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).

As a GM, it is difficult to anticipate the outcomes of the hundreds of little decisions that make up a tabletop game session, especially when almost all of them are impacted by sheer luck. In the case of this Dungeons & Dragons game, our party got lucky. All of the panicked civilians save one decided to flee toward an exit, which meant that we didn’t need to do anything to help or manage them, at least until the Druid summoned some giant ravens to help get people out quickly. This left us free to engage with the dragon on top of dealing with the other named NPCs who were on the dragon’s side. A few lucky rolls on our part meant that we weren’t afraid of the dragon and could act unimpeded. Not being the target of the dragon’s breath weapon (due to the excellent display of hubris from the dragon expending his fiery breath on a portion of the crowd the instant he could act as a full dragon, rather than attacking the player characters) meant that we could all take a few hits before being in danger. The dragon not recovering his fire breath meant that he had to deal with us individually. And then a natural 20 on a roll from an allied NPC, resulting in a cast of Power Word Stun, meant that the dragon was temporarily unable to react to us. Initially, we planned to use that stun to flee–we’d even gone so far as to develop an entire plan about how we might all flee and who was going to flee along what route. However, a critical hit from the party’s barbarian, who wanted to get a single swing in on the dragon before we fled the field now that the civilians had escaped and we’d dealt with the consequential enemy NPCs, turned the final round from one of flight into one of trying to take down the horribly injured dragon. Eventually, he was knocked out, teleported away, and left our characters with the knowledge that there is an unconscious and nearly dead dragon nearby, along with said dragon’s hoard and potentially more servants. All while we’re at half-health and only partial strength thanks to all the resources we’d already spent in the fight.

None of that was predictable in combination. Some of the individual choices might have been expected (the barbarian attacked a dragon? Nothing more predictable than that), but no one expected all of that to play out the way it did. The way the dice fell meant that options that never would have otherwise come up, came up. If one attack had missed (as at least one of them should have, given my character’s abysmal strength score), then none of this would have happened. If not for that lucky critical hit, we’d have fled. If not for the allied NPC rolling that natural twenty, the dragon might have yet finished us off. So many things were needed to make that final situation possible that there is no read of what happened other than us being blessed by the gods of sheer luck. No GM could have anticipated that entire sequence. There was no way to plan through that series of events. Fate reached in and flipped the table over. Sometimes, the dice have a story to tell and all we can do is roll with it.

I’ve had to deal with plenty of situations like that, many involving weird little house rules I put in place because they were statistically unlikely to happen. Like the time a player failed so hard a horrible monster was born from their vampiric weapon and nearly escaped their grasp into the wider world where it would have easily grown powerful enough to threaten entire cities (and instead was defeated, carted away to be studied, and might have eventually escaped from a lab to wreck havoc upon the world if the world hadn’t subsequently ended). Or the time, much more recently, when a fun narrative moment (which only came up because of an abysmal roll) turned into almost a disaster when not a single person could strike the mind-controlled player character who was about to unleash a horrible creature upon the party and their newly settled community, which meant a simple conflict turned into a horrible, stressful nightmare. Or when one of my players decided to make a deal with a devil for the power to protect his friends and opened himself up to the creature who then stole his body and trapped his soul in the gem she’d previously occupied since he was too impatient in a fight. Or the time my players literally failed to realize they were dealing with a cult complete with hallucinogenic cactus juice, a charismatic leader, and a god the party’s paladin had never heard of, all of which resulted in the party’s death at the cult’s hands because they got suspicious and broke up into groups rather than fought together (and, of course, the Paladin forgot he could fly over the mass of enemies separating him from the spellcaster that chewed the whole party up from across the room). I have even more stories than that, where mistakes or cascading choices or sheer, dumb luck caused a sequence of events that left me reeling as I attempted to keep the story going around my players. It happens to everyone, sooner or later, if you run enough games, and it shouldn’t be a cause for alarm or consternation.

A cause for a break, though, definitely. There’s no reason not to take a break when something like this happens, catch your breath, and then pivot into this strange new world you’ve found yourself in. I don’t know what the unconscious dragon situation will become (though I did throw out plenty of ideas and suggestions as to how this could still be a cool, fun thing for the group), but I trust my GM to find a way to make it fun for all of us. Sure, he might wind up doing something like creating a new game with the same players except one thousand years have passed and the villains achieved their goals, leaving the world in a sorry state as the inheritors of the now-dead party’s legacies–their souls reborn in a last-ditch reincarnation to alter the course of fate, to be specific–must fight to survive in the remnants of the world their original characters failed to save, but it probably won’t do that one, specifically, since that’s how I handled the cult-based Total Party Kill. He’ll come up with something all his own and probably more positive that the TPK situation given that we succeeded where we should have failed due to dumb luck and a powerful NPC thumbing the scales of fate. I’m looking forward to whatever comes from it, though, because there’s just so much fun to be had in the world of unexpected outcomes!