No Right Answers

If you haven't read Rise Up Comus' latest post on creating better social encounters go give that a read! It was incredibly validating and helped me better articulate how I design my own NPC encounters. But there's one thing that post touches on that I really wanted to hammer home, one that goes beyond social encounters and applies to how I design scenarios as a whole. The post sites the old OSR maxim that "There should be no single obvious solution, but many possible difficult solutions" and applies this to social situations (which I think is brilliant to do) and I wanted to dig just a bit deeper into this (and also to get this draft to some form of completion):

There should be no right answers.

OK, OK, what does this mean? This isn't really about not having solutions available, but rather offering choices where there's no choice that's clearly the morally right or best choice over any other. Where the decision of what should be done is entirely subjective to the players and their values.

No matter how you try to solve the situation there's no right answer. Create situations where every approach has clear drawbacks, force players to choose the lesser evil (or maybe try to forge a secret "right" option you hadn't considered). If I tell you Patient Zero is a cackling wizard who explicitly wants to kill everyone there's not a lot of gravity to the choice of killing him. Alternatively what if I tell you your favorite NPC you decided to bring on this quest just got infected by Petri-Blight, you know the disease that spreads fast that you were able to only recover a single medicinal flower to cultivate curative potions for? Leave the NPC here and they'll turn irreversibly within a day into a dangerous monster. Use the flower now and there's no way you'll be able to cultivate more to save more lives. You know they'll start to go feral and their eyes will glow with a petrifying stare any minute now. They're begging you to help, they don't know what to do. You flip the 3-minute sand dial and ask players what they'd like to do.

There's no right answer here. Or at least, none you've thought of (These scenarios can bring out a lot of Player creativity when its needed most). Zero Sum situations are a perfect short cut to this kind of thing.

You'll know you've done this right when a player deflates in thought, thinks over the options and then looks around the table with the smile of someone stumped on a puzzle and says "Man, this sucks."

Alternatively give them a lot of very good solutions with a twist - Hey the Dwarves would love to help the struggling city of Ironkerp, can you help them kill this dragon they have a blood feud with in exchange? (Turns out the dragon is the last of its kind, only acts in self defense, and when attacked in combat will refuse to fight back at full force before giving up and letting you kill it! We won?) Well OK maybe the High Elves will help the Ironkerp? All they want is a written contract that we'll defend them if they get aggressed upon by a rival faction? Easy, the Wood Elves never go on the offens- Oh the High Elves were attacked like right after the contract was signed? And all the evidence of the attack was destroyed in a conflagration so we can't prove if it was staged and now Ironkerp is at war? Great... Maybe we ask the Evil Wizard Glaxor the Vile? (something you the GM hadn't considered) Yes he eats babies, but maybe this is the lesser evil.

~No right answers~

What do we do with the exact clone of a party member who has no ill will? Should we raise our friend from the dead with magic we don't understand the consequences of? Our old adversary has lost all her memories, do we take her in? Kill her now for what she's done to others?

~No right answers~

EDIT: I'll add ((As Rise Up Comus wisely pointed out)) this shouldn't be every choice as it can get exhausting. In fact a lot of my campaigns usually feature a cast of morally grey antagonist that you could side with and then a singular pure evil "yeah taking that guy down would be a good thing" enemy in the middle to shake up the pacing. I find the "No Right Answer" choices are best when either first entering an area / arc, or when you're about to wrap something up. Also (as with all things) your mileage will vary on this - Some players hate this kind of game and just want to feel like good guys doing good things, and a campaign peppered with "No Right Answer" scenarios probably isn't what they're looking for.

Hopefully this got you thinking about your own scenario design and presenting your players with nuanced conundrums with no right answers ~