This post has spoilers for Elric!/Stormbringer modules and if it generates much activity I expect it'll have spoilers for a bunch of other published adventures. Some kind of warning in the sub-title or text of posts is probably called for out of consideration.

So I was looking at the old Elric!/Stormbringer sourcebook Sorcerers of Pan Tang and it has an adventure called "See Hwaamgarl and Die" and it just struck me how if the characters were the usual group of psychotic cutthroats that we all played when we were 13, the module would never get off the ground. See, the party gets hired to be patsies escorting an expendable emissary to a conference which has been announced by a fearsome and cruel nation of sorcerers. They're supposed to travel by ship with the emissary and a representative of Pan Tang, arrive at the capital city, and then witness a breathtaking act of perfidy on the part of their hosts. It reads nicely. But if my middle school friends were the players, I'd expect at least a 50% chance that before the adventure even got off the ground, the PCs would have kidnapped or killed both the emissary and the Pan Tangian, hijacked the ship, and left the poor GM sputtering.

So first I regret any habits and expectations which have domesticated players into politely giving the GM the benefit of the doubt while they wait for the adventure to unfold. (No need to defensively announce your independence from this trend, or to argue over its pervasiveness. I have something else in mind.)

More important I'd like to hear other examples of real or potential player rebellion against packaged or planned scenarios and the assumptions they make about what has to happen to get through the adventure--and what GMs can do to prepare for, even welcome & encourage that sort of behavior.

This is pretty much why I don't run any packaged adventures. Far too many of them include text saying stuff like "Melinglor the Magnificent needs to escape in this scene and will flee by boat if the combat goes against him" or "Once the party has surrendered..."

In actual play, Melinglor the Magnificent is generally taken down by a spear crit in the first round (sorry Mel) and the party is more likely to form an interpretative dance troupe than they ever are to surrender.

Most adventures I've seen make some frankly unlikely assumptions of player behaviour, and then require hard railroading to stick to the plot.  That just doesn't sound fun to me.

And I have found I can never accurately prejudge which side a party will take, a staged encounter where it is assumed the party will do something is just a failed scenario waiting to happen.  That emissary would likely have been rolled for cash long before the ship docked.

I waited like two days before responding, but now that Balbinus has broken the seal...

In my experience, the most critical factors to how players are going to act during any given adventure are context and continuity. What I mean by this is- if you drop a group of players into an adventure as a one-shot, they have nothing to lose. No context=no consequence.
 
So if even one guy wants to play a kind of intense or classicly Elric-ish chaotic character (which is perfectly legitimate!), and he has the abilities on his character sheet to make it happen, he's very likely going to waste the emissary from Pan Tang sometime during the opening scene. And in Elric, it's going to be more than one guy. It's going to be like 4/5 of the group.

Ok, but say you run the exact same adventure for a group that has been playing the same characters for a while. Mr Chaos guy is in the group, but he's already established himself to the group as being all hardcore. He's already got context. Even if this is his first adventure- but he expects to be playing for a while.. he's establishing some context.

My idea is under that context, that player may give the GM/the plot/the adventure the benefit of the doubt..  because the consequences of what he does will effect him as well as effect the rest of the group.

Plus, if he knows he's going to be coming back and playing this same character, possibly in another adventure next week.. so he knows there's no reason to suck the life out of the game all at once during that one session.

I think Abyssal is correct on context and consequences, but I also think many adventures still make some very dodgy assumptions.

Assuming capture, assuming someone gets away, assuming someone if captured won't talk, all of these can really struggle.

Assuming the players won't waste a given NPC may be more manageable if the group has continuity, in a one-shot as Abyssal correctly notes there's little to lose so even that is likely to come under fire.

Actual play example incidentally, a while back at a con the GM's adventure required that some dude escape and had assumed we would be too slow reacting to them to catch them as we would be dealing with some other bad guys.  We split forces.  At that point reality turned toffee-like as we seemed as if in some bad dream to be running slowly and unable to catch fleeing dude.  It was not a fun experience, and it made no sense at all in game.

Yay! I'm Magnificent!

I remember I wrote an adventure module for Decipher's Lord of the Rings RPG that was founded on some pretty fragile assumptions about how the players would react. Really ended up being my own personal Tolkien fanfiction with dice to roll on ocasion. I'm not terribly proud of that.

Peace,
-Joel

Quote from: MelinglorYay! I'm Magnificent!

I remember I wrote an adventure module for Decipher's Lord of the Rings RPG that was founded on some pretty fragile assumptions about how the players would react. Really ended up being my own personal Tolkien fanfiction with dice to roll on ocasion. I'm not terribly proud of that.

Peace,
-Joel

I think most of us have been to that particular place, I see it as part of learning to GM.

Actually, Maw, you can turn this around. If we all know we're playing a one-shot we also know we can't afford to fool around. We have to get through this tonight or never. Otherwise the evening will have been wasted. That knowledge will help censor your inner goofball--assuming you're not a goofball through and through, in which case you shouldn't play one-shots, well at least not with me.

Whereas in long-term play there's always a second chance, including one for the GM to catch his breath and turn the thing around next week.

It may be a matter of social contract (rarrgh). If you play a one-shot with strangers, you're inclined to behave yourself, again assuming you're a socially functional being. If you play it as a break between campaigns with your long-time gaming buddies, less so.

Anybody remember the Star Frontier module Dramune Run?  It always struck me as an exciting, well-written module.  I've never tried to run it because the whole thing hinges on taking pity on a race of space-chipmunks.  If the PCs don't want to save the space-chipmunks, the adventure falls apart. Hell, in most of my groups the yazirian would french fry the little buggers.

It's always best to build lots of redundancy into your adventures. Modules are pretty fragile things. If you do want to use one, it might be worthwhile to draw up a diagram or a flowchart of how every part of the story fits together and then pencil in two or three additional links of your own creation for the most important parts. That way, if the characters kill the big bad in part three of twelve, you've got a response ready so the story doesn't come crashing to a halt.

Spawned at The Forge, and needlessly referred to as a "narrativist" scenario, Well of Souls is a truly neat scenario that sets the scene, proposes the goals, then lets the player characters go at it with no pre-set ending point.  As Abyssal Maw suggested above, Well of Souls only requires a certain degree of context in order for the players to feel invested in engaging with the characters and setting, instead of flipping everyone the finger and wandering off over the border.  Please, ignore the Forge-ist trappings and take a look at how a good GM might organise an adventure for play.

!i!

That Well of Souls link is a 2.3 MB PDF, by the way--might be worth flagging for the benefit of people whose browsers try to load them directly.

Anyway, absolutely, people have touched on the methods of providing conflict-laden situations rather than planned scenes or even plotted stories. Here, for fun or maybe for utility, I'm thinking more along the lines of "What can we do with these scenarios to take them out of the railroady method?" E.g. one thought is to grab four or five of them and sort of overlay them to provide a cross-section of "what's going on right now". Although the PCs aren't necessarily going to follow any of the adventures, we can assume that some other poor shmoes are moving through most of the storylines, which the PCs might intersect before, after, or in the middle. As well, the railroady qualities of a given scenario might be reinterpreted as the main conflict, with certain NPC factions standing in for the scenario designer's need to push the PCs around. So the central issue isn't "the PCs go to Hwamgaarl and witness this atrocity", but "how do the PCs deal with somebody who's trying to force/hoodwink them into taking this mission on?"