Perhaps you should not be so quick to presume the worst of your players.
I run games for strangers all the time: half of them are bad players.
I find it is rather the reverse. Especially in tabletop stuff. Most people care pretty deeply about a lot of things, and nerds in particular care a LOT about stuff.
I still find it 50/50.
You're....using an AI? What?
Pay no attention to that AI in the corner.
You keep doing this: You are assuming that your experience is the only correct one. Others are either wrong, or correct but only for a tiny, invisible fraction that doesn't apply outside of their little sheltered bubble.
This is not true. YOUR experience is the weird one. That's what I've tried to tell you, repeatedly. That's what multiple others have tried to tell you, repeatedly.
Yea, but it's a Glitch in the Matrix kind of thing.
I mean I'm the reasonable one saying half of the players are bad and half are good. Your side says every single player is a perfect saint and angel.
Most players want to participate. Most players want to care. They need to be shown that doing so is actually worth their time.
Well, I find half the players don't care and will never care. They are not there to even play the game: they just want to hang out, relax, waste time or spend time away from their wife. Plus all the players dragged into the game by a friend, family member or as part of a couple.
And...well, I count your "worth their time" type player as a bad player. This Tyrant Player that comes in demanding the game must be a set way they want it and that the DM must bow down before them, is not what I call a good player.
I think your presumption that most players don't care has created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unless you coincidentally happen to run into people who think almost identically to you, you instantly presume the worst of them, and behave in ways to fight against or mitigate that presumed-worst behavior. But such mitigation tactics are precisely the sorts of things that tell a typical player not to care, and thus causing players to lose interest--but that then simply fuels your perception that most people don't care.
Don't see how. Danny shows up to the game two hours late for some dumb reason. Eric is always "checking stuff" on his phone as he is a blithering idiot. Kyle will get the phone call from his wife a couple minutes after the game starts that he "must answer" and will spend 1-2 hours talking to her on the phone....before saying he "has to go home". Nothing can be done for these three gamers. Even if I did it your way and made a perfect game that they loved 100%....Danny would still be late, Eric would still be on his phone and Kyle would still be on his phone too. Though when someone like Kyle does sneak into my game, and gets a "oh I need to take this call", I just kick them out of the game and send them home: "I understand you need to talk to your wife...so by all means go home and talk to her and never come back"
Josh just wants mindless combat and refuses to role play his character 'Josh' at all. Kevin cant be bothered to remember anything and tries to say stuff like "we go over there to that place and see that guy...". Anna does not know the rules...and does not even own a rule book...and does not care to learn them.
And again....none of the above are effected by "what game I'm running". No matter what, Anna will still say constantly "what do I roll to hit?", for example.
It really, truly, genuinely is not the case that most players truly do not care at all. Most players do care, at least a little, about many things, and often care a lot about particular things. Showing the players that their investment of time and energy will be rewarded with a fun experience is how you earn the player actually giving that investment of time and energy.
Well, over in the land of 50% of people are not so great......I expect players to meet me half way.
asking this because it only really occured to me just now, how many people here are considering how traps are used on the battlefield? rather than just as a static obstacle you can (usually) take as long as you like on out of combat.
I use battlefield traps. Lots of spells do this, after all. And 3.5E D&D has fun things like combat trap smiths.
Indiana Jones took a bunch of damage from the boulder trap, but had enough hit points to survive. In the fiction he outran the trap he triggered. Hit point damage doesn't have to be an impact like being pin cushioned. If you trigger the trap instead of disarming it, you've taken damage. That poor other fellow, though, didn't have enough hit points and so he got pincushioned and was there for Indy to see.
Traps do make people look good in the fiction, but so do hit points and narration when the PC fails to find the trap and triggers it.
I find a lot of games....and a lot of players are Combat Focused. And as part of this they require or demand that their character be at 100% at the start of any combat or the game "is not fun for them". So after a single combat they will heal up, rest, or otherwise reset their character to "default". They hate traps as a trap might do 10 damage to their 100 hit point character that they "must fix" before the next combat.
See my last post. Games do work that way. In the fiction the narration of surviving the trap is often that it didn't hit you for some reason. Indiana Jones survived the hit point damage of that huge rolling boulder, but the only way that could happen in the fiction was for him to "outrun" it.
This is where D&Ds vague Hit Point and Damage come in....though it's not really explained well in the rules. It's not the binary of "miss" and "hit".
The vast majority of gamers think damage is a massive solid hit. So in their view if they take damage from a rolling boulder trap...they are thinking more like Wilde D Coyote getting 'splat' under a boulder.
But Indy does take damage as he runs, stumbles, trips and dodges out of the way of the boulder. The trap does 5d6 damage.....and Indy took like 11 damage.
