Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SweeneyTodd" data-source="post: 2408508" data-attributes="member: 9391">Pardon the snipping, I'm going for something here.versusOkay, so you want the game to have risk and conflict expressed through combat. That's important to you.Your players are telling you in giant neon letters that that isn't what they want. The players are not interested in tactical challenges and risking their character's lives in combat. At all. Period.It sounds like they're having fun -- they're invested in their characters and have subplots running. When they can use combat as a chance to have their characters look cool, they enjoy it. When it involves risking the characters they've invested so much in, they split, prepare as much as they can, then come back to crush it. This whole "we're going to die" thing isn't so much cowardice as it is saying "This is not something we are willing to risk our characters for."I don't see how forcing them into combat is going to help things at all. They've made their preferences pretty darn clear; going against them is going to be like making them eat something you like, and they don't.So here's my question: Is there a way you can get your needs met without stepping all over theirs? Could you enjoy a game where they have to deal with challenges in other ways? Maybe focusing on other types of challenges or conflicts, where the things being risked aren't life and limb, but community and relationships. Or having a kind of "outwit the GM" where all that preparation and overkill itself is the challenge, and the fight itself is almost an afterthought.One thing you might ask them is whether they'd be interested in playing a few sessions with their original PCs as movers and shakers in the background, and new PCs who risk life and ilmb in the foreground. Kind of a troupe-style game. (Maybe one PC has a fortress, and these characters are based out of there, and go forth to clear out orcs or whatnot.) You might even suggest that they help come up with the kinds of things these characters would do, you would create the opposition, and if their new characters "win", it reflects on the larger game world that the senior PCs move in.If they're interested, it might be that they're risk averse in terms of losing their treasured original PCs. If they're not, it might be that they just don't find risky combat interesting. It doesn't let you know for certain, but it could help. (Obviously, the first thing you should do is just ask them what they're looking for out of the current game; sometimes people work better when discussing examples, though.)</blockquote>

Verification