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Message: <blockquote data-quote="discosoc" data-source="post: 7063966" data-attributes="member: 6801554">Right, but those motivations require actual input from the player at some point.  For the last 10 years, I've encountered player after player that literally won't bother doing something that their character sheet doesn't explicitly state is possible.  They seem to treat RPG's as a board game with long-term character advancement.  Now that's probably fine in the real old-school dungeon crawl sense where the whole point of the game was to just kill monsters and gather treasure for "reasons," but the genre moved passed that way back in the 80's and 90's with better story-driven adventures and settings.It's actually getting so annoying for me as a GM that I don't even want to bother writing adventures anymore, because I know anything less than a total railroad dungeon crawl with a token "puzzle" thrown in will just frustrate the  players.  It's not just my current group either; it's basically every group I've GM'd since about the time World of Warcraft got popular.  Not saying WoW is at all related, only that it's around the time that I started to notice a trend towards players just really lacking the ability to pretend they are someone else for a few hours.  Maybe it's just the natural progression of things as a result of grid-combat style systems and an overall influx of new players applying the same "logic" to the game that they apply to video game RPG's (min/max with very restricted "roleplay")? I definitely have a few regulars who love talking about the latest "build" they found online for their next character, which always makes me cringe (one guy showed up with 20 character sheets for each level based on the weird paladin/warlock build he found online...).  Could it be a side effect of modern RPG's attempting to turn every character detail into a mechanic with things like 5e's Backgrounds?  I know when I break out rules-light systems such as Savage Worlds players often fall into the same struggles of not knowing what to do or how to do it because it's not spelled out as an ability.</blockquote>

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