Well, I screwed up yesterday. I did a big DM no-no, and I watched myself do it.
Granted, I was DMing on only 4 hours of sleep, but that’s no excuse.
The players were having a BBEG fight. It wasn’t going well for the BBEG. All the minions had been cut off from them the week before through the use of a Wall of Fire spell and the minions were unceremoniously cut down. I chose not to punish the players’ ingenuity by adding tons of new minions, although I introduced some minions and they were just enough to lengthen the combat to at least three rounds. Still a bit anticlimactic.
That wasn’t the screwup I’m talking about, though.
The REAL screwup was that I took away player agency, or, rather, I made a decision that the PCs made meaningless.
[light SPOILER ALERT for Dungeon of the Mad Mage (“DotMM”), especially if using the DotMM Companion)
I doubt they even realized what I had done. Maybe one noticed; he was the only fellow DM in the group yesterday.
The BBEG, T’rissa, a drow priestess, seeing all was lost and without an escape route, begged for mercy and to be kept alive. That was an option I chose in the moment to give the PCs. After some discussion, the PCs decided to take her prisoner and back to a hobgoblin warlord, Azrok, who very specifically said he wanted T’rissa’s head.
So when the PCs brought T’rissa back to Azrok, he immediately ordered her head cut off and that’s what his troops did.
Why was this a screwup? Because I gave the PCs a decision to make, they made that decision, and then the decision had no consequence. I took away their agency by making something they did pointless.
I even had a chance to correct the mistake by adding a consequence by having Azrok get mad and maybe try to imprison the characters for not having followed his exact orders.
But I didn’t do that, either.
Now, is that going to happen from time to time? Sure. Sometimes we’ll be railroading a little too hard. Sometimes we’ll be too tired to stop it even when we see ourselves doing it. (I was operating on 4 hours of sleep.)
But we always have to be on guard against doing this. It is less fun and less engaging for the players. It’s another instance of having to improvise as DMs, part of the fun of the game and of being a DM. Have I succeeded in avoiding this trap in the past? Yes, many times. But I’ve failed before, too.
I needed to confess somewhere.