Players Always Surprise You

Sigh.

No matter how well you think you know your group, they always manage to surprise you.

Last night, in only the second session of what I thought would be a four-session adventure, my players short-circuited the entire plot and brought the adventure to its conclusion about two sessions earlier than I expected.

Maybe they're just too suspicious -- no matter how much I tried to make the wizard living in the tower at the center of the village seem like an innocuous, absent-minded, "Dumbledore"-type, they still (correctly) suspected that he was the actual bad guy. They picked up the clues about the threat to the village much quicker that I thought, solving that mystery in only one encounter.

Kudos to my players, though, they did it fair and square. I underestimated their cynicism a bit, I think. Additionally, I think I haven't had enough genuinely "helpful" NPCs around -- they were looking for the kindly wizard to stab them in the back I think partly because there just haven't been that many "kindly" folks around in the campaign. On top of that, I think I tipped my hand a bit early with the NPC spy that was tagging along with the group, but given how their proposed actions I'm not sure I could have done it any other way.

We're going to be doing a short dungeon crawl next, followed (hopefully) by a larger running campaign adventure. I need to meditate about the lessons of last night's game to make sure that the upcoming campaign adventure is as entertaining as it can be.