D&D 5E Character play vs Player play

[FormerlyHemlock]

But isn't that what you did to your players? The dc's were so high that th y needed to go do a completely unrelated quest to level up to the point where they could succeed. I'm not sure I'm seeing a difference.

DCs are never, ever the only way to engage with a problem. In the specific case in question (succubus-inspired murder/suicide), other approaches that might have been fruitful include:

* Speak with Dead (requires cleric or bard 5)
* Detect Evil habitually during social interactions (paladin 1 required)
* Detect Thoughts (requires bard/sorc/wizard 3) on all witnesses
* Zone of Truth -- even if she makes her save she tips her hand (requires bard/cleric/paladin 3)
* All the weird and crazy ideas that my players think up during play, which I never anticipate when writing lists like this. (E.g. Disguise Self as the ghost of murdered man and everybody, "Why did you kill me?!?" in hopes that the guilty party will give themselves away.)

Even when it comes to DCs, due to bounded accuracy, levelling up doesn't even help that much. The following would be more helpful:

* Enhance Ability (Wisdom) during socializing for Wisdom/Insight checks (bard/sorc/cleric/druid 3 required)
* Help: Insight while interviewing (requires multiple Insight-proficient characters in party, if you rule Help that way; or else just requires PCs to think about it if you don't require proficiency to help)

 

[ExploderWizard]

DCs are never, ever the only way to engage with a problem. In the specific case in question (succubus-inspired murder/suicide), other approaches that might have been fruitful include:

* Speak with Dead (requires cleric or bard 5)
* Detect Evil habitually during social interactions (paladin 1 required)
* Detect Thoughts (requires bard/sorc/wizard 3) on all witnesses
* Zone of Truth -- even if she makes her save she tips her hand (requires bard/cleric/paladin 3)
* All the weird and crazy ideas that my players think up during play, which I never anticipate when writing lists like this. (E.g. Disguise Self as the ghost of murdered man and everybody, "Why did you kill me?!?" in hopes that the guilty party will give themselves away.)

Even when it comes to DCs, due to bounded accuracy, levelling up doesn't even help that much. The following would be more helpful:

* Enhance Ability (Wisdom) during socializing for Wisdom/Insight checks (bard/sorc/cleric/druid 3 required)
* Help: Insight while interviewing (requires multiple Insight-proficient characters in party, if you rule Help that way; or else just requires PCs to think about it if you don't require proficiency to help)

There are also things the players can do without getting into any game mechanics that might lead them to what is really going on. Finding out about a threat and actually dealing with it are two separate issues.

A low to mid level party might put the clues together that a demon lord is behind some bad stuff going on due to clever detective work. That doesn't mean that they are ready to knock on his door and announce that they have arrived to deliver a butt whooping courtesy of the good guys. They may have to be content to work against him indirectly until they are powerful enough for a confrontation. This is the players choosing be smart about how they go about things, not the DM keeping the players from figuring out something with jacked up DC's until he/she "feels they are ready" to know.

I ran a campaign a long time ago set in a small town just north of a large forest. At the edge of the forest near the river was a lumber mill. This was a beginning adventure for 1st level characters. I set up the old standby "there's trouble at the mill" scenario for the players to go and investigate. After hearing about the opportunity while discussing checking it out, the players were speculating on the nature of the danger they were going to face. One of them casually just called it " trouble by the mill? Eh. It's an evil druid."

Bam! Just like that. Before even arriving on scene, the nature of the problem was called correctly. I could barely keep from laughing. Sure enough, the evidence eventually led to an evil druid working with ettercaps and giant spiders. It was a great moment when the whole group realized it was called perfectly from the first moment.

 

[pemerton]

There was an adventure where someone attacks the PCs then commits suicide in jail because a succubus dominates him into doing it.

<snip>

The adventure then has something come up to lure them away from the town on another mission in the middle of their investigation. Partially so that they can get enough levels so they are a match for the succubus when she eventually reveals herself. The adventure was written in such a way that it actually WAS virtually impossible to determine she was a succubus this earlier in the adventure.

To be honest the Succubus adventure would piss me off too. Hey go kill enough goblins and you'll solve the mystery would truly piss me off. I'd be very frustrated.

I'm pretty sure I expressed dislike of this scenario design somewhere upthread, and the passage of time hasn't changed my mind.

Whether as a GM or a player, I really don't see the point of a scenario that frames a mystery with the deliberate intention that the players not be able to solve it. Talk about de-protagonising!

What causes me to lose interest is the artificial blocking of solutions. If the DM drops a scenario and expects the players to care about or engage with it, then it needs to be made so.

Absolutely.

And a reply from the GM or scenario designer that appeals to ingame phenomena (eg "She's a succubus, so to clever for your PCs to outwit") is no better than a disruptive player hiding behind a CN or CE alignment. The ingame stuff didn't write itself, it was authored by someone. Why write stuff deliberately designed to jerk the players around?

**FREEPORT SPOILERS BELOW**

I set up the old standby "there's trouble at the mill" scenario for the players to go and investigate. After hearing about the opportunity while discussing checking it out, the players were speculating on the nature of the danger they were going to face. One of them casually just called it " trouble by the mill? Eh. It's an evil druid."

I've had this happen - when I ran the Freeport trilogy, one of my players picked within minutes of me filling them in on some backstory about the town that the town's head honcho (Drax?) was the villain. He did suggest that the PCs "just go and kill him and get it over and done with", but did accept the cautions from the other players (and their PCs, within the ingame context) that maybe they should collect some evidence first.

I think of this as an inevitable consequence of cliched/trope-hugging scenario design.

 

[billd91]

But isn't that what you did to your players? The dc's were so high that th y needed to go do a completely unrelated quest to level up to the point where they could succeed. I'm not sure I'm seeing a difference.

It depends on your degree of patience. Like with television shows, not all storylines (or encounter locations) need to be solved in a single episode - sometimes they mature over the whole season (or multiple seasons). Judging from online discussions, it seems too many players are too impatient.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

What if the expectation is that the player spend a reasonable amount of time trying to figure it out, and then recognize when he's not getting anywhere and put a pin in it?

That doesn't seem like a reasonable expectation for anyone to have. A common attribute of players is an unwillingness to leave loose ends that are likely to come back and bite you later on.

A significant difference between combat encounters and skill challenges is that you can't usually tell when a skill challenge is out of your league. And if you don't approach every challenge with the attitude that it can be beaten, you're likely to miss out on something important.

But here you've set up that challenge really is way more than the PCs can handle. Even if the players do figure out that the girlfriend is responsible, it's entirely likely that doing so will just lead to their early deaths. Which doesn't seem like quite the way these things are supposed to go.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

That doesn't seem like a reasonable expectation for anyone to have. A common attribute of players is an unwillingness to leave loose ends that are likely to come back and bite you later on.

Huh. Different playstyles, then. In my game, chasing down all the loose ends is physically impossible. Right now my players have the following loose ends:

* Why are neogi slavers from outer space kidnapping peasants?
* Occasional mysterious murders in capital [in reality, a combination of rakshasa murders-for-food and a Cthulhu cult's murders-for-brains]
* Invading hobgoblin army, how to stop them?
* Vampire allied with them out of fear of slaads--why is he afraid of slaads?
* Why did the Enkidu get kicked out of their ancestral homeland? [beholder invasion]
* Dragon at the beginning of the campaign--why did he help kill the Court Wizard and human army?
* How do you run the ship that they stole from the neogi? [lifejammer]
* Dragon wants them to kill vampire. Why?
* Githyanki war party offered 'cresim' to duel. What is cresim?
* Where did the ancient bio-modifications machines come from and what do they do? What do the glyphs mean?

Those are just the ones the players know about. They don't even know about the Rakshasa who's been manipulating things behind the scenes (he's partly responsible for several of the above mysteries) or about the actual history of their planet. I think it's pretty reasonable for me to expect that the players won't try to chase down all of these mysteries sequentially. Instead, they choose the ones they want to pursue, and the others will have the consequences I've planned out if they come to fruition. (Those consequences involve a fair amount of various bad guys fighting it out with each other to control key resources while regular innocent people suffer collateral damage.)

 

[Hussar]

It depends on your degree of patience. Like with television shows, not all storylines (or encounter locations) need to be solved in a single episode - sometimes they mature over the whole season (or multiple seasons). Judging from online discussions, it seems too many players are too impatient.

But, the only reason it's not resolvable is entirely artificial. It's not that the players did something wrong and so had to spend more time. They did everything right but had no chance to succeed until they go through the metagame process of levelling up.

And the levelling up apparently had nothing to do with the mystery. Hey go kill goblins until you are good enough to sense motive better.

Very much not to my taste.

Why not hold back the Succubus scenario until the pc's can actually resolve it? Why not do the goblin scenario first and then the Succubus one. Would be a lot less frustrating for the players and now they don't have to try to read the dm's mind as to whether or not the current scenario is resolvable.

 

[pemerton]

It depends on your degree of patience. Like with television shows, not all storylines (or encounter locations) need to be solved in a single episode - sometimes they mature over the whole season (or multiple seasons). Judging from online discussions, it seems too many players are too impatient.

From my point of view it's not just about patience/impatience. It's the extent to which the players are expected to dance to the GM's tune.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

But, the only reason it's not resolvable is entirely artificial. It's not that the players did something wrong and so had to spend more time. They did everything right but had no chance to succeed until they go through the metagame process of levelling up.

But they didn't "do everything right", as I understand the scenario. For instance, if they'd had a paladin in the party, and the paladin had followed the SOP of checking any significant NPCs for evil during conversation, they would have sussed out the succubus early on. If the paladin had been savvy enough to not blurt out his discovery, they might even have been able to research her nature and weaknesses and then destroy her.

The fallback scenario is "come back and deal with succubus later", but AFAIK there wasn't actually anything stopping the PCs from dealing with her early on. The DM didn't suggest anything of the sort, to my knowledge at least.

 

[Hussar]

So the solution to the scenario is to play another character? I'm thinking that's not a really good solution.

And, personally, I LOATHE the idea that the only real solution for problems is to throw more magic at it. "Oh, if we just used the right spells, then we'd succeed", while using the right skills is pretty much guaranteed to fail since the DC's are so high that it requires us to level up in order to achieve success. Yeah, not my idea of a good time. Particularly since it means that only the spell casters actually get to play, while everyone else gets to watch the spell casters. No thanks.

Again, I realise that this is a play style thing, but, presuming that the group will have specific classes/spells at the ready, is very poor scenario design. It's pixel bitching. If you don't have the right stuff beforehand, you might as well not bother playing.

Like I said, I'm not much for mysteries. I find them frustrating and boring. Looking at your campaign above, [MENTION=6787650]emdw45[/MENTION], I would not enjoy your game. I would find it scattered and not to my taste. Again, that's not saying it's bad, and since you guys seem to like it, more power to you. Me? I'd loathe it. I prefer a much more focused campaign. I've played in games like yours and found them too chaotic. There's so much going on that, for me, none of it matters. I simply can't bring myself to care about that many things at the same time. I like much more tightly designed campaigns where there might be two or three of the things on your list going on.

So, yeah, when presented with a scenario by the DM, I go in presuming that the scenario is solvable, or, if it isn't, that reason is presented very clearly, very quickly. Don't waste my time at the table watching me chase my tail when I have no chance of success. The Succubus scenario above is something i'd only run AFTER the group has multiple means to resolve it, including non-magical.