It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to use much of the substance of my PhD. I studied how politicians selectively hold media events and how they choose to answer some questions while giving non-responsive talking points to other questions and how these strategies influence subsequent news coverage.

Journalists can be predictable. Politicians know that when they show up for a pre-planned news event, they’ve got to put something in their stories, whatever is the best from what is provided.

Ironically, there’s a certain similarity with tabletop roleplaying games. A novel reader can put down a book. A television viewer can turn the channel or hit pause on Netflix and start looking for something else. The TTRPG player wants to follow along and make the best game they can out of the plot the game master provides. When they ignore the DM to have an hour long conversation with a random NPC, that’s usually a sign that they don’t want a session that progresses the plot for whatever reason. (My group goes on non-game tangents or venting about life stresses instead.) Talking to the NPCs over and over can also be a sign that players don’t like the plot provided.

Things go haywire when the players directly tell you, as a DM, that the plot does not make sense and refuse to go along with it.

Several examples with WotC full-length hardcover adventures I have DMed illustrate this point.

This post was inspired by an interview Chris Perkins did with Polygon where he said the original idea he had for a Vecna book involved Netherese obelisks that were seeded in prior adventures for 5th Edition. As Perkins was moved off of supervising adventure design, “we sort of lost the plot” about Vecna getting the obelisks.

The Polygon writer Francesco Cacciatore is a fan of this idea and hated the Vecna book as “a series of boring fetch quests.” I think that’s a fair criticism of the Vecna book, which became a travelogue of prior D&D settings with no character who appears in three separate chapters (not even Vecna).

As I revise draft after draft of a novel to make sure the characters all fit together, I know any kind of ambitious story is harder to land than it seems. As an adventure editor, I’m quick to warn that it’s easy to look at a pitch and project the glass as 100 percent full for the final project. Having been burned terribly in the last month, I’m more of a realist: every story is different, with new characterizations and plot points that have to be worked through.

Besides, the first thing I had to do when DMing Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden (the last full-length WotC adventure where Perkins was story lead) was make sure Auril felt like a villain with recurring appearances. Part of what sets Curse of Strahd apart is his frequent role in the story. I’m not a horror fan as a player or DM, but I can appreciate what this unique storytelling approach adds to the adventure, making it feel more like a novel or TV series.

I’ve talked to plenty of DMs who want to spice up their own version of the Vecna story or other WotC stories. This often comes out in a tone of “I have a better idea with a more vibrant plot than WotC. Why couldn’t WotC do this???”

I think this accusation is unrealistic. If you are writing an adventure for a convention of 100 people, you know that you may get some DMs who rewrite at least part of your adventure to fit their DMing style. Convention play is supposed to provide a more uniform experience between DMs, but it’s never completely uniform. If you are WotC, trying to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of an adventure book, you have to assume DMs will customize and tinker with what you wrote.

Having run adventures with a WotC hardcover as a baseline text, having that baseline text to provide a story outline, locations, and some NPCs is a huge time saver. When I ran Icewind Dale, I changed major plot points. I drastically altered the economy. I rewrote every single fight after level 5. The book was a damn good investment at $50 and I’d pay it again for a book of that quality, despite it’s many flaws.

What sinks things and makes a book not worth the money is when it includes plot points that make players want to do their best courtroom lawyer on TV impression

Let’s look at at the end of Chapter 4 of Rise Of The Frostmaiden:

Vellynne is a necromancer, one of four wizards looking for hidden knowledge in the frozen north. She doesn’t care about the fate of the locals. She travels with six winged kobolds, two of who she reanimated as zombies after they were killed by a rival. More importantly to me as the DM, “If she is wounded, Vellynne can cast Vampiric Touch and use the spell to regain hit points at the kobolds’ expense.” Draining life force from your allies, killing them to save yourself, is an unquestionably evil act. I can’t roleplay Vellynne as anything but an evil necromancer unless I rewrite her.

Vellynne is a deus ex machina to switch from a open ended exploration section of the adventure to a linear one. She knows that the type of artifact the party needs to stop Auril’s never-ending winter just happens to be in the lost magical city she’s trying to reach. All she needs is for the characters to go to a frost giant fortress on a frozen sea which happens to be Auril’s lair and steal a book that is the key to the lost city.

Why should characters trust the necromancer who would betray a closer ally? Players may just trust whatever is put in front of them by the DM as “here’s what you need to do next to complete the quest.” Without this suspension of disbelief, the adventure does not give the DM a no plan B. If your group won’t suspend disbelief to trust necromancers, you need to rewrite the plot. Worse, Vellynne gives bad advice in her first appearance, telling the characters to fight a marauding dragon in Bryn Shander, which leads to the most innocent NPC casualties as the dragon goes to that town last. If the players blame her for the bad advice, why would they trust her again?

If a more neutral or sympathetic character proposes the questline, there are far fewer problems. Players don’t have to disbelieve concerns if the plot writer or DM never raises them in the first place!

My DMing WotC’s 5th Edition Dragonlance book didn’t go very far. In Chapter 4, the characters have evacuated to the city of Kalaman with survivors of an invasion by enemy forces. They are level 4. The two nobles from the prior village, Lord Bakaris and his son, arrived first and are already talking to Kalaman’s council on the refugees’ behalf. Players are given cues to follow and talk to the council themselves. After all, they’re the heroes!

The boxed text for this scene ends with the governor of Kalaman saying “Are your people still preparing for battle?” The DM is reminded that “Bakaris is trying to advance his own agenda…the refugees didn’t appoint Lord Bakaris as their leader.” Players also know the refugees are mostly noncombatants. They are expected to correct Lord Bakaris, at which point he shuts them down. The squabbling can be eded with a DC 14 Charisma (Intimidation) check.

However, there is no way for the players actions here to have a long term impact on the story. Lord Bakaris tells a brazen lie. He’s rewarded with a military command position, leading the characters an ambush that goes terribly when his forces are badly outnumbered in the next major quest scene. When the characters return to Kalaman, the city council is dead. Bakaris blames the characters, who were ordered to be with him!

In the book’s last chapter, Bakaris betrays Kalaman, opening a portcullis via boxed text to let the Dragon Army in.

Accepting to go to sleep for the night after meeting the council and seeing Bakaris’ brazen lie requires suspension of disbelief. Accepting him in any kind of leadership position requires further suspension of disbelief.

My players refused to suspend disbelief. They did the most the most obvious thing I could imagine if we give players the ability to influence the overall plot instead of following along and trying to survive the combats. They called Bakaris’ bluff. It was so obvious that someone from the military would check on hundreds of new arrivals that they told Marshall Vendri, leader of the Kalaman Army, to check for himself instead of just trusting anyone at the meeting. Bakaris’ lie was obvious.

Without such brazen deployment of plot armor to start Chapter 4, several key parts of the story in Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen fall apart without a full rewrite.

Here the solution is surprisingly easy as well. Bakaris is a jerk when you first meet him in Chapter 3. He comes across as the person most likely to use and betray others in the entire book, the only one who raises an alarm. Why not have the betrayer be someone the party doesn’t expect?

We can throw Bakaris in the dungeons for life and kill him and still have a different military commander who the party has no strong feelings about make a mistake with the ambush. The characters retreat back to Kalaman to find the council murdered…at least most of them

I’d establish a young lieutenant who is severely wounded saving someone in the sneak attack which kills the council, making a new heroic character. In the last chapter, this hero falls, opening the gates assuming if Kalaman is quickly overrun they will surrender in war instead of die fighting.

It took 10 minutes, at most, for me to delete the NPCs who require a suspension of disbelief and write up new ones.

The Dragonlance adventure was the only WotC adventure since Icewind Dale to offer any kind of sandbox exploration chapters, which ask the DM to work to build a coherent narrative around the different options that players can choose from and overall story structure. Most adventures, like the Vecna book, are completely linear and riddled with similar plot holes.

In the Vecna book, once players finish their fetch quest to get the McGuffin, they are expected to immediately give it to someone who will betray them. If they say “no, we finally got a cool magic item, we’re keeping it” then they simply bypass the next chapter.

In the Planescape adventure, players can’t investigate the adventure’s core mystery: as a DM, I’m told “ultimately, any answers they find are unsatisfying or nonexistent” until a deus ex machine NPC starts a linear quest. Near the end, they learn a yugoloth named Shemeshka was responsible for their deaths. She’s then expected to walk away forever, using an Amulet of the Planes to get away if necessary. (Shemeshka felt like a DMPC to me.)

The Planescape adventure, along with a tired gimmick of a fakeout suspenseful ending to each chapter resolved with calm, asks the characters to choose between destroying a star and condemning a world of innocent astral elves with evil leaders to death or condemning your own world to death.

I think the solution to all of these plot problems is surprisingly simple stop assuming that the players will happily suspend disbelief go along with whatever the DM puts on their tabletop as the plot of the day. The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide utters this regrettable passage in Chapter 1:

Social contracts go two ways. They bind everyone. This is classic 18 year old, new to studying social sciences in college type of material, not PhD level insight.

In the social contract of DMing, the DM is obligated not to insult the intelligence of their players, or they will be the rare DM who lacks for players. The examples I gave today all invalidate the social contract I have with my players. In an age when consumers are increasingly concerned with low quality AI slop, we should encourage players to show critical thinking and reject low-quality plotting.

We should want engaged players in our campaigns who are ready to think “this seems fishy” and say so instead of wander into ambushes like I cast Dissonant Whispers on them to compel them to move a certain way.

The DM’s hard work doesn’t always produce diamonds of wonderful plot ideas. I can tell you the last time I pooped out a mix of good plot hooks and terrible ones: a playtest I ran a week ago! The DMG presumes that the DM can make rules mistakes, but not storytelling mistakes. If I’ve convinced you of nothing else today, hopefully I’ve convinced you that good storytelling is hard too! Mistakes will happen. Some are colossal.

Instead, as a writer, ask if you’d be happy with your characters going along with this plot if you played at a stranger’s table and the stranger was telling this story?