My favorite thing about playing a tabletop RPG is the open-endedness of everything. I’ve explained it to some friends this way:

Even in the most massive, open, sandbox-style videogame, your imagination, and your options, are still extremely limited. You can’t imagine what a city looks like–the game designers have already done that for you, and you see what they designed. Their 3D models, their bitmap landscapes, etc. You also can’t truly do “whatever you want.” Quests typically have one solution, and allow only one (or very few) means for achieving that solution. Even the best developed NPC will still have a finite number of lines to say to you, and you can only interact with that NPC in a set number of ways.

By contrast, a tabletop RPG allows the players to try anything they can imagine. Very few rules apply–the laws of physics (and those may not even exist, depending on the game), and any very sparse limitations the DM may impose. For the most part, you can do and say what you want, when you want, and to whomever you want. Whether you succeed or fail is a different question; but if you want to try something, the option is there. If your quest is to break into a fortress and free captives, but you think you’d rather try knocking on the front gate and negotiating with the enemy captain, you can go right ahead.

This open-endedness allows for really great, creative solutions to any number of problems. When I talk about creative solutions, I don’t necessarily mean anything extremely complex or epic in scope. Tiny, thoughtful, clever solutions are everywhere.

Take, for example, our last session of DnZ. I had designed an encounter in a bedroom, where the party was to fight 3 large, fierce rottweilers. The party triggered the “summon.” A little boy blew on a whistle, and the party suddenly heard the dogs howling and running upstairs. I was looking forward to a good little skirmish with these monsters I had designed. However, our marine sniper, Chet Johnson, said: “I close the door.”

Simple. Plan foiled.

Without rolling a single die, and without access to any special character abilities or game mechanics, Chet Johnson had created an impassible barrier that these hounds could not overcome. That wasn’t all, either. I thought maybe the team would try to shoot the dogs through the door or somehow try to kill them with minimal risk of harm to themselves. Instead, Max Power took the little boy’s dog whistle, lowered a rope out of the bedroom window, and climbed down. Once outside, he blew the whistle, waited for the dogs to come running outside, and then climbed back up the rope to the bedroom window. I was so impressed and pleased with that very clever solution to my challenge that I informed the players the dogs would remain at the bottom of the wall barking up at the window for the rest of the night.

We’ve had great creative bits in my Pathfinder campaign as well. One member of our party is a Paladin, who plays wonderfully. He is always 100% true to his character, who is an ultra-lawful servant of good. He will never fight unless forced to, and will always try to convince an enemy to give up his evil ways, no matter what evil deeds that enemy has done.

In one past session, we encountered a host of particularly evil goblins. Naturally, our Paladin stepped forward and shouted “What is the meaning of this?! Give up your evil ways this moment and you will be allowed to go free without a fight!” One problem: the Paladin doesn’t speak Goblin. My creative solution? My character happened to speak Goblin. I stepped forward and offered to translate. However, my translations were not quite accurate… Instead of “give up your evil ways and you will be allowed to go,” I told the goblins in rough translation that “my Paladin friends says he will skewer every one of you with his longsword like he has with 1,000 goblins before!” After a bit more conversation, the Goblins and the Paladin had had entirely different conversations with one another than they actually believed. My false translations got us out of a jam, and also had the table reeling with laughter at the same time. Another simple, clever and timely solution.

You just can’t do this stuff in videogames.

What are some of the best out-of-the-box solutions you’ve seen in your own games?