On a quest to save the world

Let the world get worse with each sidequest they do; if they complain, explain that the bad guy is levelling his Evil Overlord class, to keep up with them and oppress the populace better, and the lieutenants are levelling as well, by 'adventuring' in strongholds of do-goodery and heroism. Kill off people attached to quests they skipped or delayed, stop giving quests that don't involve the main story, and maybe have the BBEG and his full army come to kill them personally.

If they complain "that's not fair", go 'alright' and just keep sending armies, giant monsters, and meteor swarms (or the local equivalents) to where the players are. The King doesn't usually set forth to splatter troublemakers personally; he has an army of warriors, spellcasters, and beastmasters to do that for him.

Save the world quests are typically boring and stupid, generic trash. Your people are doing the sidequests because they're more interesting and fun than save the world quest #3582359872359872359352.

>my players aren't interested in a cookie cutter TEH L0RD OF 3VUL!!1 campaign
>they like worldbuilding, small scale adventure and NPC interactions
>how do I punish them

consider unfucking yourself, you are a shit GM

I don't know anybody who somehow managed to lose with the 150 day limit because it's fucking huge and you can even increase it further.

In the unpatched version you also had the 500 day time limit to eliminate the mutants, and that was also pretty much impossible not to do, even if you bumblefucked around all the time.

A better example of a game that actually forces you to be urgent would be Wizardry 7, which has other adventuring parties moving around on their own and they're very liable to just enter a dungeon before you and rob it of all the cool stuff before you if you don't hurry up.

desu that is a good campaign with actual consequences
i understand why theyd want to do something more interesting than stop the darkness campaign five thousand
but the fact that it still played a role more meaningful than if the campaign had just been about us versus the darkness as usual says a lot about how to better implement A DARKNESS RISES style plotlines

lets take game of thrones for instance
i know some of you dont like it but hear me out
the evil army of zombies being raised by the horrible things in the north isnt interesting on its own
its made interesting by the fact that EVERYONE is getting caught up in their own politics and personal crisis and most dont even believe its happening

the darkness rising works there because its allowed to rise via the hubris of mankind,t heir self centered way of thinking, their personal politics coming before things like common sense, paying attention to history and the like

>play fallout
>tell everyone about the vault and the water chip issue
>vault gets raided because i opened my big mouth
>everyone dead raped sold as slaves and the vault technologies scavenged

i play games int he worst way possible to point out how actions in games typically dont have consequences so i wasnt even mad when playing like an idiot had consequences

The reason it is shit is because the GM let it happen, as tho the pc party were the only force in the world, and clearly did it not because it served a narrative, but to be a cunt.
Nothing good results from GM twatitude.

he did remind them it was going to happen, however
if you properly foreshadow the coming doom
and the party still fucks off
theres no one to blame but the party

this is the proper scenario the party became too obsessed with their own personal wants, needs and desires to worry about the threat they very well know is there

Like legalizing gay marriage?

Except the party are not the only heroes in the world, the GM was just punishing the players.

You are the one presuming other 'heroes' were active in stopping the lich, there's no reason to assume someone else would just appear to plug the gap

It is disingenuous to treat the players as the only force of action in the world.
I can scarcely believe you are actively trying to defend the actions of a That GM.

There's no reason to assume that four dudes are the only ones in the world capable or interested in stopping the great evil either, which is why save the world type of plots are nonsensical and uninteresting.

If anyone could have stopped the evil lich, what good are the party for?

Assuming someone else will take care of it is what got Spiderman's uncle killed.

If you are a hero you can't just pass the buck and assume someone else somewhere will automatically be in a position to take care of it, that way leads to consequences of your inaction.

Legalizing gay marriage, obviously.

If no-one else was able to legalise gay marriage, why do the party assume someone was able to stop the lich?

QED, motherfucker.

>you have successfully legalized gay marriage!

Except when the threat is a large scale one like necromancer raising an army or undead, of course.

>Implying that anyone could have to begin with
>implying it's a battle of extremes
>implying that the only options are one single party who solves every problem across the entire setting or literally everyone can do it themselves

>exaggerating
This is why people don't play your games.

It's a vidya thing. Or completionist thing. Or wannabe powergamer thing (gotta get jacked for that final battle, and I say wannabe because real powegamer would just find rules loophole that bypasses the need for such "grind").
Also so many GMs run games with the vidya mentality that players might habitually take this for granted based on past experience.

Except the threat in the screencap wasn't "raising an army of undead", it was "completes a ritual and ushers in an age of eternal darkness". The undead hordes seem like an aftereffect of the Lich not being thwarted by a band of unlikely heroes happening to be upon him at the critical moment.

You know, I never before realized how much of a cunt everyone in this story is. On one hand, The Players were being faggots, bringing their modern conventions of Morality and Politics into their characters, rather than separating themselves from their characters completely.

But on the Other hand, The GM was being a narcissistic jackass who prioritized his super speshal pre-planned story over his players' enjoyment and interests, and tried to punish them instead of accommodating the game around what they would like to do.

Everyone in this greentext is in the wrong.

Players should have some freedom to muck about, but if they have an endless string of "side quests" to choose whether to complete that's just a sign of a DM padding the game time, which is generally foolish since games don't tend to go to completion anyway.

Players should have some freedom to muck about, and DMs should have a few non-essential hooks to adventure in their stories for sure.

I manage this by making most world-shaking events things that people can predict, just like in the real world.

>the party KNOWS that the evil arms merchant's father is slated to take over the bard's ancestral lands on the last day of the month of the Sword. That's weeks from now, but he is surely solidifying his power base day by day.
>an evil blighted algal bloom is spreading from island to island, carrying with it the shambling corpses of those that have died to its poison. It's known to spread by attaching itself to the fleeing boats of survivors. You can solve the problem now or later, but it's less likely to spread if you stop it now.

This kind of shit.

I have tons of lazy padding options in my game, some of them could rightly be criticized as video gamey, but my players rarely utilize them because they often feel like they're under more of a time crunch than they really are.

>doing what you want to do
>in a tabletop RPG

>players having genuine fun with an unconventional storyline
>GM "everyone died. THE END"'s it because players were having the wrong kind of fun while they should stick to being proper puppets in his premade story

I wonder who was in the wrong.

>players want to bring hot button liberal left politics into games

The best way to DM out of that apocryphal clusterfuck would have been to make it fairly easy for the players to accomplish their objectives. Make some members of the nobility receptive to their cause and have them send the players back onto track with plot-adjacent quests in exchange for promises of support.

Making it feel like "the main quest" by throwing adventure after adventure directly related to gay marriage would mislead pretty much any players into thinking they were "on track".

But it's all made up anyway so this is just pissing in the wind.

Woops, replied to wrong poster.

was intended

Story would be equally shitty if they tried to force a republican campaign and the GM put the same end to the story.

>GM serves the players and is only there to make sure the players are having fun, not have fun themselves

I agree that modern politics is a shit storyline for most games that aren't about, you know, modern politics.

I just came here to remind you that you are in the minority and most Americans (and most Westerners) support the "liberal left politics" that you are bitching about.

Have fun being angry at fags though, I guess.

>keeps giving the players endless sidequests to do
>writes a green text post to bitch about it.

You're their fucking DM.
Now fucking act like it you cunt.

Nobody said OP was the DM.

>Make some members of the nobility receptive to their cause and have them send the players back onto track with plot-adjacent quests in exchange for promises of support

You think they should "Mass Effect 3" it?

In that case OP is a butthurt fag that's upset that the GM is catering to what everyone as a whole wants rather than just him.

If the GM is happy to give the players what they want and hold off on the main story, it's on OP for either a) not expressing his wishes clearly, or b) going against the group.

>players want to bring hot button liberal left politics into games
Do you understand that the story was made up by the poster specifically to troll people

I can assure you that it is entirely credible and I can see no reason to doubt it.

Those kinds of disruptive behaviours and inability to separate modern values from fantasy worlds are sadly all too commonplace.

Yes, how dare they insert modern values in fantasy worlds. Just lol if you aren't raping 12y olds and practice basic hygiene. Immersion gone.

>Implying that anyone could have to begin with
Well, they certainly couldn't if no-one tried, including them.

Imagine the alternative:

>the lich's vampire bodyguards are dead and dusted, but 2 members of the party is down, the cleric is bleeding out and trying to cast quickened raise dead to get the rogue back into play so he can unlock the door to get to the lich to stop him from ushering in an age of darkness
>suddenly the door opens up and Elminster walks through the door. "Oh, were you going to fight the lich? I beat him three days ago when I sensed his magical aura. What, you thought you were the only one going after him?
>Elminster then turns the cleric into a woman then leaves

Would THAT have been a good end to a campaign? Where someone else beats the lich necromancer?

Would you rather just rush though the main plot in, like, four sessions?

Reminder a great GM is someone who can tie the side missions into the story as a whole.

I have a DM who keeps getting frustrated because we're focusing too much on the actual important objectives and he keeps making big side-quest dungeons.
"Of course we're not going to go spelunking in the back of some ruins, we have to go rescue [player character's] family from those pirates you said were on the way there. We've already wasted too much time as it is."
>Uh...oh. In that case we have to call it for today I don't have anything else prepared.

For the life of me I don't know why you'd set up a big time-is-of-the-essence problem like this and then try to do everything *but* that.

Assuming it even happened:
The GM, after that first disagreement. At any point they could have had an actual conversation about how the players wanted something different than what they did, instead of sitting on a passive aggressive bait-and-switch.

The GM continued running the game and creating content for them, for MONTHS, with the sole intention of being a shit, because they wanted a different kind of fun. And then tried to justify it by saying, "well I told you about it in the first session, it's not MY fault that it happened," as if it's some machination that's out of their control instead of something they engineered explicitly to bother the players.
And what makes it obviously bait is the fact that they actually describe themselves as a 'good sport'. Manipulative people know they're manipulative, it's not a surprise to them that they're an asshole. This is somebody trying to get a rise out of people.

Are you saying you're the only conceivable person who could have typed those words, because you're the only one who did?
Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon. Is he the only person who was alive at that time who could have ever done that?

You're not making any sense.
The lgbt quest was over, he indulged in their derail and ended the campaign with a nod to the beginning.
To call that manipulative or passive agressive is having a chip on your shoulder. It was never bait, it's universally received as a funny and gratifying story, even if it's probably made up.

>on a quest to save the world
>the party just sort of gets bored of it and decided to sail away to another country some NPC had mentioned off-handedly 20 sessions ago
get on my level

>Implying that Only Heroes can fight deadly threats.
>Implying That Kingdoms and governments don't have a stake in not dying due to Necromancer win condition
>Implying that The bodyguards wouldn't be killed along with the Necromancer and the rest of his army
>Implying that even if they did survive, they wouldn't still be dangerous threats in need of being put down, so the part wouldn't still be vindicated in taking down them down.

Your arguement is bad and you should feel bad.

Make the results of the side quests save the world without the party.

You're the GM: you can retcon as much as you please, if your players don't catch you.

>main plot
If you use "main plot" to refer to the bullshit story about a lich in a cave you came up with before the players even handed in their backstories then your main plot is probably garbage and you're an idiot.

On the one, fuck. But on the other it's really impresive that they remembered something from 20 sessions ago.

>universally received as a funny and gratifying story
Pretend I attached a 'bait' picture.

Why does your party count in hexadecimal?

>Are you saying you're the only conceivable person who could have typed those words, because you're the only one who did?
>Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon. Is he the only person who was alive at that time who could have ever done that?
I'm saying that it matters who attempts doing these things.
If Neil Armstrong wasn't the first man on the moon and never made the attempt, the Russians might have got their first, and things might have been different.

Or, for that matter:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident
>Shortly after midnight, the bunker's computers reported that one intercontinental ballistic missile was heading toward the Soviet Union from the United States. Petrov considered the detection a computer error, since a first-strike nuclear attack by the United States was likely to involve hundreds of simultaneous missile launches in order to disable any Soviet means of a counterattack. Later, the computers identified four additional missiles in the air, all directed towards the Soviet Union. Petrov again suspected that the computer system was malfunctioning, despite having no other source of information to confirm his suspicions.
If Stanislav Petrov didn't hold his nerve, if it had been someone else sitting in that guy's seat, he might have declared it a nuclear attack, and suddenly, someone else's campaign is spoiled by nukes blowing their town into tiny radioactive pieces.

If the party never attempted it, they've forsaken their chances at the lich being stopped. Other people who try it may simply fail, and the character's lives are decided by a dice roll.

Why would Elmister worry about vampire bodyguards? And would you really feel like that ending to the campaign where 3/5 party members threw away their lives in their haste to end a threat that someone else has already dealt with?

>Why would Elmister worry about vampire bodyguards?
I would assume because he cares about the safety of the world and recognizes the threat that vampire bodygaurds can pose to a world without power levels , and because if these guys are bodygaurd's that they would make more of an attempt to Gaurd the Necromancer's body. And even with that, you're still ignoring the fact that other governments, people with power, or even an angry mob of peasants would organize to get rid of the threat.

No, I wouldn't be happy with the example you gave, but that's because your example is a terrible one that that is made to be purposely shitty and that only the Dumbest of Dick DMs would do.

There's also Star Control 2 where if you dick around too long grinding minerals the Kohr-Ah will rally their navy and genocide the galaxy.

If you play smart though you'll usually have all the minerals you could ever need by the end of the first year and then you still have three years to go, so it's a pretty generous time limit.

>implying the story is real

All the red flags of Things That Never Happened are there.

I once ran a campaign where every other session was basically an anime beach episode.

It's what the players wanted and I had my fun too, so it was fine.

Although in the end they did save the universe. So, uh. Bad example maybe.

>I once ran a campaign where every other session was basically an anime beach episode
That might be a bit heavy on that, but I do enjoy a good relaxing diversion of a side-plot every now and then.
Here's an example of the last one I did:
>So you saved the trading city of Stonehilt, driving away the duplicitous wizard and his shapeshifting spiders--and making quite a name for yourselves
>In fact, you've all been invited to the Admiral's garden party!
>Why, that's strange, someone stole all the hors d'oeuvres. But who? And why?
A lighthearted whodunnit just to make sure things keep happening, a heaping portion of RP to assert the party into the setting, and a good chance for the players to get broader context for what's been happening so far and how they're viewed.

Or you could run a campaign that your players want that doesn't have some overarching goal and let them just have weekly quests or whatever. Or you know find a group that wants to join your campaign.

Obviously he means Bethesda fallout and you mean good fallout.

this.

Because those players, and people just like them, make up a fair sized chunk of Veeky Forums.

>muh agency
>muh personal goals
>muh DMbot

>the GM insists that the world doesn't revolve around the players when it's convenient
>the GM makes the world actually revolves around the players when it's convenient

Here's a question, from a novice DM:
How do you make side quests interesting?
How do you make a side quest worth doing over the current overarching quest? How do you make a side quest, that may be treacherous, still worth investigating?

>Assuming someone else will take care of it is what got
Well no, uncle Ben did because the powers the be in the marvel multiverse said that he had to die. Wanda had to actively break reality to create a universe where Ben lived

>uncle Ben died because the powers the be in the marvel multiverse said that he had to die. Wanda had to actively break reality to create a universe where Ben lived

This.
Fucking plebs.

Right? This thread should be "How do I get players interested in the main plot?" or "What are some good side-quests that can tie into this plot" etc.

A good dm would see what the players care about and tie that shit to their story. Saved the farmer's dog? Well, the farmer and his dog get killed by the orc army. Now they're invested.

if it's going to be like that, why are the PCs the only adventuring party in the world capable of stopping the wizard?

Literally when?
The 'it goes on anyway' idea has been purported on Veeky Forums for ages. Veeky Forums is the literal opposite of these kinds of players.

So in my game I'm only one with a specific goal. I want to plant this evil flower in this other world. So, we finally get to the other world (which legend says was destroyed etc) and the first person we talk to says that type of flower grows in this cave that's waaay north. So I'm like... let's go straight there. It's literally the reason I brought everyone here and they're all just on quests to redeem themselves or become rich/famous etc, right? We're also sort of supposed to overthrow our government, the npcs want to.

SO our two dmpcs bail on us because of drama and they go left we go right. We come to a town and immediately try to sell some stuff to hire a boat to take us North. We find out about this big judgment thing they have here for all the criminals- and it's next week! The direction the girls went! Well, we ignore it and continue. So, a shopkeeper rips us off, a kid tries to give us the wrong change in another shop, a man bumps into me and tries to fight, and a cultist guy bumps into us in the road and attacks us. So we finally get to the docks and get arrested for "fucking nothing" and our lizard pet gets killed(??? we're not sure actually) and we're dragged off in some cart all the way to judgment.

Only to get immediately rescued by the girls.

So anyway one of the pcs stays in the arena to fight (he's a boxer and wants to prove himself) but it's not going great and our plan was "flood the arena!" ... I'm not sure why we thought that was a good plan. I'm like a water-bender and the dm actually sets up some insanely hard rolls for me to make to succeed in fucking diverting and raising the river and killing 90% of the population of this country who're in there watching. But the modifier is willpower and I've got like max so I just destroy every check. So, I kill 30,000 people. And the PC dies.

Um, and now the girls are vampires and

Look the point is we're almost to this cave and I'm hyped. And Railroading sucks.

I've had a GM who did the opposite. Whenever we find a plot point he steers us off to do random shit. If we just ignore that and try to advance the plot despite him everything just kills us

Oh right, my point is I'm concerned he's doing this "It goes on." As in, somewhere back in our own world the game is moving on and the evil government is doing evil shit and the zombie army we think they have (didn't realise that's what it was until looking back) is just killing everyone. But he never really gave us a reason to want to stop the goverment until moments before we left. I mean, he teleported us to the other world. We sort of know where we should go to get back but I'm doing my flower thing first because I doubt we'll be back and I sort of set it up like a compulsion/obsession and like I said we don't care much about the bad guys.

Anyway we'll see. Hopefully we're a bit more invested when we get back. The last thing that happened was the probably-zombies army attacking the church we had just arrived at for information. So we didn't really get the info or get invested in the priests there, but we know they all died and that sucks I guess. We'll probably kill the government when we get back, I guess. The bard kind of wants to be king. Our revolutionary dmpc is going to be pretty pissed when we pull that off.

Honestly I don't see anything wrong with the players besides choosing a shitty GM. So they wanted to play a retarded campaign about gay marriage, who the fuck cares? The idea of overthrowing an empire for an inane reason seems hilarious.

But yeah DM was a cunt who got pissy about his players not being interested in his generic lich story.

>its made interesting by the fact that EVERYONE is getting caught up in their own politics and personal crisis and most dont even believe its happening
No, it simply isn't interesting

she ...is...so ....FUCKING HOT

Maybe the DM shouldn't be an autist obsessed with his shitty story. Maybe the players should have been up front before anything started that they wanted a simple minor chores campaign where they do some little mission or a couple small missions every day.

the buttface is the linch pin and if your the DM you better give VERY persuasive suggestions on missions

>party wants to complete More than ONE side quests on the way

True sign of bad DMing.

I don't know about it would make them a bad DM per se, but if there's a time-sensitive world saving quest and they don't feel any tension about that then there's definitely room for improvement.

what wouldve been better is if the gm had set up it to be something like they command the kingdom now vs the forces of the lich

Yeah, the game does not fucking work that way. The only variable is that in the unpatched version buying water from Water Merchants causes the Mutant Invasion date to be reduced from 500 to 400 days.

Talking to people that you're from a Vault does not do jack shit.

Mutant Invasion time limit was removed in patches of the game so that point is moot

Have side quest amount to something. Like if you're running the side quest you rescue an NPC who ends up actually being an ally to your final cause and donates to your war effort. Have a risk reward type thing. It's like the cult is trying to raise timat from hell, but they're also attempting to recruit all of the ancient dragons in the land. You know you might not have enough time in the campaign to kill off all of the ancient dragons before they summon Tiamat, but not killing any makes the final encounter that much harder. Or some townsfolk or rich folk of a big city are asking you for help when you know you have to keep on the cultists trails, however they may help fund your war effort.
New DM running Hoard of the dragon queen.

>I just came here to remind you that you are in the minority
yeah that's what the statisticians thought before the election too

>Have fun being angry at fags though
fencing strawmen, you're fitting in as a little libtard just fine

This, just because it's fantasy doesn't mean the entire world has to be in danger every time a new party is formed.
Players lose interest when you throw at them super high stake missions right of the bat.
Take it slow and when they get pretty buffed up you can introduce world size threats. You don't even have to.

Good example from Heroes of Might and Magic 2: in Roland's campaign, you can udnertake an optional mission that, if completed, will cause all Dwarf unit stacks to join you in subsequent missions. The final score of each campaign is determined by the amount of days (turns) you spend on the whole campaign: for most playthroughs the investment into the Dwarf sidequest and the benefit of free Dwarf stacks translates into a shorter campaign time.

Also you can have mutually exclusive sidequests, example from same game: Archibald Campaign lets you either help the Ogres in enslaving Dwarves (granting you free Ogre stacks and Dwarf stacks immediately surrendering upon meeting you) or the Necromancers (granting you a purchasable high level Necromancer hero in every subsequent level)

I also liked HoMM2 story mode for the ability to switch sides.

It was quite good.

Unlike Archibald. Who was... not so good.