Manipulating Destinies #15

I think I'm getting better at this DMing thing! I was very nervous about yesterday's session because I felt I was way underprepared (also because the players could have gone in a number of different directions), and I did have to improvise a lot but it worked out fine. My players decided to split the party, but I tried to switch between the groups often enough so that nobody got bored, even the one guy who decided to be sensible and thus did not get into trouble.

One thing I'm quite proud of in my set-up is that my players are genuinely wary of the city guard. In the previous campaign I played in, as well as the campaigns I watched/listened to, the police was rarely a big factor, but here the party spends a lot of time in one city and the city guard is mostly competent, and half the party got into trouble and got an official reprimand in the first session and now have to regularly check in with their parole officer. It's harder to lie to the guard if they have truth and mind-reading spells :P So now every once in a while the party debates doing something and then decides against it because it would be illegal, which means many things are more challenging, which is great. The side-effect is that I constantly have to think about which things/spells are legal or not, and sometimes I almost forget (I got so used to Detect Thoughts that I almost forgot that using it without license and warning is definitely not allowed – to be fair my players could easily have guessed that and I don't have to warn them – so now they have to hope their parole officer doesn't find out…)

I thought that would be it, as far as complications with the guard go, because they were being careful. Then yesterday one of the rogues tried to break into a suspect's house, failed, and instead of wondering if there might be an Alarm or something similar she hung around for fifteen more minutes trying to figure out a way in. And when the city guard arrived they would have just asked her if she'd seen anything suspicious, if she hadn't when asked what she was doing here replied that she was looking for the very house the guard knew someone had just tried to break into. So they wanted to interrogate her as a witness at the guard station, but she remembered the truth and mind-reading spells and freaked out and ran away. She did escape but she wasn't disguised so now the city guard is looking her. And the party has a friendly contact with the city guard but now that just means he'll definitely recognize her and know who her associates are. *facepalm* That wasn't the plan. At least she didn't actually manage to break in, and she wasn't planning to steal anything just to look for information, but there will still be consequences.

(I wonder if the party will think to ask the Thieves' Guild for help with that. They decided to ask the Guild for help next time, even though they hate them, because they feel like they're stuck with their investigation – they found a person likely part of the kidnapping but she escaped – so now I have to decide what the Thieves' Guild knows, and is willing to share. Also I remembered that I was so wrapped up in their current quest that I forgot to leave more hints about the bigger plot in the background, I'll have to pay more attention to that.)

By the way, I invented a house rule that I'm very fond of by now: There are multiple people who could and conceivably might Scry on the party, but if I asked them for Will saves each time the players would know and it's hard to ignore that kind of meta knowledge. So now at the beginning of each session I ask every player to give me five Will saves for their character and then use these when necessary. It works as intended and is very convenient.

Do you have any favorite house rules?