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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6236830" data-attributes="member: 22779">But, Ahn, as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.  The three people you've met (or however many it is) who share your preferences doesn't really say anything at all.  Believe me when I say that there are people who do not view D&D as a world building engine.  We really do exist.  Trying to blow it off by saying that you've never met anyone only really tells us how limited your experience is.So, treating the NPC as a "living breathing person" is completely pointless to me.  I have no interest in it.  The NPC is a plot device, same as every other NPC or element in the game.  "World building" is what you do when you want to write a novel that's probably about a thousand pages longer than it needs to be.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  See, I've done almost exactly what you're talking about.  Some years ago, I ran the Scarred Lands Mithril campaign setting.  In Mithril, a large city, there is a famous sage.  In the text of the setting, it says that the Sage is very busy and it typically takes months to get an appointment to see him.  The players discovered a threat to the city and decided that the sage was the best place to discover how to deal with the threat.  At least it was an excellent place to start.  So, they tried to see the sage, only to be turned away.The group then spent about two hours of table time trying and failing to see the sage and getting more and more frustrated with every attempt, to the point where they were finally just going to kick in the front door before the session ended and cooler heads prevailed.Since then, I realised that this entire fiasco, where no one had any fun, was entirely my fault.  I was more interested in protecting the setting than in the group.  The reason I don't do what you do Ahn, isn't because I think it's a bad idea, it's because I used to do it all the time and have come to realise that it's a completely bad idea FOR ME.  It works for you and that's groovy, but, for me and the people I play with, it's about as much fun as watching paint dry.  We came very close to ejecting the DM the last time he did it in our Dark Sun campaign where it became painfully obvious that he didn't really have any idea of what we should do next and we were left flailing around aimlessly.We put the game on hiatus, gave the DM some time to recharge while others DM'ed some shorter games and now we're back on task and having lots of fun.But, to me, when DM's start treating NPC's and the setting as more important than the players and the PC's, that's a recipe for failed campaigns.</blockquote>

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