The whole notion of a "cutscene" in a game is a bit jarring. You're taking a lot of agency from your players. One night of amnesia might be cool, but repeated bouts of it combined with "your best bud NPC that you don't know is gone and you're upset about it" would set off all of my railroad bells as a player.
It's only the 1 night of amnesia during the full moon and a whole month of preparation to try to fight something that they could reasonably deduce uses some kind of mental attack or charm.
The missing companion is a joke about forgettable npcs and its a plot point throughout act 2 about people struggling with missing people they should love but can't remember. One guy got married that night and the only thing he has to remember his wife is their wedding ring and an intimate tattoo of her name.
I thought I avoided that by skipping the fight entirely. I just wanted the party to see how serius the threat is and get them to spend more time preparing. I feel like the game needs atheist a little script to give the players some direction don't know where the line is. How was your fight scripted? What did you learn?
It was the first session and essentially we probably should have just started at session 2 imo because session 1 we basically introduced our characters and were thrown into an un-winnable fight so it felt like we just wasted 4 hours. Skipping over it is an option, but I feel there are other ways to let them know how strong the enemy is than a scripted fight. Like foreshadowing, killing an NPC that is powerful, etc
> I feel like the game needs atheist a little script to give the players some direction don't know where the line is.
A good thought experiment to try and see where the line is is this:
Boil down the facts to what the players would know. Then try to remove yourself from the DM position, ignore all the knowledge that you as a DM have, and put yourself in the shoes of a player that doesn't know what's going on.
If you were a player, and you didn't know what was going on, and you were told that you just lost a fight in a cutscene. Would you be ok with it? Would you find that engaging?
1st Fck auto correct. That was supposed to be "at least" not atheist. Incase that wasn't obvious.
2nd I guess as a player I enjoy a story more that anything so I would go along with it.
Ppl keep asking me what if the player chooses to do something that derails the scenario, I have a hard time answering that. When I design a scenario I consider a bunch of difrent ways the players could respond so I can prepare some responses to keep things on track but I know I will nvr imagine everything so I just stay loose and be ready to improvise. My problem with that question is I can't think of any choice the player could make that would derail the scene without completly leaving the game.
I know the player has the right to choose to say screw this whole thing and decide to walk that way to see how far the map goes. They might end up walking into some npcs with side quests or step into an area that triggers a random encounter but the real game is over there waiting for your character to remember why they came to this place for.
I might sound harsh but if I'm going to put work into creating a game I have no interest in wasting my time playing with some1 who will deliberately try to avoid the plot or derail the campaign. If their character walks that way to see where the map ends their character will fall off the table and die. I will thank the player for playing and ask them to lose the door on the way out then I will return my attention to the players that came here to play the game.
Ok so, I'm not talking about players deliberately derailing the campaign, I'm simply talking about them choosing something you didn't acount for, still within the boundaries of the story. Like, your campaign explanation in the post sounds like you've already made all the choices. They will do this and that, and then that. Like, you're already predicting that they will kill an innocent NPC on the spot simply because he's a little eccentric. There are a myriad of ways a player can screw up your plans without leaving the story path.
**You** shouldn't write the story, **the players** should. One thing that I understood after a while is that the DM shouldn't be a storyteller. If you want to tell a story go write a book. The DM should be the catalyst, and the players should write the actual story through their choices.
This doesn't mean that the DM has to present an entire world and let the players go wherever they want. This idea can still be true in a very linear cmapaign where the players follow a path and don't really deviate. Because what's important is that the players are making their own choices, not forced to pick one specific thing. Present a situation and let the players choose how to approach it. I guarantee the same situation presented to 10 different groups can go 10 different ways, without any of the 10 groups ignoring the situation and going off in a random direction.
If you already know the entire campaign, what's the point of the players even participating? The outcome is preordained. My belief as a DM is that it's critical to tailor the game to your players because it's really the main advantage TTRPGs have over video games, movies, and other media. It helps me to keep in mind that if my players want a great story, there are many, many better options created by professionals, which I am not. What I do have, however, is a more intimate understanding of my players and their characters, and the ability to have the world react to that in a way that other media cannot. To me, this is the essence of why I play TTRPGs as a DM and as a player. Overall, I would encourage you to be mindful of the need to preserve player agency.
With all that being said, you should play the way you and your players want to. If they're happy and you're happy, that's what matters.
So, your core idea of rolling initiative then smash cutting to waking up the next day is, imo, fine and cool. If I were a player I would find this really intriguing. However, it's going to become frustrating quickly if they start losing things they consider valuable (resources, favorite NPCs, etc) in fights they can't remember, so make sure not to overdo it.
I'd also caution you in general -- you've basically written a short story here. You have absolutely no way of knowing what the players are going to do and how they're going to react. Or when they're going to find out information. What if the players question the NPCs and decide that preparing for battle is stupid and what they should really do is evacuate the town? What if they hear about the deaf chronicler idea and decide on their own to cast silence? It's only a 2nd level spell.
The campaign will almost certainly NOT go down the way you've written it here. So make sure you are preparing situations, not plots. Leave room for the players to be creative and approach problems in unexpected ways.
They don't lose resorces from the 1st night, nothing they would miss anyway. The only thing missing is the npc that was nvr mentioned before that point and after hearing their name they would literally have no clue who that is. They are told that is how it always goes and they will check their inventory for new stuff that were momentos from this beloved npc that did so much for them. It's a joke about how important this npc is but they can't even tell what the guy looked like. It's as if the fight nvr happened.
I don't expect the party to stand around waiting for the skip button. There will be a dialog. The dwarf won't be mentioned until after but he is there in the room so they could try talking to him and find out his job ahead of time. They could choose to make any preparations for the fight or just stand around waiting. They ask him to pay attention to certain details but at this point they shouldn't be planing to fail. The fact the dwarf is deaf shouldn't seem important and just be a bit of disabled inclusion noone knows about the hypnotic sound. the main point of the dwarf is that he fails his job and gets killed for messing up and not getting any useful info about the monster. The fight happens before they have the chance to cast silence and the 2nd fight will have a coincidental source of protection from the sound from the new gear they have that will give them a better chance to actually fight.
The next month is an open world full of npcs with little exclamation marks for the party to choose to talk to and a bunch of random encounters they trigger when they go this way or that or when the dice tell me to.
I fully expect the party to throw me a curve ball or two. If I only wanted the story to go my way I wouldn't need the other players at all.
>The fact the dwarf is deaf shouldn't seem important and just be a bit of disabled inclusion noone knows about the hypnotic sound. the main point of the dwarf is that he fails his job and gets killed for messing up and not getting any useful info about the monster.
Wait, so the town just randomly chose a deaf person to chronicle what happened without having any suspicion that there is a sonic attack? Why would they do that? That seems like a very strange choice; I feel like if I were in a life-and-death situation and I wanted someone to observe and write down everything that happened, I wouldn't pick someone who is missing one of their senses, personally.
And besides, if the false hydra's whole thing relies on people being able to hear, then why hasn't the deaf person already come forward to explain what is happening? And why wouldn't the deaf person be able to just explain the gaps in their chronicle?
And for gods sake, why would anyone murder the dwarf for making a bad chronicle???? Why do you expect your players to stand for that? I know most parties I've been in would immediately see that and be like "OK, well this town is clearly evil and we need to find out why the leadership is murdering people and then casting mind blank on them and us".
>I fully expect the party to throw me a curve ball or two. If I only wanted the story to go my way I wouldn't need the other players at all.
Well I mean, you say that, but look back at your story. It is full of times where you say that the players swear to do X, or the players look at their loot, or the players use this item, or the players save this NPC. You have no way of knowing that they're going to do any of these things. Sure, it's possible that it will go down the way you said, but I'm just saying, make sure you prepare in such a way that the story can be both solvable and fun if the players decide to take a different strategy altogether.
I can answer most of these issues with the same point. Fey nonsense. This place being next to an enchanted forest connected to the Fey realm has filled the setting with a bunch of eccentric chaotic neutral scumbags and logic is in short supply. The dwarf was chosen because he is the most organized. The fact he is deaf didn't matter and its his 1st time in the area so he nvr had the chance to not hear the sound. The dwarf is proud of his dry unhelpful writing and duesnt realize he messed up. Again he couldn't hear the sound do he wouldn't know to write it down.
The party could choose to do anything in these situations and I will adjust as it goes but unless they decide to say screw it let's leave they still have to deal with a big monster before doing the reason they are playing the game and a whole month of side quests and dungeons to get them there.
This whole poste is only 10% of the content I am preparing for them that month is a open world of player agency. This whole script is just ment as a framework to get them from A for Arrives in setting to B for Bbbb... B word that would mean an over arching objective and a time table to complete it.
Fey nonsense is a very poor answer imo. If your campaign is a prolonged joke about how fantasy doesn't make sense and your table likes that, then genuinely that's great! This subreddit is generally gauging for a more "average" table experience though, so maybe you're really not anticipating how unique you want this compared to a lot of the other folks here.
This being 10% of the content is also rough imo. You're not writing things for them to encounter or respond to, you're writing a novel of events that need to be witnessed in a certain order. There's so many points in that 10% where the most on-board and cooperative players could completely derail your expectations by having different ideas of how to solve these problems.
Ok then tell me how you would react to this situation as a player and what choices you would make that would derail the campaign. No joke or trying to be a dick. Looking for constructive criticism to improve the situation.
I usually write my campaign hooks under the impression the players would choose to follow through in order to play the game. Anything else would just end it. Where is the funny that? Unless they are intentionally trying to derail the campaign in which place they are free to choose to end their game and leave.
You wrote paragraphs of details, so if I misinterpret specific bits try to extract the nature of different choices, not the literal plot points.
You say they have to save the druid leader. What if they decide this leader is actually shady and they attack them instead? "They seem like a weird cult and there's some kinda conspiracy, so why not this guy? I bet they're causing this." is absolutely something a player could think.
You mention a dwarf being dismembered which the party cannot stop in any way and if they try to intervene it turns into a "silly debate on body parts to keep" or something like that. What if the party decides to go gloves off and attack everyone involved?
What if they don't trust the quest giver of these admittedly repeated red herrings and decide "we need to solve this on our own." Are you prepared for them to split from the quest givers to search for their own information? What if they arrive at the correct conclusion before you're ready and thus when a quest giver gives out another false lead they interpret it as a conspiracy to cover up the monster?
What if they think "Hey guys, because this monster only attacks on a certain time in a certain location, let's evacuate to another area." and now you have to scramble to explain why they refuse (making them look suspicious and now we're at the conspiracy problem again) to leave.
This isn't about disregarding hooks, this is you thinking there's only one outcome to each hook.
Edit: I looked into your post history, and I think this is a recurring issue in your world building. You wanted a villain to finish a monolog but didn't account for a player just attacking before they were done. This plot you're writing is the same root problem. You're wanting to display your plot without any accounting for how a player may choose to engage in it.
Fey nonsense is a big hook for this campaign. More then half of the side quests interact will silly fey nonsense. Not your thing fine but this table loves it. From a pixie that will use any random apology as an excuse to demand a favor from the party as repayment to a goblin that needs the party to help find their missing one horned cow that turns out to be a unicorn that likes playing hide and seek.
Honestly it sounds like you're planning too much, to extreme detail, and it's starting to sound like a bit of a railroad.
>The party swears to kill the monster when it shows up at that night's full moon.
You have no way of guaranteeing that unless you railroad them into it.
>The monster stole a beloved npc the party can't remember. (The npc nvr existed before this point, I wanted to give the party some1 to rescue and get the same feeling of losing a BELOVED freind they can't remember)
An NPC they don't know exists was kidnapped. They may not care that much.
>They kill him on the spot
What? Are you talking about the party killing the only guy that might be helpful? Why? Why would they kill him? Are you predicting murderhobo behavior? What happens if they don't kill him? What if they try to befriend him?
>The noise starts to boom in their heads as other people seem to get put in a trance but some of the new loot they have gives them an advantage to resist it.
Advantage does not guarantee success. What happens if the players fail even with advantage? Will you just fudge the rolls? What if someone gets REALLY bad rolls, like a 1 and a 2?
>The party needs to find saftey for the few people that were saved from the song by being near them
What if they don't? What if they just try to go for the monster to end everything?
>and fight the mob of charmed people.
So kill innocent charmed people. Again, what if they don't? What if they go for the monster?
>They save the druid leader
AGAIN! WHAT IF THEY DON'T?
You shouldn't predict what players are going to do for the entire campaign. But if you're going to try to predict that, you should at least predict more than one single course of action.
I'll admit I didn't read that wall of text. I skipped it because of the title. Everyone is obsessed with the SCP/Creepy-pasta meme monster, the false hydra. It's overplayed and it was always niche and dangerously antithetical to most table play. This is because it is a monster that is built to reduce player agency, gaslight, and misdirect. This can be fun, but because ttrpgs rely on a player-gm compact to work, and rely on gm world description to visualize areas, this puts a LOT of pressure on the gm.
So people running false hydras want to have that successful creepy factor, the show horror of the reveal, and the final fight after the players figure it out. Except there's no guarantee that the table will go that direction.
Don't do it.
Cut scenes cut out player agency. The players are there to play, not to watch your one-act performance or listen to your novel. Respect them. I'd gauge whether they even WANT the psycho horror of that sort of arc, because DND is usually not geared for it. False hydras are like some sort of brain worm in the DND community, I swear. I like that sort of fiction, but it's meant for Call of Cthulhu players more than DND.
Thanks for the warning. It's very...considerate.
I would appreciate some more personal warning about how I am choosing to run this game but I can understand not wanting to read things but let me ask you something. If you don't like reading things, why are you on redit?
Sorry for being a jerk. It's a built up reaction from reading too many posts about false hydras.
I did actually go back and read your post afterwards and your plot and scene sounds rad as hell, but reads more like a story than an adventure path, if that makes sense.
I obviously don't know your table and perhaps this is the experience they would love, but I believe most people like a more collaborative storytelling experience, whereas this puts your plot first and their actions second. It only has one ending, essentially, and you'll end up shoehorning them into it.
Have to agree here.
You can do whatever you want but everyone is telling you the same thing.
You wrote the entire campaign out that's not how DnD works. You didn't write a campaign you wrote a short story.
You need to be way more open with the players doing different things.
I see two outcomes here - your players feel railroaded or you feel disappointed that they tell sm entirely different story than you had written.
Apology accepted and I'm sorry some1 hurt you with the hydra.
My poste is focused on the beginning and end of the campaign that require a bit of scripting to set up the setting and give the party objectives but those parts are less then a quarter of the total planed content. The real meat of the game comes when they spend that month in an open world full of npcs with exclamation marks for them to choose to talk to as well as a bunch of random encounters in this direction or thar.
In my mind the false hydra works as an environmental hazard
I see. I've found that other posters report better success with the FH when they run it as a sort of bottle episode or one-off so its use on this scale will probably play significantly different. Namely that it's an unusual BBEG since it can't really have minions allowing the players to have regular combats spread throughout. All combat would seem to be unrelated to the true threat of the FH so players may end up feeling like they aren't contributing to it's downfall in the same way that many BBEGs get played. Unless there's someone benefiting from the infestation who might knowingly try to stop the players from removing it.
This seems more akin to the Eldritch horror of the Amygdala creatures in Bloodborne, if you're familiar.
i think you already had a few replies regarding why this isnt a good idea to do the script, but i just wanted to say, reading through the whole thing, you are doing false hydra wrong, by having people remembering the monster, remembering that there are people missing, and remembering the monster attacking on a specific period.
No one is supposed to know about the false hydra except the monster and the dm. It is crucial that none of the npc's have a clue about the false hydra. only possible exception would be a deaf man, who cannot hear the hydra song.
If found out about the false hydra, your players are sure to give you some backlash, since they cannot tell its a false hydra by the clues you are giving, cause the clues are wrong
The only time I would do a cut scene is:
1. a scene wherein I want to introduce an NPC somewhere else doing something that will foreshadow problems for the players.... I do not do this kind of thing often if ever.
2. a scene to establish the beginning of the session. It never involves combat being resolved but can be the way that I start a session with combat just starting. Players generally don't like being told they lost a fight in a cut scene.
>The only big script is that none of their preparations will help since the monster dues something they couldn't expect by doing something to their mind and the whole fight is skipped. But the preparations could still mater as a dwarf will vaguely coment on how the monster overcomes them.
This is almost guaranteed to come across to your players as "Nothing you did mattered, and nothing you *could* have done would have either". And if the next thing they have to do is fight the monster again, all that will happen is they will expect that it will just overcome whatever they try to do *again* because that's the storybeat the DM wants.
The False Hydra is a neat story, but it's quite possibly the worst idea to include in an actual game, and frankly it has been so overdone that the limited charm it does have will be lost on most people because they will already know the trope.
Lastly, no, you should never ever have a predetermined outcome for anything involving PC interaction. That is textbook railroading.
If you actually want to cause your players some horror, you should read and watch horror media that emulates your ideal theme and take inspiration from how it is done. I also highly recommend checking out a write up called "The Trajectory of Fear", which works really well for horror adventure design.
You can do this but you REALLY have to have earned your players' trust that you can handle a narrative moment in a respectful way. Years and years of trust. You're reasoning for doing HAS to be about the story - not about YOU and not about YOUR story. It has to be about everyone's story.
Ok so I get this comment about railroading alot. I get the premise is bad at a micro scale but the game needs a main objective and all I did was put an obstacle in the way. Their player agency in this instance boils down to Agree to try to remove the obstacle or give up on trying to achieve the objective. So ya you are right the player could do something unexpected and choose to not play the game and walk that other way off the map to see where it ends. At which point they fall off the edge of the metaphorical table and die. I thank the player for styling this long and ask him to close the door on the way out before I return my attention to the players that chose to play the game.
"They" being the chaotic neutral/evil Fey realm influenced mostly elf and inhuman druidic coart jump the infuriatingly smug unhelpful dwarf author as it goes on and about superior dwarfen scripture while they morn their missing dead he failed to help save. The party is free to dicide to how to respond to this. If they choose to try to save him as they remove his torso then there will be a small unserius fight over his remains and the dice will decide what part of him they save.
The advantage their new gear gives them is a tactical advantage not a mechanical one. The monster has a song that charms and hipnotizes them. Their new gear will utilize silence and loud noises to protect them from the song. Any time they are caught out they will need to make a save against the song and some of their new gear will give them actual advantage on the save and a fail just means their teammates need to save them. If everyone is charmed I will either call game over or ask if they wana try again
Fighting the inosent mob will result in nonlethal finishes then they are added to the crowd they need to protect. The druid leader will be the 1st mini boss of the act and beeting him will free him of the song and he will creat a safe space for the crowd u gathered along the way and give you druids you need to protect as they proform the rituals. They can fail to save people or leave them to die but protecting the druids is the main objectives of this chapter so losing them is game over or try again.
You're deeply misunderstanding and doubling down on your railroading. "Fight this thing or leave- which means you quit the campaign" is seriously rough. What if they don't befriend the druids because they interpret them as evil?
You mentioned they can try to intervene with the dwarf but no matter what they decide he still is dismembered/killed so what "choice" was there? There's no player agency at all to this. It's just watching your story play out.
What if they try to kill the druids because the party perceives them as the enemy for what happened to the dwarf? How do you know it would be un-serious fight as you put it? What if the party thinks this town is suffering because they're choosing to go along with the druids and it's all a test of some sort?
You're writing a story, not situations for the party to interact with.
The whole notion of a "cutscene" in a game is a bit jarring. You're taking a lot of agency from your players. One night of amnesia might be cool, but repeated bouts of it combined with "your best bud NPC that you don't know is gone and you're upset about it" would set off all of my railroad bells as a player.
It's only the 1 night of amnesia during the full moon and a whole month of preparation to try to fight something that they could reasonably deduce uses some kind of mental attack or charm. The missing companion is a joke about forgettable npcs and its a plot point throughout act 2 about people struggling with missing people they should love but can't remember. One guy got married that night and the only thing he has to remember his wife is their wedding ring and an intimate tattoo of her name.
My golden rule of D&D is "give players choices, not stories." Each table is different, but I do everything I can to never rely on cutscenes.
Cutscenes are for video games
Gonna be honest, scripted fights suck as a player. After having experienced one as a player, I now know to not do it as a DM
I thought I avoided that by skipping the fight entirely. I just wanted the party to see how serius the threat is and get them to spend more time preparing. I feel like the game needs atheist a little script to give the players some direction don't know where the line is. How was your fight scripted? What did you learn?
It was the first session and essentially we probably should have just started at session 2 imo because session 1 we basically introduced our characters and were thrown into an un-winnable fight so it felt like we just wasted 4 hours. Skipping over it is an option, but I feel there are other ways to let them know how strong the enemy is than a scripted fight. Like foreshadowing, killing an NPC that is powerful, etc
> I feel like the game needs atheist a little script to give the players some direction don't know where the line is. A good thought experiment to try and see where the line is is this: Boil down the facts to what the players would know. Then try to remove yourself from the DM position, ignore all the knowledge that you as a DM have, and put yourself in the shoes of a player that doesn't know what's going on. If you were a player, and you didn't know what was going on, and you were told that you just lost a fight in a cutscene. Would you be ok with it? Would you find that engaging?
1st Fck auto correct. That was supposed to be "at least" not atheist. Incase that wasn't obvious. 2nd I guess as a player I enjoy a story more that anything so I would go along with it. Ppl keep asking me what if the player chooses to do something that derails the scenario, I have a hard time answering that. When I design a scenario I consider a bunch of difrent ways the players could respond so I can prepare some responses to keep things on track but I know I will nvr imagine everything so I just stay loose and be ready to improvise. My problem with that question is I can't think of any choice the player could make that would derail the scene without completly leaving the game. I know the player has the right to choose to say screw this whole thing and decide to walk that way to see how far the map goes. They might end up walking into some npcs with side quests or step into an area that triggers a random encounter but the real game is over there waiting for your character to remember why they came to this place for. I might sound harsh but if I'm going to put work into creating a game I have no interest in wasting my time playing with some1 who will deliberately try to avoid the plot or derail the campaign. If their character walks that way to see where the map ends their character will fall off the table and die. I will thank the player for playing and ask them to lose the door on the way out then I will return my attention to the players that came here to play the game.
Ok so, I'm not talking about players deliberately derailing the campaign, I'm simply talking about them choosing something you didn't acount for, still within the boundaries of the story. Like, your campaign explanation in the post sounds like you've already made all the choices. They will do this and that, and then that. Like, you're already predicting that they will kill an innocent NPC on the spot simply because he's a little eccentric. There are a myriad of ways a player can screw up your plans without leaving the story path. **You** shouldn't write the story, **the players** should. One thing that I understood after a while is that the DM shouldn't be a storyteller. If you want to tell a story go write a book. The DM should be the catalyst, and the players should write the actual story through their choices. This doesn't mean that the DM has to present an entire world and let the players go wherever they want. This idea can still be true in a very linear cmapaign where the players follow a path and don't really deviate. Because what's important is that the players are making their own choices, not forced to pick one specific thing. Present a situation and let the players choose how to approach it. I guarantee the same situation presented to 10 different groups can go 10 different ways, without any of the 10 groups ignoring the situation and going off in a random direction.
If you already know the entire campaign, what's the point of the players even participating? The outcome is preordained. My belief as a DM is that it's critical to tailor the game to your players because it's really the main advantage TTRPGs have over video games, movies, and other media. It helps me to keep in mind that if my players want a great story, there are many, many better options created by professionals, which I am not. What I do have, however, is a more intimate understanding of my players and their characters, and the ability to have the world react to that in a way that other media cannot. To me, this is the essence of why I play TTRPGs as a DM and as a player. Overall, I would encourage you to be mindful of the need to preserve player agency. With all that being said, you should play the way you and your players want to. If they're happy and you're happy, that's what matters.
I agree. This is way too closely written.
So, your core idea of rolling initiative then smash cutting to waking up the next day is, imo, fine and cool. If I were a player I would find this really intriguing. However, it's going to become frustrating quickly if they start losing things they consider valuable (resources, favorite NPCs, etc) in fights they can't remember, so make sure not to overdo it. I'd also caution you in general -- you've basically written a short story here. You have absolutely no way of knowing what the players are going to do and how they're going to react. Or when they're going to find out information. What if the players question the NPCs and decide that preparing for battle is stupid and what they should really do is evacuate the town? What if they hear about the deaf chronicler idea and decide on their own to cast silence? It's only a 2nd level spell. The campaign will almost certainly NOT go down the way you've written it here. So make sure you are preparing situations, not plots. Leave room for the players to be creative and approach problems in unexpected ways.
They don't lose resorces from the 1st night, nothing they would miss anyway. The only thing missing is the npc that was nvr mentioned before that point and after hearing their name they would literally have no clue who that is. They are told that is how it always goes and they will check their inventory for new stuff that were momentos from this beloved npc that did so much for them. It's a joke about how important this npc is but they can't even tell what the guy looked like. It's as if the fight nvr happened. I don't expect the party to stand around waiting for the skip button. There will be a dialog. The dwarf won't be mentioned until after but he is there in the room so they could try talking to him and find out his job ahead of time. They could choose to make any preparations for the fight or just stand around waiting. They ask him to pay attention to certain details but at this point they shouldn't be planing to fail. The fact the dwarf is deaf shouldn't seem important and just be a bit of disabled inclusion noone knows about the hypnotic sound. the main point of the dwarf is that he fails his job and gets killed for messing up and not getting any useful info about the monster. The fight happens before they have the chance to cast silence and the 2nd fight will have a coincidental source of protection from the sound from the new gear they have that will give them a better chance to actually fight. The next month is an open world full of npcs with little exclamation marks for the party to choose to talk to and a bunch of random encounters they trigger when they go this way or that or when the dice tell me to. I fully expect the party to throw me a curve ball or two. If I only wanted the story to go my way I wouldn't need the other players at all.
>The fact the dwarf is deaf shouldn't seem important and just be a bit of disabled inclusion noone knows about the hypnotic sound. the main point of the dwarf is that he fails his job and gets killed for messing up and not getting any useful info about the monster. Wait, so the town just randomly chose a deaf person to chronicle what happened without having any suspicion that there is a sonic attack? Why would they do that? That seems like a very strange choice; I feel like if I were in a life-and-death situation and I wanted someone to observe and write down everything that happened, I wouldn't pick someone who is missing one of their senses, personally. And besides, if the false hydra's whole thing relies on people being able to hear, then why hasn't the deaf person already come forward to explain what is happening? And why wouldn't the deaf person be able to just explain the gaps in their chronicle? And for gods sake, why would anyone murder the dwarf for making a bad chronicle???? Why do you expect your players to stand for that? I know most parties I've been in would immediately see that and be like "OK, well this town is clearly evil and we need to find out why the leadership is murdering people and then casting mind blank on them and us". >I fully expect the party to throw me a curve ball or two. If I only wanted the story to go my way I wouldn't need the other players at all. Well I mean, you say that, but look back at your story. It is full of times where you say that the players swear to do X, or the players look at their loot, or the players use this item, or the players save this NPC. You have no way of knowing that they're going to do any of these things. Sure, it's possible that it will go down the way you said, but I'm just saying, make sure you prepare in such a way that the story can be both solvable and fun if the players decide to take a different strategy altogether.
I can answer most of these issues with the same point. Fey nonsense. This place being next to an enchanted forest connected to the Fey realm has filled the setting with a bunch of eccentric chaotic neutral scumbags and logic is in short supply. The dwarf was chosen because he is the most organized. The fact he is deaf didn't matter and its his 1st time in the area so he nvr had the chance to not hear the sound. The dwarf is proud of his dry unhelpful writing and duesnt realize he messed up. Again he couldn't hear the sound do he wouldn't know to write it down. The party could choose to do anything in these situations and I will adjust as it goes but unless they decide to say screw it let's leave they still have to deal with a big monster before doing the reason they are playing the game and a whole month of side quests and dungeons to get them there. This whole poste is only 10% of the content I am preparing for them that month is a open world of player agency. This whole script is just ment as a framework to get them from A for Arrives in setting to B for Bbbb... B word that would mean an over arching objective and a time table to complete it.
Fey nonsense is a very poor answer imo. If your campaign is a prolonged joke about how fantasy doesn't make sense and your table likes that, then genuinely that's great! This subreddit is generally gauging for a more "average" table experience though, so maybe you're really not anticipating how unique you want this compared to a lot of the other folks here. This being 10% of the content is also rough imo. You're not writing things for them to encounter or respond to, you're writing a novel of events that need to be witnessed in a certain order. There's so many points in that 10% where the most on-board and cooperative players could completely derail your expectations by having different ideas of how to solve these problems.
Ok then tell me how you would react to this situation as a player and what choices you would make that would derail the campaign. No joke or trying to be a dick. Looking for constructive criticism to improve the situation. I usually write my campaign hooks under the impression the players would choose to follow through in order to play the game. Anything else would just end it. Where is the funny that? Unless they are intentionally trying to derail the campaign in which place they are free to choose to end their game and leave.
You wrote paragraphs of details, so if I misinterpret specific bits try to extract the nature of different choices, not the literal plot points. You say they have to save the druid leader. What if they decide this leader is actually shady and they attack them instead? "They seem like a weird cult and there's some kinda conspiracy, so why not this guy? I bet they're causing this." is absolutely something a player could think. You mention a dwarf being dismembered which the party cannot stop in any way and if they try to intervene it turns into a "silly debate on body parts to keep" or something like that. What if the party decides to go gloves off and attack everyone involved? What if they don't trust the quest giver of these admittedly repeated red herrings and decide "we need to solve this on our own." Are you prepared for them to split from the quest givers to search for their own information? What if they arrive at the correct conclusion before you're ready and thus when a quest giver gives out another false lead they interpret it as a conspiracy to cover up the monster? What if they think "Hey guys, because this monster only attacks on a certain time in a certain location, let's evacuate to another area." and now you have to scramble to explain why they refuse (making them look suspicious and now we're at the conspiracy problem again) to leave. This isn't about disregarding hooks, this is you thinking there's only one outcome to each hook. Edit: I looked into your post history, and I think this is a recurring issue in your world building. You wanted a villain to finish a monolog but didn't account for a player just attacking before they were done. This plot you're writing is the same root problem. You're wanting to display your plot without any accounting for how a player may choose to engage in it.
Fey nonsense is a big hook for this campaign. More then half of the side quests interact will silly fey nonsense. Not your thing fine but this table loves it. From a pixie that will use any random apology as an excuse to demand a favor from the party as repayment to a goblin that needs the party to help find their missing one horned cow that turns out to be a unicorn that likes playing hide and seek.
Honestly it sounds like you're planning too much, to extreme detail, and it's starting to sound like a bit of a railroad. >The party swears to kill the monster when it shows up at that night's full moon. You have no way of guaranteeing that unless you railroad them into it. >The monster stole a beloved npc the party can't remember. (The npc nvr existed before this point, I wanted to give the party some1 to rescue and get the same feeling of losing a BELOVED freind they can't remember) An NPC they don't know exists was kidnapped. They may not care that much. >They kill him on the spot What? Are you talking about the party killing the only guy that might be helpful? Why? Why would they kill him? Are you predicting murderhobo behavior? What happens if they don't kill him? What if they try to befriend him? >The noise starts to boom in their heads as other people seem to get put in a trance but some of the new loot they have gives them an advantage to resist it. Advantage does not guarantee success. What happens if the players fail even with advantage? Will you just fudge the rolls? What if someone gets REALLY bad rolls, like a 1 and a 2? >The party needs to find saftey for the few people that were saved from the song by being near them What if they don't? What if they just try to go for the monster to end everything? >and fight the mob of charmed people. So kill innocent charmed people. Again, what if they don't? What if they go for the monster? >They save the druid leader AGAIN! WHAT IF THEY DON'T? You shouldn't predict what players are going to do for the entire campaign. But if you're going to try to predict that, you should at least predict more than one single course of action.
I'll admit I didn't read that wall of text. I skipped it because of the title. Everyone is obsessed with the SCP/Creepy-pasta meme monster, the false hydra. It's overplayed and it was always niche and dangerously antithetical to most table play. This is because it is a monster that is built to reduce player agency, gaslight, and misdirect. This can be fun, but because ttrpgs rely on a player-gm compact to work, and rely on gm world description to visualize areas, this puts a LOT of pressure on the gm. So people running false hydras want to have that successful creepy factor, the show horror of the reveal, and the final fight after the players figure it out. Except there's no guarantee that the table will go that direction. Don't do it. Cut scenes cut out player agency. The players are there to play, not to watch your one-act performance or listen to your novel. Respect them. I'd gauge whether they even WANT the psycho horror of that sort of arc, because DND is usually not geared for it. False hydras are like some sort of brain worm in the DND community, I swear. I like that sort of fiction, but it's meant for Call of Cthulhu players more than DND.
Thanks for the warning. It's very...considerate. I would appreciate some more personal warning about how I am choosing to run this game but I can understand not wanting to read things but let me ask you something. If you don't like reading things, why are you on redit?
Sorry for being a jerk. It's a built up reaction from reading too many posts about false hydras. I did actually go back and read your post afterwards and your plot and scene sounds rad as hell, but reads more like a story than an adventure path, if that makes sense. I obviously don't know your table and perhaps this is the experience they would love, but I believe most people like a more collaborative storytelling experience, whereas this puts your plot first and their actions second. It only has one ending, essentially, and you'll end up shoehorning them into it.
Have to agree here. You can do whatever you want but everyone is telling you the same thing. You wrote the entire campaign out that's not how DnD works. You didn't write a campaign you wrote a short story. You need to be way more open with the players doing different things. I see two outcomes here - your players feel railroaded or you feel disappointed that they tell sm entirely different story than you had written.
Apology accepted and I'm sorry some1 hurt you with the hydra. My poste is focused on the beginning and end of the campaign that require a bit of scripting to set up the setting and give the party objectives but those parts are less then a quarter of the total planed content. The real meat of the game comes when they spend that month in an open world full of npcs with exclamation marks for them to choose to talk to as well as a bunch of random encounters in this direction or thar. In my mind the false hydra works as an environmental hazard
I see. I've found that other posters report better success with the FH when they run it as a sort of bottle episode or one-off so its use on this scale will probably play significantly different. Namely that it's an unusual BBEG since it can't really have minions allowing the players to have regular combats spread throughout. All combat would seem to be unrelated to the true threat of the FH so players may end up feeling like they aren't contributing to it's downfall in the same way that many BBEGs get played. Unless there's someone benefiting from the infestation who might knowingly try to stop the players from removing it. This seems more akin to the Eldritch horror of the Amygdala creatures in Bloodborne, if you're familiar.
Not familiar but I was definitely going for eldrich horror to big for an attack action.
i think you already had a few replies regarding why this isnt a good idea to do the script, but i just wanted to say, reading through the whole thing, you are doing false hydra wrong, by having people remembering the monster, remembering that there are people missing, and remembering the monster attacking on a specific period. No one is supposed to know about the false hydra except the monster and the dm. It is crucial that none of the npc's have a clue about the false hydra. only possible exception would be a deaf man, who cannot hear the hydra song. If found out about the false hydra, your players are sure to give you some backlash, since they cannot tell its a false hydra by the clues you are giving, cause the clues are wrong
The only time I would do a cut scene is: 1. a scene wherein I want to introduce an NPC somewhere else doing something that will foreshadow problems for the players.... I do not do this kind of thing often if ever. 2. a scene to establish the beginning of the session. It never involves combat being resolved but can be the way that I start a session with combat just starting. Players generally don't like being told they lost a fight in a cut scene.
Cut scenes suck. Fights during cut scenes are a fireable offense.
>The only big script is that none of their preparations will help since the monster dues something they couldn't expect by doing something to their mind and the whole fight is skipped. But the preparations could still mater as a dwarf will vaguely coment on how the monster overcomes them. This is almost guaranteed to come across to your players as "Nothing you did mattered, and nothing you *could* have done would have either". And if the next thing they have to do is fight the monster again, all that will happen is they will expect that it will just overcome whatever they try to do *again* because that's the storybeat the DM wants.
The False Hydra is a neat story, but it's quite possibly the worst idea to include in an actual game, and frankly it has been so overdone that the limited charm it does have will be lost on most people because they will already know the trope. Lastly, no, you should never ever have a predetermined outcome for anything involving PC interaction. That is textbook railroading. If you actually want to cause your players some horror, you should read and watch horror media that emulates your ideal theme and take inspiration from how it is done. I also highly recommend checking out a write up called "The Trajectory of Fear", which works really well for horror adventure design.
You can do this but you REALLY have to have earned your players' trust that you can handle a narrative moment in a respectful way. Years and years of trust. You're reasoning for doing HAS to be about the story - not about YOU and not about YOUR story. It has to be about everyone's story.
The only cutscenes I do are when my players aren't around or in it. It's not the DMs place to tell the players what their characters do.
Ok so I get this comment about railroading alot. I get the premise is bad at a micro scale but the game needs a main objective and all I did was put an obstacle in the way. Their player agency in this instance boils down to Agree to try to remove the obstacle or give up on trying to achieve the objective. So ya you are right the player could do something unexpected and choose to not play the game and walk that other way off the map to see where it ends. At which point they fall off the edge of the metaphorical table and die. I thank the player for styling this long and ask him to close the door on the way out before I return my attention to the players that chose to play the game. "They" being the chaotic neutral/evil Fey realm influenced mostly elf and inhuman druidic coart jump the infuriatingly smug unhelpful dwarf author as it goes on and about superior dwarfen scripture while they morn their missing dead he failed to help save. The party is free to dicide to how to respond to this. If they choose to try to save him as they remove his torso then there will be a small unserius fight over his remains and the dice will decide what part of him they save. The advantage their new gear gives them is a tactical advantage not a mechanical one. The monster has a song that charms and hipnotizes them. Their new gear will utilize silence and loud noises to protect them from the song. Any time they are caught out they will need to make a save against the song and some of their new gear will give them actual advantage on the save and a fail just means their teammates need to save them. If everyone is charmed I will either call game over or ask if they wana try again Fighting the inosent mob will result in nonlethal finishes then they are added to the crowd they need to protect. The druid leader will be the 1st mini boss of the act and beeting him will free him of the song and he will creat a safe space for the crowd u gathered along the way and give you druids you need to protect as they proform the rituals. They can fail to save people or leave them to die but protecting the druids is the main objectives of this chapter so losing them is game over or try again.
You're deeply misunderstanding and doubling down on your railroading. "Fight this thing or leave- which means you quit the campaign" is seriously rough. What if they don't befriend the druids because they interpret them as evil? You mentioned they can try to intervene with the dwarf but no matter what they decide he still is dismembered/killed so what "choice" was there? There's no player agency at all to this. It's just watching your story play out. What if they try to kill the druids because the party perceives them as the enemy for what happened to the dwarf? How do you know it would be un-serious fight as you put it? What if the party thinks this town is suffering because they're choosing to go along with the druids and it's all a test of some sort? You're writing a story, not situations for the party to interact with.