Join Ang, Jared, John, and Phil for GM advice about what to do when players take your game in unexpected directions. Can these gnomes deal well enough with the unexpected to keep out of the stew?
Download:Â Gnomecast #56 – It All Goes Sideways
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My most “sideways” experience was in a convention game. Any reveal of our true identities would be bad, which one player took to mean that he should run away from the presence of police. Which just led to the character’s arrest and the splitting of the party. I don’t remember if we made any additional progress in that game, but I am talking about something from over twenty years ago.
Thought this episode was great!
I think my most memorable sideways convention experience was the time someone managed to do something (I wasn’t in the room at the time, but I think it was something along the lines of revealing how we had thwarted God’s will to the heavenly host) which resulted in the last hundred years of history being overwritten and put on a much darker path. The GMs actually took about a half-hour timeout to figure out what had happened and what the plot of the game was now, and then we continued on with what I can only assume was a very different game than they had planned.
(There was also a (unrelated!) game a few years before that where I think we might have accidentally destroyed most of the multiverse halfway through the game, but the GM handled it so gracefully it was hard to say whether that contingency was part of his planning for the game or not.)