straight up do not understand DMs complaining about their players ‘totally ignoring the plot and going to do something else’ for a lot of reasons but the one on my mind right now is, like
you can just talk to your players about what they want to do next. like it’s not hard. you can just say “hey guys you get to decide as a party what investigative arc you want to take on next, you have something like five real options, all of which represent 5-10 sessions of content, it’s totally up to you, follow your hearts, just let me know in advance so I can prepare the right material for yall. DMing is a lot of work so I appreciate the heads up about what major endeavor you want to take on next. talk amongst yourselves and let me know your decision. make good choices, I love you.”
it’s not a sign of weakness to be like “yeah the entire world isn’t 100% built out to the minutest detail, I’m not going to design Andrei’s vacation home until I know you’re going to it.” my players assume that I know all of the big picture stuff, they trust me to keep all the details that are made up session by session consistent, and they know that the more they telegraph their intentions to me, the better the game will be. If they want to do something wild, like steal a car and drive 50 miles to go to a house they haven’t seen in 5 sessions, they message me during the week to be like, “Hey, I think Dunya wants to do this.” and I’m like, great, thanks for letting me know. Now something cool will happen when you do.
I think a lot of inexperienced DMs have the wrong idea about what ‘DM omniscience’ is supposed to look like. if I introduce something to them - say if a PC has a strange note slipped to them that says Do we find in you a friend of the Old Believers? - the players need to believe that they can interact with this note in any way possible, and the world will respond consistently. They need to believe that the Old Believers are a real group of people that they can deal with in any way they can think of. They need to believe that whoever sent this note had a logical reason for doing so. They need to believe that if they ask, “hey, wait a minute, what about X?” in any respect in regards to the note, I will have an immediate answer, and that the answer will be consistent with the rest of the world as they have experienced it.
DM omniscience does not mean that if they all just randomly get on a plane to Singapore, they should reasonably expect me to have a session’s worth of content waiting for them there. They can go to Singapore. They absolutely can go to Singapore. The rest of our time this evening is now us having a conversation about why you went to Singapore, and what you hope to achieve while you are there, and then you all go home and I get a week to create that content.
If my players walk into a bar, I describe a couple of likelies for them to talk to, and they go “who else is here?” - wanting to talk to a person I haven’t created yet - I turn it back around on them. What kind of person are you looking for? It’s a crowded bar, there are like 200 people here. Are you looking for a man, a woman, someone young or old, someone playing cards, what are you hoping to achieve? I don’t have 200 people locked and loaded. My players know that. They don’t believe that they could line up everyone in this bar and talk to each and every one of them and get their life story. And they know it would be incredibly antagonistic of them to try. They know that what they CAN do is tell me what they want, and why, and then they can talk to that person.
like, this whole exercise is collaborative. if your players want maximum choice, that means they need to give you guidance. you’re not a mind reader, and you’ve got a life to live outside of the game.
it’s not a big deal to tell your players that they can do anything they want, so long as they tell you what that is.
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