Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="VariSami" data-source="post: 6138877" data-attributes="member: 6698543">All right, here is my kvetch. I had this highly experimental campaign of a game within a game (essentially having the players play players of a MMORPG in which they are fully immersed). My first mistake was, of course, just publicly asking who would be interested in such a game among my roleplaying friends and accepting the first to tell me they were interested. The reason will become clear soon enough. Funnily enough, after the campaign crashed, my more experienced roleplaying friends became interested in the idea and one who works as an indie publisher prodded me to at least try designing something around the idea.But yeah... Those kinds of sessions. I had prepared a new milieu for the characters after a small time shift after a total party kill last session (that session had been kind of epic, though). I had really tried putting thought into it to make it immersing and interesting. Essentially it was an underground city in the general form of an ancient theater stage. Whatever was said downtown would travel up the city since there were no absorbing materials used except for those which also resonate. Ok, enough about that. The players' first reaction? "Well, that's freaky."In the city, they received 3 "official" quests (as in, pre-programmed quests of the in-game game) which included finding a mythic people of master illusionists and convincing them to help the city's inhabitants in their war efforts, tracking down the echo of an old woman's enchanted secret which she magically forgot once she had wistfully uttered it and finding an enemy monster who had been attacking the armies from their rear and was threatening the war effort from behind the lines. They also received "unofficial" quests regarding the storyline from other "players" in the city. While there is an element of searching in each of those, the quests were designed to be different and to aid with an earlier problem of excessive combat-orientation.They started searching for the illusionists and actually managed to track one down to their home tunnels where I had created a relatively simple teleportation puzzle. They actually realized it was a teleportation puzzle but their strategy of solving it was "ok, I run there and see what happens" and eventually they just gave up without giving it any mental effort.The old woman's secret just made them think it was a freaky quest and pass it up. Yeah, that's why I had variety in there. I thought this would happen with one or two possibilities.They thought of tracking down the enemy but gave up at the first sign of trouble. Admittedly, the trouble generated was unnecessary and was thus my fault. But it was nothing unconquerable. They just happened across an "angelic creature" that could detect evil and questioned why a clearly evil individual (one of the characters was an assassin) should be let to join the battle and possibly sabotage their efforts. They just backed down, thinking that it was not worth the trouble.Then the player-given quests... Well, they thought that the idea some players shared with them about the world having turned against them to assimilate all the players and recycle their mental information to power its inhabitants was interesting but they did nothing to pursue the "help us fight against it" path. And when they overheard some people talking about finding strong fighters to help them earn some gold, they rightly deduced that it was about an illegal fighting arena somewhere in the city. They even successfully tracked it down but declined to either participate or gamble. They just left it as it was.Finally, they just decided to use an opening I had left but not thought through (I thought they would at least try finishing some of those hooks). Ok, there was a caravan way for supplies towards the war effort. They decided to join that front and died to a ER7 battle with their level 6 characters even though there were NPC guards that were attacked first. In the battle, they would mindlessly use the same tactic each round. "Ok, I blast it. Does it work?" "I attack it. Do I hit?" You know the feeling (or rather, hopefully you do not).I know I was not the perfect DM and the campaign was really experimental but ARGH! Could they maybe even consider co-operating to create something of a story together? Could they try and put some thought to it? The foremost feeling I received was that they thought the game would unravel itself if they just mechanically followed some algorithms. Instead of trying to infer the blueprint of the puzzle (it was about 6x10 tiles) they just kept running straight ahead in circles until giving up. Instead of answering the angel, they just backed down. And in the fight they all just rolled d20 and possible damage each round without giving any thought to their positioning (well, except for the assassin who flanked an opponent) or any other options than trying to use the most basic tactic which had proven quite ineffective each round.Edit: Oh, right. I had actually asked them what kind of a game would they want it to evolve into when I proposed the time skip. And they wanted less combat. More of the meta story. Diverse challenges. So I tried to make all that according to their feedback.</blockquote>

Verification