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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Badwe" data-source="post: 4537269" data-attributes="member: 61762">Last night, as is often a horror story of campaigns. Our group slowed to a crawl, unable to decide what to do.  Allow me to provide some background on the story:The party is a warlock, a 2weapon ranger, a bow ranger, a wizard, and a cleric.  More importantly: the warlock is very focused on knowledge and overturning secrets, the 2weapon ranger is meant to be young and overconfident/brash, the bow ranger is aloof, the wizard is a reformed tiefling with a strong desire to be good, and the cleric is a warpriest of kord with a penchant for jumping into action.So there is some dichotomy of the group going on.  The brash cleric and 2weapon ranger had to quickly cover for themselves when they jumped a table to shake down a group of black market dealers, since the rest of the party made a hasty retreat and feigned ignorance of even knowing them. However, the DM has also set out to try and make the game very open ended, making nearly every encounter an opportunity to resolve it in any way we choose. In a castle overrun by wild and (possibly) demonic magic, we encountered a group of shadar-kai who attacked us without hesitating, a librarian who mysteriously never sleeps and has evaded the wrath of everything wandering the castle, a group of honor guard (the party is also part of the honor guard) who have strict instructions to watch a gem and have no idea why, a demon+animated armor that seemed to think we were servants, and satyrs sitting around the dining hall acting like they owned the place.  So, other than the shadar-kai who attacked us, we had a choice on how to handle each encounter, but we dilly-dallied on each of them not really sure what to do each time, sitting and arguing with the NPCs but not really convincing them, and just generally being indecisive.  The result was a somewhat unpleasant session that left a bad taste in our mouth.What can be changed to help smooth things out?  Is the DM being too open-ended? Is the party being too wishy-washy?  Does the party perhaps need a leader figure who pulls the party in a certain direction?  I guess the general thing to take away is that on paper, everyone liked the concept of being able to approach encounters in many ways, but in practice we were paralyzed by choice and it ended up somewhat unfun.  Any suggestions welcome.</blockquote>

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