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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7531802" data-attributes="member: 4937">So you are suggesting that everything you plan for is tightly scripted?  Do you never plan encounters where you intend to leave things up to chance and player direction?  Like, "Here is an NPC here.  He has this personality, and this motivation, and is initially has a friendly attitude toward strangers, as modified by a reaction check based on player appearance..." Planned personality is not the same as planned reaction or action.  Are you saying all NPC's with personalities you predetermine what they will do?I find none of my plans ever survive contact with the players anyway, so I might as well leave up what is going to happen to the point it starts happening.  Most of my decisions to decide by fiat that something or someone is not going to necessarily be hostile have more to do with the possibility of wrecking the fun.  I'll leave it up to the PC's to initiate hostilities.  Thinking back over the campaign that has consumed most of the last eight years, virtually no NPC however elaborately imagined has ended up having the relationship to the party that I imagined that they would have when I designed them and quite often I find myself rolling reaction checks that I simply would not have thought necessary because of how I'd stack things in the parties favor.</blockquote>