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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7732471" data-attributes="member: 42582">This doesn't really answer the question, though. How does that two books worth of detail assist the DM, if the DM is just going to ignore it and follow the players' leads?I will answer this question for my part.It depends on the system I'm running. In Burning Wheel or Cortex+, the answer is no. The rules of those games are (among other things) devoted to ensuring that the GM always goes where the action is.4e is more obscure in this department, but - if one takes seriously the idea about player-authored quests etc, plus the stuff about "skipping to the fun" (which I take to be a slightly less confident way of saying "go where the action is") - then it seems to point the same way. And that's certainly how I run it.In Classic Traveller, random encounters are a key part of the system, which relies heavily on random content generation to generate the feel of the universe through which the PCs travel. My own approach is to try and link those random encounters into the bigger picture as much as possible, so that the game doesn't get diverted from going where the action is.To illustrate: in my most recent session, there were three random encounters: with some people onworld; with an animal onworld; and with a starship while leaving the world. The "people" encounter was with bandits; I ran that encounter as a group of locals trying to stop the PCs getting back on board their ship's boat to return to orbit. On a low-tech, high law-level world which the PCs might want to come back to, this therefore forced them to make choices about how they confronted the bandits and what sort of reputation they wanted to leave behind them: they chose to use their technological advantage to utterly crush the bandits, but weren't able to stop one escaping and so are now known, onworld, to have blown up bandits with unlawful high tech weaponry.The animal roll on the encounter table turned up a small, solitary insectivore - I narrated it as being discovered in the cargo hold after they lifted off (having wandered in unnoticed at some point either when the PCs were unloading or redocking their air/raft), and the PCs were able to take a blood sample to try and identify its biological connection to the people on the planet, who were knonw to have alien (ie non-human) elements in their DNA. So the animal encounter figured into one part of the "big picture".The starship encounter was with a pirate cruiser. I decided that it's "piratical" nature consisted in its being connected to the secret bioweapons conspiracy the PCs are investigating. This was the end of the session, but the next session will probably begin with the PCs either trying to take the cruiser, or alternatively using its absence from the world where the bioweapons research is taking place as their cue to jump to that world with a reduced chance of being blown up by an enemy cruiser!I don't think what I've described is the only way, or even the canonical way, to run Classic Traveller, but it's how I've been doing it.</blockquote>

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