My Players Keep Surprising Me in the Best Way

As you know, I’ve been running a Cosmere TTRPG playthrough of Stonewalkers, the published Stormlight Archives adventure. I plan on writing a blog post (and maybe making a video) retrospective once we finish the game, but, partially prompted by my players, I wanted to write about some of the ways my players have surprised me over the last 2 sessions.

My favorite thing, both as a game master and as a consumer of actual plays, is when the players throw off the GM with their creativity. I don’t mean in the way that people talk about on Reddit (sometimes positively and sometimes negatively) in which the players go completely off the rails or in a direction that negates the prep work of the GM. My players are on board to tell the story we’re telling together, they just have some really unique ways of solving the problems they are confronted with. (Some amazing examples of the type of player creativity that bolsters the story can be found in the first 6 episodes of Mage Hand High Five’s The Badlands) A couple players have had to drop out, but everyone who remains has chosen a radiant path. As they have tried to make use of their powers we’ve definitely had our share of “yes and” and “no, but” moments. The last two battles have had some of my favorite examples.

Spoilers ahead if you wish to be a player in the Stonewalkers campaign.

The last 2 sessions took place in the penultimate chapter. The players are in Rall Elorim after Odium’s forces have taken control of the city. As the characters explore the city they enter a tavern along with some city-mandated minders. Eventually a fight breaks out and one of my players immediately asks if he can use the chaos at the beginning of the battle to go hide in the rafters. I love that and can’t wait to see what comes of it, so I approve. The battle continues and one of the players who has powers of plant growth looks around and asks if there are any plants he can use. I look at the map and only see plants on the planter outside the building, but another eagle-eyed player notices there are oranges on one of the tables. So he asks if he can use the seeds to power his plant growth? With the biggest grin on my face I give assent and the battle gets even crazier. (also: eventually rafter player jumps down for a surprise attack)

Our most recent session included a variation on the theme above along with some interesting ideas for solving problems and winning battles; ideas that might not have been envisioned by the adventure writer. To start, the players had agreed to disable some alerter fabrials. My players, who are all much deeper in the Cosmere lore than I am, had an idea. Could they create an aluminum shield to hide behind as they approached the alerter fabrials? In the Cosmere aluminum functions much like a tin foil hat - it blocks Cosmere magic. I had to go for a “no, but” on that one because it’s rare on Roshar AND the players hadn’t previously spent time gathering it or something like that. But I did enjoy the creativity there. This wasn’t the last time Aluminum made an appearance in the session.

In the previous chapter Nale had placed aluminum cuffs on a radiant to keep them from using their powers. There were much more important things going on in that scene (including saving that radiant from death!) but as a throwaday action, Nale let them keep the aluminum cuffs. So in the big battle for this chapter, one of my players decided he would try and get the Big Bad cuffed so she couldn’t use any radiant powers. But that’s not all, he also used his dust storm powers to create a dust storm that would give them advantage on sneaking the cuffs on her AND give allies a bonus to attacks.

But I mentioned there was also a variation on a theme - our vegetation radiant asks again about any plant life he can use for his magic attack. Well, it’s dark and dank on this map and there are mushrooms along the walls. So he runs up and grabs a bunch. Could he throw them some 20 feet towards the enemy? I always like a reason to let the dice give us wild events, so I gave a range of possibilities with a nat 20 meaning he somehow beans her with mushrooms from 20ish feet away. Sadly, he did not get a nat 20, but he did roll high enough to get them within range of the battle so that a fellow player could grab the mushrooms and put them in position. On the next turn the enemy was restrained by the mushroom overgrowth.

Overall, it’s been a blast so far to be the GM for this group. I’m sad that we’re nearing the end of this adventure, but I hope to be able to GM for them in future campaigns.

• Cosmere-TTRPG
• FoundryVTT