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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6354238" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is a HUGE problem.  I've been running a biweekly game for going on four years now.  It has been a huge repeated problem that even though I'm obeying the 'three clue rule' and even when players are given the clues, if they don't immediately recognize the importance of the clue, by the time two weeks roll around they have completely forgotten about it.  And since they've completely forgotten about it, the significance of any clue they find that points back at the original clue is also lost on them.  It often leads to a situation where NPCs have to take the lead and be quest givers who explicitly tell the players what to do, because the players are generally lost without a clearly stated goal to perform.   That's annoying on several fronts.  First, it means that I'm having to deprotagonize the PCs to keep them protagonized, and secondly it means that often lately there is a small army of NPCs they've gotten involved in the problem who I have to keep track of.It's probably only in the last year or so that the players have finally figured out, "All these stuff the DM keeps telling us.  Maybe we should write some of it down?"  Prior to that it was like pouring water into a sieve.  It didn't matter how many clues I gave them, it just went in one ear and out the other.   And that's not to even get into the problem where early on I discovered several had been taking treasure and then not writing it down on their character sheet, and then they kept doing it despite repeated cautions that I wasn't going to keep track of what they owned for them.  That went on for more than a year before some of the other players started figuring out it was things like magic items (cure potions for example) that were being taken and then disappearing, and then the party appointed a PC to be the companies in game quartermaster/accountant because the problem had gotten so bad that party survival was being threatened.  Maybe in another three years I will have got them to the point that they actually reread those notes before the session to refresh themselves on what to do or what they have on their character sheet.It's not that the players are stupid - in fact a couple of them are absolutely brilliant.  It's that they have their RPG expectations set by Blizzard rather than things like TSR, Chaosism, or on the cRPG front Infocom, Origin Systems, and Sierra (or even Lucasarts).   The don't expect to make choices or investigate things, and they certainly don't expect it to require thought.In the early days of cRPGs, it was implicit that the goal was to get the computer to act as a good dungeon master - a sort of recreation of the naturalistic experience of PnP play utilizing the strengths of a computer (and without the need for a social group).   Now I've got the problem that players except a DM to act like the computer, only the computers aren't actually getting more DM like but less so.   Even something like Diablo III compared to Diablo I is a huge step backwards in making the game act like a DM.  The Diablo I game engine acted like a DM in that it actually generated new 'creative' maps with new features every time you replayed it.   The Diablo III game engine does not really do that - it just toggles a few minor binary features so that they may or may not appear.   In that sense, the engine has gotten more 'stupid' despite major advances in the presentation of the game and attempts (lame ones granted) at a more developed story.UPDATE: Speaking of Diablo III, probably the case study in the dumbing down of cRPGs is Act III where the supposed greatest general and strategist of hell, literally takes on the role of quest giver to the PC by explicitly telling the PC at every single stage exactly what the PC needs to do in order to defeat him.  And he continues to do this even after the PC continually defeats him, each time expressing his disbelief that the PC could ever defeat him.  It is a joke even among fans of the game.   That is to say, the makers of Diablo III were more than willing to make their game mockable, than they were to risk even a moment of a player experiencing frustration that they didn't know exactly what to do next.Oh, and "Look.  More footprints."</blockquote>

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