Uller
Adventurer
Wicht said:My question - how do you get your players to act and not talk when they hit this sort of rut?
Deus ex machina.
If they are stuck, arguing needlessly or going in completely the wrong direction it is usually because they've missed some key peice of information either by not finding it or dismissing as unimportant.
If this is going to get things seriously off track (like having them argue for an hour), I'll remind them of the information they have (point out the useless and useful info). If they are missing relevant information because they never really got a good opportunity to find it out, I'll dig it up as PC knowledge that the player doesn't have: "Hey Bob, you once heard a tale about a gem similar to this one. According to that story...insert clue here..."
Last game, the party was about to head in the wrong direction. They were going to go upstairs in a building they were exploring without really any reason to...an NPC just told them what they were looking for was down stairs. The NPC was still with them so I had her say "Uh...Why do we want to go up here? The Forge is under the fortress." If they really wanted to go upstairs, I certainl would have let them, but I reminded them that they weren't there to explore the entire complex...they just need to find the forge.