this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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"you feel the spell take hold, but for some reason the crown remains rusty"
Then you pivot that the rust is a powerful illusion or some kind of curse cast on the crown by someone related to that backstory to keep it hidden. Then while your players try to figure out why simply cleaning the rust didn't work, you try to figure out how to weave in that backstory sooner than later.
If you're really not ready for it to happen, make sure they have some other quest to do that has a pressing time limit.
you're definitely right about the time limit. at that point you are about 5 minutes away from every spell in the party's arsenal being cast on that crown, followed by the main quest getting derailed by the mystery of the plot armored artifact.
I'm extremely naive when it comes to tabletop RPGs
Is there any kind of "plot says no" response to magic? Something like the doors in oblivion where you need a key to unlock
We don't do that here. The GM provides the model of physics the players accept and expect. If the GM just says "nah" when stuff is inconvenient, players don't know what to expect, and the world becomes inconsistent.
A big part of the GM's fun in TTRPGs is improving off that. Players always ruin my plans, but that's part of the game.
Yes, exactly. Consistency is important, because it builds and reinforces trust. The GM just saying "nah" is the other side of the player showing up with a homebrew bullshit build.
I get a lot of pushback from the Pathfinder 2e subreddit for promoting the idea that the system is really great for character-driven, fiction-first tables, because everyone just looks at the number of rules and goes "it's so obviously a gameist system, why would you ever try to run it as anything else?", and the answer is it's a fantastic physics system. The rules provide clarity and consistency where it's really useful or important, and are easily ignorable where it doesn't matter.
Really, what the DM says goes. So if you want to be boring you can just say it doesn't work for some reason. The answer above re: pivoting to it being a powerful illusion spell or something so there is a reason the spell didn't work is a lot more compelling and interesting imo
Retconing things to protect muh precious twists is not compelling, though, it's just base metagaming. The unwavering plot is the GM equivalent of the 8 page main character syndrome PC backstory. If I found out my GM was doing that, they wouldn't be my GM anymore.
That makes sense! I've always wanted to run a campaign (even though I've never really played) so I try to take guidance from stories like these
Thank you!
You could also just have it work and go with whatever follows from it though.
I believe you should have a plot prepared but you also shouldn't be afraid to adapt it if the players do something unexpected. It's more work, but in my experience players can usually smell when you're just trying to block them. And they will derive fun from having found out your plans early (which is totally ok to tell them).
Ime, players are entirely willing to accept an extremely short session just so I can prep and set back up after they throw me a massive curveball. If you're capable of doing it on the fly, that's great, but I'm not and my players usually understand.
Had a twelve minute session once because I forgot I gave the party a foldable boat like three months ago on a whim, and they used it to skip the next ~3 sessions of content. I had an entire thing setup where they'd help a dwarfhold hunt a dragon, and had started on some city-based intrigue in the next area.
I just leveled with them that I had not even slightly expected this session to go this way and had nothing prepped so we'd stop early and pick it up next time.
"You can certainly try"
there's two answers to this question, one is mechanical and one is social. you as the DM can tell the players no not now, and they can't do anything about it, but that doesn't mean they won't try to do something about it, which depending on the group could be an issue.
so in this scenario a good DM could whip up some misdirection, for example set up a traveling artificer who just passed through town a couple weeks back and who the players could track down as a lead - conveniently in the direction of the main quest objective.
this is hard to do on the spot.
IMO this is kinda one of the problems with DnD 5e, at least if you want to do certain kinds of stories.
The players just have so many tools at their disposal to do anything and everything that its hard to put them into a challenging situation that:
A) Doesn't involve combat
and
B) Isn't a completely artificial-feeling scenario that's been engineered specifically to negate all of the "I don't have to care about this" buttons that players have on their sheets.