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Message: <blockquote data-quote="thehobb" data-source="post: 6838668" data-attributes="member: 78820">From everything I've read here, similar in some ways to some of my own past experiences as a player and GM, it looks to me like everyone shares some blame in this problem.For the players: It looks like you need to put more effort into your plans. One little peek over a wall is not scouting out the defenses - you've set yourself up for failure like the DM said. If the DM prompts you by asking if you're going to disguise yourself, that is an indicator that perhaps disguising yourself is in your best interests, but it sounds like you ignored that prompting time and again. Lack of forethought, lack of planning, and carelessness is what's leading you to fail. You don't have to scour every possible avenue or ask every possible question, but neither should you be plugging your ears and going la la la as you plow ahead thinking the DM has already spoon fed you everything you need to know. For the DM: if the players are feeling frustrated, that's totally on you. First of all, it sounds to me like you're expecting the players to make deductions and decisions based on very minimal information. You told them once one of the character's father was in charge of the spy network? If that happened in a prior session, the chances of the party remembering that one tidbit is small unless they found out about that multiple times from multiple sources despite its significance to one of the characters. Then on top of that you seem to think that one tidbit leads to the logical deduction that they should disguise themselves. Why? Why would anyone in that town recognize them or even care about a group of people hanging out in taverns? How would any minions know there were any relation to the big boss? Has that character's father met any of them, ever? Did you ever give any indication to the party that anyone was watching them? Did you give them any reason to think they were raising any sort of alarms with the bad guys?With no indications as to what's going on behind the scenes, then when something happens, it happens out of the blue like you're completely springing it on them. No matter how you logically think about things happening, if you don't reveal anything to the players then you're not giving them anything to figure out, nor giving them any opportunity to come up with something creative to circumvent the problem.It is easy for a DM to forget that details you think are vitally important can become easily forgotten side notes to players. In order to impress upon players that something is important, they need to learn about it multiple times in multiple ways.This leads me to the second problem (or perhaps the same problem) that I think may be happening - you're not giving the players enough information. If the players have spent "days" trying to gather information and you've only given them "vague generalities" as your player professes, then what you're doing is discouraging their efforts. You need to make them feel rewarded for their efforts, and to do that you need to better understand what their goals are (I assume you knew they were trying to gather information) and help them achieve that goal - not hinder them until they finally corner you and can claw the information out of you.Your players are clearly not as clever as you expect them to be, so don't be such a scrooge with information. I think your players will enjoy your adventures better, feel less discouraged, and in the end you'll probably find it really doesn't impact the mystery or struggle the characters go through.</blockquote>

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