Bad Consequences are Necessary

I mentioned in my post about railroads that there are suboptimal choices and consequences for choosing them, and that this is a good thing.

I stand by that. It’s a good thing because well..

Some actions profit, and some actions represent loss. If you do things right, you should see a positive benefit from it. If you do things wrong, you should see a negative. It is absolutely vital that things go badly when the players make a bad decision. This means their decision MATTERS.

This in a way ties back to a concept that comes up frequently in theological discussions, particularly in the field of theodicy, or to simply ‘Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen™’.  The usual answer is that without the capacity, the free capacity, of man to choose evil over good, his choice to pick good is meaningless.

Or to put this less philosophically.. If all your options at a burger stand give you the same plain burger, but with different names (The Simplistic, The All America, The Bare Bones!), it doesn’t matter if their menu claims to have two thousand items. It only has one. That one burger. It’s a thesaurus, not a menu.

If any decision the players pick turns out to be the right one, and the beneficial one, then you’re coddling them. Their choices don’t matter. And even if you act like they have freedom, you’ve hooked them onto the cattle car on the rails you’re riding.

This can hurt at times, but the benefit is that a good plot is course correcting, a bad plot isn’t. The only answer for the DM is to avoid those bad plots.

By course correcting, I mean that evil plots, evil events, threats and the like don’t just have one moment of gleaming kismet for allowing the players to grab on and ride, we run a rail company, remember? You can walk between stations, take a bus, look at the nice dam, go and meet up with your sweetie, or do a hundred other things and the station will still be back there, but the initial train won’t.

Let’s posit that our players have encountered two threats on an adventure. One is a ‘local’ threat, an evil orc chieftain whose men were all over the last dungeon. The other is Grimnak, High Priest of the Demon Lord of Fire Ants. The players see both, and see that Grimnak is fleeing to his ANTHILL OF THE DAMNED, and the chieftain is running to another locale to raise more orcs to do evil orc things. Now, the ‘adventure’ has the players chasing Grimnak, but the players decide that the orc is the bigger threat.

This might be because of DM error, or player interpretation, the reasons don’t matter for our example though.

They hunt down the orc. While they’re busy putting a conclusive closure to the Chieftain’s evil, Grimnak uses the opportunity to summon the demon servant he was trying to, who if the adventure had gone the ‘correct’ way, the players would have stopped. So he has his demonic servant. While you were steam rolling orcs, the priest called in pretty terrible hefty back up. Fire ant demons are everywhere now.

You made a bad choice. You gotta deal.

The players will embrace it. Some might gripe about ‘the railroad’ at this point, and how you always intended for Grimnak to succeed, but you know you didn’t. You expected him to be stopped, he wasn’t. Consequences follow.

Thus the players actions MATTER.

Now the beauty of this is that if they didn’t go after the orc chieftain, you should also have that have ramifications. Maybe not as large, but still present. Make the opportunity cost of certain actions be something that actually has weight. The players will start thinking their plans and desires are important, this creates drama, and makes them realize that their reaction itself is a resource they need to expend.

Teach them this early.

Its abso-freaking-lutely vital for high level play and avoiding the ‘Why isn’t Elminister helping us’ “paradox.”