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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 5557964" data-attributes="member: 29398">Hmmm...not quite sure how to approach this.What I'm reading in this thread sounds like lots of DMs who either won't or can't hit the curveball.  Well, sorry to say curveballs are part of the game too; time for some batting practice.As DM, I run a module-based campaign - whether the modules are my own or pre-canned is irrelevant - but at the same time I'm always ready to respond if for whatever reason the players decide to blow the module up somehow; be it by changing sides (they've never done that...yet), getting TPKed, left-turning away from the adventure, deciding it's more fun to kill each other instead, or whatever.  If it makes sense in character and in situation* I'm cool with it.  I'm (almost) never so married to a given module or story arc that I can't let it go - if nothing else, I can store it away and run it out again sometime down the road.* - an example of a situation where left-turning does not work might be an adventure where the party is stuck on a mini-plane somewhere and the only way to get off said mini-plane is to finish the adventure.As player, there's been times where I've led the charge to bail out on an adventure - mostly because it's either boring to me as a player or because my character would simply rather be doing something else.  An example: in the 3e campaign I played my first character was all about killing Giants - they'd destroyed his home and taken his land and dammit, he wanted it back!  About 6 adventures in, the DM is trying to hook us into some adventure or other and I just said "Screw it, I've had enough of this faffing around.  The Giants are that way, so that's where I'm going.  Who's with me?".  The party followed, and the next adventure (an on-the-fly change by the DM) consisted of making a small dent in a very abundant Giant population...after which the other players had had their fill of Giants and left-turned us again into something else (at which point my character retired to keep going vs. the Giants; I had a second PC in the party and thus stayed in the game).There's also occasions where either the players or DM or both realize partway through an adventure that for whatever reason it just isn't working out to be any good - it's too easy, it's too tough, it's dull and boring, it makes no sense, whatever - and in these cases a left turn is a very welcome thing!  I've done this as DM once or twice where the players didn't even realize it - started them on one adventure, realized it was garbage, and segued into a different one on the fly.  But there's also been one or two occasions where I and the players have looked at each other, thrown up our hands, and said "Yeah, this module's useless; but we've started it now so let's just get it over with."Perhaps fortunately, the one thing I've never (yet) had to worry about was players who ignored *all* hooks in favour of doing nothing.  They'll pretty much always either take the hooks presented or dream up their own; either way, there's an adventure out there for 'em and so they go and find it.Lan-"now if I could only hit the fastball"-efan</blockquote>

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