I want to hear about you guys: how have things went south for you? Where the ball seriously was dropped, and how you managed to get it back (or not!).
I ran a sandbox game that was too sandboxy. The players could go anywhere and do anything -- including fighting great dragons at level one, if they were that stupid. I had wandering monster tables that were not level adjusted. The characters were supposed to be willing to run, if they needed to do so.
Unfortunately, by level 7, each player (except one) had gone through many different characters, and the game was just getting annoying to them.
In addition, I enforced alignment changes if their actions dictated it. So some of the players were playing characters that had been set to chaotic evil (due to a few murders), and thus had endured some class feature loss (Dragon Shaman losing his patron dragon, for example).
So the players were playing 3rd or 4th or 5th generation characters, and those characters were no longer optimal. Some fatigue had set in among the players, and some disillusionment with their character sheets. Cue fight with long-term enemy who is very powerful and while certainly beatable, not beatable by them.
Now, this enemy was a lawful neutral hero of the realm who was actually inserted into the game as an escape clause -- the players had backed themselves into a corner and were in for a TPK if they didn't get help. So they stumble across this hero and
potentially can form an alliance. Instead, they choose to fight him. One player in particular kept insisting, "I can beat him, I'm sure of it!"
Everyone groaned. One player said, "Look, we don't even care about these characters anymore. Can't we fast-forward this?"
I said yes, as soon as the "I can beat him" player breaks off and gives everyone a chance to roleplay a way out of the situation. But said player won't. Eventually the rest of the group joins in. TPK (almost) -- one player teleports out. Everyone else dies. When this happens, the kid who was sure he could win sits there with the character sheet of his 5th dead PC in hand, staring at it in disbelief. He says, "But that's not fair. We should be able to beat him!"
The death of everyone else? Actually makes the players happy. They were sick of the game, and that one session in particular just wasn't fun for them.
What did I learn? Well first, there are a couple things I know I did right. Players who assume they will always win, and in so doing they shut off their critical thinking? That's not my bad. Having real danger in my campaign is a feature, not a bug, and I'm happy with that. Second, Giving players repeated hints & tips that they ignore? I did that right. If the players discard useful information, repeatedly, then they've made it clear they are insisting on following a dangerous path. So, OK. They got it. No apologies for that. But that's where my own good thoughts end.
What did I do wrong? Two big things I ignored. First, I failed to recognize the DMPC problem. It was in my game, but masked so I didn't see it. Usually the DMPC is bad because the DM loves his own creation and gives it too much attention or power. The players sit bored while the DM's awesome PC does
everything cool. Well, I wasn't quite doing that. In fact, the players kept trying to recruit new NPCs onto their team, knowing full well that I'd have to run them. I tried to avoid it. So I'm in the clear, right? Wrong. My DMPC was the
enemy monsters -- too many that were too powerful to beat. Plus many NPCs both powerful & noble, constantly outshining the PCs. Too many that got to do cool stuff. One player discarded a cleric character, and I immediately had that character take over the local temple -- but the character was too low-level, so I had the character's god come down to walk among them, blessing the now-NPC with an ability boost and level boost. I
never would have considered having the PCs interact with gods at level 5 -- but hey, it's an NPC now and I need to do
something with him, so problem solved. Right? Well, yeah, except the players are relegated to witnesses, rather than being prime movers.
The second fault? Chekhov's Gun. That is, "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." I put a
lot of stuff into my game world that I assumed the players would not mess with. I was God saying, "don't eat the apple." I had many things that were in the game simply because they made the game world more sensible to me, or they helped me to enjoy my game world, but they were also intended at some sub-conscious level, to be things that they players would appreciate but not touch. This became frustrating not only for them, but for me as well. They kept fighting villains too soon. They kept wandering into modules that were too high level. They kept seeing cool plotlines about saving the world and assumed they were for
them. But of course
those stories were for the background NPCs.
Now, there are good intentions. A game with a rival NPC party that puts some time pressure on the players can be really cool. A game where the players start small and gain huge power is quite fulfilling. But my mistake was withholding too much too often, and giving the power to NPCs. Partly I knew that my group was composed of so many evil-minded power gamers, that if I gave them power early on, they would just go nuts and the game world would collapse. So I saved my game from a miserable end. But I saved it by imposing another more boring end.
The correct thing? Well, it's impossible to be perfectly "correct" in this situation. But I could better walk the line, balancing the "realism" of my game world with the focus on the PCs. They need more opportunities at their level, and fewer high-level NPCs interfering. Less "brutal uncaring sandbox," more "cool stuff about the PCs."
(For those that remember my previous posts about my game, yes, I'm overstating the badness of it all to make my point, and yes, the players are actually quite excited about the upcoming game on Saturday where all the new PCs get introduced. But even in a fun good game there are things that go wrong and things you can learn to do better. Having a player say, "we don't care anymore, let's fast forward," is a good sign that something needs to change.)
