Balancing when the players don't want to work as a team

[Talakeal]

As those of you who follow my threads know, I recently completed a two year campaign, and by the end I was completely burned out by the constant complaining about the difficulty. In short, they won every battle, yet still felt that the game was too challenging.

Well, now that the game has been over for two months, the bitching hasn't stopped, and whenever we get together I still have to listen to complaining about how hard my campaign was.


But, on the plus side, I think I am finally starting to see what the disconnect was.


Essentially, only one of the players actually cared about overcoming challenges and "advancing the plot," while the other character's goals actively went against it.


For example, one of the player's goal was to accumulate as much wealth as possible. This meant that his character was underpowered because he wasn't buying the item's he needed to be competitive, and he also refused (or complained bitterly to everyone DM and player alike) when he was forced to chip in on party expenses.

Now, as a result of this, the other players had to put more effort into success, as well as spending more gold on party expenses (both to cover the miser's share and to compensate for his underpowered character).


Likewise, two of the players had an in character rivalry going on, and they would actively refuse to help one another during the adventure, sometimes during a life and death battle, and a few times they actually came to blows and nearly killed one another without the monsters having to lift a finger.


But, in the end, as the DM, I ultimately had to take responsibility for all this.

So, my question for you guys is, how would you go about building a campaign where only some of the players actually want to overcome challenges?

[zinycor]

A few different ways:
1) talk to your players, so these differences are clear and look for compromise in every faction so the game can be more enjoyable for the whole table.
2) play a different game, one where the focus is on interpretation instead of overcoming mechanical challenges.
3) divide the group in 2 so the players in conflict don't have to deal with each other
4) find a new table that fits your gaming style better.

[16bearswutIdo]

I wouldn't build a campaign for these examples, tbh. I'd pull up a module if I really wanted to play a TTRPG and couldn't find another group.

Why would you spend your own time entertaining things like the two PCs intentionally and willingly almost killing each other in the middle of a fight? Or just hoarding gold and complaining the whole time? Sounds miserable.

[Talakeal]

I wouldn't build a campaign for these examples, tbh. I'd pull up a module if I really wanted to play a TTRPG and couldn't find another group.

Why would you spend your own time entertaining things like the two PCs intentionally and willingly almost killing each other in the middle of a fight? Or just hoarding gold and complaining the whole time? Sounds miserable.

I don't really mind a bit of in character drama or characters with personality flaws.

The problem is that they always blame me if this results in the game being harder than normal.

[MoiMagnus]

As those of you who follow my threads know, I recently completed a two year campaign, and by the end I was completely burned out by the constant complaining about the difficulty. In short, they won every battle, yet still felt that the game was too challenging.
(Probably a good thing your campaign stopped, though, games where peoples keep bitching are fun for nobody, and not worth the preparation time as a DM. I hope your next campaign will run more smoothly)

Just because they win doesn't mean they enjoyed putting the effort necessary to win. This was probably made even worse by the fact that for some of your player, victory was just a "necessary step" to their personal goal, and anything they had to spend to ensure victory was a loss for them, like a tax you put on them.

You seems to see "overcoming challenge" as a main component of RPGs, but that's far from being the case for everyone, and for some players the "challenge" part is what they dislike. If not already done, you should take a look at the different kind of players in role playing games, there is a lot of well-done list for that, and understanding what your players are actually interested in will definitively help.



Well, now that the game has been over for two months, the bitching hasn't stopped, and whenever we get together I still have to listen to complaining about how hard my campaign was.
... I hope this will pass. Definitely unpleasant.



But, on the plus side, I think I am finally starting to see what the disconnect was.


Essentially, only one of the players actually cared about overcoming challenges and "advancing the plot," while the other character's goals actively went against it.


For example, one of the player's goal was to accumulate as much wealth as possible. This meant that his character was underpowered because he wasn't buying the item's he needed to be competitive, and he also refused (or complained bitterly to everyone DM and player alike) when he was forced to chip in on party expenses.

Now, as a result of this, the other players had to put more effort into success, as well as spending more gold on party expenses (both to cover the miser's share and to compensate for his underpowered character).
While having a character whose goal is to be the wealthiest is fine, it start becoming a problem when the goal of the player is for his character to have as much goal as possible, rather than when the goal of the player is to have fun while RPing a greedy character. If you want to maintain balance, players need to have agreements at meta level that they justify (or not) in some way in-universe.



Likewise, two of the players had an in character rivalry going on, and they would actively refuse to help one another during the adventure, sometimes during a life and death battle, and a few times they actually came to blows and nearly killed one another without the monsters having to lift a finger.

Same as the other, that's really problematic when the rivalry is also between the players, not just between the characters. When it's just between the characters, conventions at meta level can make sure it works well.



So, my question for you guys is, how would you go about building a campaign where only some of the players actually want to overcome challenges?

Here are some ideas of different way to solve this:

1) You can accept that the game is no longer a fully cooperative game. In this paradigm, the opposition you put in front of the player must essentially be easy, and the main difficulty will come from the fact they do not have exactly the same objectives. The memorable moment of the campaign will not be when "the hero defeat the bad guy in an epic fight", but when "the bonds between the characters evolved so much through the experience they lived that even the greedy character accept to renounce to some of its wealth for the good of the group".

2) You no longer try as much to build challenges, and rather build a universe and give to your player more ways to evaluate the danger of the situation, and more way to safely retreat / avoid combat. If the group doesn't want to take risks, maybe they will just runaway of the big bad guy and let NPCs deal with it while they go live some much safer adventure exploring the world and pillaging ancient ruins.

3) You intervene more during character creation, strongly suggesting that the PCs should have positive bond between them and compatible motivations. Once they found a common motivation for their group, you actually tailor a campaign where this motivation coincide with succeeding at the challenges you want to give them.

[zinycor]

I don't really mind a bit of in character drama or characters with personality flaws.

The problem is that they always blame me if this results in the game being harder than normal.

I believe you said in another thread that you balance encounters with the idea that PCs would spend about a 20% of their resources per encounter, make it so encounters would be balanced to spend 10% of the party's resources. If that isn't enough to quiet the complaints, then you will know for sure that difficulty isn't the real problem at your game.

[NichG]

The thing that I actually prefer to run is:

You can center a campaign around open-ended choices rather than challenges. What I mean by open-ended here is that it's not a decision between some set of options, or selecting 'good' actions out of a sea of bad, but rather the 'choice' involves some creativity and decision about goals and desires on the part of the player or players. Specifically de-emphasizing challenges can help bring that kind of choice moment into focus.

As a toy example, you could have a one-shot which is basically something along the lines of 'You made down-to-earth day-to-day characters. However, congratulations, a fluke cosmic coincidence happened and you have each become nigh-omnipotent gods, though it will only last long enough to enact a single miracle. What do you do?'

That said, I think this kind of thing will likely also cause problems with the group of players you're talking about (see e.g. your account of their failure to use a 'wish'). So instead, with your group, I think it would work better if you could center the campaign around emotions. Bob, in particular, is the kind of player who feels good when they mess stuff up, so you can basically create a bunch of stuff designed with the intent to make messing it up feel very cathartic, and that would probably work to some degree to hook Bob. Have snooty NPCs in positions of power who piss off Bob - but rather than have those positions of power be realistically viable, have them all overestimate their power and in the end be trying to lord it over someone equipped with a tank while fortified behind a sandcastle. This kind of needs a cartoony style to it, with very hammy performances of the NPCs and stuff like that.

In terms of building a campaign around that, once you have a china shop and a bull who is ready to run through it, the campaign is about all the stuff that gets knocked free in the process and basically how that all accumulates into some kind of ridiculous apocalypse in which the world is overturned.

Another sort of tool you can use is something like the 'cookie clicker' type of campaign, where there's some underlying absurdly exponential progression of possibilities, and something that is over the top and totally broken/OP at one tier is basically a prerequisite for entering into the next. The game then becomes a sort of loop of 'figure out how to break out of the scaling guidelines of your tier, in order to get the awesome stuff from the next tier up, then repeat'. It's not quite enough to be the entirety of a campaign core, but it's a useful thing to have in the wings. E.g. if Bob really likes amassing wealth and wants to spend the entire downtime flipping +1 swords or something like that, in a normal campaign that might break the game and so your instinct would be to push back and make the economics more realistic (because, why hasn't someone else done this and amassed 100x WBL?). But in this kind of campaign, you say 'Great, thats a good start! You're now making 100x what the party earned from adventuring each downtime. Your skyrocketing wealth has attracted the interest of an organization known as the Exchange - they provide opportunities to buy truly one-of-a-kind things that break all the normal rules, but the prices are indeed quite high. You can basically get an infinite amount of the normal gear in the game rules now, but if you want to buy the Cosmos Tear that doubles your character level when you have it on your person, you're going to need to get that 100x up to 1000x'. It leads to gonzo games, so you have to be aware of that, willing to run it, and able to make it good rather than just obviously 'lets add a bunch of zeros to the end of everything'.

[Eisenheim]

For any rpg, single session or long campaign, to work well, all of the players, including the GM have to agree about the goals of the game, or at least to a fully compatible set of goals for play. Just like you can't sit down and have a good boardgame night until everyone agrees about whether you're playing Monopoly or Arkham Horror, you can't really have a good rpg until everyone agrees about which parts of that vast possibility space they want to spend time and energy on.

A lot of what you describe seems to be not only characters having divergent goals, but players having incompatible goals for their play. I say this because there were clearly complaints from players about how the game ran, which are still ongoing, and because you seem to have be unhappy with how the game played out.

The first step to balancing a game where the player characters aren't going to cooperate, is to have an agreed set of goals among the players that will be served by the character conflict, then you can provide space for the characters to fight each other without putting the greater mission at stake, or you can absolutely make their conflict the reason they fail at a notional shared mission. Which you want to do depends on what all the players are interested in exploring through their play.

It's worth noting that certain kinds of rpg have tacitly assumed goals that all players are expected to share, and don't work well with players who don't have those goals. D&D, and similar level-up focused, treasure gathering rpgs, tend to have an assumed goal among players of portraying a character who gains in power and wealth by overcoming deadly challenges. It is worth stepping back to consider that this is not a necessary goal of rpgs writ large.

[King of Nowhere]

I don't really mind a bit of in character drama or characters with personality flaws.


there's character drama and personality flaws.

and then there's actively sabotaging the group.

you want to play a miser, and you will be underequipped and underperforming as a result? fine, your choice. of course difficulty should take that into account, just like it should take into account the general optimization of the party.
You want to attack another character because you hate him? that's something else entirely. even if the two people agree to it, it is terribly disruptive. and why the hell would those people be adventuring together anyway???

[Anxe]

To me it almost seems like you should be running a different system. Like Dungeon World or Blades in the Dark. Both of those systems support in party conflict and ridiculous greed in more manageable ways.

Dungeon World has character bonds between people. The players get experience points by exploring their character's bonds. The bonds can be negative too, but it channels that in-fighting into something that's conducive to fun.
Dungeon World characters also don't have enormous magic item purchases that are required to stay at the right power level. If a character hoards their gold, well... That's fine.

Blades in the Dark has rules for characters fighting each other. The rules are essentially, "The players discuss how they want to adjudicate a fight. Once they've determined the rules of engagement, they can fight. The Storyteller isn't involved." It's all on them if they screw things up.
Blades characters can use their money for stuff, but there are also advantages to hoarding money. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for a character to never spend a dime from their share of the treasure.

[Friv]

... you know, maybe you should really shock these people out of their comfort zones and load up a game of Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.

The players will have a near-total ability to manipulate the story to their desired ends, and your own job as the GM is to generate NPCs and spend your time integrating all of their ludicrous solo plots into a cohesive whole.

It's basically what you're doing anyway, except that the system would have your back.

[Altheus]

Not your responsibility, the players are out of order.

You might say "The campaign was more difficult than it had to be because you (miser) weren't contributing your fair share and you two (rivals) were spending more effort fighting each other than the opposition. Next time around make characters who can co-operate so you have an easier time. Or, is one of you going to step up and run something yourself?"

That last bit usually shuts complaints up right quick.

Next time ask them to give reasons why their pcs work as a team rather than doing their own thing.

[Cygnia]

Make one of them GM for a spell.

[Quertus]

So, my question for you guys is, how would you go about building a campaign where only some of the players actually want to overcome challenges?

"Challenge" in the "tactical basketball simulator" portion of RPGs is laughably easy compared to "Challenge" in war games (RPGs rarely consider "50% chance of TPK; on a win, expect about half the PCs to die" to be "good encounter design"). Thus, arguably, I and my "playing highschool romance drama while everyone else is playing tactical basketball simulator" are perfectly positioned as your target audience.

There's a lot to making what I consider a "good" game. A good first step would be to read up on the 8 sources of fun (of which Challenge is one - and only one), and to try to understand what your group actually enjoys. Fortunately, someone else is running the game for a while, so you can sit there with your eyes & ears open and try to learn about your group, and what they engage with.

The next step is to realize that blindly following the "8 types of fun" is for idiots. I love Challenge… when it's at "war game" level. But it doesn't interest me at "RPG" level. So you'd need to do something that might actually be very difficult for you, and learn to perceive subtle differences.

If you can do that, then you can learn what your players enjoy, and actually build games that will work for your players. For example, if you want me to engage in Challenge in an RPG, the challenge needs to either be a) using player skills (a puzzle, a riddle, etc), or b) at the strategic layer (we're in a race with another party to collect McGuffins (artifacts, Pokémon, whatever) - what strategies will we use to improve our odds / hinder our opponents / protect against them?).

Fortunately, you don't actually need to develop those skills! That's right - all you need to do is to provide sufficiently diverse content, all optional, that your players can choose what interests them, what engages their styles of fun. That is, simply create a vast array of content, and run it as a sandbox. But not content of "it's too hard for your tastes, even if you do it in the easiest possible order", like your last campaign - content that is truly diverse, in all ways you can imagine.

And, uh, you know, until you build that trust back, when they say, "we'd like to do x", start by (asking them why, so you can learn what they like,) giving them your evaluation of how that should work out, and then hand them the "module" for x. See if their evaluation matches your own, make note of where/how their evaluation differs. Then, after you've done this long enough to guess correctly a few times in a row, you can try removing the "hand them the module" step, just doing the "here's my guess how you will like this / how it will turn out".

If that works out several times in a row, you can consider trying to craft content explicitly for them.

And, while the other PCs are focused on the great Pokémon hunt, I'll be trying to evolve my EV into a new, unique, more humanoid form (that I know <other player> is just aching to model), to appeal to the furry crowd when marketing my line of custom Pokémon grooming products (that will just so happen to give our best Pokémon an edge against their best Pokémon)… as an excuse for my character to get to know the cute Pokémon breeder / daycare receptionist. (I have no idea if the preceding paragraph makes any sense, but hopefully it gives you some added perspective on how divergent motivations can be)

[Reversefigure4]

Presuming that a DM is happy playing with a non-cooperative group (if not, you need to change systems, players, or both), you need to scale the opposition accordingly to the party specifically rather than to generic CR systems.

- If your party are all min-maxed God Wizards who read CharOp guides and play accordingly, obviously you'll need to increase challenges to compete with them. They are far stronger than the 'generic' normal-level optimised Fighter/Rogue/Cleric/Wizard team.

- If your party are all straight class Fighters who have spent all their Feats on Skill Focus: Underwater Basket Weaving and all their gold on carrying hundreds of Nets, you'll need to decrease challenges to face them. They are weaker than the assumed team.

- If you have more, or less players than the expected norm, challenges need to increase or decrease accordingly.

- Ordinarily, I'd say it's on the players to create character that co-operate rather than the GM's responsibility. But if you know going in that the players are going to work extremely poorly as a team, they refuse to do otherwise, and you refuse to make them or get different players or systems, you know full well they are weaker than expected and need to adjust your CRs down to compensate. Start low.

In the case of a group who have repeatedly expressed that the game is too challenging, listen to them and start really low. Start with encounters that are 1/8 as hard as the CR system expects, challenges the PCs should just squash effortlessly. Ask the players if they think it's too easy, too hard, or just right. Then go up to CRs that as 1/6 as hard, then 1/4 as hard, etc. Find out where their interest level lies. I suspect it's not going to be at "the anemic kobold wheezes, takes a swing, then collapses unconscious at your feet", but it clearly isn't at "custom unkillable monster deliberately negates party abilities". Something like "Goblins, 2 CRs weaker than expected, prove satisfying to chop to pieces" sounds like more what they're looking for. (And if the GM only wants high-challenge games, time for new players / GM / system).

[Xuc Xac]

OR! Don't customize anything at all.

Just tell the players:
"This is a world of danger, monsters, and adventure. If you don't want to spend money on healing potions or better armor, the bad guys won't pull their punches and take it easy on you. They'll just kill you faster. If you're surrounded by 20 kobolds and decide to fight with each other instead of them, they won't suddenly turn into 10 kobolds to give you a chance at winning. If you encounter a huge dragon and decide to shoot it with your crossbow because you think you're the good guys who get to win every fight automatically, it will eat you. The campaign is focused on you, but the world doesn't revolve around you."

Then let them sink or swim on their own. Give them frequent reminders like "Are you sure? Remember that they don't care if you're under-equipped. They won't trade their swords for nerf bats just because you didn't want to 'waste' money on a helmet."

[Friv]

Make one of them GM for a spell.

They're trying that. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?603201-How-to-prevent-one-of-Talakeal-s-Gaming-Horror-Stories-PC-Edition) So far, it is not going great.

[denthor]

They do not work well as a team.

Your choices:

No tactics send a monster one at a time. There 5,000 monsters in this room they are to busy counting the gold to care. They have over1,000,000 gold apiece they wait 97 hours before attacking anything. Yes boring but that's what your players want.

You do not have to treat them like babies the opponents think if they die they die.

Have one of them DM.

No matter what you do they will complain because they do not understand the game

[Reversefigure4]

Then let them sink or swim on their own.

Even in a situation where the players have expressly said they don't like the high challenge aspect of the game?

Àlso, a world that doesn't adjust down to them should also be one that doesn't adjust up to them - as many underequipped town militia getting slaughtered by the pcs as ancient red dragons.

[Xuc Xac]

Even in a situation where the players have expressly said they don't like the high challenge aspect of the game?


Yes. Especially when most of the difficulty comes from them trying to cut with the dull side of the knife. These players would complain that Rock-Paper-Scissors is too challenging because they always use "Rock" and keep losing to Paper. Talakeal could show them Paper first and ask what they want to do, but they would still pick Rock then whine that it's rigged against them.


Àlso, a world that doesn't adjust down to them should also be one that doesn't adjust up to them - as many underequipped town militia getting slaughtered by the pcs as ancient red dragons.

That's how I would do it. The world is the way it is. There's no "starting area" where all the enemies are low level.

[Droid Tony]

But, in the end, as the DM, I ultimately had to take responsibility for all this.

Well, wait that is not right. Unless each and every player very loudly said ti was your job a DM to do this.



So, my question for you guys is, how would you go about building a campaign where only some of the players actually want to overcome challenges?

I don't think there is much to do here. No matter what, each player will have a querk or two that will effect the game: but you can't really alter the game for each one.

This gets worse in heavy rules systems, like 3.5E. The game rules ''assume" fairly robotic characters that always do the right/best/most optimal thing in any encounter. By the rules, encounters should be very dull and boring.....a lot like taking a game peice in the game CHESS.

Of course few people even come close to playing the game that way. Most role play a lot more, even in heavy crunch combat times. A group will likely have at least one character that is less of an 'encounter combat ' character. Many groups will have a least one player with little or no system mastery. Most groups will have a very passive agressive player.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Really, few groups will be the hard core blitzkrieg that the rules assume.

[Lucas Yew]

The world is the way it is. There's no "starting area" where all the enemies are low level.

Couldn't resist complimenting this ideology. "True sandboxes" may be incredibly hard to prepare and run, but my (yet inactive) GM instincts scream of all the satisfaction I would gain just from actually executing this elegant kaiju of an universe.

[Laserlight]

I agree with "Tell them it was hard because they weren't working as a team".

Every now and again I ask for feedback from my players, along the lines of "what was your favorite challenge in the last few sessions", "can you tell me what you liked about it", "do you want more easy fights or fewer but harder?", that sort of thing. My players like a few difficult fights, with a least one of them hitting 0hp or close to it, and an active environment--such as "the fight where we were all on giant lily pads and we could paddle them, or jump but that would push them the other way, or set them on fire but then maybe we wouldn't have a route to a bad guy."

YMMV. But if they were whining every session for two years, then you probably need to change players.

[sktarq]

Couldn't resist complimenting this ideology. "True sandboxes" may be incredibly hard to prepare and run, but my (yet inactive) GM instincts scream of all the satisfaction I would gain just from actually executing this elegant kaiju of an universe.

It is,
i have,
i have little in the way of "plot" ever planned
The powers of the world have their plans.
Those cause events to occur
This opens opportunities for the PC's
i make sure such opportunity is brought to PC's attention.
Also powers may threaten or bribe PC's to do stuff

Then it is just reaction to the wild and wooly that the PC's do.

i am often baffled by their choices but we have fun.

However after 4-6 hours of it I am mentally drained-it is neuron burning work

[Cluedrew]

So, my question for you guys is, how would you go about building a campaign where only some of the players actually want to overcome challenges?Don't make a campaign about overcoming challenges. Make it about something else. Why would you make a campaign that is about something not everyone cases about?

One of my favourite campaigns ever started with half the players having the explicit goal to get their character's killed in a suitably dramatic and appropriate way. Also the party never formed and instead the PCs formed two groups that spent the latter half of the campaign trying to kill each other. It was great.

Sure there were challenges in the campaign, many came in the form of "so that monster you summoned with no way of controlling shows up", but that wasn't the focus of the campaign. The focus was on character interactions and stupid ideas attempted for insane reasons. It never would of worked with a standard D&D party of hardened professionals.

Of course that might not be the type of campaign your group is looking for, its just an example of a campaign that has some similar so-called problems where they weren't problems. If you try running another campaign for these people (although I have been following your threads and I have to recommend you don't) you should first figure out what campaign they want out of this. And if that isn't a campaign you want to run you should either find a happy middle ground or not run the campaign.

[patchyman]

Play Paranoia. Characters undermining each other is a perk, not a drawback.

[Talakeal]

A couple of points:

First, this would be a lot easier if people would actually state their preferences. But everyone says they want a "normal" game, killing monsters, exploring dungeons, looting treasure, foiling the BBEG, rescuing princesses, saving the world, that sort of thing, and says they want a "normal" difficulty with balanced encounters according to the games rules.


Second, a lot of the tension is between players, as they really resent other people "not pulling their weight" rather than some objective standard of difficulty.

[Pelle]

Make the players responsible for their own difficulty level.

Prepare a few hooks for different challenge levels, and let them choose themselves if they want easy fights against goblins to loot pocket change, or if they want more deadly challenges with the potential for better rewards. Be sure to give them enough information both in-character, and also out of character (average CR and encounter difficulty etc) so they are making an informed choice and can't blame you.

[zinycor]

A couple of points:

First, this would be a lot easier if people would actually state their preferences. But everyone says they want a "normal" game, killing monsters, exploring dungeons, looting treasure, foiling the BBEG, rescuing princesses, saving the world, that sort of thing, and says they want a "normal" difficulty with balanced encounters according to the games rules.


Second, a lot of the tension is between players, as they really resent other people "not pulling their weight" rather than some objective standard of difficulty.

So, how about playing games focused on role-playing and creating conflict among PCs rather than the game you are playing?

[Talakeal]

So, how about playing games focused on role-playing and creating conflict among PCs rather than the game you are playing?

None of my PCs really like role-playing or adversarial games. At least, not as much as the like killing monsters and taking their stuff.

[NichG]

A couple of points:

First, this would be a lot easier if people would actually state their preferences. But everyone says they want a "normal" game, killing monsters, exploring dungeons, looting treasure, foiling the BBEG, rescuing princesses, saving the world, that sort of thing, and says they want a "normal" difficulty with balanced encounters according to the games rules.

Second, a lot of the tension is between players, as they really resent other people "not pulling their weight" rather than some objective standard of difficulty.

I'm going to second another poster's recommendation of running Chuubo, or games like it.

Basically, as long as what you're doing looks like something familiar, both you and they will fall into old patterns unless you constantly push against those patterns. If you say 'this campaign isn't going to be about challenges' but you're running something that looks like D&D, everyone is going to still think about things in D&D terms - which is mostly a succession of tactical encounters, where 'challenge' or 'balance' will be prominent game design principles.

So if you want to avoid just falling back into old patterns, you have to go someplace that is sufficiently unfamiliar that people don't quickly connect it to things they already have associations and standard operating procedures for. It needs to be something that, when you approach it from the framework of 'balance' and 'challenge', it fails so explosively that it is completely obvious even to the most stubborn person that its a nonsensical way to even look at the game.

Of course if you have a very narrow thing you're comfortable to run, in combination with a very narrow thing that your players are willing to try to play, its basically impossible to change your situation no matter what anyone says on a thread like this.

[King of Nowhere]

A couple of points:

First, this would be a lot easier if people would actually state their preferences. But everyone says they want a "normal" game, killing monsters, exploring dungeons, looting treasure, foiling the BBEG, rescuing princesses, saving the world, that sort of thing, and says they want a "normal" difficulty with balanced encounters according to the games rules.

we know. your players don't know what they want.




Second, a lot of the tension is between players, as they really resent other people "not pulling their weight" rather than some objective standard of difficulty.

we know. your players are jerks.

seriously, we keep telling you, there is no way to deal with those kind of players. you keep thinking that if you only find the right strategy, the right game, the right balance, then you can turn them in a wonderful group. but you can't. you can't fix the players by changing the game, no more than you can save a sinking ship by rearranging the furniture on deck.

[Berenger]

"Challenge" in the "tactical basketball simulator" portion of RPGs is laughably easy compared to "Challenge" in war games (RPGs rarely consider "50% chance of TPK; on a win, expect about half the PCs to die" to be "good encounter design"). Thus, arguably, I and my "playing highschool romance drama while everyone else is playing tactical basketball simulator" are perfectly positioned as your target audience.

Real soldiers wouldn't consider a projected 75% death rate in a single engagement "good encounter design", either.

Why should anyone?

[Alhallor]

I still think you should let someone else GM on a system differently than your own. Perhaps Bob has some rulebooks lying around he knows kinda well? (I know I'm probably the oddball around here but I like to read rulebooks, even if I know that I probably never going to play them. Perhaps he does that too?)

Another idea would be too try another system that has some campaigns or adventure paths or some other name for an multi-part campaign, try running that and the most important part DON'T ALTER ANYTHING AT ALL. They want a challenge by the book, try giving it to them. Ask after every season if it was okay, what could be better, the usual.

But perhaps they just like to complain it's pretty hard to guess. You have played with them for several years from now on and it seems that they still take their time to play... They can't hate that kind of activiry or they would stop.

Also I guess they are not that good in unusual fights? Like the one with the demon-thing that could not be hurt by attacking him?

Have you tried more like that? Do your players like that usually? My players mostly dance around encounters more than facing them head-on it seems that your players don't necesarrily enjoy that and just want the dice-throwing to be thrilling and your attempt of the "dumb stupid monsters" using any amount of tactics throws a wrench in your players plans because they don't expect them doing that. (Yes these kind of misconceptions can be there for years.)

[Duff]

None of my PCs really like role-playing or adversarial games. At least, not as much as the like killing monsters and taking their stuff.

This idea clashes with the playing of characters with goals such as "Get all the money" or characters which are constantly shafting/fighting each other.

Either you've misunderstood your players or they're adding elements to the game which are reducing the fun. Maybe they heard about this "roleplaying" thing and this is an attempt to do it?
Maybe you have a mixture at the table and all need to be a bit understanding?