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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8633155" data-attributes="member: 18">Lot of good advice here, and I've had a somewhat similar experience to the OP, albeit longer ago and less severe, and what I worked out was:1) Complicated and finickity rules really do not work well for some groups, but the individual players might not realize this or might even think they like those rules.A good example for my main group is 3.XE/PF1. If, at the time, you'd asked the players if they "liked D&D" or "liked Pathfinder", they'd have said yes. It would have been a useless question. If you'd said "But is it too complicated?" they'd probably have denied it, albeit hemming and hawing slightly. It only became obvious when we switched to more straightforward RPGs, and suddenly people were more engaged at the table. Less time was spent looking stuff up or adjudicating things.2) You can also have a rules/playstyle mismatch on another level, that of players who want an experience very different to what the game, as designed, offers, but again who might not be entirely conscious of this.3.XE/PF1 works as an example here too. My group really likes flashy shenanigans, over the top stuff swashbuckling idiocy, and plans so crazy they just might work (which honestly, has succeeded before and not because of DM fiat, sometimes they blindside even me who is expecting to be blind-sided). 3.XE/PF1 does not like that kind of play. It is very detailed, very precise, and if you try to do something silly, RAW you're going to end up having to make a bunch of rolls just to get a similar result to what doing something with one or two safe rolls would have had. This cuts both ways of course - if you have groups who want earnest, precise, grounded stuff, maybe you don't want to run, say, Exalted?Both of these are solved the same way - swapping to a rules-set that is going to work better for the players. This can be major in terms of engagement, and the wrong system - which is not necessarily a "bad" system in any way - can cause serious disengagement.3) Give them what they want to engage with.A lot of people have talked about asking them what they want, but again I'm saying not every player is good at articulating that, and a lot of players will say more like what they think RPGs are supposed to be about than what they, personally, want. And asking an entire group at once is doom as I think others have indicated. But assuming they did in fact engage with some parts of what you've run, you probably actually already know the answer to some degree. With my group, over the years, I came to realize that they really love to hate antagonistic NPCs. They need Heels to be up against their Faces, in wrestling parlance. Not necessarily outright adversaries, but "I hate that guy!".Yet they also need some/most NPCs to not be "Heels". A lot of DMs, including some quite experienced ones, including ones who are published, and including some who have written extensively for videogames, get confused here*. They pick up that a lot of players like there to be "Heels", and perhaps unconsciously, or perhaps thinking there's "you can't have too much of a good thing!", they make basically every NPC into a heel. The blacksmith is a jerk. The shopkeepers are all trying to grift them. The town guard are out to get them. The mayor is a snob who sneers openly at them. The other patrons of the pub all scowl at them. And so on. If everyone is a Heel, no-one is a Heel, it's just a crapsack world, and that causes disengagement for a lot of players. Why care about anything if everyone treats you badly?So what I've found is it's important to have Heel NPCs and plenty of genuinely friendly/helpful ones. You also have to keep the sudden-but-inevitable betrayals down to a limited pace, and try not to make too many come from non-Heel NPCs, because again, otherwise you're creating a "Why should I care?" situation.And I know long dungeon crawls, which it's hard to integrate antagonistic NPCs into (i.e. ones who talk smack and cause problems for the PCs, rather than directly fighting them and then losing/dying) are thus not a good fit for this group. Much better investigations, small dungeons, heists, and so on.* = Larian, who wrote DOS1/2, have this problem. People accepted it in DOS1/2 because they assumed it was intended to be a crapsack setting. But when they did BG3 and wrote it the same way, every NPC a jerk, even nominal allies, they were taken aback because the feedback was intense and negative. People knew the Forgotten Realms. They knew D&D. They didn't want every NPC to be a jerk, rude, unhelpful, dismissive, sneering (even supposed goodies). So they actually had to row back on that pretty hard, making NPCs, particularly companion ones be less jerk-ish (and yeah if you've played it some are still jerks, but this is tame compared to how it was), giving the player more options to interact positively or get positivity out of NPCs, and so on.</blockquote>

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