Also known as, “No, Jeremy, that’s a ridiculous idea and it’ll never work.” A Case Study.

Warning this article contains the following:

• Rise of the Runelord Spoilers
• Math
• the wild ravings of a spiteful GM

Have you ever been that kind of situation? You know the one. The kind of situation where your players come up with a crazy plan out of left field, the implementation of which doesn’t jive with the material you’d prepared and – in all likelihood- will ruin months of hard work because you didn’t account for the fact that your PCs are there solely to ruin your life?

Your players think they’re being clever, finding a creative – but complicated – solution to a problem when obviously the better answer would be several of rounds of thrilling combat and maybe a dead PC or two. Why can’t they see the latter as the right choice? Don’t they know that it’s better for the narrative that way? A little PC death now and again builds character, don’t you know? Well, maybe more character building than character built, if you know what  I mean…

Story time.

The year is 2014. The game is Rise of the Runelords. The adventure is Nick Logue’s Hook Mountain Massacre. My players are creeped-the-heck-out. They’d just finished up their encounters with the Grauls and were officially done with ogres. In reality, they hadn’t encountered any ogres yet. Recall that the Grauls were ogrekin. Gross, creepy, and inbred ogrekin. And my players had had it with them.

The next part of the adventure had the PCs tasked with the liberation of Fort Rannick from the occupation of the Hook Mountain Ogres. How awesome would it have been for them to storm the gates, murdering ogres left and right, fight their way into the keep and strike down Papa Kreeg? That was rhetorical. I know how awesome it would have been. But do my players do this? Noooooo. They want to be all clever. They fly to the top of the escarpment that overlooks Fort Rannick and do some surveillance. They muse about whether it might be simpler to burn Fort Rannick to the ground and rebuild. Of course they would… lazy adventurers. I helpfully remind them that its been raining for days and the entire region is thoroughly soaked.

Which of course, leads them to consider drowning out the ogres with a 0th-Level Spell. What!? I know… my reaction was the same. At this point they had two level 7 Divine Casters, a cleric and a druid respectively. Quick math here. Create Water is 2 gallons of water per caster level. As an orison, it can be used an unlimited number of times per day. So each caster is capable of generating 14 gallons of water per round or 140 gallons per minute for a whopping total of 16,800 gallons of water per hour. That’s over 400,000 gallons of water generated over the course of a 24-hour period. Their plan? To sit on the mountain top and spam Create Water until the ogres were flooded out. My reaction? No that’s stupid. Go kill them like heroes. You’re acting like engineers. To which one responded, “I am an engineer!” I vetoed the idea anyways. Mostly because I had prepared statblocks and wanted to roll dice, not to math out how much water it would take over a given amount of time to flood out an acre of fortified land.

Incidentally, I calculated that today. It would take two Level 7 casters a little over 90 minutes to generate enough water to cover an acre of land in 1″ of water. Average soil permeability (the rate at which water drains into soil) is around 0.78″ per hour. Which means in the same time it would take for them to generate 1″ of water of an acre of land (about the size of Fort Rannick), 1.25″ of water would have drained away. Meaning it’d be nigh impossible for them to flood the Fort that way.

So, thus thwarted, my PCs decided to sneak in the Fort via underground caverns or what not. The entire adventure ended prematurely when attracted the attention of a few too many ogres and the bard in the party took a ogre hook crit to the face. The rest of the part got out alive with a piece of the bard’s foot or something and they reincarnated him. And that was a little adventure in its own right. Then the PCs came back to the Fort to exact their terrible vengeance and it all worked out.

In hindsight, should I have let my players spam Create Water to flood out the ogres? Yes. I should have let them try. I should have let them get into it and the encounter a patrol of ogres at the top of the ridge and had a fight break out while the casters tried to keep the stream of floodwaters flowing. But I didn’t. I said, “No.”

Not, “No, but…”

Just, “No.”

And that’s okay. Because sometimes it’s just better to stop your players from deviating too far for the sake of your own sanity than let them get carried away and be forced to deal with damage control later. Sometimes its better to focus them on the whole point of being adventurers and make them actually be adventurous. Because sometimes as a GM you have to put your foot down and say, “Look, this is what I have prepared and I can’t account for what you’re doing right now.” Your players will appreciate your honesty. And your game will be healthier for it.

 

Ever had to say no to your players? How did it work out for you? Let me know in the comments section below!