Majoru Oakheart
Adventurer
In most cases I don't care too much either. But there are certain times that the story created by one course of action is just more satisfying than another.
I would hate to read a book, for instance, where the villain is described as this super powerful archmage who has threatened the world for hundreds of years only to have the protagonist teleport into his castle, poison his tea and have him die later that afternoon.
And when you encourage CaW type play on a regular basis, that's how every enemy dies. True CaW play in LOTR would have involved them getting on a flying eagle at the beginning, flying to Mordor, dumping the ring and avoiding most of their epic journey. You can come up with all sorts of reasons why they DIDN'T do that, but in the end, it amounts to "The author thought the story wouldn't be very interesting that way, so he wrote story elements into the book to give them reasons to do it the hard way."
But sometimes you just run out of story elements or they become so convoluted that you are spending all of your time preventing the PCs from using CaW tactics. Take, for example the teleporting into the castle and poisoning the archmage story. Say you find it much more satisfying to have the PCs trek across the land, building up allies to fight against the archmage and having adventures along the way culminating in a big LOTR style battle.
In order to stop this you now have to say "You can't teleport in because the archmage has a spell to stop teleportation. You can't fly in because he's got a spell that protects against flying. Also, his tea is tested by poison testers. In case you try doing something like contact poison on his robes, his servants wear his clothes for an hour before he is allowed to put them on."...and so on and so forth.
Of course, the easier method is to use CaS rules to build a system where CaW is discouraged unless the DM wants it to happen.
I'm not that good at coming up with stuff on the fly. I had to cancel my game the last couple of weeks because I didn't have enough stuff planned in advance and I don't want to wing it.
Plus, every attempt I've made of "setting up the mileau and seeing them do what they want" has ended with them sitting in the bar getting drunk with no motivation to want to go on adventure. Or it ends in petty squabbles about whether there is a bank in town and whether they should be able to rob it while completely ignoring the invading army.
I once ran a Rifts game where I had the PCs all have dreams about a dimensional traveling race that devoured worlds showing up the night before another moon appeared in the sky. Then I had mystics find them and claim they also had dreams about the PCs and how they were prophesied to defeat this threat. The PCs found the first chance they had to leave the planet/dimension. Then they bought a tavern and wanted to run gladiatorial matches and bet on the results.
I pointed out to them that the enemies they were fighting were dimensionally traveling and it was only a matter of time until their new home was destroyed. They said they weren't worried, there was infinite dimensions, what were the chances they picked the same dimension they went into. And even if they did, that's fine, they'd leave and start again.
The prospect of running continually battles between random Gladiators as an entire game seemed not very fun to me. And I had spent a lot of time writing up the motivations behind the villains, stats of their technology, some NPCs who were going to help the PCs.....all that work simply vanishing because of the players purposefully avoiding what I had planned is annoying as heck.
I like epic stories. I hate running stories about stupid, petty, and mundane things. If I have to spend more than 2 minutes roleplaying about gardens and planting techniques my mind will explode. If I have to run an entire campaign about gardening because the PCs have decided that to defeat the evil archmage they simply need to reduce the commoners reliance on his food shipments and then his political power will wane....well, I'd rather shoot myself.
