This week is a week of a lot of talking and discussion. Is discussion fun for players? Do players like moral quandaries? Because my players do a lot of them. This week while the players were trying to pop their friend Duncan from the clutches of some hungry kobolds we had a long chat about whether or not we wanted to save their lives or if it was okay to kill them.
The party decides eventually to do an elaborate disguise and tell lies plan where the bard disguises as a dragon princess to mislead the kobolds and send them else where. They are successful, this takes a whole hour and a half. Hilariously the wayward enemies are sent to the house of an enemy noble.
Once the party is clear of the dungeon we go to do roleplay and hanging out. The gang gets back with their friends and such, some funny business happens and Alexsei dumps half of all of his spell slots into a red herring cauldron.
Now: here's where the interesting stuff happens. Meteors can be seen over the horizon, Aliens the team had prophetic nightmares about are ON THEIR WAY! Now, I expected a bit of panic but I have to admit I was a little surprised the way the team reacted. Very scared, losing hope immediately. The truth is, the party is not quite ready for this, in my opinion. They hardly talked to any powerful NPCs (The rulers of Destreto, one player talked to one ruler), made connections (ask anyone to join their alien killing effort), or anything like that (at least to a degree I would have been satisfied with, that's on me, I'll take the blame for that). not to mentions a battle like this is totally new to all of them, no one had a kit good for battle field combat with more than a few enemies. Overall I had hoped a strong unified city could fend of aliens but right now the city is still very divided. It's going to fall to the players to save everyone.
We talked for a while about my own intentions for this part of the game and what each person wanted to do during the fight. We agreed to do big cinematic fights with a split party. I planned to give them all allies to fight with, but they didn't know that yet.
There was a lot of tittering and excitement here, Alexsei gave a speech and we broke for the week.
Here's what I've learned. I think I'm VERY BAD at giving direction or my players aren't interested in the direction I had in mind. I'm wondering why they never gave the connections thing a chance? I'm thinking maybe they had a bad view of ruling peoples and therefore assumed all the oligarchs were basically nasty idiots who can't help. What is the best way to let them know they need to put differences aside or convince others to their cause? more over, if they don't wanna do that I think I just need to let them do everything alone or with minimal help. so what if the city is divided?
Now, the core theme of Thesots is that peoples are better together. The enemy paralyses persons to keep them from defying them as well as plants seeds of distrust to make groups split apart. A divided city is the way he wins wars, it would be opposed to my themes to let them go it alone. At the same time I don't want to change the personalities of NPCs just to make the players like them, that feels disingenuous and maybe a bit like lowering the HP of a big monster just because the encounter is hard. I don't want to be a "soft" DM anymore, so I'm going to stick to my guns here. The fights are hard now, the party is level 11 soon to be level 12, they can handle it. If they don't want Rich allies then so be it.