The Background
I run a game that focuses on narrative and roleplay. Often, my players will create their own McGuffin that I will then shift into a primary plot device. This usually takes the party away from some primary plot points and drives the story in a different direction. I feel this all works pretty well because it always allows the players to feel as if they’ve made an important discovery and that they’re driving the story, not me. The downside? This leaves some unresolved threads.
Recently, my players have been asking about those threads and what happened because we didn’t resolve them. I explain that not taking care of them has had consequences that they haven’t been around to see. Essentially, the world continues without them. However, we’ve reached a point in the story (homebrewed) where these threads matter. So we’re going back to see the consequences of unfinished business.
The Discussion
I’d like to see your take on unfinished business and how you represent consequences in the world. Do you allow the story to just move on to the BBEG, or do you make the players feel like their choices matter beyond the immediate session? How do you do either, neither, or something else entirely?
If your world has other adventurers, I think it’s ok to say some fledgling adventurers finished the job or something. It might even be a cool role-playing scenario where a clearly inferior party declares themselves superior because they did what the PCs “couldn’t” (read: didn’t) do.
If you think it would be fun to have their past actions catch up with them, do it. I think the important thing is to keep the story “moving forward” rather than pulling the characters backwards to old events. So you should imagine taking those old unused encounters, spicing them up as a consequence of the characters failing to deal with them before (ie the old hobgoblins from level 4 have made a pact with a devil in exchange for a power boost to take vengeance on the PCs who failed to wipe out the whole group), and then placing those encounters in front of the players and making them relevant to the current plot rather then making the players pause what they’re interested in to deal with something they already mostly dealt with.