Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7313801" data-attributes="member: 97077">When I hear about games where there are a lot of interrogation scenes, that tells me the DM could probably stand to be more forthcoming with information. Monsters and NPCs can give out information during battles via banter, tipping of the PCs as to their plans. Intelligence found on the corpses after the fight can also work.  I personally hate interviewing cagey, quirky NPCs as a player. We're the one leading lives of adventure - they should be interviewing us! As a DM, I give away a lot of information so we don't need to have interrogation scenes. So if you're not stingy with the 411, you shouldn't really have an issue.Further, just get these PCs away from places where NPCs are hanging out by putting the adventure locations far away from towns or wherever NPCs cluster.Time pressure. They have X days to accomplish the mission and/or every time they rest, there is a risk of a random encounter. It should work itself out. It's not really on the DM to deal with poor resource management. That's a player skill - if they want to succeed more often, they need to plan better. Once they start failing time pressure scenarios or find that taking too long to accomplish a quest is causing future quests to be harder, they'll sort themselves out in my experience. If there is legitimate conflict between players over the matter, that's when I'd try to foster a conversation between the players to work something out. If not, then time pressure is the way to go and there are many ways to build that into adventure scenarios.Since the goals of play are everyone having fun and creating an exciting, memorable story in the doing, even failure should be fun in my view - for the player, at least, even if it's bad for the character. There's a careful balance there and you'll need to judge that based on the people around your table.But again, here we go with scenarios where they're doing "stupid" stuff in what sounds like a town. Why are so many adventures going on in town? Get them away from places of civilization and you'll find a lot of these shenanigans go away. Doing silly things can also be a symptom that they are bored and looking to create dramatic conflict. So if you've been spending a lot of session time interviewing NPCs to drag exposition out of them or otherwise not having them boldly confronting deadly perils, for example, it's really no wonder that they're going to act out. Get to the adventure already!As for issues about planning, I recommend getting players to buy into the "yes, and..." method of decision-making. This is basically just nonjudgmental ideation wherein everyone offers good faith ideas in a way that doesn't shut out the ideas of others. So one player will suggest a course of action, the next player then accepts that idea ("yes, and...") and adds onto it with his or her own idea (in a way that doesn't negate the original idea), the next player does the same and so on until a plan is cobbled together. Not only does this encourage players to be open to ideas and thus encourages everyone to participate, it makes play smoother and faster by getting to the execution of the plan a lot faster.</blockquote>

Verification