Keeping Plots Discontinued (or, Nobody Cares about Your Wolfos Ranger)

Most players don’t know what goes into making a D&D session. It’s not unlike how most children don’t know what it’s like to be a parent, or how most people don’t really know what their boss (or their boss) does every day, though on a much smaller scale. Players manage a character and its rules, remember plot details, and interact with each other and NPCs. DMs manage all NPCs, all monsters, all plots, and all interactions, and are expected to know any and all rules at any given time (I can’t count the number of times players have asked me what a spell did, a spell they read in a book and prepared for the session yet mysteriously forgot by the time they wanted to use it). The average player has never had to pick out a set of miniatures, plan a map, or search for the appropriate pictures to show players on a brilliant and under-appreciated piece of software. I think that, in general, if players knew how much work went into designing a session, adventure, or campaign, they’d appreciate the results of that work much more.

Some things, though, should be kept from players. Players don’t need to know that a given monster was a reskin of another monster, or that a given map is a modified version of a level from a video game. It generally doesn’t increase the player’s enjoyment to see too far behind the screen. If they guess the source of something, fine, but I don’t think DMs should be encouraging players to understand everything and its origins. In particular, I’d like to talk about plots the DM planned but didn’t run, and why players should remain in the dark about them.

Every week at our friendly local gaming store, we run a Pathfinder event based on the old D&D Delve Night. The arc just came to a close, and the designer of the session asked me about bringing up some plot details that had been left unresolved from past session. In particular, there was a mysterious cabal running a city who teleported troublemakers somewhere far away, and we considered explaining the mechanism of the spell to the players when it failed in a catastrophic way.

The thing is, the players never questioned the teleportation. They never sought out the cabal, asked how the came to power, researched the spell, or gave a second thought to any NPCs who were teleported away. We could have explained to the players that the teleportation spell had some intricacies that would lead it to failing in the last session, bringing back all lost creatures. But given that the players weren’t interested in it, we decided that adding that level of complexity to the last session wasn’t necessary or wise.

In general, DMs should stay away from using time during the session to resolve plots that the players didn’t know existed. During Delve Night, the players have so far angered two city-wide guilds, broke some people out of prison, failed to find some “merchandise” stolen from a slaver, opted not to meet with a great wyrm, and put themselves in debt to a powerful magician. If the campaign had more time left, we could have had the guilds attack the players, sent the police after them, brought back the “merchandise” to ally with or fight them, forced them into conflict with the great wyrm, or had the magician call in his favor. But all of these are sub-plots, and the players had clearly come to the end of the main plot. I don’t see how adding all the sub-plots back in at the end would have benefited anybody.

This gets worse when you factor in the plots we planned about which the players didn’t know. Throughout the campaign, the players had ignored (intentionally and otherwise) all information about the teleportation plot. Bringing it all back in for the last session would have compressed it so much it almost wasn’t recognizable and could only have detracted from the final session.

I learned this lesson way back in the Hyrule Campaign, by having a recurring enemy attack the party in the last session. Normally, this wouldn’t be stupid, except the only place I fought for it was after the battle with Ganon. Nobody wants to beat the final boss, then have to deal with a plot they’d long forgotten. All of us would have been much happier if I’d let that plot lie.

So I recommend that if players blithely ignore a sub-plot you had planned, let it go. In a long enough campaign that plot, possibly revised, may be able to work its way back in later. But shoving additional complexity into the end of a campaign to explain things that didn’t need explaining is a recipe for confused and unhappy players.