DMs Advice - Player's bad assumptions

[howandwhy99]

EDIT: throughout the thread the example became a large question which wasn't what I intended. The question is: if your players were stuck doing something in a corner and ignoring the door, do you say to them "There is nothing you can do with that focus more on the door that is unlocked and unguarded and waiting for you to go through for the past six hours! " or just let them stay in their corner figuring out what to do with the corner?

The game element of D&D is continually determining what is going on and acting while accounting for it. If your players stop accounting for the world, then they're likely to starve to death even if they sit around having fun doing their own thing. The latter is great, but the game is meant to challenge the players. Ignore it and it will soon be over.

As for focusing on a single element, ask yourself during your adventure design process whether you are leading them down a single path or not. They could be ignoring the door because they've ruled it out regarding "what they're supposed to do" (which often lands under fighting stuff for new players).

Other possibilities include either the loss in their memory of other options or the DM not having conveyed clearly enough everything else around them to be engaged with. In either case it is good DMing to reiterate what they sense in their immediate surroundings if a lot of play time has passed. They might have great imaginations, so this might be unnecessary. I would only warn not to use it as a prompt to the players. Otherwise they'll take it as something having changed or you pushing a different direction for them.

Another way around this is simply to design (most of) the parts of your world with multiple features to explore. You can search someone, question them, dissect them to see what's inside, hire them to perform actions, become a mentor to them, or let them mentor you training you in, say, spellcasting and receiving the spells they know, hang out with them to see what they do, what they talk about, who they know, what their planning, and so on. There are many things to designing what could be a simple human NPC on the surface description.

It's hard putting in elements that are beyond the odds of the players succeeding with them as the Elementals appear to be. It's good to begin very early with this diversity and show them perhaps early other NPCs running and avoiding them just so they get the picture. A lot of tables have taken up the "everything must fall before me" rule of videogames and that just doesn't hold true in D&D.

 

[Blackwarder]

Telling them what to do isn't what you need to do, that remove player agency from the game and a large part of what make D&D what it is, but what you need to do is to figure out what the players know, what you want them to know and how you can communicate this effectively using the game world instead of out right telling them what to do.

Warder

 

[N'raac]

What crushes my interest is when the players aren't doing anything, they continue to suggest the same thing, for example "Well the Dwarves must have had a way to command the Elementals so we will have to just kill them because we don't know how to disable the Dwarven runes"

Maybe it's time for a Player/GM chat about campaign expectations and desires. They seem happy in a hack & slash environment without working to solve your puzzles. If that's what they want pout of the game, and you want more puzzle/planning gameplay, then that disconnect may mean the group just doesn't click.

You could, of course, keep the Elementals coming and make the occasional suggestion that it seems like there is an unlimited supply (or at least more than you can cope with), and create situations that simply cannot be resolved by brute force. However, if that's what you send out, and they expect to win by hitting the enemy until it falls down, you won't have a better game. To me, you need to discuss the expectations of players and GM, and locate some common ground. The other option is to play it out, let them all get killed and then comment on how, maybe, they should consider solving puzzles, but that will likely carry greater animosity, so my preference would be an open, honest discussion about your dissatisfaction with the game.

If you're just getting bored, so you quit, they don't have a game either.

 

[Grogg of the North]

EDIT: throughout the thread the example became a large question which wasn't what I intended. The question is: if your players were stuck doing something in a corner and ignoring the door, do you say to them "There is nothing you can do with that focus more on the door that is unlocked and unguarded and waiting for you to go through for the past six hours! " or just let them stay in their corner figuring out what to do with the corner?

It really depends! If they spend two hours but are slowly putting together a working solution, that all the party members are excited about then let them do it! I had a riddle on a door that was pretty difficult in my last game. I told the party that after X minutes, I'd ask if they needed help, but everyone was really into solving it and so I just let them work at it.

However, if it's been two hours and the same ideas keep coming up and shot down, then something is wrong. Ask for a int or wisdom check and offer advice, remind them of <Helpful NPC>, or, if all else fails, punt. Approach them out of character and try to help them get back to something productive. All the analysis in the word is meaningless if you don't have any real data.

One way to try and get around that is to assume your PCs will fail. I don't know about the rest of the boards but the dice seem to hate me at times. If I need the party to pass a Knowledge (Obscure Stuff) check to proceed, then I am guaranteed that the party will flub the roll.

 

[pemerton]

what would you do with those players, if the Undead were "never-ending" or the battle, due to dice, turned against them? Do you tell the players "it is unlikely that Undead would be IMMUNE to turning

<snip>

When I made the example, Arcane runes, I knew they would need an Knowledge Arcana check but when the players decide to start using Diplomacy on the Elementals and continue to try to find a way to negotiate (without summoning an Earth elemental to talk to them, which I wouldn't see coming but I would allow) rather than dealing with the source of the trap. I know that there are several ways to avoid the trap but firstly they have to identify the trap.

They can kill the elementals and walk through the door but that takes a lot of resources and the players would either continue on to their death or retreat and have the town burned down (or whatever the cost of failure is)

Common sense is an easy fallback but if the battle isn't going to kill them but just deplete their resources enough to have the next fight kill them, since they don't know what the next fight will be

<snip>

I think that I have been too "hands-off", I give the players all the information they need and then if they do the wrong thing, I try and help them but I am not telling them what to do and it sounds like that is what needs to be done.

Here is my take on some of these issues.

First, take a step back and ask, "Why are we playing this game?"

If the answer is, so the players can show off how clever they are in playing their PCs and beating the GM's challenges, then why would you tell the players what to do? That defeats the whole purpose.

If the answer is different, though - maybe it's something like "To find out together what these PCs are about, what makes them tick, how their future will unfold as heroes" - then you need to ask yourself, as GM, What is the point of sticking to your guns and resolving a situation like the undead or elemental fight in a rigid way, as if there's only one right answer, and if the PCs suffer a TPK then c'est la vie? This is what games like Burning Wheel, Marvel Heroic RP and now 13th Age talk about as "fail forward" ie when you resolve a situation, the PCs might succeed or might fail, but if they fail the game (and the story of the PCs) doesn't come to an end. Instead, things go on but with the PCs at some sort of disadvantage or having paid some sort of price. This sort of adjudication requires flexibility as a GM, coming up with interesting ideas for failure on the spot as the players tackle the situation in whatever way they think makes sense, and you as GM adjudicate those actions and tell them what happens.

So, for instance, if the PCs deplete their resources fighting the undead or the elementals you don't frame the next fight as one that will kill them - but you frame things so that other consequences of that resource depletion become clear to the players (so, for instance, in your example they can't stop the village being burned down). Now this can be harder to do in D&D, which has very specific and highly silo-ed mechancial resources, rather than in a more abstract system where spending resource (eg Fate Points) on fight A leaves you without enough Fate Points to achieve goal B (like stopping the village burning down). In 4e D&D healing surges can pick up some of this slack as an all-purpose resource for effort/exhaustion as well as fighting. I don't know how exactly you would do this in earlier editions of D&D (in classic D&D gold is something of an all purpose resource for paying for goods/services and escaping monsters, but that doesn't support the "fight too much and so weren't able to stop the town burning down" trade off very well).

Yet a third reason for playing D&D is for the players to experience the thrill of "being there", and of playing through the GM's story. For those players, maybe telling them "You recognise the runes as Arcane. They were probably put there by the Archmage" or "You can tell this trap isn't a dwarven one" would do the job. Because that helps those players get the feel of being there, immersed in the situation of their PC. It prioritises "being the PC" over making choices for the PC.

TL;DR - there's no right answer here, but different techniques are better suited to different playstyles.

 

[Omegaxicor]

I guess I have always been too hands-off, trying to avoid playing my adventure for them that I have distanced myself a little too much, thankfully the players don't seem to have noticed but I will try to remember to remind them of everything they have learned thus far, at least what can help them.

 

[Grogg of the North]

I just came up with another wrong assumption example.

The party was fighting what we called a pizza golem*. It was made of dough, had red sauce for blood, and lived in an oven.

The golem attacked us and we fought back. After we hit it with a fire spell the DM told us that the crust was blackened and burned. As players we heard "It's super effective! Kill it with fire!". But what the DM was trying to tell us was that every time we burned the crust it got hard and tough, increasing its natural armor. So as we kept burning it and our martial characters had a harder and harder time hitting it. We managed to bring it down eventually but it wasn't until after the session that we learned we were wrong about our assumption. I don't recall any clues being given to us about how the creature's crust was giving it more and more armor just that we were missing.

*Stromboli or Calzone may be more accurate of what it was but they don't exactly roll off the tongue.

 

[N'raac]

If the answer is, so the players can show off how clever they are in playing their PCs and beating the GM's challenges, then why would you tell the players what to do? That defeats the whole purpose.

If the answer is different, though - maybe it's something like "To find out together what these PCs are about, what makes them tick, how their future will unfold as heroes" - then you need to ask yourself, as GM, What is the point of sticking to your guns and resolving a situation like the undead or elemental fight in a rigid way, as if there's only one right answer, and if the PCs suffer a TPK then c'est la vie?

I don't think anyone has suggested that "failure = TPK". I think the only failure that = TPK tends to be players who run characters who will walk through a meat grinder because the game, to them, is just combat, and the prospect they could lose is unfathomable. This trap sounds quite similar to the Undead situation in that both allow the PC,s to retreat with limited or no consequences. They have the option of stepping back to lick their wounds and reconsider their options.

I always liked the old Villains &Vigilantes modules' approach of specifying what happens if the players lose this combat. Having a sense of what happens if the PC's fail, as well as if they succeed, means the GM is not at a loss when it happens, and it becomes clear that it's not only OK to fail (ie that's not "TPK - scrap campaign and make new characters"), but that failure can lead to a game session at least as fun as success will. It also can jar "those players" out of the worldview that the PC's can never fail so there is some acceptance that, sometimes, they are just overmatched, and that this, too, will advance, rather than end, the game.

This is what games like Burning Wheel, Marvel Heroic RP and now 13th Age talk about as "fail forward" ie when you resolve a situation, the PCs might succeed or might fail, but if they fail the game (and the story of the PCs) doesn't come to an end. Instead, things go on but with the PCs at some sort of disadvantage or having paid some sort of price.

As noted above, this is hardly some revolutionary indie game concept never considered before. It's Drama 101.

This sort of adjudication requires flexibility as a GM, coming up with interesting ideas for failure on the spot as the players tackle the situation in whatever way they think makes sense, and you as GM adjudicate those actions and tell them what happens.

Considering other approaches is the same. In fact, it's quite possible to plot out an adventure with "if the heroes fail here" planning, so that you don't need to do a lot of thinking on your feet to adjudicate those results.

So, for instance, if the PCs deplete their resources fighting the undead or the elementals you don't frame the next fight as one that will kill them - but you frame things so that other consequences of that resource depletion become clear to the players (so, for instance, in your example they can't stop the village being burned down).

Sure - the village gets burned down; the Gate gets opened; the prisoners get released; the Bad Guy gets the magic artifact he was seeking; whatever. And the game goes on. We must rebuild the village/stop the army that's been released; close the gate/defeat whatever came through; recapture/slay the former prisoners; stop the Bad Guy before he can use that artifact for his nefarious ends/whatever.

In a good game, the players generally won't know whether they were "meant" to succeed or fail. Some years back, I had a player survey the field of combat, look at the group and say "Guys, I think this is one of those battles we just weren't meant to win". Actually, it was an encounter I had expected to be challenging but that they would win, but things had gone poorly for them for a variety of reasons. They didn't need to know that. The Bad Guys had goals not involving the PC's, so having won, they went about their business. The PC's, meanwhile, spent a lot of time and effort planning out the "inevitable rematch". The only thing that made that rematch "inevitable" was that I had to write it in after seeing how much they were looking forward to it. And that later rematch was a great session.

In a GREAT game, the GM should seldom, if ever, have a preconceived notion of what the players are "meant" to succeed at, at least when looking at significant challenges.

Now this can be harder to do in D&D, which has very specific and highly silo-ed mechancial resources, rather than in a more abstract system where spending resource (eg Fate Points) on fight A leaves you without enough Fate Points to achieve goal B (like stopping the village burning down).

First and foremost, getting out of the mentality that every battle is "one side wins and the other dies" is the first step. Methodically slitting the throats of the fallen isn't the expectation I have for heroes, nor does it tend to be the source material's approach. If it was, Luke Skywalker would have been Wampa Chow, James Bond would have been executed in his first outing and Batman's head would be on the Joker's den wall long ago. Once we recognize "lose" and "die" are not synonymous, a world of possibilities open up.

The heroes can't stop the village being burned down because the spells and HP they needed to defeat the enemy behind that arcane ward were used up fighting the elementals, or just because they took so long to figure it out that the enemy could marshal his forces so they moved en masse, and could not be picked off by a rag tag group of adventurers while they were still planning the raid. Or, perhaps, there was no rush to get into that area, nothing was going on there anyway. If that door has been sealed for 500 years, three more days should not make that much difference, should they?

Yet a third reason for playing D&D is for the players to experience the thrill of "being there", and of playing through the GM's story. For those players, maybe telling them "You recognise the runes as Arcane. They were probably put there by the Archmage" or "You can tell this trap isn't a dwarven one" would do the job. Because that helps those players get the feel of being there, immersed in the situation of their PC. It prioritises "being the PC" over making choices for the PC.

I'd call these "trivial difficulty". Anyone who can read Dwarven knows the runes aren't Dwarven, and anyone with any arcane knowledge (a rank, a spellbook or the ability to read a scroll) can see they are Arcane.

 

[S'mon]

Even a PC who has no idea how to read Dwarf runes vs Arcane runes should be able to see at a glance that they look nothing alike (unless for some reason Dwarves in your campaign are the font of arcane writing - might make sense in a Norse themed campaign). As a player I'd probably assume that the GM would tell me the sort of writing it was, or at worst "You don't recognise the script", and I'd be REALLY annoyed by a GM who said "You never asked if they were Dwarven!" after I've just spent time investigating them. So this looks like a bad GM call to me.

 

[billd91]

I always liked the old Villains &Vigilantes modules' approach of specifying what happens if the players lose this combat. Having a sense of what happens if the PC's fail, as well as if they succeed, means the GM is not at a loss when it happens, and it becomes clear that it's not only OK to fail (ie that's not "TPK - scrap campaign and make new characters"), but that failure can lead to a game session at least as fun as success will. It also can jar "those players" out of the worldview that the PC's can never fail so there is some acceptance that, sometimes, they are just overmatched, and that this, too, will advance, rather than end, the game.

There are times I think players of many different styles get into D&D combat and suddenly spend too much effort thinking of the game as a game to be won or lost, live or die, rather than as a role playing game inspired by a literary genre with genre conventions to use. The Villains and Vigilantes reference highlights one genre, 4 color superhero, that has some pretty strong conventions that ameliorate setbacks and other problems that occur when overmatched in combat or when the dice turn against the players. What supervillain ever simply kills the hero he defeats? Hardly any. They'd rather capture the hero so they can monologue at them, put them in death traps, show they're the alpha male, whatever they want to do. And that gives the heroes the opportunities they need to escape and turn the tables on the villains.

Fantasy has similar conventions. In the Conan movie, did Thulsa Doom simply off Conan when he found him infiltrating in disguise? He did not. He monologued, showed off his power, and then condemned Conan to a slow death that enabled his companions to find and rescue him. Even in the bloody Song of Ice and Fire, killing off protagonists isn't always straightforward. Ned Stark could have been allowed to take the Black. Jamie Lannister is captured and, in effect, ransomed despite a lot of people wanting him dead. Later, he's maimed rather than outright killed, enabling him to escape and live on. And characters who don't follow conventions have been paying some pretty steep prices for their perfidity. Red Weddings, public executions of just men, and just being mountainous brutes all have costs that are being paid as the series goes on.

Let the players know that you'll use reasonable genre conventions and that all isn't lost simply because the last hit points keeping PCs conscious are whittled away.