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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 7138670" data-attributes="member: 22779">Was reading and posting in this thread:<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?554850-Warlock-in-party-with-Quasit-breaking-story" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?554850-Warlock-in-party-with-Quasit-breaking-story</a> and I had a bit of a thought that I figured I'd share.  Take this with a grain of salt and a HUGE dose of "This is what works for me, take it or leave it, it's up to you."Ok, disclaimers out of the way.  Something that I noticed in the advice in that thread is a number of DM's who were suggesting that a possible solution to having a player do stuff that you don't really like is to change the parameters of the game so that the player can't do that anymore.  And, at first blush it's not bad advice.  The player is doing something that is making the game less fun for you; making him or her stop is going to make the game more fun again.  Fair enough.The thing is, IMO, that's very bad advice and something you should almost never do.  The end result will only be frustrated players and bad sessions.Personal anecdote time.  I recently ran a module set in Primeval Thule - Night of the Yellow Moon.  In the adventure, the PC's are hired to retrieve the son of a noble from a cult that is wandering around the countryside.  The PC's quickly learn that the cultists are very bad and they're forcibly recruiting members while slaughtering anyone who doesn't convert.  They chase down the cultists to a small village where the cultists are setting up their schtick - come in all peacefully, give folks drugged wine and murder everyone that doesn't convert.  Now, the PC's march up to the chieftain's hut and demand entrance.  And they aren't subtle about it.  The guards tell them that unless they have business with teh chieftain they can go pound salt.  The PC's insist that they want to talk to the cult leader (who is in conference with the chieftain).  They intimidate their way past the guards and burst in.  They proceed to ignore the chieftain and try directly talking to the cult leader.  Chieftain gets very pissed off, calls in the guards and kicks them out.  The cult vastly outnumber the PC's, meaning direct confrontation without allies is out.  The PC's learn that the person they are trying to rescue has moved on with a part of the cult so, they leave the village to its grisly fate.The entire scenario was a complete flop.  No one had any fun.  I was trying to play the barbarians true to how I felt they would react and the players approach was pretty much the worst thing they could have done shy of outright violence.  But, and here's the thing.  I could have salvaged things and turned it around.  I didn't have to call in the guards.  While calling them in was perfectly plausible, it's not like it was mandated for any reason.  I could have rolled with what the players were trying to do - confront the cult leader and instead of my planned encounter where the PC's would be presenting their case to the chieftain and the cult leader would be trying to win her over - a sort of extended opposed skill check - I could have scrapped what I wanted, gone with the flow and everyone would have had a better time.Reading over the Quasit thread, really hit that point home to me.  There's no point in road blocking the players.  It just causes everyone to be frustrated and well, that's no fun.  Not that the players have to automatically succeed.  That's no fun either.  But, adapting and changing the challenge would have been a MUCH better solution.  Step back, observe what the players are latching onto and roll with that.  Instead of road blocking, just pave a new road.Anyway, just something that's been on my brain for a couple of weeks.  <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" /></blockquote>

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