![]() There is a comparison to be drawn between GMs and teachers. Both have difficult jobs, with very rewarding outcomes. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of being the GM, you know that it takes an incredible amount of work to prepare a game (even if you’re not the type to write down notes, or plan, or pre-make maps or sound scores, you’re still engaging in prepping, even if its just theory crafting in your head while you’re at work), but watching your players engage and react and enjoy the game is worth the effort. What happens, though, when your players decide to not just “do something unexpected” (which is, honestly, expected), but take a path or make a decision that steers them completely away from everything you had planned? Did you make a dungeon, with maps and rooms and cool items for your players? Replete with encounters and NPCs and maybe even a quest? What happens when you buy or print handouts, but your players have now completely circumvented the need for them? Some new GMs may think: oh well, all that work for nothing. They adlib and move on or they end the night early for lack of content. My players circumvented my prepared content regularly, but it was never “the big stuff”, just small things that didn’t really take much time to make and didn’t really matter. It wasn’t until they decided to allow what was, essentially, a magical explosives factory, to… well… explode, instead of taking the time to shut down the steamworks machinery in the proper order to prevent the catastrophe, that I learned my lesson.
I love making puzzles, and I had designed 4 different puzzles for the 4 different pieces of machinery they needed to shut down in order to prevent a nuclear level bomb of magical energy from being unleased upon the countryside. I printed these puzzles off on cardstock (because, of course, they were the kind of puzzle the players needed to interact with physically), laboriously cut out pieces and even made a rotating puzzle board thing with various office supplies…. Hours and hours of work. And they just let the factory blow. I had given them plenty of reason to not want the factory to blow (and thus save the lives of the thousands of inhabitants caught in the blast radius), they knew exactly what they needed to do to prevent this. I neglected the fact that the player at my table who most consider a logistical mastermind (not to mention the fact that he was playing an alchemist who was, for all intents and purposes, a logistical mastermind) was also a prior EOD technician from his career in the army (did I mention he was playing an alchemist whose catchphrase was “explosions!”), and whose character had contracted psychosis from some mushrooms they had encountered in a mushroom grove earlier in the campaign (no one knew yet, that was part of the psychosis), AND I had given them necklaces that allowed them to teleport back to their “home base” once per day that was conveniently out of the blast range (they were high levels by this time, a magical item of that kind of power was appropriate). Maybe I should have seen all of that coming; in hindsight, it’s fairly obvious. Now I was left with 4 puzzles that cost me many hours of my life and that fit thematically into a very niche place (a steamworks factory in a mostly fantasy game). I immediately knew I COULD NOT just throw these away; we moved on from that scorched earth scene without engaging my puzzles, but my players wouldn’t get off that easy. Instead, I tricked them into a side-quest dungeon that was also thematically steampunk, repurposed the reason for the puzzles to be solved, and since I had effectively trapped my players in this dungeon, they had no options but to solve them. That may have taken a kidnapper vibe towards the end there; but my point is, even if you have to wait weeks or months to bring that content you worked so hard on back, it’s worth it! Hold on to everything you don’t use and you WILL find an occasion to use it in the future; even if you have to orchestrate a dungeon where your players can’t escape in order to do it.
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