Huh. Cool stuff. Today I tee-totally learned something new.

For me it was kind of the opposite. I care less about getting shit faced and more about flavours. Getting buzzed is just a pleasant side effect.

Fair enough I can see that.

War gaming can be fun, but I don’t think DnD is especially geared toward it

Isn’t like 90% of the rules for DnD just rules for combat and treasure? Literally every single class in DnD is a combat class. And when people talk about their DnD characters they say “I played this Dragonborn Cleric…” or “Multiclassed Tiefling Mage/Rouge” and not “I played this Dwarf that had really good proficiency in Persuasion and ‘Use Rope’”. [Btw is ‘Use Rope’ still a skill in newer DnD editions?].

Also beverages when hosting a party. No need to buy name brand when store brand is half the cost and will get drank the same anyway.

People will drink it, but they may also remember. I have a cousin at whose house I turn tea-totaller, because the beer & wine they offer at parties is literally the cheapest stuff available and it’s fucking horrible.

Specifically for Ukraine there is also the fact that, when your country is under attack, nationalists are the first ones to sign up to fight the invaders. It’s like their whole thing. And the intersection in the Venn diagram of Nazis and nationalists is usually almost a circle.

One helpful starting point for me is often: What is it the bad guys want to do? Whatever they want to do usually causes problems for good and normal people. So you look for intersections between what the players do/plan/like experiencing and what the bad things the bad people have done are.

When you write your adventure like that a single point of engagement situation happens only under one of 2 circumstances:

1. the bad guys evil deeds only cause a problem for like… 2 people and their dog, or
2. the bad guys evil deeds are virtually undetectable unless you follow a very specific trail of breadcrumbs

If it’s (1) your bad guys are not very evil and the PCs time is probably better spent thwarting some other bad guys (i.e. you need to make your bad guys more bad).

If it’s (2) your bad guys are too competent and will likely only be stoppable by Batman (who is the world’s greatest detective). I.e. make your bad guys (or at least some of their minions) more incompetent.

You can also analyze prewritten material from the perspective of the bad guys. Often you will find that what is written as a single point of engagement thing actually lends itself to a multitude of hooks that you can find by looking at the plans of the bad guys.

There is one type of adventure that can’t be dealt with like this: environmental adventures. Stuff that relies on players being in a specific place/situation (like a classic dungeon crawl) and that doesn’t have a bad guy per se. But those are the easiest to deal with with my methods 2 (make them justify being in that place/situation) and 3 (give them a quest to be there) from above (“I have heard there is a cursed ruin in these woods, can you check so I know wether it’s worth buying the land?”)

Here is a couple of techniques that I developed for running a prewritten adventure that had these Single-Point-of-engagement type problems:

• dont be subtle: you gotta have better descriptions than “odd couple”. Just giving longer and more detailed descriptions let’s your players know: these guys are important and worth interacting with. An odd couple can be ignored. A couple where one is significantly larger than the other (like 2x larger), both are engaged in an active heated discussion which drops a few key words that the players are interested in and the smaller of the two is clearly the dominant party in the dialog is much harder to ignore.
• make them justify it to you: Instead of waiting for the players to say “I talk to the odd couple”. You say “on the way out of town you meet a strange couple, you strike up a conversation with the wart faced woman with hunched back, the smaller of the pair. What thing did you notice/overhear about their conversation/behaviour/appearance that made you want to get in?” This way your players experience what they need to and their descriptions actually get to highlight traits of their character, this not taking away their narrative control/Agency (eg my character likes tattoos and the woman has a very large tattoo of a specific design on her cheek or sth).
• make hitting that single-point-of-engagement an actual quest. Maybe the daughter of one of the pair sees the characters head that way out of town and asks them to give them a letter/item/whatever when they run into them.

In summary: single point of engagement situation are usually a sign of a badly written adventure. With a little bit of experience you can drag your players by the nose through anything and they will never be the wiser.

I don’t like the term “illusion of choice” or “railroad” for my style, even though I can see how people might think that’s what’s going on. The players don’t get a choice in what major story beats are going to happen, which NPCs they meet and what set-piece encounters they experience. They do get a choice in what context they meet these people, where they are when they experience the major story beats and how to engage with the set-piece encounter.

For example: In my last session I wanted three things:

• the PCs to get some face time with the BBEG of the next little arc (a Dr. Mingel), (meet an NPC)
• have a chase scene through the busy streets of London during the day and (set piece encounter)
• have Dr. Mingel attempt to obduct an NPC (Mr. Fairstyle) that could become a major source of power to the PCs (story beat).

So a regular questgiver gave the PCs the task to find and protect this Fairstyle character (hook). How they go about this is their choice. But whatever they do, once they rolled two or three times successfully to find Mr. Fairstyle (be that through asking around amongst their contacts, using divination magic, or digging through the church register to find Mr. Fairstyle and his antecendants), they will get a solid clue to his location. He can be found in a public place where scandal is to be avoided. Once there, they find Mr. Fairstyle and Dr. Mingel already engaged in polite conversation, which they can join. They observe behaviour in Dr. Mingel that reveals him to be a bad guy. When leaving the public place either Mr. Fairstyle or Dr. Mingel will attempt to flee from them (depending on context and who they try to chase).

All of these things will happen. All of the details are up to my players. E.g. I did not know ahead of time that Mr. Fairstyle and Dr. Mingel would be in a Casino playing a rare card game that is only offered in this one place. It was a casino with a specific card game because thats what the trail of clues led the PCs too and the 3rd successful roll was when talking to a gambling guy who had met Mr. Fairstyle before (I hadn’t fixed the number 3 before either, that was purely based on how much time they spent searching and what the mood was at the table, if we had gotten caught up in throwing back Monty Python quotes for half an hour a single roll would have sufficed and if the players were really into the investigation bit it would have taken them 5 or 7). The players decided to chase down Dr. Mingel when exiting the casino and leaving Mr. Fairstyle to fend for himself. So while they caught Dr. Mingel, his henchmen caught Mr. Fairstyle and while they try to get him back, (spoiler alert) Dr. Mingel will escape in their abscence.

Edit: Btw, they had killed a previous incarnation of Dr. Mingel without learning his name or talking to him. So the dead guy is now Dr. Mingels dear but insignificant assistant, for which he also wants to kill the players (long term). The story beat they hit there was “disrupt one of Dr. Mingels operations”, and the set piece encounter was a fight in a warehouse full of chemicals. I would have liked it if “Dr. Mingel” had gotten away from that fight (in which case they would have recognised him in the casino), but “learn the BBEGs name” was not on the agenda for that session so they don’t even know that they 1st turn killed the BBEG of an entire story arc. Because they didn’t because that wasn’t Dr. Mingel because that’s not the context the players created.

Why have I never had that issue?

Do people really just write their adventures as a list of predefined conditions and consequences and if players dont meet the condition, the consequence just never happens?

I would go mad. Just write what you want the PCs to learn, who the bad guys are and what they want to do, and what the players get as a reward for stopping them.

All the rest just flows from there?

If your players walk away from your hooks then they don’t want story, just throw random encounters from a table at them.

I’m not down voting you because I disagree with your pick, but because this answer needs to be at the very bottom of the thread.

It’s a trilogy of children’s books, where the first two get a movie each and the last book is split into 2.