"When your plan falls apart. " Topic

I learned in the past the value of having an extra adventure or two rolled up on the side in case my PCs wanted to be unpredictable. Sometimes PCs just don't move around the way you want, or ignore your adventure hooks. That is fine, part of the enjoyment.

The way I usually "hook" side adventures is to have a note somehow find its way into the party's hands. Be it through combat, message in a bottle, mistaken identity, whatever.

So the PCs just get hold of a bandit's orders (after killing him, obviously) only to find it is detailing the routes they plan to ambush. The Ranger is naturally infuriated, and storms off shouting something about it being his duty to protect the innocent. The rest of the party, unsure of what to do, chases after him to help.

I should take a moment to say a lot of my events are timed. I keep track of the passing of days in my adventure, and have things running all over. For instance they may find a caravan looted with dead bodies around, which may lead to a quest. Conversely, if they reached that area a day sooner, they might've been in time for the ambush. Simple stuff like that.

Back to the party, they burst out of the forest and come upon the caravan, and find several dead bodies with some men standing over them, seemingly inspecting the dead. Before the men even stand up to speak the Ranger immediately starts dropping them with his arrows. The rest of the party is like

O.o

At this time, the men rally to fight back and push to a pause of sorts in the combat. They start shouting they are city guards, coming to investigate why the caravan never showed. Ranger says,

"Oh "

After a long conversation and many many charisma rolls to defuse the situation, we now have a disgraced Ranger (now fighter) and the rest of the party accessories to a heinous crime. So after a brief stay in the dungeon, they are offered a shot at redemption by undertaking a harrowing quest to clean out an Orc hideout near the city.

I have a new lesson in the unpredictability of PCs, and I think they learned questions first is usually a safe bet.

On an aside, once Rangers commit a crime like that, they lose Ranger status forever. Do you think I should let him do a solo quest to regain his honor and title? Or forever damn him to his actions?

I'd always allow for the possibility of redemption, but not in a single adventure or even a single campaign. But it depends on the depth of story you want in your campaign, and how your group handles role play— are they just out for adventure, or do they like to explore the personalities and life-stories of their characters? If the former, then redemption is just a plot hook for adventure— use it if you like. If the latter, then redemption becomes a life-long struggle for the character, with all sorts of pressures and tests along the way— does he have what it takes to recover from his mistakes?

By the way, did the Ranger character have a comparatively low Wisdom score? "cause shooting first and asking questions later is a sign of a total Wisdom failure. So was it "in character" for the Ranger to behave so incautiously, or was that the fault of the player himself/herself?

Fault of the player. In the book a character has to have a 14 Wis as a prereq to the class. I made sure to mention the men were inspecting the bodies, not so much looting, when he came upon them. I barely finished that sentence when he started rolling to shoot. I was going to allow him a wisdom roll to notice that the bodies were half buried in snow(it is winter right now), while the men had little on their cloaks, which shows they came after the battle, but he went straight to shooting.

I should also mention my players trust me to not railroad them or trick them. They always have the information they need to make an informed decision (otherwise it is made clear to them that their information is sketchy at best) However, they also know I wont baby them, or give them do overs if they mess up. In this case, he was just too eager to kill the bandits, even though he was wrong in this instance.

I always found that no scenario survived first contact with the enemy, I mean, the players in my RPG group.

I like the way you think, Ethan. I'd make his redemption arduous, and uncertain. Like a difficult series of good services, each of which are rolled for to see if they are effective. Redemption has at least as much to do with social perceptions as individual. Efforts can fail, and there is the *possibility* of never making one's way back to acceptance.