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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 6167658" data-attributes="member: 1210">I stay away from story like the plague. While there are always a million things going on in the milieu, I try very hard to never choose where they are going, especially once the pcs decide to tug at a given thread. That guy that you wanted to be the BBEG of the campaign- what do you do when the pcs kill him at 3rd level? My answer is not to have a preconceived, specific BBEG at all. Yes, there are a lot of BBEGs out there, but I let the pcs and the natural evolution of the setting handle who becomes their nemesis, if any.I very much follow a "let the dice fall where they may" philosophy. The whole "prep vs. play time" issue is one of the big flaws I discovered in high level 3e- I loved spending hours making burly monsters with templates, classes, etc. But after spending six hours on one gnarly epic bad guy, he'd die without ever acting.But that's okay- I always let legit round-1 kills go through. BBEG failed his save against death spell? Them's the breaks. It's only fair; after all, I don't give pcs freebies just because it's round one.[EDIT: One of my players once mentioned, after killing a bad ass fiend with a destruction spell before it got to act, that my "let the dice fall where they may and accept the one-round-kill" approach was a big draw to him, and a number of other players agreed. But as we all know, there are all kinds of playstyles, none of which are inherently right or wrong. I'm just lucky that I'm good enough at running my preferred playstyle that a lot of players seem to enjoy trying it for a while- which usually turns to years or decades.]I put the integrity and consistency of my setting first. Fun is an emergent quality in my game; I rarely actively strive to make anything "fun". I shoot for good description, interesting npcs and places, convoluted and interconnected plot threads and a good social environment. Fun just happens in our group.As for drinking and table chatter, we're a pretty hard-partying group, with most of us usually drinking moderately to heavily throughout the evening and many of us smoking pot as well. Generally, we don't do anything harder when gaming (as it is a deterrent to good play, while the drink & smoke might occasionally lead to one player's drunken stupidity but rarely causes the entire session to fall apart).</blockquote>

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