It's often said that no plan survives contact with the enemy. In Storytelling, your players aren't your enemies, but they are equally destructive to your plans. It's generally not worth trying to set up elaborate schemes that arc across months. Sometimes, it'd not even wise to plan out a session too closely. Your players will do something. They'll kill a key player in your conspiracy, or expose a plot too early, or solve a problem in a way you didn't expect. Something will always happen.
Quite recently, the Atlanta Band entered the Mayan Underworld to locate their hearts. The only reason their hearts were missing is because one of the Band members, Johnny, used Out of the Frying Pan to escape another bad situation. He dropped the entire Band (except Boris) into the Lair of Camazotz, the Avatar of Ritual Sacrifice. In the few seconds the Band was in his Lair, Camazotz stole their hearts and replaced them with obsidian.
Was that planned? No. I had no way of knowing that Johnny would dump the Band into Camazotz' lap. I didn't plan for the Band to encounter Camazotz until they had already achieved Godhood. But when they ran into his lair, I either had to kill them instantly (lame) or do something fun with it. And since he's an Aztec figure all about death and sacrifice, I went straight for hearts. The exact plan that Camazotz has for the hearts isn't relevant here, but suffice to say that the Band is not in favor of Camazotz having their hearts.
Now, after the Band dug around and figured out why their hearts were missing and where they were (the House of Bats in Xibalba), they decided to go after them. I read up on the Popol Vuh, which details the travel of the Mayan Hero Twins into Xibalba and the challenges they face there. Now one of my players is a graduate student with a heavy focus on Mayan culture, so he took these challenges fairly well. He even managed to come up with a solution to one of them so heavily rooted in Mayan mythology that I had to let him have it, even though it was not what I had planned at all. I hadn't even thought of it, because Mayan mythology isn't my specialty.
Instead of taking one of the four roads presented and trying to guess the correct one to take, Alan's player suggested that because in Mayan culture there are FIVE cardinal directions (North, South, East, West and Center) that there may be FIVE roads. He had Unlidded Eye and he found the hidden, Fifth Road that didn't exist until Alan's player came up with it.
By doing that, he was able to help the group bypass several challenges. He earned it, by having a brilliant idea and working it into the story seamlessly. His reward (aside from a big stunt and happy feelings of success) was an easier path into Xibalba.
And that's really what spurred this post. Rewarding your players for creative solutions. Players deserve to feel a sense of accomplishment for defeating challenges. That doesn't always mean fighting through them. They can negotiate them, side-step them or go off in a totally different direction. Just because the players didn't defeat the challenge the way you, the ST, envisioned them doing so doesn't mean they did it wrong or don't need the reward.
When the Band was about to enter the second of the six Houses of Torment (Cold), when one of the Lords of Xibalba appeared and offered to help them out, if only they'd do him a favor. But when the group's social whiz, Johnny, decided to burn everything he had in a bid to get Blood-Gatherer to spill the beans on what he was really up to, he succeeded wildly. So what happened? Blood-Gatherer spilled the beans, revealing that he was really working for Camazotz and planning to betray the other Lords of Xibalba and help Camazotz use the Bands' hearts to empower an army of bat-monsters to invade and overcome all the other Underworlds.
While Blood-Gatherer delivered his Evil Villain Monologue, Johnny used his Sound Boons to broadcast the whole thing. The other Lords (the ones being betrayed) heard and put a stop to Blood-Gatherer's plans. They captured him and his partner, Scab-Picker and hauled them off to Fates Unknown. As a reward the leader of the Lords, One Death, grudgingly agreed to let the Band into the House of Bats without forcing them to go through the other Houses first.
So the end result was that the Band only had to pass through the House of Darkness. They got to skip the House of Cold, the House of Jaguars, the House of Razors and the House of Flames. These were going to be four huge challenges for the Band, but because of Johnny's quick thinking, the Band was able to avoid them. Thanks to Garreth, Alan and Boris working together, Johnny didn't even have to die for his bright idea. Blood-Gatherer hurled a few dozen levels of Aggravated damage at him in vengeance before he was hauled off, but the three big, strong men of the Band were able to combine their powers and absorb the attack. Boris took the brunt of it, but walked it off with only a few horrible burns from flesh-eating blood.
Now, at first I debated coming up with extra challenges for the Band. I didn't want them to skate easily to the end of this Story. After all, at the end of this Story, the Band is going to be beginning the process of Apotheosis. This is their final adventure as Demigods. I didn't want it to be a cakewalk. Then, the more I thought about it, the more I came back to my gut feeling: Don't Do This.
Johnny's player may have blown my plans to smithereens, but he did it with style and everyone loved it. It was fun listening to Blood-Gatherer go into a maniacal speech, complete with evil cackling, getting louder and louder until his voice boomed across the Underworld, revealing every detail of his treachery. It was dramatic, and awesome.
If I had added more challenges just to pad out the adventure and make it take longer, I would have been robbing Johnny's deed of its value. If instead I roll with the punches and let the players see a real, tangible benefit to such things, I set a strong precedent of rewarding awesomeness and they get to feel like, yeah, their choices and actions really can change how the story unfolds.
That is far more important than overcoming a few obstacles that I pull out of my ass just to add time to a Story. So, yeah, this Story will be about half as long as I originally planned. I'm alright with that, because thanks to Alan and Johnny, the Band EARNED that short, easy route. Relatively easy, at least. Because the House of Bats won't be a cakewalk and Camazotz himself is still waiting for them.
Plus, who knows what the Band will get themselves into now? I don't.
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