Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lindorie" data-source="post: 4161187" data-attributes="member: 62727">We finished another session a few hours ago. I thought I'd report in due to all the great help you're giving me. Believe me when I say that it's mental comfort to have your support. I'm not sweating combat near as much as before my first post, and made some <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=4159733&postcount=104" target="_blank">Monster Cards</a> that should help.I do, however, think the problem is bigger than combat. Even with no combat today, the pace was still very slow. It may be just me dealing with inexperienced players, which I've never done before. But there was three main problems I saw today.1) Having combat the first day caused some trouble. Today, outside of combat, the players kept specifying what they wanted to do in mini one-round-like actions. I stopped them many, many times to let them know this wasn't needed. It took a lot of prodding, but they eventually loosened up [a little]. This may be solved by the next time we meet. One of the players finally caught on and started leading the non-action. This player helped change the "we move 6 spaces" to "we move to the forest clearing we visited last night".2) Inter-party arguing. Every NPC interaction caused them to go into high debate, trying to figure out the right approach. This is taking a lot of "herding" on my part, but i think it'll eventually work out. I do, however, feel like I'm weak or missing some DM skills to handle this.For instance, one of the party members died in the previous combat. I introduced their new character today, setting up a situation that I thought would be conducive to a "we're heading the same way, so...". The rest of the party planned for about 10 minutes how to introduce themselves to this new stranger [not *entirely* unreasonable, as they are somewhat fugitives from the town they just left, but I made it clear the other party member was from another town, meeting them at crossroads].The new-character's player wanted to role-play his introduction and be convinced to join the party. Another player was pushing to "just say yes and lets get on with it". Another player was trying a bluff that the rest of the party didn't want him to do [the guards are looking for YOU, stay with us for protection], and yet another kept a running dialog going with new character filled with bluffs and diplomacy. The other two characters were mostly silent, fulfilling their assigned roles as sentries and waiting for things to play out.I'm embarrassed to say how long this took. As I said, I'm now questioning my DM skills for handling this reoccurring "everyone wants to do their own thing" scenario.3) The strong-willed 3.5 player. He's constantly telling the others what they should do. Several times, I pushed to get everyone's input when he was railroading the situation. At the end of the day, all but one player were getting their words in. At one point, he was pressing with "I'm the leader of the group or I'm not playing". Seriously! To which two other members of the group were caving in, knowing that he really won't play unless he is. There hasn't been a real need for a leader yet, so we'll see how that turns out. Personally, I think the person who helped fix (1) would be a much better and more diplomatic leader, and may enjoy playing a warlord (anyone have a good writeup?).Overall, it was a little better, so I'm optimistic that it'll eventually work out.</blockquote>

Verification