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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6037652" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 296: June 2002part 8/10The play's the thing: Sometimes, a game just isn't working, for whatever reason. Now, you can try to fix it on your own, but in an inherently social pastime like roleplaying, things will probably be a lot easier if you learn how to negotiate. No matter what mechanics you put in the game to mitigate it, the simple fact is that you'll have far more success roleplaying if you also develop your real life social skills, whether you measure that in fun, xp, or just the best magical doodads of this adventure's haul. Fortunately, there are plenty of books you can read to help you out with this. Yup, Robin's digging into the Dale Carnegie self-help ouvre to teach you how to get along with people and have a productive and long-running campaign. Surprise surprise, you're more likely to get what you want if you make a genuine effort to understand other people and satisfy their desires as well. Hell, even just asking people what their problems are, nodding and looking interested, and then going back to doing things exactly the same can often work, for quite a while, as often all people need is to feel listened too and appreciated. Being confrontational and aggressive, on the other hand, can turn even a minor problem into a huge argument that results in everyone being more polarised at the end than they were at the beginning. Keeping the violent conflicts strictly IC is the way to go. Yet again, Robin shows us the value in looking to outside sources, and how seemingly disparate ideas can be combined to great profit. DM's toolbox: Johnn tackles a very similar topic to Robin, once again showing how different people can look at the same puzzle from different perspectives and come up with different solutions. Of course, as the DM, you do have rather more options at your disposal to alter the way a campaign is run if problems are cropping up, and this column assumes that you're the guy in the viking hat. This means you can introduce subplots if some of the players are stumped or feeling underutilised, have sudden unexpected encounters if they're bored or faffing around, redescribe the area with more detail or pointed clues so they're more likely to figure out a solution. Basically, while Robin is talking about the OOC methods, Johnn is about watching the signs and adjusting the pacing and details of the game to compensate. After all, stopping everything to have a detailed discussion of everyone's feelings will really break the mood of a life or death situation and cause problems in itself. Too much therapy just keeps emotional wounds open long after they would have faded away if you'd sorted out the problem and moved on. Since I spend more time DMing than playing and suck at talking about my feelings, I think I'd find these methods rather easier to implement than Robin's. Which isn't to say it's a better method. Robin's advice is certainly more applicable to social situations outside of gaming. Some tools are very good at one thing, others are harder to use but more versatile. A lot of the time you're going to need both to get the job done really well.</blockquote>

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