Irritation at my group

[reapersaurus]

total superficial guess:

the player is approaching RPGing like a computer game.

 

[Agback]

If they've been been busy adventuring and stuff, they may get to the point that they almost forget they're wearing armor.

This happens. You would be amazed at how often members of the [Australian] Army are apprehended trying to board commercial airliners with grenades, pistols, and knives in their pockets--and at how bewildered they are as the Protective Service and then their commanding officers explain to them that these things are not acceptable travelling wear.

But they are arrested, rebuked, and reprimanded when this happens, despite their blasé demeanour.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Mark]

Mark: We havn't had so much description of general life. A lot of their recent travelling stuff got glossed over, so we didn't hit towns there. And aside from where they are, they've spent time in only one other real town. There they were the local law enforcement, sort of, they were occuping a town that had allready been cowed. Of course, with an exception or two, most townsfolk avoided them there too. It's not so much his character's actions that bother me. I thought that those were hilariously in line with a burly fighter type. It's just a cross between this player's "That's not the way this should happen" arguement with me, and walking into a random room, and expecting to find answers in it that annoy me. He does both often, and gets very irritated when neither work.

Perhaps you need to emphasize more how people react in general to an armed and bloody adventurer walking around town. Maybe they need to "see" people avoiding them while in their adventuring condition. Dogs barking at their approach as the dogs' masters cower or give them a wide berth, Shopkeepers closing their kiosks when they come dripping blood down the street, those who talk to them barely daring to mention that they should clean themselves up while in town (if the adventurers are acting otherwise friendly.) are a few ways to drive the point home. The DM is the characters' eyes, ears and perceptions in all things. They know nothing that you don't expressly tell them, even if most of the time they seem to make the right assumptions.

 

[ThoughtBubble]

Wrapup

Sorry for dragging this back up from page five, but I wanted to thank everyone for the suggestions and make a final statement or two.

The first is to agree with everyone who stated that I need to be more consistant with showing people reacting to the fully armed and armored party. I should probablly make sure to do a bit more of this in general, instead of just leading into conversations with key NPC's.

The fighter and the dwarf are currently hiding outside of town. They're bored. The remaining party members were rounded up, questioned, and detained overnight. They were let go in the morning (they were very cooperative, one of the clerics offered to heal the injured bouncer) with the warning that if they were suspected of doing anything, they'd be fed to the sharks. It's likely 10 days till the ship they've booked passage on leaves. Kay has been caught, and is currently cooperating with the group. I'm thinking that the guards will round up the remaining members of the party (assuming they stay in town), and coerce them into taking them to the fighter and dwarf for a little "conversation". Ultimately, the combined crimes of the two consist of breaking and entering, threatining the owner of the harlotry, and later beating the bouncer into a pulp.

The two hour discussion was an attempt on my part to try to lead the party into more group friendly tactics. The game was originally supposed to be a series of high fatality dungeon crawls. I was trying to avoid having to pull punches to avoid TPK's (as that evening would have been). We never got as far as to get into tactics, sadly. The conversation died somewhere around "You know, you could have done better." "Nu-uh." "Ya-huh." "Nu-uh." "Ya-huh." Needless to say, that whole thing could have been approached better. Which I guess is part of what I'm asking now. I guess what I really should have asked is: How can I say "This is how I see things" in a way that he'd be more willing to listen to?

And finally, reapersaurus, your observation is very accurate, but that's a whole new rant.