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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2758507" data-attributes="member: 812">Bastoche, I suspect that you being a player rather than a DM leads to your focus on providing the players with what THEY need, which of course IS the goal of any DM, but my focus is on those times when as a DM I fail to predict what my players need. It would make sense to me that you aren't quite grasping how important it is for a DM to be able to handle cases in which they fail to predict their players, given that you are not an experienced DM.Because otherwise, your description of reality utterly contradicts my experience. I do not live in a world where I know ahead of time what is or isn't going to happen. You keep insisting that you live in a world where EVERYTHING that is prepared turns out to be important. I don't know that world, I don't live in that world, and so I guess that's why I keep asking the same question over and over again, and you keep not answering it.Hey, if you can't answer the question, just say so. Don't pretend you can predict human behaviour. Are you seriously suggesting that you can dictate to your players the sorts of questions they can and cannot ask?The question was, WHAT IF this happens? How does the DM respond? You don't get to just pretend that your control over reality is so complete that you can prevent somebody from speaking. It's stuff like this that I just can't imagine any experienced DM not understanding.TRY running a mystery your way sometimes. The players will start asking around: "What were YOU doing at the time of the killing? Where's the body? What was the weapon used? When did it happen? Who saw what happened? Where?" You're telling me that you can seriously just make that crap up on the spot, have it be consistent and turn out to be a satisfying story? That you have in fact actually DONE this? I frankly don't believe you have.There are SOME facts that you need to have in your head to get the adventure started. WHO was killed. WHERE the body was found. In what condition the body was found. Who found it. You need to be able to answer the question, "Where were you when the lights went out?" of any and all potential suspects (keeping in mind that the players will almost certainly surprise you with who they consider a suspect). I find making that up on the fly outrageously difficult, especially given that my end goal is to deliver a fun, thrilling game to my players, and so I try to prepare my answers to those things ahead of time.Now of course you might change your mind half-way through the session, come up with an idea that seems brilliant, and alter the story based on PC input, or just to make their line of investigation more fruitful and avoid boring them with an unproductive game session. Your job is to make things fun, not necessarily to enforce any pre-determined set of conditions or actions.Please. I DON'T write out the plot of my campaign ahead of time. Period. Full stop. Never ever. Not at all. In no way, fashion or means do I do anything remotely resembling this, and I have said so many many many many times.I think about my NPCs, what they want, and what they're likely to do, and I make notes on their actions while the PCs are doing THEIR thing, so that should the PCs encounter those NPCs, I don't have to invent on the spot what they've been doing for the past year or whatever. And because often as I'm considering what the NPCs are up to, I come up with ideas for things to happen to the PCs. These are NOT "plot lines" being "pre-written". I have NO IDEA what the plot line of my campaign will look like. All I do is come up with ideas for what my NPCs are doing, what sorts of natural (or unnatural) phenomena would be fun to suddenly inflict on my PCs, and then see what happens as a result.You are always referring to PCs as clearly embarked on some story or another. It seems like in your world, the PCs always know what they're doing, why and what they need to do in order to accomplish their goal. This has never been the exclusive case in any campaign I've ever run. SOMETIMES this is the case. Sometimes indeed they come into town, looking to solve the murder, and their actions are focused and directed and more or less easy to predict. Sometimes, however, not so much. After they've solved the murder and handed the suspect over to the authorities, it may not be so crystal clear what's up next. I may THINK I know what they're going to want to do (and I might have very good evidence to suggest that I know -- like my players' own words on the matter), but I'm not always right about that, and so sometimes I develop material that I end up not using.Sometimes my players just feel like asking around to see what's doing. Crazy fun adventures have resulted from nothing more than that.LostSoul's description of Open games well describes the kinds of games I'm trying to describe, and the kinds of games I run. It seems weird that we're in agreement on THAT, but so opposed in our own descriptions. Perhaps we haven't been expressing our ideas super-well.</blockquote>

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