Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6170096" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think I ever indicated that the world is static.  If the players fail to stop the BBEG, his plot goes forward with all its consequences.   NPCs will try and fail to stop the BBEG on their own, and various events will occur according to the logic of the setting.But, at some point if I just let that happen it means the PCs are moved from protagonist status to observer status, and are left behind by the story to engage in comparatively meaningless tasks not involving saving the world.That's the problem here.   I try hard to utilize the three clue rule.   At this point, despite missing a few clues, I think that the players have tons of options for tracking down the BBEG.   If it was merely a matter of them being out of clues, I could use an event to dangle another clue in their faces... which I may have to do anyway.   But the problem has not been the lack of information, but the lack of follow up.   At this point, the players have been in my game for literally hundreds of hours.  Yet they are still playing with very little finesse or comfort.  Early on I presented linear adventures in small worlds - in essence giving the players little or no choice and railroading them onto the plot.   This was because I knew they were inexperienced and because there wasn't yet time for them to have accumulated information about the setting - I had to give them an initial set of three clues.I then added the twist of having a linear path and a red herring (a dead end).   At that level of complexity, they've never been able to go forward.  They get stuck, unable to choose between the two approaches.   Worse, they literally prefer to attempt 'brute force' solutions to any sort of branching problem.   They persistently investigate all dungeons using the right hand rule.  I've thought of metagaming that behavior, but they have a knack of getting into the dungeon from the most round about direction.  They have a knack of picking the right door last.   The closest I've ever come to a TPK is  in a dungeon they early on realized that they could track the BBEG by following the path of the open doors (and disabled traps) he'd left behind him in his exploration.  After having been very successful with that, they suddenly decided to open a door and walk into a telescoped death trap that practically had a neon sign on it.   They've recently suggested the equivalent of searching the entire world systematically for a volcano that fits a description they've been given, despite being in a city famous for its knowledgeable scholars.   Worse, they've suggested buying a map and searching 'all remote areas'.  If presented with a list of suspects, they basically assault each suspect on the list until they find the one that seems both evil and capable of defending themselves.   Because there are very few high level characters in my campaign world, this generally 'works' for detecting a foe - if they can fight back when a group of PC's rough them up, chances are they are indeed the bad guys.   The are generally never able to understand why the clues pointed to this person.   I of course could easily thwart this behavior and cause it to work against the players, but if I do so it would probably be campaign wrecking.And the thing is, these are not unintelligent people.  Some of them are downright brilliant.  I'm at a loss to explain it, but it's getting frustrating.  I feel reduced to putting '!' marks over the heads of quest givers and giving them a map with 'go here' marked with a big yellow target.</blockquote>

Verification