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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 1957018" data-attributes="member: 697">Oh boy, are they stubborn. Once they decide they want to do something, they drive towards it no matter what. There's a legacy of really bad DMing that haunts this group - a bunch of them are used to games where the story grinds on regardless of their actions, so a few players try to be clever and destroy the "story" that I've supposedly built into the game. Since I don't DM that way, it leads to some weirdness.I think there might be some amount of blame against me, tied into what I said above. I could see a couple of the players thinking, "Mike wanted us to parlay, so when we attacked he just killed us all off."The frustrating thing is that I can see all the bad plans and ideas playing out like a script, week after week. They tend to decide what they have to do, or what an adventure is all about, before they get into the action. With the temple, they had decided long ago that they have to fight their way through everything. Even in the face of more and more evidence that this isn't the case, they stick to their initial read.A good example - the party could've attacked north to the earth temple, or headed south the mine passages. They explored a bit of the mines, found nothing, and went back north. Later, I asked them why they didn't just head south.My roommate told me, "The earth temple was all stirred up and ready for a fight. We wanted take advantage of that and attack."So, basically, they wanted to attack while their opponents expected a fight, had fortified their position, and were ready for an attack. If they had gone south and spent some time away from the area, he was worried that the earth temple would relax its defenses.It's funny, because as soon as I explained it in those terms he finally caught on to how their plan was, basically, designed to hose the themselves. It's a good example of how they think - they were engaged with a foe, and they just assumed that they had to keep fighting until they had one.As for what's next - I have no idea. I'm tempted to take a week off, or maybe I'll run a module or something. My Eberron campaign is on hold until I'm done with my current design project.</blockquote>

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