When creating adventures, I genuinely try to cover a reasonable range of possible PC actions - maybe they'll fight the bad guys, maybe they'll negotiate, maybe they'll hide, maybe they'll try to trick them. If they do fight, maybe they'll go for a straight-up battle, maybe they'll try to arrange an ambush... Whatever, I try to cover the bases as well as I can.
Every so often, though, the PCs do something that takes me completely by surprise.
In the first session of "Eberron: Dust to Dust", the PCs had been dropped by a plot device into the foundations of Sharn. Off in one direction there were abandoned ruins of an old goblin settlement; from another they could hear (and indeed see) a patrol of Spider-eye Goblins coming in their direction.
So I'd considered various options: maybe they'd retreat into the ruins, maybe they'd hide, maybe they'd fight...
What I didn't expect was that they'd strike up a conversation with the goblins and agree to journey back with them into their lair. I mean, everything about that scenario positively screamed "It's a Trap!" (I think maybe I'll need to get an Ackbar mask for future cases like this.)
Anyway, the consequence of this was that rather than fighting the goblin patrol (which would have been a tough fight), they found themselves fighting a large part of the goblin tribe (which was an overwhelming fight). And so a TPK ensued...
... only it didn't. It turns out that the 5e encounter-building system is much more forgiving than I expected, especially when the party has a full complement of PCs. Consequently, they were (just barely) able to fight through well enough to buy themselves some time, and then they were able to retreat. Which is lucky, since it would have sucked for the first session of a campaign to result in a TPK!
Still, always fun when the PCs take you completely by surprise. And now I know I need to be better prepared for the next session...
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