Legendary Actions and More of Talakeal's Gaming Horror Stories

[Lord of Shadows]

It was supposed to be the segue into the next campaign, like the Samuel L Jackson dropping hints about the Avengers at the end of Iron Man.

1- What? How does a fight work a segue?

Easily. The so-called "final" or "end of campaign" fight results in the discovery of some previously unknown/hidden agenda or piece of information that ties into the start of a new campaign. It is not uncommon at long term gaming tables for threads to connect subsequent campaigns together. Sometimes the connection is bluntly obvious, sometimes it's more subtle. It's often up to the players and DM if they want to pursue it or not, or switch to something else. Like those movies where the end is left open for a sequel... sometimes there is one, sometimes not.

[zinycor]

Here's the thing; some people are sore losers. If they lose, they will make every attempt to shift the blame, and if they win they do everything in their power to take all the credit. Bob is certainly in this camp, he isn't happy unless he is both dominating the enemy and outperforming the rest of the team. He isn't the only player I have ever had like that, my brother has a similar personality, albeit to a much lesser extent, and he isn't even the worst person of that type I have ever played with, but he is the only guy like that in my group.

Based on Bob's bitching and a few out of context quotes of mine, you have decided that my game is too hard and that my players don't enjoy close battles, and that I should ignore what my other players past and present are telling me, my own personal feelings on the matter, all the advice I have gotten from my friends and family, all of the guidelines in every DMG, all of the advice I have gotten from gaming guides and blogs, all the advice I have gotten from texts on game design, my knowledge of human psychology, my knowledge of sports and board games, and even conventional folksy wisdom like "without evil there can be no good" or that episode of the Twilight Zone where a gambler goes to Hell and finds it takes the form of a casino where he always wins. Heck, I was literally listening to a gaming Podcast on the drive home from work where they were interviewing several guests and unanimously agreed that without the risk of player death all accomplishments in D&D are meaningless. Even in this very thread there have been people who are arguing against super easy games, like the one guy who, rather crassly, said that at that point the DM should just put the dice down and give the players hand-jobs.

So again, do you really think its reasonable for me to completely ignore everything I am being told for the sake of stroking Bob's ego and appeasing a few strangers on the internet?


Also, you seem to be giving me conflicting messages in this post. You are talking about the DM "making"* the battle close is a bad thing, but then you are going on to say that the DM should "fix the fight" so that it looks closer than it actually is, which is really confusing me.

*: Also, how does the DM "make" a battle close? Do you simply by following the rules in the DMG and creating a balanced encounter? Or does it involve the DM fudging? Or what?

Is kicking Bob out of the group not an option? or something you haven't seen people write? because am pretty sure I did write about it several times.

So no, the solution is not to ignore ever advice you ever gotten but actually take the good advice you have received.

[Kane0]

Also, how does the DM "make" a battle close? Do you simply by following the rules in the DMG and creating a balanced encounter? Or does it involve the DM fudging? Or what?

There's more than one way to do it. Depending on the edition of D&D you can follow the encounter guidelines (usually on the harder end), you can pack additional content to the encounter such as secondary 'encounters' and hazards, alter the tactics used in the encounter to counter the PCs, implement unusual or entirely new mechanics to throw a wrench in the works, manipulate the game math (including fudging), and tons more.

[NichG]

Here's the thing; some people are sore losers. If they lose, they will make every attempt to shift the blame, and if they win they do everything in their power to take all the credit. Bob is certainly in this camp, he isn't happy unless he is both dominating the enemy and outperforming the rest of the team. He isn't the only player I have ever had like that, my brother has a similar personality, albeit to a much lesser extent, and he isn't even the worst person of that type I have ever played with, but he is the only guy like that in my group.

Based on Bob's bitching and a few out of context quotes of mine, you have decided that my game is too hard and that my players don't enjoy close battles, and that I should ignore what my other players past and present are telling me, my own personal feelings on the matter, all the advice I have gotten from my friends and family, all of the guidelines in every DMG, all of the advice I have gotten from gaming guides and blogs, all the advice I have gotten from texts on game design, my knowledge of human psychology, my knowledge of sports and board games, and even conventional folksy wisdom like "without evil there can be no good" or that episode of the Twilight Zone where a gambler goes to Hell and finds it takes the form of a casino where he always wins. Heck, I was literally listening to a gaming Podcast on the drive home from work where they were interviewing several guests and unanimously agreed that without the risk of player death all accomplishments in D&D are meaningless. Even in this very thread there have been people who are arguing against super easy games, like the one guy who, rather crassly, said that at that point the DM should just put the dice down and give the players hand-jobs.

So again, do you really think its reasonable for me to completely ignore everything I am being told for the sake of stroking Bob's ego and appeasing a few strangers on the internet?


Quite a ways back, I'm pretty sure I outlined three scenarios, and this advice pertains to one of those scenarios specifically. The three scenarios were:

1. Don't game with Bob
2. Game with Bob but intentionally make the decision that you don't care if Bob enjoys game
3. Game with Bob and try to make a game that he will be happy with

All of this assumes that we're talking about case #3. Case #2 is, well, I think its bad behavior for a DM but it's logically coherent at least (and if a player is forcing themselves into your game, then saying 'okay, but if you don't like it that's on you' isn't any more unreasonable than the player's behavior in that case). Case #1 is and has been my foremost recommendation.

What I'm arguing against is saying 'Because I heard all of this advice from elsewhere, Bob must be wrong if he's saying that he feels my game is too difficult.' Because the game can be too easy for your tastes and too difficult for Bob's tastes. There has also been quite a few examples where you say 'see, my game is easy!' but then present anecdotes and evidence that don't look like what you'd see in an easy game. That suggests further that maybe, while Bob has problems, you also have problems in gauging how the material you present is actually perceived by players in your group, Bob included. If that's the case, it will be a problem even if you game with other players, and it's a very common problem that DMs have that difficulty looks different from their standpoint of omniscience about the game's contents than it does from a player's standpoint.

Given your attitude about things like the three clue rule and how that sounds like it would trivialize the difficulty of the game, that further supports my impression that your judgment about difficulty is likely strongly influenced by your own point of view in which you already know the answers, and that you aren't doing a good job of putting yourself in your players' shoes and thinking about how the game you run might be experienced by them.

That kind of mismatch can easily lead to the sorts of conflicts you've described as having with Bob and Brian, and now Sarah.

So moving past 'I got this advice from a reputable blog, so it must be good' into 'I understand what I am doing, how it is perceived, and how that advances my goals - and choose how to run my game accordingly' is an important step for not having those difficulties in the future with a new group. Otherwise, when there are these mismatches in expectations, you're going to periodically have players throw fits, blame you, behave strangely, flub the game, lose trust, insult you, etc and continue to not understand why or what could be done about it.



Also, you seem to be giving me conflicting messages in this post. You are talking about the DM "making"* the battle close is a bad thing, but then you are going on to say that the DM should "fix the fight" so that it looks closer than it actually is, which is really confusing me.

*: Also, how does the DM "make" a battle close? Do you simply by following the rules in the DMG and creating a balanced encounter? Or does it involve the DM fudging? Or what?

I'm not saying 'the DM should fix the fight' as some kind of rule. But, if I have the goal of my players becoming confident and comfortable with their characters' abilities (which is generally among my goals), then close fights where it looked easy but turned out difficult are counterproductive to my goal, whereas close fights where it looked hard but turned out easy advance my goal.

And if it comes to designing the encounter, the psychology of the opposition, etc, there are absolutely things I can do which make the former likely to happen, and things I can do which make the latter likely to happen. Enemies which have abilities that are devastating if responded to incorrectly but easily countered with careful thought and who telegraph their abilities well ahead of time support the structure of 'looks hard, actually easy'. On the other hand, enemies that seem simple but have a hidden trick (like a war troll that looks like a troll until you find that you wasted your action on a fireball) go the other direction - 'looks easy, actually hard'.

The point is to note that my goal is not achieved by the players having a hard time with the encounter, its only achieved by the players being able to successfully make the encounter easier for themselves. An encounter which is too easy might not satisfy that goal if it doesn't motivate the players to actually do that (though this need not be the case if the players find their characters' abilities sufficiently cool to be inspired to find new ways of using them independent of the strength of the opposition). But its not that it fails because it was too easy, its that it fails because it didn't provide motivation; I can keep the 'easy' part if I can provide the 'motivation' part in another way. A pattern I learned from another DM is to use what they called a 'popcorn fight' shortly after any major change in a character's abilities or scope; the purpose of this fight isn't to challenge anyone or even to pretend to that, it's to give the players the ability to calibrate the effects of their new mechanics and better understand how their stuff works. Because the motivation exists ('I have a new ability and I want to try it out'), you don't need any sort of challenge.

If my goals were different, then maybe there would be a context in which what I should do is to design encounters that are crushingly difficult and make players weep with despair. Tournament games are an example where that might be appropriate - since they're intended to be a competition, finding the peak manageable difficulty makes the test of relative player ability most accurate at the high end of the scale. That doesn't mean that I'm saying 'DMs should use crushingly difficult encounters' or 'DMs shouldn't use crushingly difficult encounters' - they're neither inherently good nor inherently bad, they're tools. But whether or not you should use them depends on your goals, your players, and the context of the rest of the campaign.

[Kane0]

A pattern I learned from another DM is to use what they called a 'popcorn fight' shortly after any major change in a character's abilities or scope; the purpose of this fight isn't to challenge anyone or even to pretend to that, it's to give the players the ability to calibrate the effects of their new mechanics and better understand how their stuff works. Because the motivation exists ('I have a new ability and I want to try it out'), you don't need any sort of challenge.


Ah, the test run encounter. The only thing I’ve found random encounters to be truly useful for.

[patchyman]

Talakeal, the members of your group were acting fairly insensitively to you, but I would not conclude that they were holding a grudge or acting intentionally maliciously without further investigation.

My recommendation would be to approach Brian and Sarah one on one and ask them something like “Just thinking about the last session in my campaign. Was that last boss mistake really that bad?” Based on their feedback you will hopefully learn whether the “last boss” thing really bothered them or they were simply making a joke that fell flat.

[Talakeal]

@NichG: Sorry if my last reply was a little heated. I just really hate the "appeal to authority" thing as it often makes it impossible to provide any evidence for a position, and a position without evidence is really easy to dismiss.


Is kicking Bob out of the group not an option? or something you haven't seen people write? because am pretty sure I did write about it several times.

I am pretty sure I have answered this several times.

It isn't an option right now.

First off, he is a friend and a quality play-tester, and he (usually) adds more to the game than he detracts from it, so I don't really want to kick him out. But, more importantly, he is the one who got this group together and lives at the place where we play, so kicking him out would almost certainly require dissolving the entire group and starting fresh.


So no, the solution is not to ignore ever advice you ever gotten but actually take the good advice you have received.

The problem is that everyone thinks that their advice is the best advice.


What people have said is: time lost to setbacks is a factor, whether the game is explicitly competitive is a factor, the feeling of winning versus the feeling of losing is a factor. You've said "ignoring those things you said were factors, why is there a difference?". Well, we told you why - its those factors you just chose to ignore. You say 'in fair competitions a 50% loss ratio is normal, why can't RPG players handle the feeling of losing?', ignoring when we said that we don't view tabletop RPGs as primarily competitive games, and therefore there are different standards at play. We said 'time matters' and you said 'I'm not sure that time matters'. We've said that winning feels better than losing, and your response was to say 'it shouldn't/you're wrong for feeling that way' rather than 'hm, okay, even though that causes problems with my style it just means I have to figure out how to work around that'.

What does "time lost due to setbacks" actually mean though? We generally run one adventure a session, if it takes a lot little longer or a little shorter based on how quickly the players kill a monster, you are still doing one adventure per session.

Furthermore, there is never negative progression. The players always end the session with more XP and treasure than they started with, no matter how bad it goes. Likewise, they have never ended a session where they didn't move the narrative forward and accomplish some storyline goals. Likewise, the players learn more about both the lore and the mechanics of the game, so they are improving along with their characters.

The only way I can see this being accurate is if you exclusively look at narrative losses and ignore both mechanical and narrative gains.

Likewise, ideally the game should be fun, and time spent playing isn't "time lost" even if you aren't working towards a goal. In the best game I ever played in, we would often spend entire sessions without advancing the plot at all, I remember one session spent doing nothing but planning a party and coordinating our outfits, and it was a blast.

Which again, really comes to the root of my issue: Why can't people have fun playing a game that they aren't "winning," and why is this so much more of an issue in an RPG?

Shouldn't the lack of competition make the loss easier to handle?

Also, I never said that winning doesn't feel better than losing. What I said was that an earned win / close game feels better than a one sided victory.



That makes some of the things you've said particularly alarming. For this kind of style, knowing your players personally and individually and adapting content, theme, difficulty, etc very carefully to their tastes is very important. You're asking for a lot of control and a lot of trust from the players in this style of game, and the responsibility that goes along with that is that you'll use those tools to customize the game to each player to a degree that would be impossible for them to get just grabbing a book off the shelf and running a module. So when you say things like that you prepared individual encounters a year ahead of the campaign start, or give indications that you're basically ignoring preferences that your players express because you don't understand or share those preferences yourself, those are big warning signs for me.

It's also why I keep coming back to the point that the players matter. And not all players are going to enjoy this style of game. I would not run this style of game for your players (well, I wouldn't run any game for your players, but if for some reason I had to...).

My current campaign is very much not the style of campaign I prefer. I like high immersion campaigns which are primarily social and exploration focused, although I certainly don't mind tactical combat. My players have always been much more "crunch" minded than I have been, which means my campaigns have always tended towards high combat dungeon crawls. Heck, I remember a few years ago someone on the forum telling me to "get over myself and run a dungeon crawl," because I was running an outdoor skirmish game and the some of the players were upset with the other players for deciding to kill the other sides women and children after defeating their warriors.

My current game was a (failed) experiment in running an old school sandbox / west marches style campaign, because I have been reading a lot of blogs that go on and on about the virtues of that sort of gaming. I tried it, found that my players didn't like the randomness, and found that I didn't like the possibility of failing the campaign as a whole or wasting everyone (including the DM's) time that would be required to make that sort of game work.

Again, I get that you are telling me to do what works for my players not what is "normal", but I still get the impression that you are looking down on me for doing, what I can tell, is a very normal style of gaming; grabbing an adventure path / module or creating a "megadungeon / sandbox" and then running it for whatever players happen to show up with whatever characters they happen to bring to the table.

Now, as far as customizing the game for the individual players, this is thorny territory.

My players always tell me they want "fair" and "balanced" encounters and don't want me tailoring the campaign to them.

I am sure I have told the "cycle of stupidity" story before. Basically, when I first started gaming with my former group (of which Brian and Bob were members) I would adjust the scenario difficulty to the table. If they wanted to play high op T1 casters, I would give them equally optimized enemies and cosmic adventures, if they played "by the book" character I would throw standard enemies out of the monster manual. As a result, the players would always try and up their min-max game, which would result in harder encounters, which would result in more min-maxxing. The players dubbed it the cycle of stupidity and told me that they felt frustrated because they were just spinning their wheels.

Now, the players (primarily Bob and Dave) said they wanted an objective standard to be compared to. So, as a compromise, I banned or fixed truly broken game mechanics immediately with house rules, and then ran them against scenarios that were created around the objective difficulty laid out in whatever system we were playing, and made encounters that were designed to be overcome by a generic party rather than tailoring encounters to challenge specific abilities.

Now, in hindsight, I have come to believe that what Bob and Dave actually meant was (and I am sorry if I sound condescending with this phrasing) they want to be able to play one dimensional characters and engage in one sided power fantasies.

Again, the problem is that I am bad at reading between the lines. Players always tell me my fights are "unbalanced" or "unwinnable" when they lose, so I try very hard to stick to objective standards or challenge, but what they players may really mean is that the game is too hard.

Likewise, I am now getting contradictory messages from Bob. For example, he got mad at me during the "sneeze-ogre" encounter for tailoring an enemy to beat him, but he also got mad at me during the "ghost-hydra" encounter for not tailoring that fight to their party which didn't have a lot of CC at the time. (Or the temperament. During that conversation I told him it was a perfectly beatable encounter, his monk from the last campaign would have tied the guy up in knots no problem, to which he responded "no she wouldn't, because it would never occur to her to subdue an enemy without lethal force).

So, yeah, I am starting to realize that all of this talk about "balance" and "tailoring encounters" and "railroading" is just Bob not liking to lose and looking for someone or something to blame it on. I actually hard a similar conversation about him with Brian yesterday, he prefers wizards, and when he plays a generalist he complains about how he isn't powerful enough, and when he plays a specialist he complains that he isn't versatile enough, and Brian told me to ignore it as feedback, Bob just likes to complain.



The big problem is that you don't recognize when what you're doing is a gotcha versus not, and your habits and preferences for restricting information have a tendency to make you slip into the 'gotcha' region. Since you also don't seem to recognize why this is bad or what harm it can cause, you're not very motivated to make changes to take this risk into account. The result being, your players often end up expressing that they felt things were unfair.

Have I mentioned how frustrating this gotcha thing is?

I still don't have a working definition of it, and I am not sure if it is even something that I am doing in my games, yet it seems everyone is convinced that it is the source of my problems. Now this whole thing has gone meta, and now you are saying that it is my very inability to understand the concept of a gotcha that is my big problem.


Quite a ways back, I'm pretty sure I outlined three scenarios, and this advice pertains to one of those scenarios specifically. The three scenarios were:

1. Don't game with Bob
2. Game with Bob but intentionally make the decision that you don't care if Bob enjoys game
3. Game with Bob and try to make a game that he will be happy with

All of this assumes that we're talking about case #3. Case #2 is, well, I think its bad behavior for a DM but it's logically coherent at least (and if a player is forcing themselves into your game, then saying 'okay, but if you don't like it that's on you' isn't any more unreasonable than the player's behavior in that case). Case #1 is and has been my foremost recommendation.

What I'm arguing against is saying 'Because I heard all of this advice from elsewhere, Bob must be wrong if he's saying that he feels my game is too difficult.' Because the game can be too easy for your tastes and too difficult for Bob's tastes. There has also been quite a few examples where you say 'see, my game is easy!' but then present anecdotes and evidence that don't look like what you'd see in an easy game. That suggests further that maybe, while Bob has problems, you also have problems in gauging how the material you present is actually perceived by players in your group, Bob included. If that's the case, it will be a problem even if you game with other players, and it's a very common problem that DMs have that difficulty looks different from their standpoint of omniscience about the game's contents than it does from a player's standpoint.

Given your attitude about things like the three clue rule and how that sounds like it would trivialize the difficulty of the game, that further supports my impression that your judgment about difficulty is likely strongly influenced by your own point of view in which you already know the answers, and that you aren't doing a good job of putting yourself in your players' shoes and thinking about how the game you run might be experienced by them.

That kind of mismatch can easily lead to the sorts of conflicts you've described as having with Bob and Brian, and now Sarah.

So moving past 'I got this advice from a reputable blog, so it must be good' into 'I understand what I am doing, how it is perceived, and how that advances my goals - and choose how to run my game accordingly' is an important step for not having those difficulties in the future with a new group. Otherwise, when there are these mismatches in expectations, you're going to periodically have players throw fits, blame you, behave strangely, flub the game, lose trust, insult you, etc and continue to not understand why or what could be done about it.



I'm not saying 'the DM should fix the fight' as some kind of rule. But, if I have the goal of my players becoming confident and comfortable with their characters' abilities (which is generally among my goals), then close fights where it looked easy but turned out difficult are counterproductive to my goal, whereas close fights where it looked hard but turned out easy advance my goal.

And if it comes to designing the encounter, the psychology of the opposition, etc, there are absolutely things I can do which make the former likely to happen, and things I can do which make the latter likely to happen. Enemies which have abilities that are devastating if responded to incorrectly but easily countered with careful thought and who telegraph their abilities well ahead of time support the structure of 'looks hard, actually easy'. On the other hand, enemies that seem simple but have a hidden trick (like a war troll that looks like a troll until you find that you wasted your action on a fireball) go the other direction - 'looks easy, actually hard'.

The point is to note that my goal is not achieved by the players having a hard time with the encounter, its only achieved by the players being able to successfully make the encounter easier for themselves. An encounter which is too easy might not satisfy that goal if it doesn't motivate the players to actually do that (though this need not be the case if the players find their characters' abilities sufficiently cool to be inspired to find new ways of using them independent of the strength of the opposition). But its not that it fails because it was too easy, its that it fails because it didn't provide motivation; I can keep the 'easy' part if I can provide the 'motivation' part in another way. A pattern I learned from another DM is to use what they called a 'popcorn fight' shortly after any major change in a character's abilities or scope; the purpose of this fight isn't to challenge anyone or even to pretend to that, it's to give the players the ability to calibrate the effects of their new mechanics and better understand how their stuff works. Because the motivation exists ('I have a new ability and I want to try it out'), you don't need any sort of challenge.

If my goals were different, then maybe there would be a context in which what I should do is to design encounters that are crushingly difficult and make players weep with despair. Tournament games are an example where that might be appropriate - since they're intended to be a competition, finding the peak manageable difficulty makes the test of relative player ability most accurate at the high end of the scale. That doesn't mean that I'm saying 'DMs should use crushingly difficult encounters' or 'DMs shouldn't use crushingly difficult encounters' - they're neither inherently good nor inherently bad, they're tools. But whether or not you should use them depends on your goals, your players, and the context of the rest of the campaign.



Yes, I consider that to definitely be on the high end of difficulty. I would expect and tolerate that from things like 'Dungeon Crawl Classics' modules for tournament-style play, which are short bursts of high stress activity with a pretty sharp terminator for the consequences of success or failure (in that context, if there even is a 'next module', its going to involve new pre-gens or new characters anyhow). I wouldn't like to play in such a game extending over a period of months or years.

For example, in a tournament event at a local game club we played 'Crypt of the Devil Lich' over three sessions, which has (purportedly, though I'm not sure we encountered all of them when we played) 21 encounters in it, and we made it to the second to last fight and then lost (some died, some ended up fleeing through the Well of Worlds in that room to a random plane). So that's about 5% per encounter, and just a bit higher at session level: one loss per three sessions rather than one per four. The developers of the module refer to it as a 'killer dungeon', a 'meat-grinder', etc (https://goodman-games.com/blog/2017/01/02/forgotten-treasure-crypt-of-the-devil-lich/). Edit: I might count 2 losses, since there was something on the first floor that left a lot of the party strength-drained and at least one character relying on potions and spellslots of Bull's Strength to not be at zero strength and paralyzed, which would make it 10% instead.

This might actually be worth starting another thread over; but nothing I have seen indicates that my campaign is unusually hard. It doesn't seem any more difficult than other campaigns I have played in or read about or modules I have read / run, and it actually seems significantly less deadly than the encounter guidelines given in the DMGs.

I have never played in an actual "old school" meatgrinder campaign, but I have read lots of APs and in those it seems like character death and parties being forced to retreat to avoid a TPK are common occurrences, tending to happen at least once per session.

Note that in your example, you have 21 encounters, with 1 near loss and 1 TPK. That is significantly more deadly than anything I have ever run. Note that my campaign ran for almost two years, (about 250 encounters) only includes two actual "losses," one caused by sheer stupid randomness and the other by the players being choosing to die based on stubbornness and poor communication; the rest of the losses (still only about every 20 sessions) are just very temporary setbacks or narrow victories.


Quite a ways back, I'm pretty sure I outlined three scenarios, and this advice pertains to one of those scenarios specifically. The three scenarios were:

1. Don't game with Bob
2. Game with Bob but intentionally make the decision that you don't care if Bob enjoys game
3. Game with Bob and try to make a game that he will be happy with

All of this assumes that we're talking about case #3. Case #2 is, well, I think its bad behavior for a DM but it's logically coherent at least (and if a player is forcing themselves into your game, then saying 'okay, but if you don't like it that's on you' isn't any more unreasonable than the player's behavior in that case). Case #1 is and has been my foremost recommendation.

What I'm arguing against is saying 'Because I heard all of this advice from elsewhere, Bob must be wrong if he's saying that he feels my game is too difficult.' Because the game can be too easy for your tastes and too difficult for Bob's tastes. There has also been quite a few examples where you say 'see, my game is easy!' but then present anecdotes and evidence that don't look like what you'd see in an easy game. That suggests further that maybe, while Bob has problems, you also have problems in gauging how the material you present is actually perceived by players in your group, Bob included. If that's the case, it will be a problem even if you game with other players, and it's a very common problem that DMs have that difficulty looks different from their standpoint of omniscience about the game's contents than it does from a player's standpoint.


So basically, I have been trying to do #3 for years, but I am starting to feel more and more like Bob isn't actually giving honest feedback and drifting into #2.

Here is the thing, I take everything everybody says very seriously, even people who are almost certainly just trolling / lashing out in anger.

As I said above, I try very hard to make Bob happy, but the more I think about it, the more I think he is actually just trying to find excuses to mask his failings and to make differences in preference sound like failings on other people's part.

Bob tells me that he wants a balanced game and I do my best to provide it, yet we still end up with him calling me a killer DM and me thinking he is just a sore loser who won't admit he wants to play a 1-sided power fantasy.

And again, I have trouble reading between the lines; some fights I get in trouble for tailoring the enemy to the PCs, some fights I get in trouble for not doing it. It makes it really hard for me to actually parse feedback.

I fully agree that I have trouble reading my players or imagining things from their point of view.



Given your attitude about things like the three clue rule and how that sounds like it would trivialize the difficulty of the game, that further supports my impression that your judgment about difficulty is likely strongly influenced by your own point of view in which you already know the answers, and that you aren't doing a good job of putting yourself in your players' shoes and thinking about how the game you run might be experienced by them.

I have said this before, but just to be clear: I do not think that knowledge trivializes difficulty and I do not use ignorance to provide a challenge.

I do:

1: Feel that giving clues so obvious that they cannot be missed would hurt the narrative.
2: Enjoy using more subtle clues as they enhance verisimilitude and reward observant players.
3: Reduce the difficulty of encounters where a lack of information will make them harder.
4: Want to reward players (or avoid punishing players for) investing in knowledge or information gathering abilities.

And again, the three clue rule was never meant to apply to every piece of knowledge in the game, or really about information gathering at all. It is about making sure that there are not "bottle necks" in the plot, where there is only one way to proceed. Also, in my experience players (myself included) tend to be very dense, and three clues is nowhere near enough to solve most puzzles.



I'm not saying 'the DM should fix the fight' as some kind of rule. But, if I have the goal of my players becoming confident and comfortable with their characters' abilities (which is generally among my goals), then close fights where it looked easy but turned out difficult are counterproductive to my goal, whereas close fights where it looked hard but turned out easy advance my goal.

And if it comes to designing the encounter, the psychology of the opposition, etc, there are absolutely things I can do which make the former likely to happen, and things I can do which make the latter likely to happen. Enemies which have abilities that are devastating if responded to incorrectly but easily countered with careful thought and who telegraph their abilities well ahead of time support the structure of 'looks hard, actually easy'. On the other hand, enemies that seem simple but have a hidden trick (like a war troll that looks like a troll until you find that you wasted your action on a fireball) go the other direction - 'looks easy, actually hard'.

The point is to note that my goal is not achieved by the players having a hard time with the encounter, its only achieved by the players being able to successfully make the encounter easier for themselves. An encounter which is too easy might not satisfy that goal if it doesn't motivate the players to actually do that (though this need not be the case if the players find their characters' abilities sufficiently cool to be inspired to find new ways of using them independent of the strength of the opposition). But its not that it fails because it was too easy, its that it fails because it didn't provide motivation; I can keep the 'easy' part if I can provide the 'motivation' part in another way. A pattern I learned from another DM is to use what they called a 'popcorn fight' shortly after any major change in a character's abilities or scope; the purpose of this fight isn't to challenge anyone or even to pretend to that, it's to give the players the ability to calibrate the effects of their new mechanics and better understand how their stuff works. Because the motivation exists ('I have a new ability and I want to try it out'), you don't need any sort of challenge.

So what did you mean by "the encounter is only close because the DM made it so"?

[zinycor]

I don't get how you speak of people who openly mock you and disrespect you as friends. *scrubbed* so I guess I'll now leave this discussion.

[NichG]

What does "time lost due to setbacks" actually mean though? We generally run one adventure a session, if it takes a lot little longer or a little shorter based on how quickly the players kill a monster, you are still doing one adventure per session.

Furthermore, there is never negative progression. The players always end the session with more XP and treasure than they started with, no matter how bad it goes. Likewise, they have never ended a session where they didn't move the narrative forward and accomplish some storyline goals. Likewise, the players learn more about both the lore and the mechanics of the game, so they are improving along with their characters.

The only way I can see this being accurate is if you exclusively look at narrative losses and ignore both mechanical and narrative gains.

If I do something that's meant to move things along and find out that now we're spending another hour on the thing I wanted to get past (especially if it seems as though the reason it will take another hour is because of my action), it doesn't really change that feeling if, in the end, we eventually get past it no matter what. 'You gained XP, don't complain' is a bit of a fig leaf on the matter of the actual gameplay feel. I've for example been in a campaign where the DM really liked trying to make travel feel like it took as long as the distance you were going, which meant that we had something where it felt the campaign was building to some kind of climax but where the resolution was in another city, and then we had three sessions of random encounters, preparing camp, etc on the road. Even though we were gaining XP and treasure, that basically didn't matter because we weren't really progressing the elements of the game that, at that point in time, we cared about. And so it was extremely tedious.

Also, what you're describing here is hard for me to square with the fact that you describe your campaign as a sandbox. How is it that no matter what the players do, the game progresses by the same amount each session?



Likewise, ideally the game should be fun, and time spent playing isn't "time lost" even if you aren't working towards a goal. In the best game I ever played in, we would often spend entire sessions without advancing the plot at all, I remember one session spent doing nothing but planning a party and coordinating our outfits, and it was a blast.

Which again, really comes to the root of my issue: Why can't people have fun playing a game that they aren't "winning," and why is this so much more of an issue in an RPG?


Gaming isn't inherently fun simply by virtue of being gaming. It has to engage with something that the player cares about or enjoys, and there isn't some gold standard game that everyone must enjoy or they're the problem. I've been in a campaign where many of the players enjoyed having 6 hour long sessions that were entirely 'shopping trips', buying gear upgrades for their characters and assigning feats and things like that. I hate spending game time on that kind of thing and felt that those sessions were a total waste of my time. That doesn't make their enjoyment and less real, nor does their enjoyment make the fact that I disliked that kind of gaming any less real.

You can't assume that, because you had fun with something, if other people don't have fun with it then they're wrong. Your players' sense of what is fun is something you have to account for and work with, its not something you can declare on their behalf. Maybe you can find a group of players who have fun when they're losing; I would guess that such players exist. But saying 'but, players should be able to enjoy losing' isn't an answer to a situation in which you have players who don't.



Shouldn't the lack of competition make the loss easier to handle?


Um, no? It's quite the opposite. Competitions are about 'who will win' (which is really a proxy for 'who is better?' or 'who is dominant?'), but tabletop RPGs are collaborative rather than competitive (there can't really be a competition between players and DM due to the extreme power asymmetry, even if the DM strictly follows CR guidelines and things like that). Losses are progression in a competition, but in a tabletop RPG unless they're handled very cleverly, losses are just denial of agency, return to the status quo, or even steps backward. Expressing player agency in a loss is not something I will say is impossible, but it's going to be a 'Yeah? Show me' where I will be very picky and critical about the details if a DM claims to be doing it - because I think it would be very easy for a DM to believe that the way they handle losses is empowering without it feeling like that from the player perspective..



Again, I get that you are telling me to do what works for my players not what is "normal", but I still get the impression that you are looking down on me for doing, what I can tell, is a very normal style of gaming; grabbing an adventure path / module or creating a "megadungeon / sandbox" and then running it for whatever players happen to show up with whatever characters they happen to bring to the table.


What I am looking down on is hiding behind "normal" as an excuse to not change things that are problematic or just not working. E.g. you yourself say that your current campaign is a failed experiment, but then justify it as 'but grabbing a module and just running it is normal'. Saying that something is "normal" is basically just abandoning responsibility for thinking about it and mimicking the gaming styles of other people without actually trying to understand why those styles worked when they worked and why those styles might fail. I will admit that is something I look down on.

Note, I'm not saying 'don't run experimental campaigns' or 'don't try things you don't understand'. I'm saying that for those experiments to be at all useful, you have to learn from them, and that means that when things fail its important to put that failure in a context that will let you make better decisions in the future. Justifying things as 'it was normal, so it should have worked' is counterproductive.



Now, as far as customizing the game for the individual players, this is thorny territory.

My players always tell me they want "fair" and "balanced" encounters and don't want me tailoring the campaign to them.

...

Now, in hindsight, I have come to believe that what Bob and Dave actually meant was (and I am sorry if I sound condescending with this phrasing) they want to be able to play one dimensional characters and engage in one sided power fantasies.


It's okay to use this phrasing, as long as you don't take it as an excuse to consider those desires less real or less valid. I would agree that this is more or less what Bob and Dave actually want. The fact that it sounds condescending doesn't invalidate them wanting it. Accepting that this is something a player could truly and honestly want, even if it sounds like its shallow or meaningless to you, is a useful step to make. Treating it as serious and real to them will better help you navigate whether compromises are possible, as opposed to offering compromises that sound completely one-sided to them. And yes, the situation is made more complex by the fact that they won't just come out and own that position (but given that it would likely be subject to ridicule and condescension from at least the other players in the group, that's not so surprising).



Have I mentioned how frustrating this gotcha thing is?

I still don't have a working definition of it, and I am not sure if it is even something that I am doing in my games, yet it seems everyone is convinced that it is the source of my problems. Now this whole thing has gone meta, and now you are saying that it is my very inability to understand the concept of a gotcha that is my big problem.


Basically, the gotcha thing in of itself isn't the source of all your problems, but it's indicative of a mismatch between how you see what you're doing and how other people would experience it. And that sort of mismatch can be a large source of problems, including things that exacerbate trust issues and style differences.

What it comes down to is that you're doing a lot of things that you would describe one way and that seem okay to you, but some of them are okay and some of them are really not okay. The fact that you not only can't tell the difference, but that when people repeatedly point it out to you you have difficulty even accepting their accounts as to how those things make them feel, is a giant warning sign. It means that, for example, if you accidentally did something to piss someone off, you might never actually understand what it is you did that set them off, keep doing it unawares, and as a result develop the view that they're just someone who is perpetually pissed off for no real reason - which basically would make getting along with them in any kind of functional way impossible.



This might actually be worth starting another thread over; but nothing I have seen indicates that my campaign is unusually hard. It doesn't seem any more difficult than other campaigns I have played in or read about or modules I have read / run, and it actually seems significantly less deadly than the encounter guidelines given in the DMGs.


The DMG encounter guidelines really don't give any sort of indication of deadliness. Take for example (in D&D 3.5 since this is where I'm familiar with specific cases), these are all CR 8 encounters (some variation of all these occur in Goodman Games modules I've played, chosen specifically for being surprisingly difficult given their CR):

- 8 Dire Weasels, which each deal 1d4 Con drain per round if they land a single attack on someone, attacking from holes in the walls of a narrow passage.

- 1 Hellwasp swarm, which can't be damaged by weapons, flies, can stack its abilities with a nearby cadaver (say from a previous encounter) in order to effectively be a 2-stage boss, doesn't need to roll to hit, and has an automatic save-or-lose-your-action effect within its radius.

- 5 Allips, which have flight, incorporeality, and wisdom drain on each attack, and provoke 5 saves per party member at the opening of combat to basically force them to not act for 2d4 rounds. Combine with individualized attacks from within the floor, and they effectively have +8 AC on top of the incorporeality and can pick off individual PCs without breaking the Fascinate effect on the others.

These are not from GGG modules, but are pretty dangerous:

- 14 Lv1 Wizards behind murder holes of a fort, casting Magic Missile in a focus-fire pattern against single targets each round. Basically 50 damage per round to a single target that can only be avoided by a specific hard counter. Use partially charged wands to stay within NPC WBL while giving the firing squad staying power.

- A Lv8 Wizard who ambushes the party's camp at night, dropping fireballs on them from 720ft up in the air from stealth+Greater Invisibility (using scrolls to expand spell slots), and using the distance and condition penalties for Spot and Listen by strict ruling (that's a -72 to Spot from distance, -40 from invisibility, ...).

These are also CR 8 encounters, not from any particular module:

- A single Lv8 Fighter who uses Power Attack, Toughness, Weapon Focus, etc as their feats.

- 4 Dire Boars in an open forest environment. They can do some damage and have Diehard as a special trait.

- 3 Trolls

If you throw the former against a Lv6 party, then in both of the stat drain examples they have no recourse to actually recover without purchasing spellcasting services from a higher level caster, meaning that all subsequent encounters they have for quite some time will be more difficult. But I would say that a Lv6 party can take out the single Lv8 fighter with no real issue or resource expenditure, and while the boars might be dangerous if they focus-fire on a squishy character, but the 8 dire weasels focus-firing would also likely kill someone (conservatively about 10 points of Con drain plus 25 or so damage if half land their hit and then the entire group is wiped out in the subsequent round).

What's trivial and what's lethal depends on a lot more than CR.



I have never played in an actual "old school" meatgrinder campaign, but I have read lots of APs and in those it seems like character death and parties being forced to retreat to avoid a TPK are common occurrences, tending to happen at least once per session.

Note that in your example, you have 21 encounters, with 1 near loss and 1 TPK. That is significantly more deadly than anything I have ever run. Note that my campaign ran for almost two years, (about 250 encounters) only includes two actual "losses," one caused by sheer stupid randomness and the other by the players being choosing to die based on stubbornness and poor communication; the rest of the losses (still only about every 20 sessions) are just very temporary setbacks or narrow victories.


You previously listed 12 near-losses in 40 sessions, which you said corresponds to a 5% per-encounter rate. That's different than the 1 per 20 sessions which you're listing here.



As I said above, I try very hard to make Bob happy, but the more I think about it, the more I think he is actually just trying to find excuses to mask his failings and to make differences in preference sound like failings on other people's part.


It's dangerous for you to claim this, because a lot of what you've been doing in this thread has been expressing your preferences for things like difficulty (close fights are better than one-sided fights) and saying that for example the people who prefer the one-sided victories are toxic, immature, etc, and 'should' be able to enjoy losing (with the implication that, if they don't, there's something wrong with them). So you've also been kind of engaging in what you're saying that Bob does here.



And again, the three clue rule was never meant to apply to every piece of knowledge in the game, or really about information gathering at all. It is about making sure that there are not "bottle necks" in the plot, where there is only one way to proceed. Also, in my experience players (myself included) tend to be very dense, and three clues is nowhere near enough to solve most puzzles.


If your experience is that three clues isn't enough, then the natural reaction to that should be to increase the availability of information, not to decrease it... Also, you're doing the 'meant to' thing again - people aren't bringing up Three Clues because there's a checklist of things your game must have to be signed off on, they're bringing it up because it's a good example of the mismatch between how easy a DM might think something is to figure out and how it looks from the player perspective, and it gives a concrete strategy for overcoming that mismatch without requiring the DM to just see things perfectly from the players' point of view.


So what did you mean by "the encounter is only close because the DM made it so"?

So lets say I have something like a potential red dragon fight coming up. The players roughly know the age category, they have a rough familiarity with the difficulty of dragon fights, etc, and think that they have a good chance at it. However, I set things up so that the dragon obtained a casting of Energy Immunity (Cold) that day, is using metabreath feats to change the elemental type of its attack to something that the party happens to not have prepared resistance to, etc. If the party then just barely scrapes by, they're not going to think that this victory was narrow because the fight was really hard but they were really awesome. They're going to think the victory was narrow because the dragon was propped up to be harder than they thought it was. So something that should have been a straightforward fight was instead a close call.

That's a success in that they didn't lose, but it's also a failure in that it felt like it should have been easy, but instead was difficult.

[Kane0]

Which again, really comes to the root of my issue: Why can't people have fun playing a game that they aren't "winning," and why is this so much more of an issue in an RPG?

Shouldn't the lack of competition make the loss easier to handle?

Also, I never said that winning doesn't feel better than losing. What I said was that an earned win / close game feels better than a one sided victory.


https://youtu.be/c-2lnnKz5J8
https://youtu.be/n-5gb0sVK7o
https://youtu.be/sLXLlJ7FhJU

[Talakeal]

Honestly, NichG, I am not really sure if we are going to get anything productive out of this. It seems like you and I have a fundamental disconnect in philosophy when it comes to gaming, and perhaps life in general, and I am starting to doubt that anything productive is ever going to come out of this discussion.

I mean, when we are disagreeing with such fundamental things as "being a sore loser is a character failing" and "things are more satisfying when you have to work towards them," I am not really sure we share enough common ground to actually have a meaningful or productive discussion.


Also, what you're describing here is hard for me to square with the fact that you describe your campaign as a sandbox. How is it that no matter what the players do, the game progresses by the same amount each session?

Basically, I can't run a pure sandbox because we are running the game at someone else's house in a room where I can't leave anything set up from one session to the next, and I am a fairly prop-heavy DM. Instead, I have a bunch of "points of interest", and the players decide which one they are going to go to next at the end of the next session, which allows me time to prepare, to know which models and maps to bring, etc.

Throughout the entire course of the game, there was never an occasion where it took more than one session to explore one of these sites or a session where they had time to visit more than one.


You previously listed 12 near-losses in 40 sessions, which you said corresponds to a 5% per-encounter rate. That's different than the 1 per 20 sessions which you're listing here.

Go back and read the session by session count.

The players were only forced to fall back twice (in the first session and against the "sneeze-ogre") and only suffered 2 TPKs (one from the random encounter with the revenant and one because they thought the easiest way to deal with the "ghost-hydra" was to grab the artifact and let it kill them).

All of the rest are simply close battles which you deemed "feel like a loss".

[Koo Rehtorb]

For what it's worth, I think people have pretty consistently been overreacting on this particular subject. No, there isn't anything unusual at all about liking RPGs in which the PCs losing is commonplace, and it isn't even close to being commonplace in your campaign anyway from the sounds of it. Frankly, your campaign sounds dull to me from the other end of things, no penalty respawns sounds unbelievably tedious and completely free of any meaningful tension. There's a relatively well known saying even "losing is fun". And furthermore, it is well within your rights to run the sort of game you want to run. I don't even have any particular problem with looking down on people for their tastes. I'm going to go ahead and say that I find "We want to be invincible gods amongst men effortlessly crushing the world beneath our boots" childish and off-putting.

With all that said, your problem is the same problem it has been from the start. Your players are not well suited to your game. Pointing out that their taste is dumb and bad isn't going to make them any more well suited to it. I find your desire to keep running things for them bewildering. But you've said before that bad gaming is better than no gaming for you. So with that in mind I'll suggest something I think I suggested before. Stop caring about what they want. Run the game you want to, ignore them when they complain about it, get yours. It's thoroughly dysfunctional, but what else is new? If they keep showing up then they're clearly getting at least something out of it.

[Talakeal]

For what it's worth, I think people have pretty consistently been overreacting on this particular subject. No, there isn't anything unusual at all about liking RPGs in which the PCs losing is commonplace, and it isn't even close to being commonplace in your campaign anyway from the sounds of it. Frankly, your campaign sounds dull to me from the other end of things, no penalty respawns sounds unbelievably tedious and completely free of any meaningful tension. There's a relatively well known saying even "losing is fun". And furthermore, it is well within your rights to run the sort of game you want to run. I don't even have any particular problem with looking down on people for their tastes. I'm going to go ahead and say that I find "We want to be invincible gods amongst men effortlessly crushing the world beneath our boots" childish and off-putting.

With all that said, your problem is the same problem it has been from the start. Your players are not well suited to your game. Pointing out that their taste is dumb and bad isn't going to make them any more well suited to it. I find your desire to keep running things for them bewildering. But you've said before that bad gaming is better than no gaming for you. So with that in mind I'll suggest something I think I suggested before. Stop caring about what they want. Run the game you want to, ignore them when they complain about it, get yours. It's thoroughly dysfunctional, but what else is new? If they keep showing up then they're clearly getting at least something out of it.

I pretty much agree. I also think the no penalty respawn is a bad mechanic, but I wanted to go easy on the new players, generally don't run high lethality games anyway, and the players were complaining about randomness and acting extremely over cautious (to the point where they were simply wasting more IRL time than I could stand) when I used the "mishap table" for being defeated and so I just chucked the whole thing out. Not that it ever came up again in natural play.

As for the second paragraph, I pretty much said the same thing to NichG on the previous page; I used to take Bob's concerns very seriously and tried to change my game to accommodate them, but over time it just seems like he gets mad when he loses and is just looking for excuses to justify his anger and make his loss someone else's fault, and am starting to just tune him out.

[NichG]

Honestly, NichG, I am not really sure if we are going to get anything productive out of this. It seems like you and I have a fundamental disconnect in philosophy when it comes to gaming, and perhaps life in general, and I am starting to doubt that anything productive is ever going to come out of this discussion.

I mean, when we are disagreeing with such fundamental things as "being a sore loser is a character failing" and "things are more satisfying when you have to work towards them," I am not really sure we share enough common ground to actually have a meaningful or productive discussion.


It's probably part of that fundamental disconnect in philosophy, but I don't think its necessary to agree on values or morality to determine ways to work with someone or solve a problem. If you disagree with Bob's values and say to them 'I disagree with your values and won't run this kind of thing for you' then that's one thing, but if you disagree with Bob's values and then say 'I just don't understand why Bob does what he does, shouldn't he have the same values as me?!' then that's unproductive.

I mean, I could just conclude 'oh, Talakeal is so judge-y, that makes him a bad person', but what would be the point of that? How would that make any interaction for anyone better? How would it resolve any issues?



Go back and read the session by session count.

The players were only forced to fall back twice (in the first session and against the "sneeze-ogre") and only suffered 2 TPKs (one from the random encounter with the revenant and one because they thought the easiest way to deal with the "ghost-hydra" was to grab the artifact and let it kill them).

All of the rest are simply close battles which you deemed "feel like a loss".

I mean, we can quibble over what goes in each category, since technically we fled through the well of worlds the one time rather than actually having a TPK, and the other time we won and pressed on but it just felt grueling...

[Lord of Shadows]

https://youtu.be/c-2lnnKz5J8
https://youtu.be/n-5gb0sVK7o
https://youtu.be/sLXLlJ7FhJU

Thumbs up for these three... the whole series looks good, although the other episodes deal more in electronic games that RPG's, but a lot of the basic concepts are good.

[Kane0]

Thumbs up for these three... the whole series looks good, although the other episodes deal more in electronic games that RPG's, but a lot of the basic concepts are good.

Yes they were (are?) primarily videogaming focused but have branched out to topics on history, mythology, writing, RPGs, and some others

[Talakeal]

https://youtu.be/c-2lnnKz5J8
https://youtu.be/n-5gb0sVK7o
https://youtu.be/sLXLlJ7FhJU

Thanks for the links!

Who is this new guy? What happened to the Extra Credits team?

Also, thank you for not posting the "perfect imbalance" video. It is a pile of nonsense, but people keep linking it to me when it doesn't even apply to the conversation at hand.


I mean, we can quibble over what goes in each category, since technically we fled through the well of worlds the one time rather than actually having a TPK, and the other time we won and pressed on but it just felt grueling...

The thing is, you keep making what I see as false statements, and then redefining the terms to make your statement correct.

Temporary set backs and close victories are not TPKs, but you can't them as such to support your assertion that my campaign is extremely deadly; the three clue rule is about having multiple paths to proceed through the adventure, but you redefine it to mean telegraphing enemy abilities three times to support your assertion that I don't give enough information, etc.

I don't really know how you expect any other outcome to come from that besides quibbling over definitions.

[Kane0]

Thanks for the links!

Who is this new guy? What happened to the Extra Credits team?

Also, thank you for not posting the "perfect imbalance" video. It is a pile of nonsense, but people keep linking it to me when it doesn't even apply to the conversation at hand.


Dan left a while back to do his own thing, he’s got a channel on animation (i particularly liked his Breath of the Wild Climbing and Andromeda Facial animation vids). Remember it has been nearly a decade so many of the team have finished whatever they were doing when the channel started and have moved on.

Yeah they have some dud videos occasionally (most recently on Normalizing [Godwins Law]). The imbalance one i think they sorta missed the mark just a little but werent totally off base. Then again i’m no stranger to the concept of balancing by kind rather than magnitude.

[NichG]

The thing is, you keep making what I see as false statements, and then redefining the terms to make your statement correct.

Temporary set backs and close victories are not TPKs, but you can't them as such to support your assertion that my campaign is extremely deadly; the three clue rule is about having multiple paths to proceed through the adventure, but you redefine it to mean telegraphing enemy abilities three times to support your assertion that I don't give enough information, etc.

I don't really know how you expect any other outcome to come from that besides quibbling over definitions.

The three clue rule isn't just about having multiple paths to proceed. It arises from the observation that DMs often place one path forward, which the players don't discover, and then wonder 'Why didn't the players discover the path forward? It was right there!' leading to not just the game bogging down, but the DM and players getting frustrated with each-other.

Your campaign doesn't have a bottleneck, but it does have instances where you've said that you laid out what was going on pretty clearly, and that you don't understand why the players came to the wrong conclusion. So that's the point of contact in that example. The same reasoning that can be used to figure out 'ok, a potential solution to the difficulty of not being able to get around the fact that the DM knows what paths forward they already put in and therefore underestimates how hidden they are is to just triple the number of paths' applies to 'ok, a potential solution to the fact that even when you place enough clues that you think it's too much your players still don't get it would be to try tripling the amount of information you provide about situations'.

[patchyman]

This might actually be worth starting another thread over; but nothing I have seen indicates that my campaign is unusually hard. It doesn't seem any more difficult than other campaigns I have played in or read about or modules I have read / run, and it actually seems significantly less deadly than the encounter guidelines given in the DMGs.

I have never played in an actual "old school" meatgrinder campaign, but I have read lots of APs and in those it seems like character death and parties being forced to retreat to avoid a TPK are common occurrences, tending to happen at least once per session.


I’m trying to understand. If you are not running D&D, what criteria are you using to conclude that your encounters are less deadly that the DMG guidelines (also, which DMG, since tules have changed considerably over the years)?

[Talakeal]

The three clue rule isn't just about having multiple paths to proceed. It arises from the observation that DMs often place one path forward, which the players don't discover, and then wonder 'Why didn't the players discover the path forward? It was right there!' leading to not just the game bogging down, but the DM and players getting frustrated with each-other.

Your campaign doesn't have a bottleneck, but it does have instances where you've said that you laid out what was going on pretty clearly, and that you don't understand why the players came to the wrong conclusion. So that's the point of contact in that example. The same reasoning that can be used to figure out 'ok, a potential solution to the difficulty of not being able to get around the fact that the DM knows what paths forward they already put in and therefore underestimates how hidden they are is to just triple the number of paths' applies to 'ok, a potential solution to the fact that even when you place enough clues that you think it's too much your players still don't get it would be to try tripling the amount of information you provide about situations'.

The miscommunications aren't about clues though, they are typically about me (or sometimes another player) flat out telling someone something and then them either misunderstanding and thinking they are being tricked. That has nothing to do with the three clue rule except for semantics.

And again, I don't want to make clues so obvious that they can't be missed as it hurts verisimilitude and punishes players for investing in knowledge skills or the like. Sometimes an observant player will pick up on a clue and get a bit of insight on what is to come, sometimes they don't and they learn by doing. I don't have puzzles with only one solution or surprises that wipe the party, so lack of foreknowledge isn't a huge issue.

The problem is the lack of trust between me and Bob, if he doesn't see something coming and it hurts his character, he will assume I just made it up on the spot to screw him over. So the only real question is, will me hammering every point home with a 10-ton hammer so Bob can't possibly miss it actually improve trust between us?


Edit: Also, another problem with Bob is his "accusations" aren't consistent and I have to guess at the real motivation behind them. For example, as I mentioned up thread, he was complaining about how tightly my encounters were balanced and saying he rarely ends sessions with a significant number of high level spells, to which I responded that this is good because I am shooting for close battles and that means my skill at judging difficulty is improving. Now, people took that as me dismissing his concerns (probably rightly so), and so I tried to have that conversation again with him the other night, but now he claims that he feels that I "pull encounter difficulty out of a hat" and that my game isn't nearly tightly balanced enough!


I’m trying to understand. If you are not running D&D, what criteria are you using to conclude that your encounters are less deadly that the DMG guidelines (also, which DMG, since tules have changed considerably over the years)?

Well, I did play D&D for a number of years, primarily my formative ones, and I learned most of the softer stuff like adventure design from running D&D.

I am still running a D&D style game (fantasy d20 dungeon crawler with 1 DM and a team of 4-6 PCs each playing a member of a party of adventurer's) and while the specific crunch might change, the softer stuff like what makes a good plot or an appropriate risk / challenge still applies.

And besides, my current game is over, I am using this thread right now to think about what I want to do in the future, and there is a very high chance that will be vanilla D&D.

[NichG]

The miscommunications aren't about clues though, they are typically about me (or sometimes another player) flat out telling someone something and then them either misunderstanding and thinking they are being tricked. That has nothing to do with the three clue rule except for semantics.

And again, I don't want to make clues so obvious that they can't be missed as it hurts verisimilitude and punishes players for investing in knowledge skills or the like. Sometimes an observant player will pick up on a clue and get a bit of insight on what is to come, sometimes they don't and they learn by doing. I don't have puzzles with only one solution or surprises that wipe the party, so lack of foreknowledge isn't a huge issue.

The problem is the lack of trust between me and Bob, if he doesn't see something coming and it hurts his character, he will assume I just made it up on the spot to screw him over. So the only real question is, will me hammering every point home with a 10-ton hammer so Bob can't possibly miss it actually improve trust between us?


Edit: Also, another problem with Bob is his "accusations" aren't consistent and I have to guess at the real motivation behind them. For example, as I mentioned up thread, he was complaining about how tightly my encounters were balanced and saying he rarely ends sessions with a significant number of high level spells, to which I responded that this is good because I am shooting for close battles and that means my skill at judging difficulty is improving. Now, people took that as me dismissing his concerns (probably rightly so), and so I tried to have that conversation again with him the other night, but now he claims that he feels that I "pull encounter difficulty out of a hat" and that my game isn't nearly tightly balanced enough!


Bob is a difficult case, so what I can think of that might work within a short timeframe would go against your other constraints (verisimilitude, etc). I also do think making Bob regain trust may risk the fun of the other players, so that requires care.

Basically, I'd start by trying to think of the moments when Bob got really intensely into something in a positive way (not necessarily what he says he wants, but when you observe him to really be excited during game). Then I'd distort the game to provide those things, while avoiding the things that set him off (generally, this seems to be any kind of setback, humiliation, or situation in which he has to give concessions or let someone else be in control).

The tricky thing is doing all that without ruining game for everyone else, including yourself. So to that, I'd try to keep an eye out for things that feel significant but don't actually matter so much, which can be used to make Bob feel in control. This can be something like going along with Bob's readings of the rules in a rules debate, or letting a plan that doesn't make sense to you still work, etc.

In the long run, I think just avoiding things that are humiliating or which reduce Bob's feeling of being in control could gradually improve things. That might mean sometimes just stating things outright, though it doesn't have to be in all situations.

[patchyman]

Well, I did play D&D for a number of years, primarily my formative ones, and I learned most of the softer stuff like adventure design from running D&D.

I am still running a D&D style game (fantasy d20 dungeon crawler with 1 DM and a team of 4-6 PCs each playing a member of a party of adventurer's) and while the specific crunch might change, the softer stuff like what makes a good plot or an appropriate risk / challenge still applies.

And besides, my current game is over, I am using this thread right now to think about what I want to do in the future, and there is a very high chance that will be vanilla D&D.

Generally, I agree with this 100%...for non-combat encounters. D&D and similar games are extremely rules heavy when it comes to combat, so this is precisely the place where “my combats weren’t deadly according to the DMG” can absolutely be misleading to you.

The “Which DMG?” also stands. Older versions of D&D were notoriously deadlier than 4e or 5e, so it is possible that you are calibrating your scale against an older standard, which could be a problem if you are accommodating 3 newer players.

[Talakeal]

Generally, I agree with this 100%...for non-combat encounters. D&D and similar games are extremely rules heavy when it comes to combat, so this is precisely the place where “my combats weren’t deadly according to the DMG” can absolutely be misleading to you.

The “Which DMG?” also stands. Older versions of D&D were notoriously deadlier than 4e or 5e, so it is possible that you are calibrating your scale against an older standard, which could be a problem if you are accommodating 3 newer players.

3.0, 3.5, and 5E.

Also, it isn't the deadliness that is the problem, it is the number of close fights where it takes most of the PCs resources to finish and adventure.

[TexAvery]

So, possibly dumb question. Have you taken any advice from this thread? I've seen you dismiss it, I've seen you argue against it, and I've seen you insult it. I've never seen you say "I tried that thing one of you suggested and here's how it went". (I certainly may have missed it in this thread, but don't believe I can have missed much of it.). So, what are you looking for as a result of this thread? Is it just venting, or do you hope that if you can convince those of us here that your players will feel differently?

[Talakeal]

So, possibly dumb question. Have you taken any advice from this thread? I've seen you dismiss it, I've seen you argue against it, and I've seen you insult it. I've never seen you say "I tried that thing one of you suggested and here's how it went". (I certainly may have missed it in this thread, but don't believe I can have missed much of it.). So, what are you looking for as a result of this thread? Is it just venting, or do you hope that if you can convince those of us here that your players will feel differently?

Pretty sure I have answered this exact question word for word before.

It is mostly just venting, as it is mostly discussing things that happened months in the past in a campaign that has already ended. I will likely take a fair bit from it if I ever DM for this group again, but not a whole lost.

Actually getting useful advice from any thread is really hard, because people are not a unified consciousness and most people on the internet are a lot more critical and aggressive they are in real life; essentially every time you ask a question on the internet "Fifty percent of people say yes, fifty percent of people say no, one hundred percent of people agree you are stupid for asking the question."

Most of the advice boils down to "You have terrible players, kick them," or "Your players are right, you are terrible, completely change everything about your GMing style," neither of which I am willing to do, so only the more moderate advice is really useful or constructive.

And, in a broader note, there isn't really one problem. My players find something to complain about every encounter, but it is never the same thing, and I have no idea what my players are actually upset over, and so I tell the forum, and the forum assumes that they have a solution, to a problem that may or may not have ever been an issue in the first place. Take the whole "Gotcha monsters" thing, we probably spent 500 posts discussing it, but it only happened a handful of times in my entire campaign, if at all (depending on the definition), on the assumption of a single forum poster (I don't even remember who at this point) that it was the root cause of all of my problems when neither myself or my players think that it was ever a serious problem to begin with.

[Mr Beer]

Most of the advice boils down to "You have terrible players, kick them,"

That's good advice though.


or "Your players are right, you are terrible, completely change everything about your GMing style,"

That is not what "most of the advice is", most of the advice you have received is constructive, either 'drop these crazy people' or decent suggestions of how to improve.

The fact that you're so stubborn about this whole thing likely prompts most of the unhelpful advice that you do actually receive, because it's the equivalent of a guy trying to get honey by repeatedly jamming his bare arm into a beehive, complaining about the pain, asking beekeeper.com for help and then refusing to make any changes to his approach.

[Talakeal]

So, on the subject of gotchas, I found this gem in the 3.5 DMG "One way a DM can challenge their players is by using illusions and decoys so that the players will expend most of their high level spell slots before the actual encounter even starts." Now that would definitely by a "gotcha" right? Can you imagine my players reaction if I pulled something like that?


Also, I am going to have to be really careful with my words in the future around my players, that is for sure. For example, I had plans for a continuation of my current game (the thing I was foreshadowing with my epilogue), but I told my players that I needed a break and if I ran any campaigns in the near future they would be short term, semi-cannonical, prequel games rather than big serious affairs. Well, Brian and I were watching Heavy Metal the other night, and we got to the scene where the heroine is gratuitously putting on her armor, and I said that watching this inspires me for when he plays his character (a cheesecake female barbarian) again in the next campaign. Now, I was referring to the next campaign chronologically in universe, the one sequel to the one I just ran, but Brian assumed I meant the next game I ran. He didn't say anything at the time, but when the whole group got together to make characters for his game, he went on a rant to them about how I was just lying to them about running a different game because I referred to the sequel campaign as the next campaign, meaning the next one I would run.



Speaking of Brian's game, so we made our characters, and Brian has... concerns. I would like to help his game succeed, so I could use some advice to give him. Anyone want to discuss it here, or should I make a new thread?



That's good advice though.

That is not what "most of the advice is", most of the advice you have received is constructive, either 'drop these crazy people' or decent suggestions of how to improve.

The fact that you're so stubborn about this whole thing likely prompts most of the unhelpful advice that you do actually receive, because it's the equivalent of a guy trying to get honey by repeatedly jamming his bare arm into a beehive, complaining about the pain, asking beekeeper.com for help and then refusing to make any changes to his approach.

Maybe so, but it isn't really actionable.

Yeah, I agree that I am stubborn and defensive, which does probably form a counter productive feedback loop, I will own up to that, but a lot of the criticism I get seems to be completely wild assumptions not based on anything I have ever said or done, and I just feel compelled to argue with it instead.

A lot of the advice has been pretty drastic, and I am just not willing to drop players or radically change my game this far into it (keep in mind that when this thread really picked up, we only had ~4 sessions left and it has since completed).

I might be willing to try out a lot of the advice in the long run, but the more dramatic stuff (like giving players note cards will all of the monster stats / adventure notes) would have to be a short term thing as gaming would simply no longer be fun for me at that point.

[Kane0]

So, on the subject of gotchas, I found this gem in the 3.5 DMG "One way a DM can challenge their players is by using illusions and decoys so that the players will expend most of their high level spell slots before the actual encounter even starts." Now that would definitely by a "gotcha" right? Can you imagine my players reaction if I pulled something like that?

I would say a trick, yes; a gotcha, no. There isn't a threat to the PCs, and their normal or expected actions would still typically work just fine on the illusions/decoys. Their expectations have been subverted, but not in a way that invalidates previously established consistency.



Also, I am going to have to be really careful with my words in the future around my players, that is for sure. For example, I had plans for a continuation of my current game (the thing I was foreshadowing with my epilogue), but I told my players that I needed a break and if I ran any campaigns in the near future they would be short term, semi-cannonical, prequel games rather than big serious affairs. Well, Brian and I were watching Heavy Metal the other night, and we got to the scene where the heroine is gratuitously putting on her armor, and I said that watching this inspires me for when he plays his character (a cheesecake female barbarian) again in the next campaign. Now, I was referring to the next campaign chronologically in universe, the one sequel to the one I just ran, but Brian assumed I meant the next game I ran. He didn't say anything at the time, but when the whole group got together to make characters for his game, he went on a rant to them about how I was just lying to them about running a different game because I referred to the sequel campaign as the next campaign, meaning the next one I would run.

Speaking of Brian's game, so we made our characters, and Brian has... concerns. I would like to help his game succeed, so I could use some advice to give him. Anyone want to discuss it here, or should I make a new thread?

Odd Brian is odd, but for those of us who like to watch dumpster fires (no offense and pardon the expression) sure thing.



Yeah, I agree that I am stubborn and defensive, which does probably form a counter productive feedback loop, I will own up to that, but a lot of the criticism I get seems to be completely wild assumptions not based on anything I have ever said or done, and I just feel compelled to argue with it instead.

You were going great until the 'but' :smallbiggrin:



I might be willing to try out a lot of the advice in the long run, but the more dramatic stuff (like giving players note cards will all of the monster stats / adventure notes) would have to be a short term thing as gaming would simply no longer be fun for me at that point.

Most systems have those kinds of resources already available (like 5e's spell cards and 4e's monster cards), no extra effort required on your part.

[Great Dragon]

Speaking of Brian's game, so we made our characters, and Brian has... concerns. I would like to help his game succeed, so I could use some advice to give him. Anyone want to discuss it here, or should I make a new thread?

I'm still willing to try and help improve your games.
(as well as maybe learning things to improve mine)

Personally, I'd prefer a new thread for Brain's Game.
But, so long as there's an obvious indication on which is for your game
and what is for Brian's Game in here, it shouldn't be too big a deal.

[Quertus]

This thread is already too long for forum… taste/tech. Definitely start a new thread.

[Frozenstep]

So, on the subject of gotchas, I found this gem in the 3.5 DMG "One way a DM can challenge their players is by using illusions and decoys so that the players will expend most of their high level spell slots before the actual encounter even starts." Now that would definitely by a "gotcha" right? Can you imagine my players reaction if I pulled something like that?

I don't know how your players would react, but in my opinion (and I think I've shared it before), the "gotcha" part is where a normally smart decision based on past and present information is instead designed to be punished. And the part where that turns into a bad thing is where it feels like the DM is the one trying to get one over you rather than whatever is tricking you.

What's the difference? Presentation. Which is a slightly unhelpful way to describe the work that goes into setting up situations in a way that is both believable yet also designed to be entertaining, giving players appropriate chance to counterplay, and several other small things. As a DM, you are the only window into whatever world you are crafting that they can see through. So tricking your players is easy, you can simply not show information that would give them a chance to see through the trick. But people would rather be tricked by something that was in the window's view, but not obvious (like a cat in a bush that can be spotted if you're perceptive).

And to turn the example around, you are the only window into whatever your tabletop experience looks like for the rest of us. Opening that window wide enough to show everything is pretty difficult, so you can only show a part of your world. If you show us trees, it's easy to conclude there are more trees outside the direct view the window is giving us (and it can be even more confusing if we disagree on what a tree is, and you insist that there are no other trees outside the view of the window). That's kind of the unfortunate part of describing a situation that has so much more contextual information.

Anyway, good luck with the new campaign.

[Talakeal]

I would say a trick, yes; a gotcha, no. There isn't a threat to the PCs, and their normal or expected actions would still typically work just fine on the illusions/decoys. Their expectations have been subverted, but not in a way that invalidates previously established consistency.

Again, I am still lost as to what a "gotcha" is, but if that isn't one then I really have no clue.


Odd Brian is odd, but for those of us who like to watch dumpster fires (no offense and pardon the expression) sure thing.

Expect a new thread this weekend!


You were going great until the 'but' :smallbiggrin:

Note that I said "can't" not "shouldn't", I am owning up to my foibles, not trying to justify them.


Most systems have those kinds of resources already available (like 5e's spell cards and 4e's monster cards), no extra effort required on your part.

Well, I don't usually play D&D, and even when I do I use a lot of home brew, so it would still be an issue. But the bigger one is punishing players who invested in knowledge or information gathering skills and abilities, as well as the simple lack of drama and tension that results from failing to "show don't tell".

[Kane0]

Well, I don't usually play D&D, and even when I do I use a lot of home brew, so it would still be an issue. But the bigger one is punishing players who invested in knowledge or information gathering skills and abilities, as well as the simple lack of drama and tension that results from failing to "show don't tell".

Here's a fun way to handle it then:

Have the statblock printed, or photocopied if you wrote it out yourself, and also have a pair of scissors handy. When the PC rolls their knowledge check you cut an appropriately sized portion of the statblock and hand that to the player. It might be a little snippet if they rolled poorly or only know the basics an adventurer would figure out at a glance or the entire thing if they have extensively researched or are themselves experts on the creature in question. You can even hand out different bits to different players so they can literally piece it together between them.
Bonus points if the players turn the scribe's notebook into a scrapbook with all these props you hand to them over time, right next to the maps and letters.

There are secondary benefits to this, like shifting some of the recordkeeping burden from you to the players and setting those creatures in stone for the future, so you cannot be accused of doctoring stats for or against the PCs. If a creature shows up that varies from the information provided the players will know it is special in some way, whether you specify that or not (which reduces the chances of that ever-elusive gotcha).

Edit: Put the most simple way, gotcha is shorthand for 'you got tricked, players!' and the players were not amused. Both of those conditions need to be met for it to be a gotcha, and the method varies wildly. This guy (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQs8-UJ7IHsrzhQ-OQOYBmg/featured) is pretty cool and might have something about it.

[zinycor]

Edit: Put the most simple way, gotcha is shorthand for 'you got tricked, players!' and the players were not amused. Both of those conditions need to be met for it to be a gotcha, and the method varies wildly. This guy (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQs8-UJ7IHsrzhQ-OQOYBmg/featured) is pretty cool and might have something about it.
Every video I have ever watched of that guy has been horrible, personally I don't see any appeal on him.

[Excession]

Speaking of Brian's game, so we made our characters, and Brian has... concerns. I would like to help his game succeed, so I could use some advice to give him. Anyone want to discuss it here, or should I make a new thread?

My advice to you would be to focus on being the best player you can be. Being a back-seat DM isn't really that. It's not always easy to switch from being a DM to a player, so it may be something you need to concentrate on for a bit.

Things like: don't be the first to jump in with a rules clarification unless asked. That's the DM's job, that they can delegate if they choose to. In general I would recommend letting Brian run the game how he wants to. If it doesn't meet your expectations then you can adapt or politely leave.

[Great Dragon]

My advice to you would be to focus on being the best player you can be. Being a back-seat DM isn't really that. It's not always easy to switch from being a DM to a player, so it may be something you need to concentrate on for a bit.

Things like: don't be the first to jump in with a rules clarification unless asked. That's the DM's job, that they can delegate if they choose to. In general I would recommend letting Brian run the game how he wants to. If it doesn't meet your expectations then you can adapt or politely leave.

Strongly agree.

Only offer information when asked, and keep it short and simple.

if Brain wants DM help, I'd suggest having him join GitP and make his own thread, where people can directly respond to what he asks in the post.

[Talakeal]

Strongly agree.

Only offer information when asked, and keep it short and simple.

if Brain wants DM help, I'd suggest having him join GitP and make his own thread, where people can directly respond to what he asks in the post.

The thread isn't going to be about advice for Brian, its about how we can help him.


My advice to you would be to focus on being the best player you can be. Being a back-seat DM isn't really that. It's not always easy to switch from being a DM to a player, so it may be something you need to concentrate on for a bit.

Things like: don't be the first to jump in with a rules clarification unless asked. That's the DM's job, that they can delegate if they choose to. In general I would recommend letting Brian run the game how he wants to. If it doesn't meet your expectations then you can adapt or politely leave.

Absolutely.

Its gonna be tough.

[Great Dragon]

The thread isn't going to be about advice for Brian, its about how we can help him.
Ok. I look forward to the new thread, to see if I can be of any assistance.


Its gonna be tough.
Yep: Patience will be needed.

[Quertus]

My advice to you would be to focus on being the best player you can be. Being a back-seat DM isn't really that. It's not always easy to switch from being a DM to a player, so it may be something you need to concentrate on for a bit.

Things like: don't be the first to jump in with a rules clarification unless asked. That's the DM's job, that they can delegate if they choose to. In general I would recommend letting Brian run the game how he wants to. If it doesn't meet your expectations then you can adapt or politely leave.


Strongly agree.

Only offer information when asked, and keep it short and simple.

if Brain wants DM help, I'd suggest having him join GitP and make his own thread, where people can directly respond to what he asks in the post.

Strongly disagree.

Look, humans are idiots. They can get all bent out of shape if you let them show their idiocy before correcting them with a rules quote. Or if you let them show their idiocy, and then, later, someone else looks it up / talks about their session on a forum, and learns that their GM is an idiot. The best tables, nobody cares who gave the rules quote - when a rules question comes up, the person who knows the rules quotes the rules. And, when two people both think that they know the rules, but disagree, you look it up.

The alternative is that the GM loses face when the rule becomes known - or, worse, tries to save face when the rule becomes known by reconning reality, or spontaneously generating house rules :smallyuk:. And, in the modern day of social media, forums, etc, it's safest to assume that the actual rule will become known.

Of course, creating a good gaming environment, a culture of win, is not exactly your strong suit, Talakeal. Nor is reading other people to determine what their existing culture is. So your best bet may be to very explicitly ask about anything that might be an issue.

That said, you've gamed with this guy before, right? Has he run anything before? This might already be a solved issue that we're over thinking.

[kyoryu]

Strongly disagree.

Look, humans are idiots. They can get all bent out of shape if you let them show their idiocy before correcting them with a rules quote. Or if you let them show their idiocy, and then, later, someone else looks it up / talks about their session on a forum, and learns that their GM is an idiot. The best tables, nobody cares who gave the rules quote - when a rules question comes up, the person who knows the rules quotes the rules. And, when two people both think that they know the rules, but disagree, you look it up.

The alternative is that the GM loses face when the rule becomes known - or, worse, tries to save face when the rule becomes known by reconning reality, or spontaneously generating house rules :smallyuk:. And, in the modern day of social media, forums, etc, it's safest to assume that the actual rule will become known.

Of course, creating a good gaming environment, a culture of win, is not exactly your strong suit, Talakeal. Nor is reading other people to determine what their existing culture is. So your best bet may be to very explicitly ask about anything that might be an issue.

That said, you've gamed with this guy before, right? Has he run anything before? This might already be a solved issue that we're over thinking.

You're not wrong.

However Talakeal is in the situation of being hte last GM of the group, which means that it's a lot easier for there to be a perception that he is trying to GM the game from the player's seat.

I think what you're saying probably makes sense for the rest of hte table. But specifically for Talakeal, I think it would be best to be a player and only offer input when asked, at least initially, until it has been made clear that he's not trying to run the game for the new GM.

[Quertus]

You're not wrong.

However Talakeal is in the situation of being hte last GM of the group, which means that it's a lot easier for there to be a perception that he is trying to GM the game from the player's seat.

I think what you're saying probably makes sense for the rest of hte table. But specifically for Talakeal, I think it would be best to be a player and only offer input when asked, at least initially, until it has been made clear that he's not trying to run the game for the new GM.

I don't disagree - that is probably the correct answer. But if Talakeal goes in with that attitude, players/GMs - especially ones who know him - will interpret it as Talakeal sulking (something like this happened before, right?). So it seems better to me for Talakeal to be very blatant with the GM in a 1-on-1 conversation, to make sure that they're as close to on the same page as possible.

[kyoryu]

I don't disagree - that is probably the correct answer. But if Talakeal goes in with that attitude, players/GMs - especially ones who know him - will interpret it as Talakeal sulking (something like this happened before, right?). So it seems better to me for Talakeal to be very blatant with the GM in a 1-on-1 conversation, to make sure that they're as close to on the same page as possible.

Eh, I don't see it being interpreted as sulking unless he's engaging in other sulking-like behavior. If he's an active, enthusiastic participant that just isn't offering GM advice, I don't see how that can be interpreted in a negative way.