During a recent D&D game I got to play in (it’s the wrap-up of another campaign that some of my friends used to play in years ago that needed another player to round things out as they try to bring it to an end this year), things went a little off the rails. I’ll claim some responsibility in starting the process since I decided to act in a situation that the other players didn’t seem inclined to and wound up preventing a bad guy from magically escaping. Sure, this meant that we got to show the entire city that they were being ruled by a terrifying Adult Red Dragon, but that also meant that we were stuck in a room with an angry Adult Red Dragon and a ton of bystanders who had no hope of surviving an attack from him. It was rough, seeing half of those people die as the party of intrepid adventurers tried to intervene against some of the named and known unsavory NPCs at the ball we were all attending, but we forced a dragon (the leader and ally of the aforementioned NPCs) to reveal himself and set up an interesting situation that we’d need to flee. Only, when it came time to run, the battle immediately turned sideways. This sudden shift was only made possible by a series of moments that, individually, seemed largely unremarkable, but ultimately ended with one of our group knocking the dragon unconscious before a Contingency spell zipped him away from us. Which, needless to say, really knocked the plot and session plans (current and future) asunder. I wound up talking to the DM afterwards (he is one of my dearest friends and a brother to me, along with being my longest-running tabletop game player), about how these kinds of things happen, the choices we make as GMs, and how to live with what happens after the fact (we wound up branching pretty far in our conversation, as we often do, since he’s also been around pretty much every time something similar happened to me).