>>With events, I would love it if GMs would run open ended events where we can actually determine the end of the event.
This actually happens a lot more than players know. I can't speak for every GM, but I know that I do this for every event that I possibly can. It's just not something that's really appropriate to advertize IG since that sort of pulls everyone out of the moment, and because of that, it's not like you guys can know "Well, nobody said X to GMNPC Y, so GMNPC Y didn't actually kill the whole room of people and instead decided to be sneaky about things since nobody got GMNPC Y mad, and that changed the whole way things played out." or "Player W did Z when GMNPC Y was there, and so then GMNPC Y decided to R instead of O and now that means GMNPC K won't even show up." Heck, on a purely personal note, I have a GMNPC that even acts pretty differently when in one Province than another, simply because of stuff that went down in that one Province when they went there.
Like Solomon said, though, full on 'anything can happen' level of open ended is really hard/not feasible to do in certain types of circumstances. If certain beats have to happen, or a certain end has to happen, what instead occurs (in stuff I run, again, not imposing on my peers here, though I've absolutely seen the same out of other GMs!) are reactions to player events spin the flavor of how we get to those beats.
Every now and then something a player does is impossible for me and/or the group of GMs I'm working with to respond to in the way we'd most prefer to, too. I'll totally admit that. Sometimes that's us not being able to respond as a NPC/GMNPC that originally had nothing at all to do with the event, but a player decided in the spur of the moment to go try to involve them (creativity is awesome!), and we either don't have the number of GMs around to maintain the parts we're already running AND go attend to something that's happening in a completely different location, or simply that the GM/GMs that oversee whatever NPC/Area/etc that the player is trying to gain the attention of just isn't around and the response to the player is time sensitive. That stinks for us as much as it does for you guys, it really does, but sometimes we simply can't address every possible player reaction/action, especially right in the moment. It is something we should strive for and DO strive for, but it's a bar that is unlikely to ever be perfectly reached for a whole lot of reasons that all boil down to GMs being human and the nature of running live events.
The other end of 'welp, we can't exactly have ANY ending be possible' are end of the world situations, like with this year's HE lead in. There were many different ways things could play out, and player actions absolutely altered how things went down (see also the differences in Plat and Prime's storylines there), but ultimately, Dergati had to at least partially lose, or we'd need to reset the servers after a bit since the entire planet would have become inhospitable to any life Dergati didn't decide to 'make better' enough to survive. Using the sun receptacles became sort of set in stone after awhile, due to back end needs, but players completely could have ignored filling them, and things would in fact have gone a fairly different way. The Spirit Parents and their interactions, loyalties, and betrayals also made a large impact on how things went down, not the least of which was the actual personality of Xito!
Your actions do matter! Even your inactions matter. They just don't always have effects that are completely easy to see, because events are living, breathing things. I'm open to suggestions on how to better communicate this sort of thing, though! My main concerns here are 1) feasibility/amount of GM time involved (otherwise we have way less time to make and run events!) and 2) not spoiling plot or killing the in-the-moment flow or mystery of events.
PS - On the badguy front: Watch your socks in the new year. I have plans.
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