Castles in the sky

In my DnD game last night my group is about to assault a flying castle.  We were in the middle of an encounter where we learned the location of the castle and the time at which it would leave, carrying away its enormous hoard of treasure.  We were told that the castle was going to leave in a couple of hours, and it is a few miles away.

(Faugh, miles.  Real roleplaying systems use kilometers!)

The group looked at each other and quickly concluded that we weren't going to the castle.  We were all badly beaten and nearly out of spells and going into a difficult fight was suicide.  With no time to rest there was no hope - it was time to collect the spoils from our previous encounters and go home.  The castle would fly off and we would have to hope that someday it would come back.

Naked Man, the DM, looked at us with panic in his eyes.  He hadn't realized that we were so beat up, that our spells were so low, and that his timeline had left us no time at all to rest.  We were completely correct to run away, no doubt about it.

So he changed things.  He told us the castle was further away than that, and that it would be leaving in a day or so.  That would give us enough time to rest and replenish our strength before invading the castle in our endless search for more money.

This is a challenging decision, from the DM's chair.  It is hard when you build a campaign and have a bunch of important stuff to have the players simply walk away from it.  That is especially true when they are walking away because you gave them a relatively arbitrary answer to a question and only afterwards do you realize that arbitrary answer totally derailed your plans.

It isn't the decision I would have made though; I would just have accepted them walking away and moved on.  If I really wanted to have the characters invade that flying castle I would have brought it back later.  It flies around, so it could easily end up in our path at a later time.  I think that people realizing they can't do something and retreating is a powerful part of a story!  It establishes player agency, and allows them to feel like they can control what they do and that the world will change based on their decisions.

In the past I have let characters really mess things up a lot.  Sometimes they invade buildings by setting those buildings on fire and then the fire spreads to other buildings and then they have to cope with having started a major catastrophe.  Sometimes they have killed important people that I did not think would die, and the plot shifted dramatically because of it.  I really like that sense that I set it up, but the players choose how and when to knock it down, and then we all examine the pieces and figure out where to go from there.

However, I am not working from a written adventure.  I make everything up from scratch so if the characters choose not to go into a particular castle that isn't a huge problem - it isn't as though that is the only castle to go into.  When you are working from a written adventure though there are lots of places the characters *must* go, or nothing happens.  The world has some interesting places and the rest of it is blank.

In one of my previous games I set up a realm that was going through a revolution and the characters had to choose if they wanted to support the revolution, or defend the current order.  (They could have wandered off and ignored the revolution too, I would have rolled with that, but I expected them to pick a side, and they did.)  This changed everything - who was in charge, how the government worked, their command structure, and more.  You sure can't do that in a published adventure.

Naked Man is constrained.  He can't just let us make that big a mess.  But when I am in the command chair I LOVE messes.  I get a gleam in my eyes and cackle wildly when the characters do something destructive and they groan, knowing that their lives are about to get complicated.  I remember in the 2nd edition rules there was a section talking about giving monarchs more hit points so that some crazed player character doesn't overthrow your fantasy kingdom with a single swipe of their sword.... but overthrowing the kingdom with a single swipe of a sword sounds like a ton of fun, from both sides!  There are going to be consequences, often including the death of the character in question, but if you are allowed to do that you tend to think carefully about your choices, and I like that.