NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6469535" data-attributes="member: 4937">The answer is you give them what they want and hope they diversify their play before you get utterly bored with it. If a party insists on being uninvolved except through combat, give them mentors that point them in the right directions and a steady diet of combat challenges.  Let them try to solve all problems by hitting it with a big stick.  For certain definitions of 'works' that strategy sometimes even works, though in the long run you are likely to end up with an evil aligned party just because the party has brute forced its way through all moral dilemmas.  In general, parties like this do poorly with adventure path play unless there is an NPC over their shoulder telling them what to do at all times.  They can't follow even a linear roadmap, so don't expect them to.  Let them start carving a random swath of blood across the world with no more goal than acquiring XP and treasure.  Accept that someone else is probably the hero in your world.  Your PC's are probably earning a different sort of reputation.  The game design you are going for here looks a lot like Diablo III on paper - with big dumb bumbling villains, quest givers that practically have flashing signs over their heads, linear or semi-linear dungeons filled with random hazards, and no story worth talking about. The real hard part for me isn't feeding the party what it wants, it's maintaining my interest as a GM in the game. At some level the game devolves for me down to opening a page in the monster manual and running a combat, and then rolling up some random treasure. You get the feeling pretty quickly that the entire aspect of being a GM could be handled procedurally by a decent computer program. Since as a GM you aren't really trying to win, because winning means ending the game, there isn't a lot of reward for a GM in this style of game. With some luck you can hook your players into a sandbox and at least get them to care about something, like at least being outlaws on the run from the law.Play around with the personalities you use for NPC's in the ally or mentor role to see whether their is a personality conflict. You may find you need to swap around your villains and foils and your intended allies and mentors.  Ideally you eventually hit upon some characterizations that are emotionally evocative to your players, and this gives you some hooks.  However, keep in mind, some players will actively rebel against any hook you throw them, so you have to let them hook themselves.  In short, read 'Knights of the Dinner Table'.  You've got one of those parties.  Attempts to railroad them into mature play is not going to work.  What they want to do is roam around the jungle having nothing but random encounters and collecting loot.   Trying to force this to have a cool story is probably going to end up in frustration for everyone.   Nonetheless, though BA is always trying to railroad his players, he does over time successfully integrate them into some sort of coherent world by letting them turn their own actions against them and creating their own foils and nemesis.</blockquote>

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