The idea was to have some kind of urgency but only once the players were far enough to understand the basics of what was going on. To that end, the date was supposed to be vague so that the GM was free to say “you figured out that the ritual will happen right after summer ends – which is in less than a week”.
Then he forgot that the timeframe was vague when I wrote the letter and told me to pick a date.
Unfortunately, this cut out a side plot where our party would’ve hired another party to hunt down some artifact. That artifact retroactively got downgraded to a red herring for time reasons.
On the other hand, we got an absolutely precious scene where the one party member who wasn’t magic-affine and didn’t want to be involved with any supernatural stuff had to ride an unnaturally fast six-legged half-demon horse in order to catch up with the bad guys.
Also, it cut down on all the “three wizards and a vintner have breakfast and discuss the state of the investigation” episodes. We had a lot of those.
We once skipped an entire chapter of “Out of the abyss” by saying “nope!” and running out of the city!
The DM introduced all the factions in the city, we realized they were all conspiring against each other, and they all asked of us to collaborate with them (against the others)… Instead, we stole a ship in the night and sailed away!
Only afterwards the DM told us it means we skipped a full chapter he had worked hard to prepare!
Couldn’t they have gone the other route and made the villain’s plans a year later? But sounds like it was a lot of fun the way it was run!
The idea was to have some kind of urgency but only once the players were far enough to understand the basics of what was going on. To that end, the date was supposed to be vague so that the GM was free to say “you figured out that the ritual will happen right after summer ends – which is in less than a week”.
Then he forgot that the timeframe was vague when I wrote the letter and told me to pick a date.
Unfortunately, this cut out a side plot where our party would’ve hired another party to hunt down some artifact. That artifact retroactively got downgraded to a red herring for time reasons.
On the other hand, we got an absolutely precious scene where the one party member who wasn’t magic-affine and didn’t want to be involved with any supernatural stuff had to ride an unnaturally fast six-legged half-demon horse in order to catch up with the bad guys.
Also, it cut down on all the “three wizards and a vintner have breakfast and discuss the state of the investigation” episodes. We had a lot of those.
We once skipped an entire chapter of “Out of the abyss” by saying “nope!” and running out of the city!
The DM introduced all the factions in the city, we realized they were all conspiring against each other, and they all asked of us to collaborate with them (against the others)… Instead, we stole a ship in the night and sailed away!
Only afterwards the DM told us it means we skipped a full chapter he had worked hard to prepare!
The more time a DM spends preparing something, the less likely the players are to play along