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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5086768" data-attributes="member: 3820">Not to "tell a better story," to meet the out-of-character needs of the players. It's the same reason that if my players have had a rough day at the office (even at our office, we have 'em) and want an obvious target for a dynamic conflict rather than an evening of subtle investigative legwork, I'll tweak a session to give them what they want. If the puzzle and mystery were the most important thing to my players, and they'd gladly risk a couple of hours of boredom and frustration to make sure that they get their answers the hard way, then yes, I would set things up so that the mysteries can only be solved by pre-determined fashion, and cut no slack.Yes, if that's their choice. However, it's been my experience that if players are actively disinterested in a given conflict, if you push it on them six months later, and it now will take more attention, time, resources, blood, sweat and tears to deal with, it doesn't generally become more fun to play through. If anything, it becomes more of a burden. I just don't want my players to feel like they wasted an evening of play doing drudge work, particularly in this post-college, some-have-kids, can't-game-all-the-time era. That doesn't mean "no adversity you don't specifically request" or "whatever decision you make is the correct one." It just means I'll try to give them the flavors of adversity they're most interested in dealing with. I totally agree, as far as the characters are concerned. But if the players aren't doing what they enjoy, why are they playing in the first place? If a player absolutely hates romantic subplots I'm not going to force one on him no matter how realistic it might be that a given NPC would fall in love and bring a lot of complications along. It's the same principle, just in terms of overall conflict arcs. Again, though, I can afford to play exclusively with friends with similar interests, so I rarely have to make that call. But (to pick a random example), if I said "There's an encroaching fleet of spelljammers that are going to pillage half the world if nothing's done" and then half the group said they really didn't like the concept of spelljammers, I'd try to work something out. I would rather they didn't feel like I was punishing them for not beating their faces against a spelljammer-shaped wall until they could get back to the storylines they wanted to play. Have you seen the Spirit of the Century approach? Not that I'd recommend it for your game (it's definitely keyed more toward a deliberate literary emulation than the simulation of the world's in-character rules), but it's a clever method of encouraging players to have fun coming up with character connections.Sounds pretty solid. Good luck with it!</blockquote>

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