Plot, Meet Players
There's an old saying about the best-laid schemes of kobolds and elves often going awry (or something like that). And quite frankly, there's nothing more disruptive to a DM's story than the party. What can a DM do when plot meets party?
This is the quandary I have struggled with many times, especially when dealing with certain players. As always, I will illustrate with an example.
One week, I was down to the wire with no good ideas for session. We play on Sundays, and Sunday morning, I was staring down the day with no idea what the party was going to do that day. They had just accomplished a major goal (re-defeating a couple of villains who made a reappearance), and were working out where to go next. But I knew they'd be looking for some kind of clue about that, and I had nothing.
So I figured, take the easy way out. My group can often be the Party Of Slowness, and battles take a lot longer than they should, so whenever I'm running dry on story ideas, I throw in a battle to flesh out a short session and keep them on their toes. Searching through the Monster Manuals, I ran into Yetis. They were about the right level without having to adjust anything, and I figured it might be fun for them to fight a yeti or five. Quickly, I whipped up a mission idea where an ally of theirs - the dean of arcane studies at the big university - needed help getting some of her students back from an arrogant despotic asshole of a king who was holding on to them. Not quite a hostage situation, but a little bit more than diplomatic negotiations. I figured they'd ask the king to let the students go, and he'd make a deal that if they took out a few of these yetis causing trouble in his kingdom, he'd let the students go. Simple. Easy. Straightforward.
I made a horrible mistake. I neglected to take into account Viraren.
Viraren was an Elf Druid, and the player controlling him was playing him as a frustrated, willing-to-be-violent hippie. He loved Nature and despised anyone who screwed with it. What I failed to take into account was that Viraren saw the yetis as natural creatures, and unless they directly attacked him, he saw hunting them down just to kill them for no good reason as deplorable. He thought I had put the king there specifically to be an antagonist. He attacked the king.
Session ground to a halt as I stared in shock at the player who had just attacked the king. Finally, I started spluttering about how he couldn't do that, and he insisted he had just done that. I insisted that the king was defenseless, and while arrogant, was at worst Unaligned, and by attacking him, Viraren was going to shift alignment to Evil for murder. He swore up and down that the king was evil and killing him was justifiable and even good. The rest of the players took their sides and the room echoed with the arguments.
Finally, I let him have his attack, but my character, Tarak (see my post about him), turned around and attacked Viraren. Before they could come to further blows, the Cleric of Kord, Khaylin, Dismissed Viraren just to get a handle on the situation. He sent Tarak outside like a scolded puppy, then healed the king and convinced him that perhaps the students should just be let go now. The king agreed, and the party convinced Tarak that Viraren had only done what he thought was right. I still pushed the alignment shift to Evil, but at least the session could continue, though it was definitely not what I had expected.
In the end, what happened that day turned into some interesting character development (especially the relationship between Tarak and Viraren) and launched a HUGE plot arc that still ripples in the campaign as it stands today.
So the point I'm trying to make is that it's very easy to get frustrated when a character so completely derails your plot, and you shouldn't be shy about making sure there are consequences (in Viraren's case, the alignment hit). But it all comes down to the same idea I learned from the evolution of Edina (see my previous post about her); that if you're willing to let the party follow what interests them, and don't force what you expect or want down their throats, you can recover even from a massive derailment. It may not be easy, and years later, you may still groan whenever someone brings up the "king and his yetis", but the fact that it was so memorable will smooth down the rough edges and make it into a story worth retelling.