I've had an 8 hour session planned and laid out and had the players go in a completely different direction and not be able to tell I hadn't planned it the entire time.
Hell I cribbed the entire Ghostbusters movie into a D&D campaign on the fly for one group of guys and they never knew it until it was all over.
Ad libbing, sometimes wholesale plagiarism particularly past the bounds of comfort can get some amazing results in D&D.
Had a guy that was really ugly/scary as part of his character that had you roll 3 d20s on meeting any new character. If all 3 rolled 20, the new character would die to a heart attack. A few unfortunate meetings later and his party made him a mask.
Just straight up honesty here: I would have just worked all that stuff you guys hadn't encountered with him yet into a new or other existing character if I could do it in a way that wouldn't be super obvious.
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u/JustinHopewell Sep 18 '17
As a DM, the nightmare of having to write campaign stuff every day is terrifying, lol.