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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[scriver]

Getruthensprechen!

[Rolan7]

Gesundheit!  (Target gets a +1 morale bonus on next skill roll)

"Answer!"
"I refuse to tell you anything." is an answer, and true, but doesn't tell the players anything of note.

It's an answer, but is it true?  Or self-contradicting?
Sounds like the sort of idle chatter my group enjoys getting sidetracked by...

[scriver]

Would you allow "Sidestep!"? But would you allow "Side step!"? "Side-step"?

[Jimmy]

Yeah, but always remember that as DM, your job is to subvert your players' carefully planned strategies. Mind controlling the mooks is only a valid strategy if they have useful information to supply, and if they don't resist their interrogation with every method possible.

Also turnaround is fair play, so don't forget to give the baddies the ability to use the same strategy against the players too.

[NullForceOmega]

Being frustrating for the sake of being frustrating is being a bad DM.  Sometimes your players' careful strategy has to be allowed to function, because while you as DM have meta-knowledge of their actions, the badguys don't, and can only act based on their awareness.

That said, those badguys aren't stupid, so they should be taking reasonable precautions based on the power-level of your setting.

Just as a general bit of advice to ALL DM/GM/Storytellers out there, the game is not DM vs players.  It is players vs world.  You are the creator, what you say goes, but once you commit, there are no takebacks.

[Draignean]

I'd also note that players are generally gradually less interested in coming up with cool and detailed plans if those plans frequently go completely tits up and get resolved by pants-flying shenanigans.

Pants-flying shenanigans are great- they're generally where the tastiest play, but players should still generally feel that planning and forethought will result in decreased risks and improved rewards. It's a sin I ran into with one of my better campaigns, where the plan generally devolved into walking straight at the enemies and then hiding under a table when things went south and the entertainment inexplicably caught fire.

[NullForceOmega]

Once upon a time, when I was nineteen and in the Army*, I ran a RIFTS campaign for a few guys in my company.  I made the mistake of trying to do something imposing and epic involving an army of thousands of undead created by a necromancer who led this army (from the rear) to destroy the brave fools who had dared to interfere with his plans.  He (and I) neglected to account for military-grade paranoia and explosives.  Mostly the explosives.  The army of near-indestructible skeletons and zombies were crushed under thousands of tons of wrecked buildings, and the necromancer took a particle beam to the eye, with a nat 20 against a -15 to hit.

Moral of the story, sometimes the players win because they were smart, and you can't just take that from them to be a dick.

*these terms are not often synonymous, but they probably should be.

[MrRoboto75]

Never, ever, give players access to high explosives.

They will use them to solve problems.  They will use them to solve all problems.

Its like giving Boatmurdered access to magma.

[Egan_BW]

"What's that? We need to rescue the hostages? Well, tossing in a few high explosives is probably a good start..."

[Rolan7]

"Arson to all taverns which house us, including motels and gas stations in NWoD" is pretty much my group's mission statement.  Regardless of switch GMs.

At first it was just screwing around with cursed dice.  Eventually it became a sort of way to let off steam, heh.
Last session was so intrigue-heavy that a gas station survived, and I was a little sad when I realized.

My allies did indulge in violent drug rampages once we reached the party, but it's just not the same

[NullForceOmega]

I have learned to respond to high explosive shenanigans with massively disproportionate response.  Once the party has bombed a couple targets the game switches to mutually assured destruction, requiring much more thought on the players' part.

I do however make sure that there are hard limits on how high the stakes go, I'm not running DBZ styled campaigns after all.

[Egan_BW]

"You guys atomized the penthouse that my top lieutenant was staying at, so I guess I'll be forced to punch the planet to death until you're all dead."

[NullForceOmega]

Well, I did have Unicron in that one campaign...

[Trekkin]

Of course, one can also avoid the need for brute-force DMing regarding explosives by simply not designing the sort of problems that killing everything deader than dead can solve.

I like giving my PCs access to some setting-appropriate variant of explosives, because their use sends me a very clear message: there was nothing in the blast radius that my players had any use for or any reason to care about except in the most soporifically violent of terms. Explosions are how players efficiently take shortcuts through rooms full of boring cardboard-cutout enemies who are only there to fight and  be fought, and that's not something I want in my games, so I treat bucketfuls of damage dice as an indication that my villains aren't interesting.

It must be said that big flashy pyrotechnic distractions and sabotage are entirely different matters, but players approach those very differently.

[IcyTea31]

You could have pulled the classic "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" where the interrogatee just won't. stop. talking. The correct code is probably somewhere amidst the code to his locker, his bank pin number, his phone number, his mom's phone number...

After all, the Command was to 'answer' didn't specify a question.