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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 4591776" data-attributes="member: 30001">Let me reframe your question in a way that makes it more humorous and yet more fitting to what my answer to this is: You've worked on making the dynamics of your world (player choice, etc.) as close to the real world as possible. The real world presents people with choices with infinite complexity, often inscruitable purposes, and often important consequences. And so what you've observed as a consequence is that your players act like people do in the real world - they fret about their choices, debate the consequences, reconsider their allegiances and strategies, etc. Mission accomplished! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /> The DnD game world exacerbates these issues because it almost encourages a adventuring party composition made up of people with drastically different backgrounds and outlooks. It's exactly what *would* happen in a situation where an elf, a dwarf, a necromancer, and a berserker all met in a bar. Yes, character development would occur when the beserker and necromancer started arguing. No, the two would probably *not* drop the argument at some point and then decide to risk their lives together in the Caves of the Unknown.  Yes, I think our DMing styles are very similar and I've had these problems in the past. Various playing groups over the years have come to the conclusion that it's largely their responsibility to make sure that their characters are compatible as designed - this is more than just alignment. For example a bunch of stealth characters in a party with a tank. The tank resents getting attacked by all the monsters, the stealth characters resent the tank constantly giving away their position. It takes some experience playing in your kind of game for players to work through these things.  See - your game simulates real life very closely <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />  AFAICT your expectations are entirely meta. To simplify, the game world you've set up mirrors reality, the PCs act like people do in reality, and you're not entertained because it's not heroic. Heroic action adventures are built around simplifications - otherwise they'd be character studies. I think the best solution to your problem is to accept that simplifications and meta-gaming are really a necessary component of heroic adventuring. I'm just talking about achieving a balance (and I think you're on that track anyway), not dispensing with your campaign details.  Yes, information dispensing by the DM is a huge subject in itself. Basically, as a simulationist IMO you should recognize that you are not physically capable of describing all of the information that a real person who lived for 20-or-so odd years in your campaign would have. You're not really capable of describing, in words, EVERYTHING that a character would see in any given location - every possible transaction between NPCs that might be observed in a bar for example. There's no way that your words, no matter how detailed, could cover all of the reality that a person present in an area can perceive with a combination of their five senses and intuition. As a result, in spite of your (and my) simulationist leanings, we have to accept, as DMs, that our job is to synthesize things that have meaning to the characters - and that can drift uncomfortably close to railroading at times but I think it's unavoidable. I basically tell my players this, and tell them that my descriptions are basically me sorting through the detail of my world and trying to present them with a view of things that I think would best fit their characters priorities.  Yea - having them sit around and be passive and have stuff happen to them is NOT why you've designed all this stuff for your game world in the first place. As I understand your goals, you'd really want the players to be creative with the elements you've designed, which means taking the initiative. You want the players to carefully think about consequences.  But you're stuck with having to play out Time in your campaign world, and like every other aspect of the game it requires some consent from the players. In the real world, Time passes without anyone's consent, and there's no expectation that the world will make anything interesting or entertaining for anyone. Also, as an inhabitant of the real world, I can live my life without having to get agreement from a psychotic dwarf and flighty elf that I'm forced by the gods to hang out with. Again, what passes for an interesting DnD game (esp. human moderated) is not plausible, setting aside even dragons and wizards and stuff. It's not plausible from a human psychology perspective and I really think it requires some degree of metagaming, railroading, etc. to make work.</blockquote>

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