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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6420669" data-attributes="member: 42582">Could the PCs have stopped the riots by intervening in the situation to head off the unrest (eg get the laws changed; persuade the people of Baldur's Gate to adopt non-violent resistance tehcniques; etc)? If they could have, and the player knew of that possibility, and ignored it, then I'm ready to criticise the player for not fully engaging the adventure.From my (outsider's) point of view, having only your posts to go on, it sounds like the PCs couldn't have stopped the riots. And it sounds like your player noticed this, and also noticed that roleplaying the personal motivations of his PC and giving more flavour to his PC's personality would have had no practical effect on the unfolding of the adventure. For instance, whether he spent his spare time helping old ladies across the road, or spent it drowning puppies, the riots would have come on just the same.I'm inclined to agree.The event was over 20 years ago - so I can't remember if the kobold spoke Common, or we had a dwarf or gnome who spoke kobold (probably the latter - my brother was a player, and at least back then he had a thing for gnome illusionists).It seems certain that this kobold was dumber than the rest, given that this one was dumb whereas the rest had come up with some moderately clever plan to infitrate the city. But why was this one dumber than the rest? Because the GM decided that it would be, so that we couldn't interrogate it. That is, the GM decided to roadblock us.None of this is roadblocking except for the fireball, and in that case the relevant fictional consideration  - namely, that the PC is underwater - had already been established.Contrast this example, which I don't think I'm making up (as in, I have some vague memory of having lived through this in some episode of play decades ago): the PCs have to deal with a wooden building, the player of the 5th level MU decides to fireball it, and the GM, rather than rolling on the item saving throw tabe, retroactively decides that the timber on the building is too damp to catch fire. That is a roadblock. (In G1, Gygax anticpates this possibility and builds the dampness of the timber into the initial description of the situation.)Let's put to one side the fact that not rolling for morale, or for reaction, is just burning the player who chose to play a high-CHA PC. Let's focus on "fun" and "better story". I think the GM I am talking about failed on both counts. His game was so un-fun that his players walked en masse and started a new game with a new GM (me) and a new system (Rolemaster). His story was so much worse than what we wanted - namely, a story in which interrogation of the prisoner enabled some sort of intelligence to be gained, and hence some sort of pro-activity on our part - that we dropped it rather than find out what he had in mind.The idea that the GM has sole authority over what makes for a better story is not something that I accpeted than, or accept now.I'm not quite sure how making a PC be king is framing a scene. But anyway, I've never found that framing situations the players are interested in to be a bad idea. Nor allowing them to realise goals like becoming important social and political actors. (Though, within D&D, PC-build mechanics and genre tropes interact - eg a ruler is typically a name/paragon level character, not a 1st level one.)Conan was a king and yet REH found plenty of interesting things for him to do. One of the PCs in my 4e game is a Marshall of Letherna, so hence one of the most important agents of the Raven Queen, and a peer of any mortal ruler, but he has plenty of interesting things to do too!There are at least two ways of "seeing what happens next in the story". One is to have the GM dictate it to you. Another is to participate in creating it. I, and my players, prefer the latter.Likewise, ther are at least two ways of "figuring out the answers to the problems the GM throws at the PCs". One way is to try and guess the answer the GM has in mind. The other is to inhabit one's PC, imagine what is feasible within the shared fiction, and come up with ideas, with an expectation that the GM will adjudicate them fairly in accordance with the rules of the game. I, and my players, prefer the latter.My players don't want to simply "use their cool abilities in combat". They want to choose who their enemies are, and who they try and make friends with. They want to form meaningful goals for their PCs - goals that relate to the campaign world, like "undo the sundering of the elves" or "increase the scope of the Raven Queen's divine power" or "kill Orcus and thereby defeat the powers of undeath". And then pursue those goals through play. Fighting will be part of it, but not just for its own sake. The fighting is located within a broader context of goals and values and friends and enemies, that are reflective of, and change with, the players' choices for their PCs.You keep talking about "change" but you haven't identified any change. If the GM has not described whether or not the NPC is bearded, or whether or not he wears boots rather than sandals or clogs, or whether or not the alley contains boxes or lumber of hay bales, then when a player asks about those things, for the GM to follow the players' lead is not to change anything. It is to establish some ingame fact that hitherto had been unsettled.The GM I am talking about didn't say this. Even if he did, I'm not sure that would have saved him. If he can retroactively decide that a kobold is too stupid to yield useful information under interrogation, why can't he retroactively decide that some of the kobold guards got drunk and fell asleep at their posts?Where does the story get these "needs" that oblige the GM not to deviate from the script? Whose needs are they? If the players want to infiltrate the kobold camp, haven't those needs changed? The GM broke script to roadblock the players, and that's good GMing - but breaking script to give the players the fun game that they want is bad GMing?That sounds topsy-turvy to me.</blockquote>

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