Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 5527787" data-attributes="member: 3424">To be honest, I think that allowing your players to be creative is better done at the table, while playing the game, rather than at the planning and designing stage.&nbsp; You might want to ensure that you yourself can think of at least two or three ways to deal with every situation you put the PCs into, so that you don't inadvertently fall into the trap of setting up a situation for which there is only one plausible means of resolution, but beyond that, I think that the real key is, when running your game, to focus on the reasons why the players' plans would work (or how they could be made to work) rather than reasons why they won't. If you want to encourage creativity in your players, avoid dead ends and sudden death scenarios. When they come up with plans that cannot plausibly work due to factors or circumstances that they aren't aware of, try to communicate them to your players so that they can modify their plans. And assuming your players aren't coming up with idiotic or suicidal plans, don't heap dire consequences on them without warning. In a way, it's like playing a game of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)" target="_blank">Mastermind</a> with the players. You need to set things up so that the players can find out what is and isn't going to work (preferably indirectly, through events that occur in the game world) without worrying that a single mis-step will end the game for their characters. Without feedback, or if they are constantly worried about the possibility of sudden, game-ending consequences, they are likely to ditch creativity and simply fall back on tried and tested methods.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FireLance, post: 5527787, member: 3424"] To be honest, I think that allowing your players to be creative is better done at the table, while playing the game, rather than at the planning and designing stage. You might want to ensure that you yourself can think of at least two or three ways to deal with every situation you put the PCs into, so that you don't inadvertently fall into the trap of setting up a situation for which there is only one plausible means of resolution, but beyond that, I think that the real key is, when running your game, to focus on the reasons why the players' plans would work (or how they could be made to work) rather than reasons why they won't. If you want to encourage creativity in your players, avoid dead ends and sudden death scenarios. When they come up with plans that cannot plausibly work due to factors or circumstances that they aren't aware of, try to communicate them to your players so that they can modify their plans. And assuming your players aren't coming up with idiotic or suicidal plans, don't heap dire consequences on them without warning. In a way, it's like playing a game of [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)"]Mastermind[/URL] with the players. You need to set things up so that the players can find out what is and isn't going to work (preferably indirectly, through events that occur in the game world) without worrying that a single mis-step will end the game for their characters. Without feedback, or if they are constantly worried about the possibility of sudden, game-ending consequences, they are likely to ditch creativity and simply fall back on tried and tested methods. [/QUOTE]

Verification