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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1809706" data-attributes="member: 16936">No, I left that one out very deliberately.  You should NEVER run a plot that you don't like just because your players love it.  That would just be unnecessarily masochistic.  It's tough enough to GM a game without making it a game that you don't enjoy at all.  But running something you only "kinda like" as opposed to running something you love is fairly easy to accept, if the players genuinely love it.Because running something that the players enjoy and NOT adhering rigidly to something they don't is hardly pandering to them.  It's just acknowledging that the game has to be fun on both sides of the table.Personally, as a GM it drives me absolutely crazy when something I'm running is clearly not entertaining or interesting to my players.  Hell, most of my fun comes from getting them involved in the game and seeing them have a good time.  And yes, I've had plot threads of all varieties (major, minor, trivial, world-shattering) fizzle out because their PCs weren't interested in following them up, and sometimes that has made me a very sad panda.  But I certainly don't think our game is being held for ransom when the players don't want to follow along, any more than they should think our game is being held for ransom if I file off the serial numbers and repaint that plot hook and present it to them again a few more times.  If there's something I want to run that they're just not buying, I often try to tweak it a few ways to see if they'll change their minds, but if that fails I'm willing to drop it.  It's not a serious imposition on me, because I can think of lots of different things that would be pretty fun for me to use in a game and I don't need to try to ram the wrong plot down their throats and kill the whole campaign.  I'll just cannibalize the prep work I did for whatever they didn't want to do and use it somewhere else, and then I'll put that poor abandoned plotline back in my notebook for use in another game later on.That's not pandering, that's collaborating.  I am in a conspiracy with my friends to play these games and have fun doing it, and I like it that way.  It's understood that if a significant number of the players aren't having fun, they'll end the game on their own, one way or another; likewise, it's known that if the GM isn't having fun, the game will also end (and that the "significant number" of unhappy GMs it takes to end the game is "one," so making sure the GM is happy is vitally important!).  It's also understood that ending a game because it stopped being fun really sucks, if the alternative was finding a way to make it fun again.I actually don't think our viewpoints are all that far apart.  You might have more of a "but this is the dream game I want to run, the only thing I really want to run, so they should just let me run it" perspective as opposed to my "hell, I'll run anything that I think I can do well and that doesn't annoy me" attitude, perhaps.  But I know that even when it comes to my dream games, I don't necessarily agree with you that players are in any way obligated to play anything that the GM puts effort into just because the GM put effort into it; if they don't like the game being offered up for their fun, they should vote against it...with their feet, if necessary.And in my experience, they generally don't play games if they don't like them; in other groups, I've seen everything from blunt statements that they just don't want to play this game to passive-aggressive tricks like "schedule conflicts" or deliberate total party kills.  I'd like to avoid seeing that in my current group if at all possible:  I prefer it when everyone can talk about what they like and dislike right up front, so an attempt can be made to make the game fun for everyone again.--and i'd give pretty good odds that you would agree with that last sentiment at the very least</blockquote>

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