Do you reequire your players to think?

[tetsujin28]

I voted yes, but no to puzzles. I hate the dang things.

 

[MonsterMash]

I encourage it, can't really force them to do it.

 

[Thanee]

I generally prefer if the players come up with ideas and such on their own and not just stupidly follow the course of the game and roll dice to see what happens, as if it was the 'game of life' or something like that.

I also don't think the game would be fun, if there was no interaction apart from the bare minimum, which basically requires thinking on both ends.

Bye
Thanee

 

[IronWolf]

I went with yes. I think it is good to have thinking in the game. The out of game thinking you mention with skill point recalculation with an Intelligence level boost isn't a big deal in my opinion. As a player I certainly have no issue recalculating things, especially when you are really trying to help me out and not penalize me.

 

[Bloodstone Press]

Yes, I like to confront my players with difficult situations that they have to think their way out of.

Personally, I think the murder mysteries, puzzles, duplicitous characters and ambiguous situations are the things that keep my players interested in the games I run. The most entertaining games we've played were often games where the players spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do.

However, I think what you are asking is a little more akin to "do you mind hassling your players with character maintenance issues while the game is going on?"

My answer to that is no, I don't mind hassling them about keeping their skill points properly adjusted when their Intelligence changes.

 

[Psion]

If I required my players to think, we'd never get anything done.

I like throwing intrigue into the game, but I find that with my current group, I can't get too deep.

As far as skill points go, that doesn't really come up that much... strength, on the other hand, tends to come up a lot, and yeah, last night the fighter must have adjusted his combat stats a dozen times.

 

[Romnipotent]

I require them to think, sure...

Whether they do, well sometimes I wonder

 

[Silver Moon]

I toss lots of things into my modules requiring a great deal of thought. If they get it on their own they get significant experience for it. When they don't I'll start giving clues while scaling down the experience points accordingly. When it becomes obvious that they just don't get something I'll have an NPC figure it out for them, with no experience along with the newfound knowledge.

 

[derbacher]

I toss lots of things into my modules requiring a great deal of thought. If they get it on their own they get significant experience for it. When they don't I'll start giving clues while scaling down the experience points accordingly. When it becomes obvious that they just don't get something I'll have an NPC figure it out for them, with no experience along with the newfound knowledge.

That's pretty much the way I do it, too. An interesting thought occured to me: of my two groups, the one that actually thinks the most is my Sunday group of kids (ages 12 - 17). They plan, try to solve problems and puzzles, and generally think their way through things. My other group of old fogies (35 - 45, like me) tend to just charge into things, say the wrong thing, tick off the wrong person, and get into all kinds of trouble that could be avoided. Makes me wonder about the stability of people my age...

 

[Ellie_the_Elf]

I voted yes, since I tend to favour very complex plots

In my last campaign, I gave each of my PCs a prophetic dream around 10th level. The dreams needed quite a lot of interpretation before they made sense, but would have pretty much told them what I had planned for the rest of the campaign if they figured them out. Some parts of the dream were exclusive to one PC, and there were elements which were in all 5 dreams. They spent a lot of time coming up with various theories, and trying to tie things that happened later in with these dreams, but even now there are a few things from them they don't understand.

Ellie