Save My Game - Goes off like a bomb!

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Oh, and if I dare risk it, I'll draw the direct comparison to how I see people play a particular MMORPG - WOW. My experience with WOW players is that once they get to the max level they just do the same quests over, and over, and over, and over.

There's only a handful of quests that can be repeated at max level. Nearly every quest in WoW can be done once, and it's over. Most people who reach max level in WoW do PVP, engage in larger group raids against harder targets, including whole dungeons designed for 10 or more characters, and so on.

I don't think more than a handful of people do nothing but repeat the same 12 or so repeatable quests ad nauseum. I would be surprised if it were that many people, in fact.

Needless to say, pitting yourself against other players in violent confrontation certainly is more involved than "do A in response to B." Likewise, the majority of the raid content is among the most complex in the game, even without factoring in all the challenges provided by working with up to 39 other people at a time and all of the player-generated chaos that can add to things.

 

[Felon]

Most people who reach max level in WoW do PVP, engage in larger group raids against harder targets, including whole dungeons designed for 10 or more characters, and so on.

He was probably referring to the raids, not actual quests. Folks do repeat those ad nauseum. They can be chaotic, but they can also be rote.

 

[Thurbane]

Also back the original post - would not a simple Search check have turned up the opening mechanism anyway, or am I missing something?

 

[Hussar]

Also back the original post - would not a simple Search check have turned up the opening mechanism anyway, or am I missing something?

Apparently not.

I know that the advice tends to be pretty harsh in the article, but, y'know what? Look at the question again. The DM isn't saying, "Hey, this idea I had didn't work very well, how can I make it better?" he's asking, "Hey, my players are stupid. How can I make them smarter?"

That deserves a serious smacking. If my class (I'm a teacher too) doesn't understand a concept as a group, that's my failing, not their's. If one student doesn't get it, then that might be his problem. For this DM, his entire group didn't get his point. That's his fault.

Playing read the DM's mind is bad DMing and always has been.

BTW, no worries about the Godwinning, it's cool.

 

[Brimshack]

I don't see much point in taking sides on an event that the rest of us had no roll in. I could as easily see the DM providing hint after hint until he is virtually telling them what to do and the players don't get it as I could the DM sitting there waiting for the players to come up with some complex solution that he only alluded to in an obscure comment three games back. I've been there on both sides, and I've seen it done right and done badly, done it right and done it badly myself from both angles. Whether the hints were enough depends to me an awful lot on the particulars.

In general I do prefer multiple solutions to one solution scenarios. As a player, I feel less subservient to the GM that way, but the occassional riddle or complex puzzle can be fun.

As a DM I do find that my players are consistently slow to recognize the hints I provide. This combined with the fact that I know my players are damned smart people suggests that there is a kind of cognitive bias at work. What seems like enough information to me may not be to them, ...frequently isn't. I've also been in situations where I am practically telling the players what to do; it's as though they aren't even trying to puzzle it out. Often I think that happens when players have had little success in solving problems or played so many hack and slash games they've gotten locked into a thoughtless mode of game play ...just give me an ogre to kill! You have to establish a pattern in qhich problem solving helps them accomplish things, or they may very well sit and blink while you tear out your hair waiting for them to use their brains.

I think the real questions are how to avoid the problems:

1) Start easy. In the first few games give the players solveable problems. Things they can clearly do. This builds confidence, not only in their abilities but in your willingness as a DM to put a viable solution on the table.

2) Double check context. When I as a player fail to get the hint, it's often because I didn't have enough background information to appreciate the hints I was given. You have to imagine each fact in the context of a larger world, and I think one of the most common mistakes GMs make in giving hints is they imagine the significance of a certain fact will be obvious when in fact players can think of several different ways to take a single fact. So, it ends up as a wash. So, you take a little extra time to build up the extraneous info. especially stuff that seems relevant to the hints you will provide later. Take a little extra time for background narratives. Through in some decoy information as well, but be sure that the players hear enough about the situation to be able to grasp the siginifance of the hints when they come.

3) Two stage hinting. One way to avoid the dilemma of too obvious or too obscure (gee which do I choose) is to provide a hint that seems mundane, but give an additional piece of information that makes its relevance clear in a later moment. In this case, perhaps a story about a servant who got in serious trouble for moving a chair once. Present this as a story about the cruelty of the master; everyone remembers how he reacted to that simple thing. What a tyrrant! Since its presented in a different context, you can play it up a great deal without making its significance as a hint obvious. Then as people search the room, they see scratch marks on the floor as though the chair had been regularly moved from point A to point B. That's not the best example I can come up with, but the point is that gives the players two opportunities to grasp the basic idea that moving the furniture is important. When seeing that the chair which must not be moved IS in fact moved, or has been moved many times, they should get from 2 ad 2 to 4. Then you can leave one or two more hints about the room in cae they blow that one.

 

[Jhaelen]

Clumsy as all hell, and absurdly frustrating at the time, but hardly unique. A lot of DMs have doors that are just as impossibly locked, regardless of how clever the players are, until the players complete the quest that the DM wants them to complete.

Maybe it happens, but it clearly shouldn't.
This is just plain bad adventure design.

If I want to discourage my players from going somewhere, I tend to drop hints that things might get really dangerous if they continue along that path. That usually works quite well but if they insist, I let them.
And if they find their way around an obstacle, I thought they wouldn't be able to pass - more power to them!

There's a different situation, though, when I actually tell my players ooc they shouldn't continue: That's when they are about to enter an area which I haven't developed yet and am uncomfortable to make it up on the fly completely.
Imho, you're not doing the players a favour if you start throwing a bunch of random encounters at them till they get bored. I'd much rather tell them, they are free to explore it after I've decided what will be there but that it isn't connected to the adventure in any way.

 

[Fieari]

I feel that Shamus Young's blog entry "The Plot Driven Door" is extremely relevant to both the OP, and the CRPG tangent.

One of my problems with WoW is that nothing anyone does in WoW has any impact on the world at large. You can never, ever, ever, be THE hero. Impossible. While I don't play myself, some of my former roommates were addicts (and I mean that in the "destroying your life" sense, in that they'd play to their detriment physically, relationally, financially, and so forth) so I've seen a lot of it.

Despite the ability to form raids, you can't raid anywhere the game doesn't want you to. You can't raise an army, march into the enemy territory, and burn their cities to the ground. You can't kill rulers and leaders and have them be dead dead. Even in the context of raids, you kill the big guy, and he's back again next week. There's no real persistence in the plot. A tabletop game is inherently superior in this respect.

In games where you are the hero, they're always single player games. No problem with that, except that you inevitably run into the plot driven door, above. And the subject of the OP. To reiterate what others have said, this is a matter of GM skill in a large degree. A GM -can- make the game be as limited as NWN2. But the GM, if he's any good, can also avoid this trap, and even improve on the fly.

The situation in the OP specifically could have been handled well, as has been described. Clues and such could be given. The players have a responsibility to actually play, after all, and if they won't play with the GM, they won't have a game for long, because the GM will get bored and go home if nothing he does gives the players a hook. The situation, on the other hand, could be as bas as is assumed, in which it is the GMs fault. To which I say to that GM, now is the best time to learn how to do it better. People have given good advice here.

Almost any situation can be done well, or not well.

 

[molonel]

One of my problems with WoW is that nothing anyone does in WoW has any impact on the world at large. You can never, ever, ever, be THE hero. Impossible.

Now THAT is a valid criticism of MMORPG structure.

Oddly, I ran into the same problem in the first longterm 3.0 campaign I played in. We played in the game for 3 years, a large portion of that time every week. It went from 1st through 21st level. The game evolved into an evil campaign, especially after we incorporated Monte Cook's Book of Vile Darkness into the game.

Nothing we did ever really changed the world, because the DM felt that evil characters shouldn't succeed in a heroic world. All our plans always unraveled and fell apart. Our enemies were always one step ahead of us. We might win the battles, but the war was never ours to win.

The DM even admitted it, when we finally confronted him with our frustrations in the game.

He wasn't a bad DM, either, although I finally gave up on the game.

Despite the ability to form raids, you can't raid anywhere the game doesn't want you to. You can't raise an army, march into the enemy territory, and burn their cities to the ground. You can't kill rulers and leaders and have them be dead dead. Even in the context of raids, you kill the big guy, and he's back again next week. There's no real persistence in the plot. A tabletop game is inherently superior in this respect.

Mmmm .... I'm going to have to disagree, here. Because you most certainly CANNOT just wander around most tabletop games killing whoever you want with impudence.

The point about persistent plot is a valid one, but this one is not.

 

[Ourph]

Where I disagree with Ourph is in the assumption that RPGs are different. I've played in a game where we tried to get through a portcullis by Bluffing the serving girl who was talking with us, using Disable Device, or even just Sundering it with a nice hefty magical warhammer. The DM finally raised his hand and said, "This is the hand of plot! The hand of plot says that you can't get inside until you go to the temple!" He systematically shut down any attempt to get off the rails.

This is the DM acting like a CPU rather than a thinking, creative human being. The difference between an PnP RPG and a video game is that an actual CPU can't choose not to act like a CPU, whereas there's a possibility that this DM might be talked into acting like he's got a brain rather than a silicon microprocessor in his head.

 

[I'm A Banana]

This is the DM acting like a CPU rather than a thinking, creative human being. The difference between an PnP RPG and a video game is that an actual CPU can't choose not to act like a CPU, whereas there's a possibility that this DM might be talked into acting like he's got a brain rather than a silicon microprocessor in his head.

I dunno, man, that's pretty insulting to some of the DMs who might just have sticking points and bottlenecks for the purpose of their campaign. It's like saying that a DM who commands you to create a second level character is behaving like a CPU in artificially limiting the options that the game provides, rather than thinking like a creative human being and adapting to whatever level the player chooses.

CPU's and DM's both limit their games to what they can handle and what they think is fair.