they can smell the vibrancy of improv.

they can feel in their bones that Finneas McDungarees is not like the others.

In my best game, the players basically adopted Windy the Goblin from the first session. Windy played the flute, and was found rummaging through a raided wagon. I’d considered that players might talk to the goblin instead of just murdering, but wasn’t sure.

On the other hand, I had pre-planned a villain named Pretty Paul (modeled on Handsome Jack from borderlands) and how in his first scene they’d find him aggressively hitting on an NPC named Anri. The players basically ignored everything else in the scene to go bail Anri out. The rest of the game they maintained a deep hatred of Pretty Paul, who was admittedly a dangerous scumbag. They also sort of adopted Anri, and helped them get to wizard university later.

I definitely run into this. I’ll write out some details about something and fully forget when it comes up and just kind of override it in the moment. I think it’s just part of the process, and I try to remember to update my notes after the fact.

Much better to forget something and change it on the fly than to be inflexible and freeze up when players do something unexpected.