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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Sidelining Players- the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Poll
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<blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 7155103" data-attributes="member: 22779"><p>Funnily enough, this actually came up in my last session. Irony.</p><p></p><p>It was entirely unintentional. I had written up a dungeon crawl with narrow (5 foot) corridors and hadn't realized that there were more than a couple of choke points. We have a fairly big group - 5 PC's and 1 NPC and as they progressed through the adventure they got caught up in the choke points.</p><p></p><p>One of the players tends to play a "stay at the back" character and, true to form, his character was bringing up the rear. Which meant that for about 2 hours of a 3 hour session, he couldn't do anything. The party was piled up at the choke points and the player simply couldn't do anything. </p><p></p><p>I actually felt pretty bad about it. I knew he wasn't exactly having a great time, and, for me, the prime bar for what I consider a successful session is that everyone has a good time. </p><p></p><p>Note, to be completely fair, he never complained, never made it an issue and never said anything about it at all. This is entirely on my end. I'm sure he would have liked to have done more than watch the game for a couple of hours and I'm pretty sure he was pretty bored, but, he didn't complain.</p><p></p><p>Thing is, I could have fixed that in 2 seconds. Hindsight being 20/20 and I didn't think of it at the time, but, all I had to do was change the scale of the map from 1=5 feet to 1=10 feet. Double the width of the corridors so now you can stand side by side and poof, the problem would have went away. </p><p></p><p>So, yeah, his bad time was 100% my fault. And it was a fail on me as a DM. Live and learn. </p><p></p><p>My advice though, to any DM who thinks that sidelining a player for extended periods of time is perfectly fine, it's not. It really isn't. It's a DMing fail. You had a player at your table that didn't have fun. Anytime you have a player at your table who isn't having a good time, that's a fail, AFAIC.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Hussar, post: 7155103, member: 22779"] Funnily enough, this actually came up in my last session. Irony. It was entirely unintentional. I had written up a dungeon crawl with narrow (5 foot) corridors and hadn't realized that there were more than a couple of choke points. We have a fairly big group - 5 PC's and 1 NPC and as they progressed through the adventure they got caught up in the choke points. One of the players tends to play a "stay at the back" character and, true to form, his character was bringing up the rear. Which meant that for about 2 hours of a 3 hour session, he couldn't do anything. The party was piled up at the choke points and the player simply couldn't do anything. I actually felt pretty bad about it. I knew he wasn't exactly having a great time, and, for me, the prime bar for what I consider a successful session is that everyone has a good time. Note, to be completely fair, he never complained, never made it an issue and never said anything about it at all. This is entirely on my end. I'm sure he would have liked to have done more than watch the game for a couple of hours and I'm pretty sure he was pretty bored, but, he didn't complain. Thing is, I could have fixed that in 2 seconds. Hindsight being 20/20 and I didn't think of it at the time, but, all I had to do was change the scale of the map from 1=5 feet to 1=10 feet. Double the width of the corridors so now you can stand side by side and poof, the problem would have went away. So, yeah, his bad time was 100% my fault. And it was a fail on me as a DM. Live and learn. My advice though, to any DM who thinks that sidelining a player for extended periods of time is perfectly fine, it's not. It really isn't. It's a DMing fail. You had a player at your table that didn't have fun. Anytime you have a player at your table who isn't having a good time, that's a fail, AFAIC. [/QUOTE]
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Sidelining Players- the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Poll
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