Some Problem Players

[jedipotter]

Three come to mind:

1.The Cheater They often try to add a plus or two or three for every roll. Or they often forget penalties or anything negative. And so on and so on.

2.The Zipper They are trying to zip through the adventure in just a couple minutes....so they can, sit around and do nothing? It's common enough to have the players avoid roll playing (''eh, we don't talk to them and look for something to kill''), but it gets worse when they rush through combat too. They don't seem to want to play the game just finish it.

3.The Easy Mystery Solver Oh..this one. A typical game of mine has a lot of mysteries. I like to have lots of things for the players to find and discover. But enter the solver. They just want to solve the mystery, in a second or two. They some how miss the idea that ''X has been unknown for a thousand years'' and think if they just walk down the street they should be able to find it. They just don't grasp the concept of a clue, or that a mystery might take more then a minute to solve. If they can ''just solve it'', then it is ''too hard'' and they just shut down.

But I'm not asking how to deal with that players, I can do that (Muhahahaha). I'm asking why they act/think the way they do. Any ideas?

1.Why bother trying to cheat at a game where everyone is just having fun?

2.Why do they even want to play? What is the point if you just skip over everything? If you did do things the way you wanted, and finished an adventure in like an hour, what would you do then?

3.Why is it so hard to take some time and effort to solve a mystery? What, really, is the point of solving everything so there are no mysteries left?

[nedz]

There could be any number of reasons for these behaviour patterns.

Here are some possibilities

1.

Insecurity — can't risk loosing
Competitiveness — Someone else's character is stronger
Disconnect— Doesn't take the game seriously enough, so doesn't care about the rules


2 and 3 probably have the same driver

Impatience
Low attention span


Without more information about the players it's hard to know for sure.

[Amphetryon]

Mysteries are really difficult to do well within 3.5's rules set. Between the various Divination spells and the Gather Information Skill (with all the ways to improve a given Skill to the realm of "auto-success" territory), the only way to reliably keep things a mystery from a determined adventurer is a pile of anti-Divination spells. If said pile of anti-Divination spells are in effect, the PCs either trudge off to find a guy who knows (Gather Information), or force the person(s) keeping the secret to give it up. . . or shrug and go back to the things that 3.5 excels at modeling: fighting things, gathering loot, and shopping.

In a 3.5 D&D game where neither the Divination approach nor the Gather Information approach is showing any signs of success, many a Player will (rightly?) come to the conclusion that the DM no longer wants the PCs to use the rules of the game in order to interact with the game world. That can be a frustrating conclusion for many a Player.

[Segev]

Mysteries are hard to run well, period. Mysteries are all about information control. You have to make sure the PCs can acquire information to lead to the next clues and have enough pieces to put it all together, but you can't hand it out too fast or readily or it's both not believable and not really all that much of an accomplishment. And sometimes what seems obvious to you from the clues you've handed out will never occur to your players, while others they'll put together 1 and 12 and get 42 because they knew the other 31 bits already, or intuited them, or because it was actually a lot less mysterious than you thought.

Mystery-solving is very hard to translate into game mechanics, which means that the player is more important than the character, and Ditzy Donna who wants to play Sherlock Jane needs you to hand her every bit of the puzzle and explain three times how it goes together, while the Dirk Tective (who goes by his first initial, "D."), playing his clueless Barbarian, figured it out from the first two and a half clues and is gnashing his teeth in frustration that he has to hold back or feed it all to Donna.

You often wind up with the party not having a clue and the DM leading them around by the nose just showcasing set piece after set piece until it's all explained to them, much like the poorer-done mystery movies and novels. Well-done ones that have the clues everywhere run the risk of the audience figuring it out before the "brilliant" detective main character(s). It takes really well-done mysteries to have the clues all there, but have them be something that the main characters will put together before the audience at least 95% (so the audience needs a nat 20) of the time.

And when the audience is playing the main characters, and the audience has different talents than the characters they're playing, using mechanics to drop the clues and put them together without giving the whole thing away is even harder.


Finally, to the main topic of "problem" players who want to solve mysteries quickly... most people read mystery novels, watch movies, and TV shows because they lack the patience and skill to doggedly pursue oblique clues that they may not even recognize as clues in real life. It is a level of impatience, but it's also a feeling of making no progress.

I have often noticed DMs think the players are rocketing along, making all kinds of headway and possibly throwing his pacing into the dump heap by the sheer tonnage of information they gain each session...while the players feel like they've never learned anything new or useful, and like everywhere they go they hit a brick wall. Players need to feel a constant sense of progression. They need to feel like they learned something new with each investigation effort. And what they need to learn is probably more than you, the DM, think they do, or they will feel like they've learned literally (not figuratively, literally) nothing. Like there was no new information they hadn't heard before.

Doling it out in managed chunks that gives a clear sense that they've uncovered another hidden corner of the plot that suggests a bit more of the overall shape, while not just giving the whole thing away so fast it's unbelievable that nobody's solved it before, is hard. It's even harder when you consider that Search rolls can fail, as can Gather Info checks, and yet they can also succeed magnificently. Add in character stats like "Intelligence" and "Wisdom" which might arguably represent that the player wanted the PC to be better at this than he, the player, is, and...well.

It's. Very. Hard. And it's usually not the player's fault when they get frustrated or screw things up. When I say it's the DM's, I don't mean it in the sense that "he should have known better." I mean it in the sense that it is often beyond a DM's ability. It's a learning experience, and you just have to keep practicing. Learn your players as much as their characters, and know your mystery inside and out, and learn through painstaking practice how much and what sort of information to leave lying around where in the game world so your players will find it in just the right way. And then reward them for figuring things out faster than you expected by making the mystery deeper, if needs be, but don't deny them their short-term victory.

[DeadMech]

Mysteries are not easy to write. How often do you go to a movie and you or someone else figures out the big plot twist half way through? Alternatively how often does it seem that even hours after the movie you and your friends can't understand how everything came together without it being a plothole.

Another problem with mysteries or really anything in general is that somethings are more oblivious to spectators than to people directly involved. Your players probably have allot of things to keep track of and pay attention to that are distracting them from the clues. It may be helpful if they get stuck trying to figure it out the mundane way to take a step back and retell the story from an outsiders perspective.

One of the most frustrating things I find is when I'm watching something on youtube like a let's play or a dnd campaign. Someone will miss some piece of information and suddenly get stuck, spending 3 or 4 minutes in utter confusion about some event, accomplish nothing and then just dismiss it when they can't figure it out. Meanwhile the whole time I've literally been sitting there pointing my finger at the screen saying "IT'S RIGHT THERE!"

As for your problem with cheaters... Well it's human nature. Just because something is just for fun doesn't mean that someone isn't being compelled to "win"

On the other hand though don't blame malice for what can easily be explained by ignorance. Or however that saying goes. Sometimes people make mistakes. It may even be subconscious. I tend to notice that most of my mistakes would favor my side. Or at least I get called on my mistakes more often by people who's side loses out from a mistake.

[Rosstin]

You can have mysteries in DnD, but high level magic will definitely jack them up.

I don't generally run mysteries in DnD. Mysteries are very easy to run without any system at all, because it's all about information.

That said, I've definitely run some very successful mystery games. However, it should be noted that I generally spend twice as much time preparing them as I do running them. A lot of your prep will be cut through by player cleverness or ignorance. I've often thought that the most efficient way to run mystery games would be to develop an adventure, then run it for 2 or 3 groups so I could get more "value" out of it.

However, I'm also a VERY inefficient preparer. I always spend at least as much time planning as the players do playing. This is part of the reason I don't DM very often. Attempting to spend less time than I need usually results in a rough game. I just haven't properly developed my improvising skill to the point where I don't need to prepare.

[Gnome Alone]

the things that 3.5 excels at modeling: fighting things, gathering loot, and shopping.Ah yes, the "River City Ransom" school of thought.

[Story]

2 and 3 probably have the same driver

Impatience
Low attention span



There's another possible reason for #2 - boredom. If you place me in a dungeon that consists of entirely of featureless rooms full of random MM entries (yes this actually happened), I'm going to try to get back to that city that had actual characters in it as fast as possible.

It also makes sense from an IC perspective. If you have a job to do, you'll probably want to just get it over with.

[Morphie]

I think the Zipper and generally the players that usually don't want to talk and just want to skip to combat has to do with the fact that good role-play doesn't have the same immediate awards XP-wise as defeating a monster. So they just want to skip to the dice-rolling, get closer to evolve their char and be done with it. I know that it depends on the DM, but usually it's an unfair fight between role-playing and Roll-playing.

[Grod_The_Giant]

#1 can also crop up when the dice are being nasty. It's really, really frustrating when you're playing Batman and keep rolling natural 1s on Intimidate checks. My character concept says I'm the scariest mother#$^%@# around, and I'm not going to let a few $%^(#@$ dice say otherwise!

#2... I don't know. It could be lack of interest in the specific adventure. It could be lack of interest in the game-- they're only there to hang with their friends. It could be impatience with the actual mechanics. It's hard to analyze without more info.

#3 is probably coming from one of two directions. It may be that the player really isn't that fond of mysteries. He's there for the fighting, or the talking, or for the story, or for the friends, or for any one of the dozens of other reasons we play RPGs. He just doesn't like mysteries, specifically.

The second likely answer is that you've misjudged the information flow. I once played in a campaign where I felt like we spent session after session spinning our wheels, never really getting closer to figuring out what the villains' plot was. The GM, meanwhile, thought that we'd uncovered just about everything. The player might feel like the clues that they're being given are too stingy, or that nothing they do really tells them anything. You, meanwhile, think you're giving them plenty of information.

Also, everything DeadMech said is fantastic and true.

[Thrudd]

It's possible some people don't really want to play at all, but are doing it because their friends do (which could be due to low attention span or other issues, or they just don't really find it fun). Maybe they only feel that way occassionally, but if someone acts like they don't want to be there and aren't really into playing...it probably means they don't really want to be playing. When that happens regularly or with more than one player, it may be time to mix up your "game night" a little and do something else occasionally.
(This is assuming, of course, your gaming group are also your friends, and not a random group of people recruited from the local gaming store or university club)