Thursday, August 25, 2011

Players' Survival Guide - Never Be Reluctant to Skip Town

You know how in every crime/mob/gangster mvoie/TV show some poor chump totally stirs up shit and than, even though he knows he should skip town, stays in his mom's basement or visits his girfriend and gets wacked? Hell, look at what happened to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser's girlfriends?

Don't be that guy. When you end up kicking over the hornet's nest and you know that the shithammer may very well be swinging your way, don't mess around, don't tie up loose ends, instead steal some horses or a boat that very night and get the hell out of town.

And don't shack up two villages over or anything else half-assed; beat the hoof hard and get your butts on another continent if you can. There's more of them than their are of you; and divination magic, speak with dead, etc. makes it really hard to cover your tracks in a bulletproof fashion.

"Getting out of Dodge" is a cliche for a reason...

6 comments:

  1. Testify, brother !

    Campaigns I play in are usually a list of places we cannot go back to. In many ways, the life of an advenrturer is much like that of a classic aimless serial killer.....bodies, lack of remorse and all.

    Hmmmm. So, if we live in some kind of simulation and don't know it, maybe the Serial kilers are the PC's ?

    Great. Looks like I'll be up all night again.....Stooopid brain.

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  2. The players in my current campaign split for the New Lands across the great sea becasue things had (or were soon going to be) too hot for them.

    Horde of undead advancing on civilization, an awoken snake-god, a pissed off witch-queen, a number of murdered priests...time to leave.

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  3. I created a Rome-ish country for my players, and included two mafias. It took like an hour before one was stealing a small fortune from one while another player murdered several members of the other for a keg of good beer. They fought their way out of the city within the week.

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  4. Great stories! Those wacky PCs and their madcap escapades...

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  5. Tracy Hickman tells the story of DMing for some of his son's friends. They got into so much trouble in town they started a riot, shoved a woman through a window, and ended up drawn and quartered. Gotta love PC plans sometimes...

    Great post, players need the help. :)

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  6. Once I was in a round robin style campaign where the city we were in was threatened by at least three impending doom situations (angry god about to set off the volcano, an invasion of drow from below, and a cabal of midget vampires), and no one could be talked into getting out of town.

    "I hear Rosewater is nice this time of year" (referring to another city in the campaign world) became a running gag.

    I think the main reason this happened was because as a round robin/shared campaign setting, nobody was willing to abandon it for DM reasons, although for the characters packing up and bugging out would have been the logical response.

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