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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6234682" data-attributes="member: 5143">Yeah, I'd lose all my players in a second if I did that.  They are very rules oriented and any inkling that I wasn't following the rules precisely would be enough to have them dump me as a DM.  It's also not very satisfying to me.  I like the idea that the game is "Set an appropriate challenge, see if the PCs can beat it by following the rules.  Hopefully interesting things will happen."  3.5e just did a very poor job of allowing me to set appropriate challenges so the whole thing fell apart.  I just need a ruleset that when I adhere to it, it ends up creating the feeling I'm looking for.I'm bad at improv.  I've tried so many times and it almost always ends up with a trite contrived plot with nothing surprising in it.  I'm lazy and don't like to do work so I hate planning in advance.  Yet, my favorite stories are ones that have grand story arcs with lots of twists and turns along the way:  Babylon 5, Fringe, etc.  I really like stories that drop clues really early about stuff happening way later.To create those stories requires a lot of planning.  So, I let other people do the planning for me.  That's why I almost exclusively run prewritten adventures that I purchase from other people with a preference towards multi-part adventure paths.  That way I can do almost no work to prepare and still have a well planned out story.Though it also causes my problems because I look forward to seeing stuff happen.  I'll read a page long description about this demon and his motivations and all the interesting things he's planning to do and the cool combination of powers he has that will cause the entire party to be paralyzed and unable to fight back.....only to have none of his motivation or powers ever show up in game or be found out by the players.I'm lazy.  If I work on something, it WILL show up no matter what I have to do to make it show up so as not to make the effort I spent writing it worthless.  Which is precisely why I don't generally write anything myself.  I've seen DMs come up with their pet plot of that just had to happen regardless of what the players want.At the very least, if I'm running a prewritten adventure and someone says "I don't want to do this, I want to do something else instead" I can say "I bought this adventure and we all agreed to play it.  If you don't want to play it, I'm sorry but we'll find someone else to play with us instead."If I had written it myself, I'd have no excuse and have to just toss it.</blockquote>

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