"We'll stop here and finish it next session, no problem!"
In my current megadungeon home game, we have not played for almost 4 months now because of a mistake I made. It's a mistake that makes sense at the time, but has had disastrous consequences for play since then.
The mistake: I ended a session in the dungeon right at the start of a big battle because we ran out of time.
I should not have done this. I knew it could be a problem. At the time, I didn't want to risk having a PC die because we were in a "hurry up and finish" mode of combat. And I just didn't have a clever way of resolving the fight in 10 minutes that would be satisfying. I figured that stopping at the beginning of a key battle and the potential rescue of an NPC would carry enough potential energy that the next session would be focused and start with a bang! Combat! Action! High stakes!
That was 4 months ago.
Now modern life of work, kids, and family life have understabily intervined. Don't take this post as any sort of angry rant. My play group's focus is rightly on the various important aspects of their lives and playing D&D is a minor aspect. However, it IS a hobby everyone greatly enjoys and consistency is a key aspect. Long absences can dissolve the game.
I wish I had stuck to my rule of ending the session at the end of our allotted play time, and if that meant the players could not save the NPC, then so be it.
Fail Forward...Into The Next Session
In general, I think splitting the session led to three general, unwanted downstream effects in addition to delaying play for an extended period.
Denial of Agency: At the time, I thought that making the player go back to town and have the NPC become a sacrifice was robbing the players of agency, a big no-no in old-school play. However, in not completing the town-dungeon-town loop, I ended up robbing the players (and myself!) of 4 months of agency by not playing!
Decreased Flexibility in Attendance: I also decreased the flexibility of the megadungeon set-up to host a variable number of players and not require the attendance of 100% of my player pool to start a game. It is often this strengent 100% attendance requirement that kills a lot of trad-games or even any game. Hence, the joke of modern D&D is that the BBEG is "scheduling". In my experience running this game, I've been able to host a variety of out-of-town players who drop in for a session or two because we begin and end in the town. It creates a solid staging point and does the least to disrupt the narrative flow.
Yes, I could certainly have PCs with absent players be slightly off camera or function as sorta meta-ghost. But no one ever really likes doing this. And in my experience, it always results in awkward situations where present players will want to use the "ghost" PC's abilities, but then it has to be explained away why they don't directly come into harm's way or some other setup.
Missed Opportunity to Shake the Status Quo: Finally, I think the big thing I also denied my world was the chance to evolve it around an unfortunate outcome. Just look at how awesome it was when Ned Stark got it in Game of Thrones. It's a shocking twist, certainly, but it really drove home the feeling that the world moves under its own power instead of the author's. It's not true, of course. But that illusion is key in making an enthralling read AND an enthralling game.
Disruptions like the death of an NPC, particularly one the PCs witness, can be a catalyst for antagonist goal advancement AND a disruption of the status quo around the PCs. So not only do the bad guys advance but the good king now hates you for not saving the knight.
A Possible Fix...And A Suprise!
To remedy this problem, I turned to some of the RPG Discords I am on and was handed a really nice solution, which has since been turned into a blog post: Mindstorm's Quick Stakes for Tense Situations.
Exactly what I was looking for. And I set up my own table below.
It provides plenty of player choice to decide what would happen, leaving some up to chance and forcing some hard decisions. I even ramped it up by allowing players only 3 free choices before they had to move some into the WILL NOT HAPPEN category in order to remove remaining items into the WILL HAPPEN.
My players ended up deciding that both the monster and cultist WILL NOT be killed in order to ensure no PC was grievously wounded, and they saved Ambrose. But in the end, we were able to actually get everyone at the game, breaking the no-game curse.
How the fight actually went down is that they were able to save Ambrose, kill the monster, and the cultist got away- ah well- time for a new villain!
