Taking action! How to handle party paralysis

[Irda Ranger]

Some background on our DM. He is what I like to call an "in-character DM", he is very particular about not doing things that might temporarily suspend the illusion of D&D.

That's how I DM too. However, something you may want to raise with him is the concept I think of as "data compression for lack of bandwidth." Or to use another phrase, "A glance is worth an hour of narration." Your PCs will often be able to take in instantly, at a glance, what could take him 20 minutes to describe; and the glance would be more accurate too. If you actually see a "big keyhole", there's no mistaking it; but all the little visual clues that form the conclusion "big keyhole" often don't make into words well. You can easily mistake his meaning.

For that reason I've found that the world is actually more believable, and immersion deeper, if I help my players draw conclusions that their PCs would be able to draw on their own given the sensory data available to them in the game world.

For some things, especially the intuitive ones, I just skip the clues and tell the players the intuitive feeling. "You get the feeling you're being watched." etc. It's the sort of think that a person actually in the game world would know without knowing how they know it.

 

[Janx]

I'm getting the sense that's its not just the players, it's the DM.

If you spend an hour chatting up NPCs that he put there (not just random patrons in a bar), and don't get the info you need, piss them off, or convince them to help you, the GM is NOT moving the story along.

It would be very easy for a GM to not let the NPCs get convinced, and even, not get angry, unless you fight them. In fact, I would bet a GM that expected you to fight them, would act this way when faced with a party that doesn't start a fignt right away.

If the DM is being verbose and cryptic with his descriptions of that which your PC would easily figure out, he's trying not to make a puzzle of out it for the players. This invariably fails when the players are too dumb, or the clues too useless. Oddly enough, it's more often the DM's fault, not the players for being dumb.

 

[Badwe]

Thanks Irda_Ranger and others, great suggestions. I've got a few idea for what I'll be trying as a player next week, as well as my own ideas for when I get back onto the other side of the screen. I do like it when our current DM is at the helm because he has a lot of exciting concepts and he loves to lay clues that can be followed like a bread crumb trail (or so he has done in the past with different groups that i was also in). Unfortunately, I think so far we've been failing to pick up on those clues.

For me I'll definitely be brewing on how to be less linear and more open-ended when it's my turn again, while still sticking to some of my own preferences. I enjoy building off of themes or concepts that I know the PCs have already experienced in other media (novels and videogames for example) to build somewhat obvious, but hopefully more open-ended challenges and options for the PCs to gnaw on. I'll have to post it in another thread at some point, but my latest inspiration is a "dungeon on a d12".