizard, did the rest of the party survive the adventure?
When I read these kinds of stories, the author often includes a disclaimer that these players are actually fully-functional, intelligent adults, and the events of the game aren’t a reflection of their true mental capabilities.
Honestly, I can’t imagine that to be the case with this particular group.
Long time ago i was doing an hard sci-fi campaign at Jovian Chronicles (a very old sci-fi game, think about gundam meets the expanse); during first adventure the player had to investigate a missing person on one of the domed cities of Venus (i don’t remember many details, it was more than 15 years ago…)
After several painful steps, going from one PC finding a “phone book” clue, putting in the backpack and forgot he ever found that, and one PC spending a whole session to program an AI to crack the misterious code they found on the aforementioned phone book (note: there are no AI in the setting, thus he miserably failed) at the end they found SEVERAL clues pointing at the location where the missing person was hiding.
As i said, i don’t remember the details but there was several clues, not just 3, and one of them was basically being told to them by a friendly NPC contact of one of them.
Then, they decided the hiding place was “sure just a trap because we found too many clues pointing to that place” and to backtrack to the first step to found the “real hiding place” (and also back to programming the AI to solve the code…)
This time i gone further over railroad said “no guys, there is no trap, this is the hiding place, so please go there”. Then they had the one and only fight of the adventure. And left the planet for good.
We never played again this campaign (also, because of some IRL issue, we stopped playing not long after. But this was a different story)