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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storm Raven" data-source="post: 3461865" data-attributes="member: 307">I totally disagree. Creating a preconcived "roleplaying encounter" and trying to make it work in the way you, as the DM, want it to, is generally obnoxious. The PC came up with a completely valid way of dealing with the encounter. Roll with it. Which brings me to me points:46: Be flexible. The PCs will, almost certainly, approach many situations differently than you think they will. Don't try to force them back to what you "wanted" the situation to be. Roll with their choices. It helps if, when designing a scenario, you consider what might happen if the PCs fail, avoid, evade, or confound the situation. It helps to consider NPC goals, rather than planning NPc strategies. Why did the knight challenge the characters to a nonlethal duel. Does using magic offend his sensibilities? Will he bear a grudge against the party now?47: Don't bite off more than you can chew. You often don't need to do as much as you are doing, at least at first. You probably don't need to come up with an entire continent worth of setting. You may not even need to detail an entire nation. Look at the Temple of Elemental Evil - the needed setting consisted of two villages, a vaguely defined city and a couple of almost completely undefined nations. Yet it provided sufficient material to carry the characters from 1st through 8th or 9th level.48: Don't redesign stuff "just because": Lots of DMs get the rules writing jones. They decide to add facing, create "realistic" damage systems, rewrite the magic system, and so on. These sorts of things are time-consuming, usually frustrating, and steal time away from creating interesting adventure material for the PCs. Unless you really need to make a major rule change, it is probably not worth it.49: D&D (and d20) may not be the right system to use: If you must rewrite sections of the rules, you may be better off using a different system. If you want to have a setting where magic is low-powered, uses a point system, and prerequisites, you may be better off using GURPS than using d20, because GURPS gives you those things without you having to spend time on rule writing.50: Resist the temptation to plan lots of stuff out: Many novice (and not novice) DMs make the mistake of envisioning an entire campaign arc at the outset, and trying to move things so that the arc plays out. And then they try to plan out everything for the arc on Day 1, prepping setting material that won't affect play for the next six months. Given that six months from now all of your carefully laid plans will probably be in ruins, this is probably wasted effort.51: Never expect PCs to resolve a situation by means other than killing things: Many DMs think they can have someone fight the PCs, have the Pcs surrender or be captured (or run away) and get lots of role playing goodness as a result. This is amost always a recipe for failure. PCs hate to be captured. They hate to surrender. They hate to run away. They will frequently obstinately refuse to do these things in the face of overwhelming odds, resulting in TPKs and bad feelings. 52: Don't make the campaign hinge on a preset outcome of a situation in which players can influence that outcome: Don't make moving forward in the campaign dependent upon the PCs making friends with the guy they mistakenly thought was their adversary and who they have been opposing for the last ten sessions. Give yourself a trap door in case they kill the guy. Always have a trap door to let ou recover from PCs deaths, NPC deaths, failures to overcome obstacles, failures to pick up on clues, and so on.</blockquote>

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