The session of Dungeons and Dragons that I ran yesterday went really well. I had done a moderate amount of preparation, and set up the adventure as an ongoing situation that the players entered, with several hooks but no obvious plot rail. The party need some information held in the archives of a repressive, anti-magic, anti-nature government, and said government was not at all inclined to let them have it.
After one player character got captured and thrown in the dungeon, the rest of the party decided, very quickly, to seek out the enemies of the regime, and not only rescue their friend, but also overthrow the Lord of the city and put his bandit brother in his place!
Now, standard D&D DMing says a lot of “no.” Like “No, you can’t overthrow the regime, they have too many guards, too strong of a keep, too many resources, etc.” or says “Maybe, if you overcome wave upon wave of guards who fight to the death and storm the castle gates.” Instead, I said “Yes, this could work” on the basis that the bandit brother had a legitimate claim to the Lordship, most of the guards weren’t loyal or dumb enough to fight against bad odds, and the Lord was overconfident in his security. In the real world, lightning fast, mostly bloodless coups do happen, and the players came up with a great plan (releasing all the prisoners in the dungeons never hurts).
So after breaking into the dungeon from the sewers and freeing their captured friend, they met little resistance to their force of nearly 30 bandits and prisoners backed up by the PCs and the local reluctantly involved wizard and enthusiastically involved druid. Most of the guards surrendered, leaving only a climactic battle with the Lord and his closest allies in his chambers. The Lord ended up beheaded by the player character who he had captured and had tortured, and the battle was won.
I thought about ending the session after the party had concocted their plan, and fully prepping for the storming of the castle, but I knew if I did that the momentum would be stopped and need to be restarted next time. So I ran it without pre-prepping, and I think it came out all the more dramatic for it.
I hadn’t particularly expected the players to go straight for overthrowing the government. I had thought they’d go for a simple jail break, or a stealth mission into the archive to retrieve the information they needed. But they went for something bolder, and by my saying yes to that, our story is all the better. In general, I think a GM should say yes as much as they can, because when everyone’s ideas are incorporated into the story, everyone is encouraged to contribute, and to be more engaged, instead of, as too often happens in role playing in general, waiting to see what the GM wants them to do.
