You can bend the rules. You can choose your own path. I’ve done it. it doesn’t work with all games, but it does work with some. Skyrim is the first to come to mind, but the Elder Scrolls games and Fallout games were meant to be twisted into your own way.
In Fallout 3 I think it was, I was faced with rescuing some kids from a camp of slave traders. The questline said infiltrate by winning their trust and joining them, and gave a few choices as to how to do this. Now…. My characters are usually goody-two-shoes and that one was no exception. ‘Right’ and ‘good’ above all else, and all the choices I was given were against that. In order to infiltrate I had to, in essence, become one of them. Well f-that… I got mad. I killed all the slave traders and set everyone free. Didn’t do the quest the ‘right’ way, but by golly I wasn’t gonna become one of them just to complete a quest. I can’t remember if it completed that way or not. Probably not, but I don’t care. I wasn’t gonna break my own rule. 😀
You can play however you want, you just have to be creative sometimes. 😀 But hey, you like pen and paper, I like looking at beautiful 3d worlds (and sexy guys). 😀 It’s all good.