Reacting to Player Decisions In a Non-Stupid Way

It's been awhile, not having internet and fiendishly searching for employment does that. Either way, today I'm going to ramble about one of the biggest hurdles facing a GM who wishes to try something non-linear: How to react to your players, or, my players just shot the Big Bad in the heart, what do I do?

The main reason I despise purely linear gaming is because it allows a GM to plan on the straight and narrow. That is to say that if the GM is determining the order everything is happening in with no breaks, then they have to plan in an extremely narrow fashion - events can only really have one outcome.

The flaw in this is surprisingly obvious but often ignored: Players, even those cowled and sheltered by years of this style of play, are eventually going to do something you didn't expect them to do. Maybe they kick your main villain into the lava you had intended mostly as scenery. Maybe they refuse to fight and join your villain. Maybe they just drop dead before you intended them to. All of these situations lead to a single question in the linear GM's mind: "What do I do now?" Your plot has been destroyed. Your recurring villain who was supposed to end up menacing the party and invoking most of the plot has just Gollum'd into oblivion.

There are a couple options, most of them being weak. You could bullshit some excuse for the villain to not die - you see this in anime a lot. This is a weak option because it takes away your player's effectiveness - they will eventually realize they can't kill the villain until you let them, robbing them of any desire to try to.

You could do a weak patch job on the plot - somehow connecting the current situation to the rest of it in such a way that nothing actually changes. So you want to work for the villain - but a Bigger Villain shows up, with far more evil intentions, that you must oppose! Handily enough his goals are evolved versions of the villain-turned-employer's. This is weak storytelling. It shows that your world is stuck in some sort of fate, that your precious planning is more important than your world growing more complex. Once your players figure this out, they're likely to simply ride along, knowing that they have no real impact on the plot.

So what is the good option here? Well, you take your planning, notes, and everything past the point that just happened, and you toss it. The world just changed and you're going to have to figure out how. If your players want to work for the villain, let them - they'll get the chance to see the world from the other side, maybe see why exactly he's a villain and why they don't want to be. You'll have to be quick on your feet, but really you're just using common sense and a little bit of causation.

Many of you have realized that taking this route will lead to a similar problem when you next reach a point in your plot with multiple solutions, many of which you won't think of. That is when your brain realizes that the problem lies not with your plot or your players but the way you are actually planning - if your players are doing things that are unexpected, you must stop planning the outcomes of situations. If you do that, you realize that rather than linear paths, your session plans begin to look more like a skeleton - events that happen, locations in-between, but no meat - because that's what your players provide.

So what is the ultimate answer to this question? Don't plan narrowly. Realize your players are smarter than that, that they don't want a single path to follow. Plan wide, allow them to make their own decisions. That's the only way you can improve both your abilities and their experience.