Concealed Calendar of Fate

>PCs are always "just too late" or "just in the nick of time" as the plot calls for it
>Did the party make their best effort to set aside all distractions and make haste? The PCs are still just too late to stop the cult from conjuring demons, and now the party has to defeat those unleashed demons!
>Did the party dilly-daddle and spend their time sipping tea and drinking alcohol when they should have been on the move? The PCs are nevertheless just in the nick of time to rescue the princess from being sacrificed by the evil dragon!
No. How about this.

Create a calendar of events that will occur on each day unless the PCs intervene.
"Day 1: The cult/dragon is doing X.
"Day 2: The cult/dragon is doing Y."
And so on. Upload the entire calendar as a single paste on a pastebin-like website that has timestamps and password protection. Give each player a link to the paste, but do not tell them the password.

As the party goes along the adventure, refer to your calendar as normal and have events unfold appropriately. Do not, under any circumstances, deviate from the calendar, unless it would be incontestably in-character for the villains to adjust their plans to respond to the PCs.

At the end of the adventure, give the players the password to the paste link. This way, they can see what the "original course of fate" was supposed to be, and how their choices and actions meaningfully altered that course of fate. At no point were they ever artificially "just in the nick of time."

Is this a good idea?

Too much effort just to appease entitled, ungrateful, and selfish foreverPlayers

This. If a player complains about something as insignificant as that, then their priorities aren't in the right place and they don't belong at my table.

How would you improve this idea, then?

By not bothering

this is straight up shitposting now, not even with a legitimate "he meymey'd/mentioned the wrong game" excuse like usual.

Stop this. Live a better life. Go outside. Dind some friends to play games with. Do something better than this. Humanity is worth more than you are doing with it. Please.

No one made you shit post, you did it of your own free will faggot that you are.

Don't show the calendar to the players. If they think you're making them 'always just in the nick of time', then they don't trust you and you should probably try to fix that.

Having a timeline in mind in advance that will proceed as planned unless the players meaningfully interfere is a good idea.

Going to the trouble of putting it up in a password-locked pastebin to reveal in the end just illustrates a serious lack of trust between players and GM, which is a problem in its own right.

>Having a timeline in mind in advance that will proceed as planned unless the players meaningfully interfere is a good idea.

It depends on the "destiny" in question - sometimes you have to allow for time for the PCs to move from point A-Z, which in turn means fucking around with your campaign map.

But one thing you can do is add in various "omens" or "portents", eclipses, blood red moons etc, which then correspond to elements of a prophesy the PCs can be given - Angle series 3 iirc did something like that, though that was amusingly enough all a ruse - series big bad had gone back in time and added some shit to a prophesy just to try and neutralise another, legit, prophecy by setting out that a bunch of omens led to something bad happening when in reality nothing bad would really have happened.

>omens
>divinations
Always shit in any RPG.

I meant more in the sense of "have a living world that progresses at its own logical pace rather than at the speed of plot as set by the PCs", not so much fate or destiny. Most games have some method or another to gain intel about what the BBEG's up to...provided the PCs think to do so. If they don't, that's their fault.

The sort of timeline I'm thinking is more along the lines of "construction on the BBEG's superweapon will take X number of days/weeks/whatever, then once complete the BBEG's forces will march to Goodplacetown, which will take Y days of travel, after which time shit goes down hardcore if the PCs haven't thrown a wrench in the BBEG's plans by now."

This would be all fine and dandy. Except the player's actions would change the timeline.
No calendar survives contact with the players.

>the point
>your head

It can lead to a too much rigid and simulationist world for my taste. As I enjoy pacing my games more like an episodic miniseries would.

However, this could be interesting as a meta-concept if changed somewhat. I need to look into this.

Is it fun to keep track of?
Will this add to the story?
Will your players care/want this?

Yes. Wizards of the Coast used such a calendar to great effect in the 3.5 campaign "The Red Hand of Doom".

Notably there were various actions the PCs could take to affect the calendar.

IIRC some of the Powered by the Apocalypse games use clocks which are somewhat similar. You come up with consecutive stages of some evil plan or catastrophe, like hours on a clock. Then you progress them as story goes forward, with triggers that PCs can ignore or try to avert. Progressing to next "hour" or stage results in omens and changes to the world. 12 o'clock means that whatever was looming on the horizon has transpired or is about to and things are generally fucked.

I banish thee, rusemaster. Never come back to this board. While the weak members of this here board have fallen for your tricks, I Will prevail.

> Tell the party the dark master will return in a year.
> decide to spend the 12 months leading a populist rebellion simply to legalise gay marriage

Yeah the idea of an advancing timeline is a cool one but I don't see why you have to reveal it to the players. I mean you can if you want but why bother?

They're the best of both worlds imho. Your villains don't suffer from "wait in my evil throneroom for the players to arrive" syndrome and actually have their own goals to accomplish.

And you don't have to bother with making a labour intensive calendar full of events. You just use your "kommin sens" as a DM to decide when villain goals are achieved and when their plans are foiled.

OP, big problem you don't seem to have grasped:

Everything that happens in the world beyond the immediate grasp of your players is *still your sole responsibility*. Calender or not, if you dispense entirely with plot following the characters, then the players are just going to assume it was deliberate on your part.

If they don't get a chance to succeed, whether they're too late or *too early* and forced to find something else to occupy time, then it doesn't look any different than causing them to fail by fiat. Best case is you'll get a few kudos from players afterwards for the interesting idea- worst case is, you get fired as a DM because your game is worse than the players expected and they literally don't give a shit that you were trying to be clever.

>if you dispense entirely with plot following the characters
Allowing the party's timetable to always be "correct" and coincidental is just lazy GMing.

>not so much fate or destiny.

No no, you misunderstand me; I meant "when shit is happening off screen, have on screen stuff happening to mark important moments in the evil overlord's plans" - you slip these things at the beginning of the campaign before the Evil Overlord has neccesarily even been introduced, then use it as a possible way to give clues to the PCs where the shit is going down, with portents appearing in the sky in the direction of shit going down.

Final the ultimate pay off for all of this is when they arrive at the final boss fight either on time or early and the final portent appears.

then when they meet the evil overlord face to face he explains to them that yes, they'd have been early if the evil overlord hadn't found a remarkable source of powerful souls to speed things up... and then they make the souls of all the PC's dead parents appear around him and explains how it was easy to get them under his control once he collected some blood spilled during previous fights with his minions

I just eyeball it. If they roll really well in the previous scene, they get there in time. If they get delayed or drag their feet too long, I decide it's too late. Usually I try to set up the end of every scene with a catalyst/ impetus for the next scene so there's a constant feeling of urgency.

Eh, that really only works if the BBEG is some kind of world-scale power, a dark god or something. I'd say for most BBEG's, the only hints the PCs should get about his progress without making the effort to gather intel should be rumors about the really big shit that's pretty much impossible to ignore.

urban shadows?

OP, you're trying to prove the players wrong in hopes that winning the argument will win them over. The pain they're feeling is that they want a fun game and somehow you're not delivering that.

No matter how hard you prove them wrong and yourself justified, you can only hurt your game. The only way this is going to work is if in some coincidence all the players feel that the reveal is somehow cool (but they probably won't because you're telling them about it ahead of time) and that it will vastly outweigh the butthurt of them feeling that you're just trying to tell them "shut up and deal with it, I'm right."

If you want to win an argument and lose a game, go for it. I would suggest thinking of something interesting to do with the campaign that the players will enjoy.

Why are the players wrong?

Because they're going to use what they feel to decide if they want to bother with the game. They don't have to be right, they just have to not want to deal with it anymore.

Whoops, misread that.

They're not wrong, they're just incapable of suspending disbelief right now. It means that the GM has some work to do.

Here's an even more fun way of handling that.
>BBEG has power over fate
>At first, party is thrown off by setbacks whenever possible; BBEG does not have complete control but is enough to influence major event timing
>As the BBEG's power grows, so does the party's ability to counteract fate- be it through fighting spirit, protective wards, the blessings or interventions of gods- whatever it is, something that the party needs to maintain
>The final battle literally comes down to determinism vs optimism, the BBEG reveals that this cycle has happened the exact same way hundreds upon thousands of times across dimensions and every single attempt has been fated to end in failure
>pretty much steal from Gurren Lagann desu