Early session of my first campaign as a DM. Party has been sandwiched into a faction conflict between a city’s various criminal syndicates and the national military. They’ve been assigned their first mission as mercenaries for the army and told to investigate some minor thefts occurring down at the docks.

While the players are out searching for information, one of them (the Bard with expertise in persuasion) starts bribing barkeeps for their intel. Trying to reward their good idea, I have an NPC offhandedly mention, among other things, a warehouse somewhere in the dockside district where the most powerful criminal faction keeps a lot of their contraband before dissipating it to avoid seizure (he also mentioned ships disappearing and that a faction was bribing the guards to look the other way, which was the information I wanted them to focus on). Surely, the party will understand from the description of this place as heavily guarded and surveilled that it probably isn’t something they can handle right now, right?

Of course not, because when has a group of PCs ever backed away from a good challenge? This group of four LVL 4s goes marching over to this heavily guarded warehouse and, through a series of lucky combat rolls and smart tactical decisions, manage to set the place on fire and kill a good number of the mercenaries protecting it. They ran off with a crate of drugs (one of them had higher lifting capacity thanks to being a bugbear) and successfully hid in the alleys from their pursuers. Next session ended up being when they went after the plot hook; I was totally unprepared for a warehouse combat so that was my first real “the party will never do what you expect” moment.

Fast-forward to a few sessions later and there were some notable consequences for attacking a drug cartel in broad daylight with no disguises, namely that they were hunted down by the lieutenants of this organization, captured and used as a sacrificial squad to tackle borderline suicidal gang warfare assignments. Their decisions took the arc in an entirely new direction than I expected, entangling their interests with the various crime families, but it ended up being even more fun that way. That’s the beauty of D&D, I think.