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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2000053" data-attributes="member: 26473">Some players are highly risk averse with regard to their characters, and on one occasion I  suggested that a player retire his character and find something else to do with his time if his adventurer didn't want to adventure.One question to ask is this: as GM, do you spring too many difficult challenges on your players? Do they have assassins stalking them in their beds every night, and dragons swooping down upon them every day? Are the risks they face reasonable, such that the characters' lives between adventures...well, do they have lives between adventures at all?IMX some GMs go totally overboard with too many traps, too many encounters, too many this, too many that, too many the other, and never give the characters a chance to come up for air. The players become risk averse due to the sense that literally the whole world is out to kill them all the time. It's one thing to ratchet up tension - it's another thing to have an otyugh waiting in the bottom of every outhouse in the land. Players screwe by bad GMs tend to be the most cautious, IMHO.As a GM I try to reward acts of derring-do, rather than punish them by making every action so dangerous that there is little hope of survival. Some encounters are cake-walks, some are comic relief, and a few are extremely challenging - the characters get to build up their confidence before its tested. I also try to use the "v-word" (verisimilitude) to guide my encounters - would a room really have a dozen traps in it? how did the occupants remember to deactivate and then reset them all - stuff like that.You might try talking with your players about this and see how they feel. If they insist on running away, let them find a safe place to hide, and then fold up your notes and go home, explaining that they've avoided the assassins and now the characters are free to live out their lives in the back of the cave/under the floorboards of the house/whereever.</blockquote>

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