"The aim is for the players to have fun"

Or he would have them do a side quest to find and recover the Ring, and then resume the Fellowship...

The group here suffers from both distractions (laptops, cell phones, etc) and from what I call the "Respawn" effect: character dies, reload and enter new character.

The best way I have found to keep the players invested in their characters and the campaign is to A) make them develop logical character backgrounds and B) create a meta-plot that ties the backgrounds together. They can dungeon-crawl all they want, but when they realize they may all be tied together by something they don't fully understand, it creates a sort of "us" (the party) vs. "them" (the BBEG) environment.

Your mileage may vary.

@SmuggleNutz tried that neither worked...

@Majoru Oakheart I agree but I would probably get bored of D&D before I would give up and accept it but if I gave up and accept it then the game will eventually degrade to where the party will be bored and then noone is having fun, obviously you are better at hiding your displeasure than I am

@Dannyalcatraz I think that that would make as interesting a story for the viewer because Sauron rises up and an army defeats him again just like the first time but the party's adventures are walking in circles looking for this ring and not finding it, dredging the Dead Marshes looking for it

I think that the issue is 1) the players die too often, I will have to look into that 2) the characters are not valued, which may be because they die a lot or it is their playstyle which might be a problem

For years I GM'd a game where PCs killed each other with reckless abandon. Not just through accidently, they actually killed each other in their sleep, in duels, during combat with enemies, poisoning their meals, it was ridiculous. I eventually just said I didn't enjoy that level of conflict and didn't want to GM for them anymore.

We swapped over and played Paranoia for a while. Now that is actually my favourite game of all time, but I can seldom get people to play it with me. This gave them their fill of rampant PC-murder but at the same time made them band together in wanting a game where PCs survived for longer.

In the following campaign, things settled down a lot, however I came across a new issue. Without the high turn-over of PCs I had a cool ongoing plot. The most disheartening moment of this campaign was when I revealed a major twist, a long time in the brewing to be met with "uhh, who's that again?" where nobody could even remember the major NPC from the previous session. Rather than untangle any mysteries, or deal with conspiricies etc, people would literally ask me "So, like, who are we meant to be killing now?". I just gave up at that point for a long time.

Currently, my group pretty much don't roleplay at all, D&D is just a tactical game for them. I can get them to get involved in out-of-combat tactics sometimes, but never in real roleplaying. I consider it a win if I can get them to remember the plot from one game to the next. They are getting what they want from the game, but I am not.

From the sound of it, it sounds like you don't actually like the player's characters to die - you want high risk, but aren't willing to accept the consequences (character death) when it happens. I mean, if a player can't replace his character with another, what is he do? Sit on the sidelines and twiddle his thumbs for the remainder of the campaign or until the characters can round up the gold to raise his dead body? A replacement has to come from somewhere. If you're not going to reduce the deadliness of the game you're going to either have to open up to the idea of "miraculous" replacements or somehow make it harder to lose the character.

And the second idea's not so bad - it's used in other games and stories as well (in fact, in 7th Seas, which I'm DMing right now you have to go out of your way to kill someone). As the saying goes, "There are worse fates than death." A character goes down in the heat of battle; the wound is bad, but if he can be dragged away, he'll live - but perhaps his armor is rent and either is useless or must be reforged anew. Another character may be hauled away by the enemy, tortured for information to ambush the party and the group needs to put a rescue plan into action before that happens. And so on. You might not always be able to save an PC (Disintegrate is hard to write off, for example) but most of the time death doesn't have to be outcome. Sometimes a major setback can be enough to get the point across.

Getting players to take the gameworld (including, but no limited to, their PCs) seriously is not always easy. Some players just aren't interested in anything but light-hearted play.

That said, I would start in small steps and gradually build up. Run your game in a way that (i) conveys a serious tone, and (ii) makes the gameworld matter to action resolution and its consequences: family members of the PCs, friends, enemies - something that tries to make the fiction matter to the player because of the way it is affecting the situation in which the PC is embedded.

Conversely, if the fiction never matters except as a means to an end - for example, if the only way to tell the difference between rescuing the princess from the dragon and killing the dragon for its loot is to refer back to the adventure's intro text - then the players probably won't take the gameworld seriously. Because in that sort of situation, which is very common in published adventures, the gameworld really doesn't make any difference to anything.

What [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] says: the DM is one of the players and is entitled to her share of fun.

As a matter of fact, the DM is doing much more work, especially between sessions, and takes all the blame if something goes wrong, therefore the players should learn to give the DM more respect. No DM, no game.

I think that that would make as interesting a story for the viewer because Sauron rises up and an army defeats him again just like the first time but the party's adventures are walking in circles looking for this ring and not finding it, dredging the Dead Marshes looking for it

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Well, darn it, yes- it would be a good story...but not what I was trying to get at. Forgive me.

What I'm getting at is making the PCs les expendable by virtue of giving them unique, in game, campaign specific, non-mechanical awards for game play.

If you have a PC whose connections make it easy to gain access to the local Mage Academy's rare tomes vault- say, he had an uncle who was a former dean- and he dies, that PCs replacement will not have that same kind of access, meaning researching will be more difficult. The party might regain access to those vaults later on, but not until after they did some great favor for the academy. Until then, the resource of the vault is lost to them because a PC died.

Perhaps one PC did a favor for a powerful cleric, earning him special status within that organization. As a result, he can get himself and his friends free blessings, curse removals, etc. at the temple. He dies, and there are no more freebies. The party may still be able to get back into that temple's good graces, but it will have to be earned.

The bennies make each PC more inherently valuable. As such, players won't be so quick to attempt unusually risky acts because doing so deprives them of an irreplaceable resource. They might not get to the point of full investiture, but they'll at least they'll start treating their PCs like paper queens instead of paper pawns.

@Unwise That sounds like the group I have, they are still good at the game but the role-playing aspect is difficult for them, they stumble from scene to scene, which means we have to have more combat based encounters, which means more chance for the dice to "Hiccup" (rolling consistently low for several rolls) and the party member to die.

@Stormonu You have misunderstood, slightly, I don't mind the replacement characters or even players dying, but the players get their replacement "Temporary character" while they are reviving their guy and then forget to revive the character, they just keep playing the replacement until he dies.

@pemerton The problem I have there is that they don't respond to their party member's friends and family, I have tried it before, I might try it again though

@Dannyalcatraz I misunderstood your meaning, I might try that.

Omegaxicor said:

The general problem is that character's lives are short...the players wanted to have checkpoints (well a single player) which I was unhappy about having but his second idea is that when his character dies there are other characters that are similar to his that can join the group, but I envision a moment where we start the campaign with James, Tom, Jane and Davis but five or six quests later the party is composed of Frank, Mark, Lidda and Redgar, I don't like a world where the player struggle through defeating great monsters only to find others have reached their level (level 5 is unachievable by civilians in my campaign) without defeating the same world ending threats.

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You yourself have said it. "The general problem is that the character's lives are short." Because you are killing them. Stop that and they might get to care for them.

I also don't want characters to be expendable,

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Which directly conflicts with "The general problem is that the character's lives are short." Short-lived characters are by definition expendible.You are absolutely right. The general problem is that the character's lives are short.

Omegaxicor said:

EDIT: Do you think then that the quests should be made easier for the party so death is less likely

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Who says death is the only form of failure? Look here for another. Indeed in TBZ, there is only one way a PC can die - they first need to be badly battered. Then they need to say "This is something I am prepared to die for" - which gives them +3 to all rolls. If they lose at that point then they die. If they haven't said they are prepared to die for something they simply don't. They just fail. If the PCs fail to stop the goblins, the PCs don't die - they just have to watch while the goblins sack and slaughter the villiage and either kill the villiagers, enslave them, or both. Then come back to the enslaved villiagers or the free ones every few months - either they meet someone they failed to save or they get helped in some minor but significant way or feted once in a while by the ones they did (think Jaynestown).

Omegaxicor said:

The problem I have there is that they don't respond to their party member's friends and family, I have tried it before, I might try it again though

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Have you tried carrots before sticks? Some sort of benefit or gentle assistance is provided by a friend/family member? Then if that person is subsequently targeted by bad guys, the players might be a little more invested.