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fergo
2020-06-28, 05:18 PM
Hey guys. I haven't posted on this forum in years (and I don't think I ever posted in the RPG sections in any case).

This is a genuine question: I'm looking for advice about how I should handle similar situations in the future, not just venting about a minor player gripe. It might seem like a vent, because it is, but I'm genuinely open to suggestions :smallbiggrin:.

I'm a pretty inexperienced DM. I've just run the first session of a (hopefully) long campaign by phone with a couple of friends, both of whom have more experience playing RPGs.

It's a no-magic fantasy setting, and without going into too much detail I'm trying to go for a grand story where the players shape the world around them, not just a series of dungeon-crawls (not that there's anything wrong with dungeon-crawls :smallwink:).

The campaign basically starts with an assassination attempt on the local ruler. There are various factions involved in the plot with a number of clues which lead to each of them, so I hope there are multiple routes the players can take to solving the mystery--the opening gambit is pretty scripted, though, with the players simply unable to stop the assassination attempt, and one assassin killed by an NPC.

A second assassin fired from an upstairs window, and the PCs run up. They find the room abandoned, incidentally with a few clues that hint at her identity and ultimate destination, but never mind. Both players jump out of the window in chase, and find that she's taken off on a horse, which all witnesses described as a very, very fine horse.

Perhaps inevitably, the players immediately split up, with one searching (read: looting) the room and the other jumping on a tired old horse that happens to be nearby and tearing off in chase

Now, straight off the bat, I guess I have to admit I didn't want him to catch the assassin. Her identity is a bit of a twist and I wanted it to be something the players unravel over a couple of sessions and feel like an achievement when they get to the bottom of it.

At the same time, I certainly was willing for the player to catch her, if he came up with a plausible way to do so. And I'd never underestimate the ability of my players to come up with madcap schemes that completely take me by surprise and wreck my carefully-planned plots (even if this is a bit harder to do in a no-magic setting :smalleek:).

Unfortunately, he wasn't really equipped to chase someone down. His character is supposed to be a bookish, intellectual guy, super smart but not necessarily great or experienced with his hands, and he was chasing a much stronger character on a better horse.

From the start he was kind of... I don't know, combative? He started arguing about how long horses could gallop for (even stopping to Google it), saying that he would catch up eventually even going at a slower speed on a slower horse, when... I just don't think this logically follows?

Then when he left town and got onto the main road he said "Well, I suppose there aren't any other horses around so it'll be easy to follow her tracks."

This is despite (a) me telling him that it had been dry weather and the road was dusty, so the horse's hooves weren't leaving much in the way of tracks; (b), it's the main road into a major city, so yes, there were other horses around; (c) his character doesn't have any tracking skills (or indeed riding skills, but I let him off with that because I didn't want to shoot his ideas down from the very start).

Basically, he chased her for several hours out of town until around 2 a.m. He fell further and further behind because he stopped at taverns and villages and asked if they'd seen her ride by, which indeed they had, but obviously couldn't tell him where she'd gone except that she'd passed down the road.

Quite early on he learned she had swapped horses a few miles out of town, so had two fast horses. Eventually he spent the last of his money hiring a slightly faster horse himself, at around 10 p.m. game time. He argued he should be immune from the effects of hunger and exhaustion because his character was a monk so was presumably used to going without sleep or food (kind of fair, and he was getting a bit frustrated, so I rolled with it).

I asked him a few times if he wanted to continue and he said he did. Finally, at around 2 a.m. game time, he asked if I had decided that he couldn't catch the assassin. I replied that I hadn't decided, but was frank that I felt he wasn't equipped to overtake her as things went, so that he just wouldn't be able to succeed unless he presented me with a new plan.

He said he had two plans which should let him catch her.

Firstly, he was asking everyone along the route if they'd seen her. And I'd rolled with that, and everyone had agreed they had seen her, but it was now the middle of the night, so, guess what? No more people to ask. And that doesn't help if you're just falling further and further behind anyways!

Secondly, his character should be able to work out where she was heading. I brought out the world map, and agreed that he could be confident she was probably travelling to another city to the east, a few days' ride away, which is where this road headed, but after there the road goes in several different directions. (I said he could always go there and hope to track her further, if he wanted, and didn't even point out this would sunder the party beyond repair :smallannoyed:).

But no, he said, his character is smart. Super smart. So he should be able to work out her ultimate destination by... calculating how fast she was going? Seeing if she was favouring one side of the road over the other? Like he can judge her ultimate destination on a multi-day journey by... doing complex mathematics examining her tracks? Which he can't find in any case because his character can't track things, and it's the middle of the bleeding night and pitch black?

He then said he thought I must have wanted him to catch the assassin because I wouldn't have let him get get this far if I didn't.

He eventually agreed to give up, stay in a tavern overnight, and head back to the city in the morning.

Meanwhile, the in-game clock for the other player had fallen behind, so there was a time-lag between the two. He spent the in-game day actually following a few different clues, getting some leads, and then made the meta decision to wait for the first character to return the following afternoon so they could investigate together, even if in-character this meant letting the trail go cold on a few different things and, in character, he had no idea where the other guy was or whether he was returning at all. (I tweaked my own plans so that this wasn't as big of deal).

Meanwhile, the first player was peeved off, and hadn't paid attention to what had been going on while he wasn't involved so was confused both in- and out-of-character.

So I'm not sure where I went wrong, exactly. I'm not sure if my issue is that I made it so difficult in-game for them to catch the assassin--essentially treated her as a clip scene in a video-game, I guess--or if I just didn't handle the attempt to do so properly.

Should I have:


Not have had an assassin that the players would find it difficult to immediately catch?
Rolled with my player's ideas of, I don't know, mathematically proving her destination?
Retconned my own pre-laid plans for how well-equipped and well-prepared the assassin is, so the player was capable of catching her?
Just told him flat-out that it was impossible for him to catch her from the start, so he never left the city in the first place?
Something else?


Sorry for the moan, I'm just a wee bit frustrated, but it's a genuine question: an uncomfortable situation for both of us, obviously the result of bad DMing on my part somewhere along the line.

Nifft
2020-06-28, 05:26 PM
If you've said everything exactly accurately, and nothing else happened, then this sounds a bit like a bully player trying to coerce you into getting his way.

It's possible that you set an expectation of victory which you didn't intend to set, and thus you're not reporting here, but a player with good intentions really ought to have picked up the hint about the different horse speeds before midnight.

denthor
2020-06-28, 06:46 PM
I have never liked the tracking rules. That vent done.

Ask your player if the subject of being tracked can turn off the road at any moment. If you miss it you have no idea where she is. You know it is a woman your 10 14 hours out from where you started the next town is 2 days away?

Where do you go you can track at 1/4 speed no feat no survival. In 2 days no longer any real tracks to follow.

Super smart reality says no way to track if she makes a fork or town go back.

Is this character human? Is the other horse rider human or something else? Vision is a problem for some at night .

The food thing who cares. Water is important after 3 days no food or sleep penalties and rolls.

As a player you made this way to hard for the first go around. Would want your assassin to make riding check NPC'S can fail rolls as well.

No major issues here. Just a DM that does not roll enough dice.

Rynjin
2020-06-28, 06:57 PM
You should have definitely made it clear to the player that with their current resources, they had no way of catching the assassin. The longer you drag things out by letting someone think they have a chance, even an infinitesimally slim one, the more they're going to get attached to finding that outcome where they succeed. If your player has already spent what I would imagine sounds like 30 minutes to an hour of real game time trying to come up with stuff to try, they're just going to be more inclined to double down, then double down again, etc. rather than accept they've wasted an hour of the session trying plan after plan that just doesn't work. That's fairly simple psychology you pick up after a while of managing groups of people, and it can turn even the most otherwise reasonable person into "That Guy" for a session.

In essence the interaction should have gone like this:

DM: "The assassin flees on a fats horse down the road."
PC: "I pursue on my own horse."
DM: "Okay. To be clear, your horse is slower than theirs, and they are a significantly more skilled horseman than you. Simple pursuit isn't going to work. Unless you have another plan, we're going to shortcut this and say you lose track of them after a few hours of pursuit. You could potentially pick the trail up with a tracker in the morning."

Total interaction time (with maybe a few more back and forths, as the player throws out other options): around 5 minutes real time.

VonKaiserstein
2020-06-28, 07:03 PM
I agree with Rynnjin. I totally understand the idea of wanting to be open to their ideas, and reactive to player desires. But if his character is that smart, he ought to know there's no way this Craigslist pig is beating Elzar's 3,000 year aged pork.

At worst, have a rainstorm or something go through after rolling some dice and then make him make a tracking check, then inform him he's lost the trail.

The night was a very good call, and should have been the end of it.

It's ok to railroad your characters, especially at the beginning of the story. It's also ok to let them do whatever- but if it's impossible, tell them it's really, really unlikely and let them roll to see if it works quickly before you lose a session to a bad idea.

kyoryu
2020-06-28, 07:22 PM
Yeah i'd have been up front with them about the whole situation.

"This person seems professional. As such, it's probably reasonable to assume they have a plan to get out of the situation. On the other hand, you're not a tracker, and aren't a professional in those areas, so you're at a huge disadvantage. I think it would take pretty much a miracle to be able to catch up with them."

Then perhaps allow a single Tracking roll at a ridiculous difficulty to give them a chance to actually catch up to them (likely when resting, etc.). And if they succeed, cut to when they catch up.

King of Nowhere
2020-06-28, 08:32 PM
He then said he thought I must have wanted him to catch the assassin because I wouldn't have let him get get this far if I didn't.


this looks like a simple misunderstanding. i wouldn't say anybody is bad here; faulty communication happens all the time. you certainly should not let the player succeed at an impossible task just because he tries more; then again, you also shouldn't shut them down, because there is always the chance they come up with something creative.
i don't see anything that could be learned from this episode that could not backfire in a similar, but slightly different situation

Deathhappens
2020-06-28, 08:43 PM
From a "DM as the arbiter of the sandbox" perspective, you did absolutely nothing wrong (at least going by your version of events): You gave the player every fair opportunity to chase down the assassin without biasing events too much in either direction. No questions there.
However, there was clearly a misunderstanding somewhere down the road between you and the player. No way to clearly tell which of you, if not both of you, was responsible, or more responsible, for it, but it would fall to you in your "DM as a fellow player" role to eventually stop the game and OOC explain to the player that failing a cataclysmic turn of events he was wasting valuable playing time. Especially considering you allowed him to go on for so long in game he actually ended up with a time lag from the other player. For his sake, if nothing else, you should have put a pin on the chase at nightfall at the latest and let the other player have his turn until both were at the same page.

Composer99
2020-06-28, 11:36 PM
So, I think there's rather a difference between being inexperienced and being bad, even if the two sort of DMs do some (or even many) of the same things. There's a certain... I don't know... ill will and/or incorrigibility involved in being a "bad" DM, along with not just making mistakes or bad DMing decisions, but chronically doing so, that a merely inexperienced DM can hope to overcome. So I wouldn't say you're a "bad" DM, just inexperienced.

With that philosphical rant out of the way, I do think that both you and the player have made some mistakes here.
- It seems to me that your player's error was doubling down on a strategy for defeat (attempting a chase with inadequate resources, in the form of a slower mount, inadequate skills, in the form of a lack of tracking competency, and no plan beyond chasing after their foe with those inadequacies and then resorting to some really desperate straw-grasping as that plan inevitably failed), along with unreasonably and unfairly monopolising real session time.
- It seems to me that your error was enabling the player's monopolising of session time, and allowing their strategy for defeat to turn into a gameplay morass instead of resorting a simple resolution.

There are other ways it could go down
What I would suggest as a "here's how it could have gone down" is this:
(1) You know the assassin's escape plan, and a few ways they might adapt it to shake off pursuit (assuming they become aware of pursuers)
(2) You require that the player describe, up front, as thoroughly as possible, his approach to undertaking the chase
(3) Compare the player's approach to the assassin's escape plan and see how they interact; if there was a way for the player's approach to allow them to catch the assassin, great! They catch the assassin. If not, too bad. If the interaction led to enough uncertainty to justify die rolls, then roll dice and see how they shake out.
(4) Narrate the results. ("You try chasing the assassin for a few hours, but your slower animal and lack of experience as a tracker leave you unable to effectively keep pace. You ask around at wayside stops to see if anyone has seen a person matching your quarry's appearance, but each time you do so you find you are further and further behind. Finally, as night falls, you and your horse are tired, hungry, and thirsty, and so far behind that catching up is no longer within the realm of possibility.")

If you want, you could split the chase into a few chunks, giving the player a chance to change their strategy, or give up, but best to still use the above procedure at each step to keep it simple. Also, that way you can cut to the other player. "While you're doing that, let's see what So-And-So is up to."

Switching it Up
Speaking of cutting to the other player, from your description, it's not clear to what extent you switched between the perspective of the PC who was on the hunt and the perspective of the PC who stayed in town to look for clues, but I should guess that the player who was chasing the assassin was able to monopolise the time. Cutting from one perspective to another, even if you hadn't used the above approach, could have kept the session better under control.

Don't be afraid to step "out of the game"
Players monopolising real session time is an out-of-game/out-of-character problem that demands an out-of-game/out-of-character solution. At some point along the line, you probably ought to have simply called them out on it.

Granting that making sure everyone is having fun is everyone's collective responsibility, and that time management is a part of that responsibility, the burden does tend to fall heaviest on the DM, requiring a bit more action on your part to resolve these issues.

It might have been worth it if the player in question was having a real blast, despite the Googling and all that, but it sounds like they weren't having fun, either. I think your time, and both players' time, is sufficiently valuable as not to be worth frittering away on digging in on such sunk costs, and if the player isn't being responsible about that sort of thing, it falls on you as DM to force the issue.

PC Capabilities
I assume you are playing some edition of D&D, based on your use of the term "DM", and the supposed extraordinariness of a no-magic game. That being the case, the monk character's capabilities are usually pretty specifically defined. As far as I am aware, no edition published in the last twenty years gives monks, or horses ridden by monks, any better ability to withstand hunger, thirst, or fatigue than other characters, unless they have some feat. If the text doesn't say monks are better at dealing with hunger, they aren't.

What is more, the player's final attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat can really only be seriously responded to by lampooning it (http://(1) Know the assassin's escape plan and a few ways they might adapt it to shake off pursuit (assuming they become aware of pursuers) (2) Require that the player define, up front, as thoroughly as possible, his approach to undertaking the chase (3) Compare the player's approach to the assassin's escape plan and see how they interact; if there was a way for the player's approach to allow them to catch the assassin, great! They catch the assassin. If not, no dice. (4) Narrate the results. ("You try chasing the assassin for a few hours, but your slower animal and lack of experience as a tracker leave you unable to effectively keep pace. You ask around at wayside stops to see if anyone has seen a person matching your quarry's appearance, but each time you do so you find you are further and further behind. Finally, as night falls, you and your horse are tired, hungry, and thirsty, and so far behind that catching up is no longer within the realm of possibility.")If you want, you could split the chase into a few chunks, giving the player a chance to change their strategy, or give up, but best to still use the above procedure to keep it simple. Also, that way you can cut to the other player. "While you're doing that, let's see what So-And-So is up to.") ("Look how the sunlight is refracted by the fresh dew. From this, I can derive a set of equations unifying electricity and magnetism").

So the player really had no business making this stuff up on the spot, but your error with respect to this was not being more authoritative in keeping to either the rules of the game as defined in the books, or as modified by your house rules.

Related to this element, PCs' formal capabilities do have to mediate their ability to impact the game world to some extent, no matter how much you want to reward creativity. Part of the problem here is that the player in question wasn't being creative: based on your description, they leaned into their weaknesses, instead of trying to find a way to bypass those weaknesses and play to their strengths. What is more, even their attempt to play to their strengths ("I'm super smart, I'll Sherlock Holmes my way out of this predicament") leaned even further into those very same weaknesses (since deducing that electromagnetic radiation is quantised - I mean, calculating a likely destination based on reading tracks depends on finding said tracks, which the character was, by the player's own decisions, inept at).

Pelle
2020-06-29, 03:05 AM
Good input so far, I would like to add:

when one character pursues something you assume or know has a low chance of success, try asking the player for how long time they will continue even if they make no progress, and what they will do if they don't find anything. Then you know what their failure looks like. So when you know their approach, you can set the stakes clearly and adjudicate accordingly. If what they describe has no chance to interact with the assassins' plan or the player fail their roll, just cut to the agreed upon time when they head back to town.

when the party intend to split up, if you suspect that it may be difficult for you to keep all of them engaged, due to different time scales their activities involve or just lack of meaningful content in their path, warn the players out of character that it may cause one or more of them to be bored because of it and let them reconsider. Make it a player choice to remain inactive, and make it a player responsibility to not let other players become bored.

when it's time to get the party back together, don't be afraid to let the players metagame and come up with a plausible reason for why they bump into each other. Maybe both characters suddenly decide to go to a specific pub. It's their favourite pub, so of course it makes sense for both of them to make the same choice independent of each other.

to be fair to the player, the escaping assassin situation easily reads like an adventure hook. If you don't intend it to be, signal harder that it's not achievable, or just cut it entirely or at least not involve the pcs directly in it.

Fleetfinger
2020-06-29, 03:57 AM
I just had to reply to say that I have been in that players shoes. As others have mentioned, this was a communication error, those will hopefully get less frequent as you get more experience and get to know more of your players expectations and ways of solving problems. It's really great that you try to relfect on the situation. The only bad DM is the DM that is unwilling to learn and grow.

Imagine things from the players perspective
Put yourself in the players shoes. First a dramatic assassination attempt and they give chase! You have just set up either a chase scene or a fight, that is what the players are expecting. They arrive and understand that the assassin has jumped out of the window so they do the same. That is the dramatic and interesting thing to do and in line with the action-oriented scene they were expecting. But they dont see the assassin, instead they get second hand accounts of her riding of on a fine horse. Here the confusion comes. Is this a chase scene? Or is this an investigation? If it's a chase they can't stop, if it's an investigation they could miss clues if they run after. The ambivalence is reflected in the players wise choice of splitting up.

Fun vs. frustration
And here I want you to ask yourself, was the pursuit fun? For either you, the pursuing player or the player watching? Because if not that's your problem right there. From the sound of it, you didn't want to shoot the player down, but you didn't make his journey interesting either. That easily makes what the players doing a slog. Something he doesn't want to abandon, since you keep giving information and descriptions, but something that takes a lot of time and effort without being interesting. The player seemed to get more and more frustrated and tried to throw out any reasons why his approach should have worked. Thats probably because the player felt he was in a scenario where he couldn't affect the outcome no matter what he did. That feeling can get very frustrating, especially when you feel you're just following the threads of the adventure. He pursued, but the assassin could veer from the main road at any time so OF COURSE he had to ask at inn or tavern and OF COURSE that increased her lead, but what could he do otherwise? And he's right a gallopping horse can't cover the same distance over time so OF COURSE he expect to begin to catch up with her before realizing she switched her horse. And it makes sense to assume that the assassins co-conspirators are based in the city or near it and that they set up a rendevouz point so OF COURSE he expects to find an inn with suspicous people or further clues.

But it's getting more and more clear that hes not going to catch up to the assassin OR get more clues, so he gets increasingly frustrated with all the time he's wasting and with the fact that what he's doing seems to be futile, and, above all, NOT FUN. So he looks for anything that could get him on track again, in vain. And all the time he's wondering "Why did the DM let me pursue this for so long if theres nothing to it? What's going on?"

Reframe the situation for the players
So how could this situation have been handled differently? The easiest answer is of course to not have any confusion in the scene to begin with. Let them give chase but be hindred by a locked door before they enter the assassins room. When they start to break it down or lockpicking it (make it as flimsy as it need to be fore the characters to get through in two or three turns) they hear a seemingly startled assassin breaking something trying to make a hasty escape. When they get in the room they know the assassin has a lead and they see some guards on horses giving chase. They realize that the guards have a better chance of catching the assassin than they do and at the same time they see something left behind by the assassin. This hopefully makes them realize that there could be other clues left behind. Try to make it clear that yes there is an assassin fleeing, but that seems to be handled by other characters, in the distance, the focus is the crime scene. The act of setting an obstacle in front of them also makes them feel less like it's a chase and less pressing to continue the pursuit.


But we want a chase
But lets say the characters goes for the chase anyway. They know they are the heroes in the story, of course they can catch the assassin! Then you have the option to make it very clear they won't chatch up. A tip is to stop describing the action and make a small time skip so they realize that this ISN'T an action scene "By the time you've found horses, the assassin and the guard has disappeared, you give chase as far as the town gates before you realize the town guard has more of a chance of catching her than you do and you decide to reutrn to the palace. There might be more assassins or clues as to whats going on there." Yes this is railroading the players, it also says, "here's the content I've prepared and where the plot points are".


But you seem to bee a DM who likes the players to have agency and roll with their punches. Thats great! Just make sure to put interesting content where they go. You find it unlikely that the pursuing player could catch up? That's okay, just ask yourself what other interesting stuff could happen. The assassin changed horses so maybe the player notices that a horse vendor has a very fine horse in his collection, a horse that fits the description of the assassins horse perfectly. The player finds out that the horse was sold by a peasant who didn't disclose where it came from. The peasant is just a simple thug that got paid to stand with a horse and then take the first horse back to the city but decided to sell it instead. He doesn't know anything about his employers, but he noticed (insert other clue that could be found elsewhere).
Or maybe you decide that no, this route doesn't contain any clues but it could contain an interesting NPC, one that you've created and that the group will interact with later. Maybe an ally, maybe a foe, but it could lead to an interesting social encounter that ends with the NPC giving the advice that the player should drop the pursuit, the assassin is to far away anyway.


One last tip is to not be afraid to switch from one player to the other. As soon as the first player stopped at an inn and got the information that he was lagging behind you could have switched to the other. When he started discovering interesting things the first player would probably realize where the plot was and before player number two discovered more you can switch to player one again and say "So what do you want to do? Do you want to continue the chase or return to town and (other character)? They will probably choose to return.

I hope my post was helpful.

Deatch
2020-06-29, 04:11 AM
Many pieces of good advice here. My approach generally boils down to assessing the situation and letting the players roll. In this case, you inform the player that their chances are slim because of all the factors that were already extensively disscussed. If their chances are none, don't bother with rolling and just tell them.

One thing to keep in mind, when doing this, is that the roll then represents the chaotic nature of the world.

In this example, the assassin might had everything planned, horses ready, route planned. But there is a small chance that the horse throws a shoe. Or she gets ambushed along the way. Or some other random occurence that leads to opportunity for capture (lets say roll of 20).

Lesser roll might lead to a chance encounter with someone who recognized the assasin, or a piece of equipment that got left behind in the pursuit. This should provide a clue for future investigation and make the player feel the action was not completely wasted.

Low rolls than mean that this was a dead end, but since it took only few minutes of game time, it's not a huge loss.

KillianHawkeye
2020-06-29, 09:49 AM
I agree with the general sentiment that this was mostly a difference in expectations between you and your player.


Here's a few small comments: On your part, you could have either made it more clear that the player had almost no chance of catching the assassin, or come up with some kinds of difficulties that the assassin might encounter to make catching up possible. But personally, if you felt like you didn't want the players to catch the assassin yet, you should stick with that feeling and not waste the players' time with a one-in-a-million chance.

On your player's part, they should've known their character was not well suited to this task, especially with the inherent disadvantage they started with. They seem to be clearly overestimating what their character is capable of in numerous ways.



I will also say that a chase is a bad element for a roleplaying game, because most games simply have no rules to support it. You're either the faster one or the slower one, or you're both the same speed. A chase scene works best if it's extremely short and close and action-packed, with obstacles that can sway the outcome.

A long chase with horses on a road, where you're not even close enough to see the person you're chasing, without any obstacles to change things up, and having no way of tracking them when you inevitably lose them... is just a bad scene that will frustrate everyone.

One thing that's important for a DM to learn is what kind of things work well in movies or video games, but don't work at all in tabletop roleplaying games.

zinycor
2020-06-29, 10:17 AM
From my opinion you shouldn't do these complex plots (Such as mysteries and assassinations) at the start of a campaign, the start of a campaign should be all about setting the PCs relationship with each other and the players learning the game mechanics and getting comfortable with it.

If you want to do this adventure, you can wait until you built a rapport with the players and the characters.

Darth Credence
2020-06-29, 12:45 PM
I'm pretty big on letting the players do what they want to do, so I can see the instinct to let him give chase if he chooses. I would have described early what the challenges were to him succeeding, but if he wanted to go for it, I would have let him. But I also would have focused much more on the other player.
Here would have been my basic way to handle it. At first, I would have let him get to the part of getting his own horse for the chase, then I would turn the focus back to the other player, and let them know the results of their search. I'd get what their next actions are, then turn back to the chaser. At this point, I'd describe that he made it to the main road. Rather than let him say that there should be clear tracks, I'd have him make a tracking check - the difficulty should probably be a 20 or 25 based on how you describe it. After the roll, I'd ask him what he wanted to do - if he did find them, and he wanted to follow, I'd let him follow, but switch back to the other person and play with them for a while. If he failed, I'd do the same, but he'd go the wrong way no matter which way he picked, unless you had a good reason for her to go a specific way.
I'd do about 1/2 an hour of in game time working with the other person, then go back to the chaser. If he failed the earlier tracking check, then I'd tell him that no one has seen his quarry. I would hope that would get it across. If he had passed, I'd tell him that she had been seen, then I'd have him make an intelligence check, setting the DC at 10 and giving him whatever bonuses I could come up with. If he passes, I'd tell him that he's been thinking about this, and is pretty sure that he has no chance of catching up. If he fails, and he knows he biffed it, I'd tell him he's thought about it, and even though the odds of successfully finding her are about 3,720 to 1, he thinks to himself that he still has a shot. Then I'd repeat the check every time I go back to him for 15 seconds to update him on the futility.
This is my attempt to balance unlimited freedom with rationality. I will almost never tell someone they straight up can't do something. But I do like having them make very easy intelligence checks that will give them the information that it is impossible. For instance, the longest long jump ever recorded is just short of 30 ft. If the players come upon a ravine, and the other side is 40 feet away, I'd assume no one would even think about trying it. But if someone has high strength and dexterity, plus acrobatics, they might think they can break that record by ten feet while in armor and carrying a fifty pound pack. If they say they want to do it, I'll give them an intelligence check with a DC of 5 (I know). Assuming they pass, I'll tell them they've looked at the gap, done a few practice jumps, and they are completely confident that attempting this jump will end with them being a stain on the bottom of the ravine. If they fail, I'll say, 'although you've never jumped anywhere close to that far before, and you're weighed down with a lot of equipment, you've thought long and hard about this, and you think - hey, it could happen', laying on as much sarcasm as I can. If they then say they are going to jump, I'll describe them falling to their deaths. There's only so much you can do to make up for dumb choices.

So, tl;dr - I think what you did wrong would have been not giving the other player equal time, if that's how it worked out. Maybe make the futility of the chase more clear, but if you want your campaign to be one where people can try anything, then I think allowing him to pursue the chase was fine. And if any player in my campaign thinks that it must be correct if the DM is allowing them to attempt it, then I would have to figure out what I did wrong to give them that impression.

Anonymouswizard
2020-06-29, 12:55 PM
You should have definitely made it clear to the player that with their current resources, they had no way of catching the assassin. The longer you drag things out by letting someone think they have a chance, even an infinitesimally slim one, the more they're going to get attached to finding that outcome where they succeed. If your player has already spent what I would imagine sounds like 30 minutes to an hour of real game time trying to come up with stuff to try, they're just going to be more inclined to double down, then double down again, etc. rather than accept they've wasted an hour of the session trying plan after plan that just doesn't work. That's fairly simple psychology you pick up after a while of managing groups of people, and it can turn even the most otherwise reasonable person into "That Guy" for a session.

This. There should have been a 'it's unlikely you'll catch up to her, she knows her route and has a faster horse, but you can still follow and try to pick up her trail later' discussion at approximately the city gate. Make it clear that while pursuing this lead isn't pointless, it's unlikely to bare fruit at this stage because you're trying to catch a rocket-propelled Harley-Davidson on a poorly maintained penny farthing.


But yeah, it's a mistake, but one I've seen GMs make several times (especially because, despite theoretically being highly intelligent, I will just bash away at one approach until somebody drags me away or I break through whatever wall the GM put there*). One of the best is the one who had learned to make clues (far more than they needed), make situations, and then slot clues into situations on the fly, so that if we missed a clue for whatever reason or became fixated on one thing we'd still be able to move forward. But they key thing is communication and honesty, right when the chase started to go south you should have asked the player what their plan for catching her was, and made it clear that it was unlikely to succeed for the next few in-game days unless he could get more speed.

Really, the lead is a perfectly acceptable one to follow, just it needs to be followed by seeing where the trail stops cold and using that to define a search area, as well as putting out as good a description of the assassin as you can. This is information the player should have been given when the chase began to drag on, or you should have set a specific 'catch her by this point or lose the trail' point and explained you were going to do something like 4e Skill Challenges to resolve it.

* I tend not to go for direct spells which have easily defined effects on people because it encourages this, I tend to load up on illusions or restoratives these days.

martixy
2020-06-29, 02:36 PM
I've been on the DM side.

For my money, I was ambivalent as to how it went, but... I kept things going instead of shortcutting, because I kept hoping for my players to come up with something creative. In the end they didn't.

A bit of a downer conclusion, but sometimes players aren't very smart. They can often tunnel-vision and miss even obvious clues/information. Just recognizing when that happens so you can adjust can help a lot.

KillianHawkeye
2020-06-29, 03:32 PM
From my opinion you shouldn't do these complex plots (Such as mysteries and assassinations) at the start of a campaign, the start of a campaign should be all about setting the PCs relationship with each other and the players learning the game mechanics and getting comfortable with it.

If you want to do this adventure, you can wait until you built a rapport with the players and the characters.

I agree with this advice, too. Start with something simpler so your players can get into the game and their characters, then it might be okay to do something trickier.

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-29, 03:53 PM
One of the better ways I've seen with dealing with this sort of thing is the Extended Test. I don't know what system you're playing (we can always hope it's not D&D - please say it's not D&D), but essentially it's exactly what it sounds like. You say "alright, your trying to ride down the assassin, the assassin is trying to ride away from you, in essence. Great. You get X dice or an X modifier based on in game system to represent being a bookish untrained horseman on a nag. She gets X+3 dice/modifier to represent being a very good horseman on a very good horse. If you get to Z successes/score first with dice rolls, you catch her. If If she gets to Z-1 (she has a head start, right?) she puts enough distance on you that there's no real hope of catching her in a straight chase."

It lets him roll dice that give him a chance to actually succeed, while accounting for the factors that mean she probably won't be caught. And if she is caught? Well, he got lucky. Her horse threw a shoe, or she got held up forever by the guards at a gate somewhere. Or he doesn't "catch her" in the rode her down on the road, but finds the hamlet she went to ground in because he shows up and sees a very, very fine horse looking blown near the inn.

If he loses? Hey, the odds weren't in your favor. You gave it a shot, spent a cold snowy night riding around, and now you need a new plan.

And you can do this for basically any big long extended thing. Want to see if you can build the town's defenses before the orcs arrive? Sure, we can roll to see how far you get. Want to see if you can find information in the eldritch tome before dawn? Have at it, you need Z, and each roll takes an hour.

Player agency is returned, GM sanity by ensuring a semi-plausible outcome is returned, everyone walks away happy.

BRC
2020-06-29, 04:12 PM
One of the important GMing skills is knowing how to communicate when A Player Has Failed.
It's not something you can be subtle about, and it often feels bad, especially for something like this. It's tempting to just keep the narrative rolling as the characters experience it.

You search the room, you don't find anything, it doesn't mean there wasn't anything there to find.


You chase the assassin, you don't catch them. But, they don't get to just keep rolling over and over against to succeed, otherwise failure has no consequence. Letting players "Just Try Again" is tempting, but often a bad idea without some sort of consequence. unless some circumstance has changed dramatically. If the players start listing specific things they're trying to do, unless those have an additional cost to them, assume that the PCs did all the common-sense smart stuff first time around.

But at some point it's important to make it clear out of character "You failed, you can keep trying, but you rolled the dice and failed." If they really want to try again, clearly outline the circumstances under which they could try again, with the potential consequences of doing so.

To answer the original question, no, you're not a bad DM. You made a mistake letting the chase go on as long as it did, but that's a super easy mistake to make.



Here's how I would have handled it:
The bookish monk makes a roll to catch up with the assassin in a chase, and fails, due to it being an older horse and less-experienced rider, plus the assassin's head start. The assassin has gained a significant lead.
Make it clear, the initial roll to chase resulted in the Assassin getting away.

Now, give the Player the choice to do the following
1) Redouble their efforts, basically making the same check again, but harder, and if they fail this time, they give up and the assassin gets away.
2) Attempt a shortcut to cut the assassin off, make the check at the same difficulty, but if they fail there are serious consequences (Their horse breaks a leg trying to jump a fence, they anger somebody by trampling through their yard, they get lost trying to navigate the backstreets and lose a lot of time finding their way out)
3) They can slow their pursuit, focusing on tracking the assassin rather than pursuing at full speed.

For option 1, re-attempt the same test but more difficult. If they succeed, they managed to catch up. If they fail, they ride their horse to exhaustion and can no longer pursue.
For option 2, re-attempt the ride check, if they fail, some more serious consequence happens. If they succeed, they take a shortcut and manage to catch up with the assassin, if they fail, serious consequence.
Option 3: the goal is no longer to catch the assassin tonight, switch it to at tracking roll to get information about the Assassin's final destination, although this will take a lot of in-game time and won't neccessarily give you a street address.

Kraynic
2020-06-29, 07:12 PM
I'm going to disagree with most (from the looks of it) people in the thread so far. There is nothing wrong with doing a complex plot to start off with and there is really nothing that was done wrong with the chase.

In my opinion, the only thing that might have been good is to switch between the players more frequently. If a player really wants to go chase after someone who totally outclasses them in riding ability and the horse they are riding, let them. Anytime there is a potential place to pause and catch up with what is going on behind, take that time to find out what the other player(s) are up to. That not only lets whoever got left behind have some time to do stuff without waiting too long, but it also lets the player "in pursuit" have time to think about what they are doing and maybe get interested in the situation they have left behind. The only other thing I would say is that if there is anything at all connected to your plot that can happen on the road, even if it is just an overheard rumor, an event, or a certain passing npc (or group of them), then have that cross the path of your person in the hopeless chase. If there isn't anything directly connected to your plot, have something happen. Are there other things going on in the world that may be of interest that may have effects or rumors here? Is there something coming later for which you can provide some foreshadowing? The road can be a strange place, filled with the potential for odd circumstances and outlandish people, even when it isn't dangerous.

I tend to run fairly "sandboxy" games, so I am totally up for letting the players do stuff that won't work out for them (at least not in what they originally set out to accomplish). I am also one of "those DMs" that doesn't see the need for there always being a chance of success. I would try to have something interesting happen out on the road though. If nothing else, just to keep the players guessing (and hopefully interested). The only time I shut people down on some direction they are taking is with one-shot games where play time is an issue and there won't be a "next time".

zinycor
2020-06-30, 12:25 AM
Another thing I would look for is that this, as the first adventure, sets the mood for the game, as the mission is conceived as "There will happen an assasination and the Assasin will go away" this sets up a scenario where the PCs may get only half a win, a consolation prize, and this does set up a mood going forward.

This ain't a bad thing, but it is something to have in mind, as you could play with that.

zinycor
2020-06-30, 02:04 AM
Guys, what do you think about D&D
That's a very big question, you probably should make a specific thread in regards to that.

Anti-Eagle
2020-06-30, 04:20 AM
I don't think you're a bad DM but maybe this player has different expectation of the game than you.

kyoryu
2020-06-30, 10:13 AM
there is really nothing that was done wrong with the chase.

Wrong? Like "bad DM" level? No.

Could it have been handled better? Yes. Giving the player reason to believe they had a reasonable chance to succeed, and playing it out as minutely as was done, when the player really didn't have much of a chance wasn't a good way to either set expectations or manage time in game.

Handling the whole sequence with a handful of die rolls would have made it a five minute prelude to the game, and communicated hte actual likelihood much better, without spending the majority of a session on it.

Pacing is a skill, and one that could have been done a bit better in this case, i think.

Aneurin
2020-06-30, 01:01 PM
I don't think you did anything wrong here; the player tried something, it had a (low) chance of success and you let them try - that's absolutely fine. What I would suggest doing differently in future, though, is being more careful in telegraphing how badly outmatched the character is in regards to this obstacle.

Players aren't always good at spotting how difficult a challenge will be, because the difficulty of the challenge will be different between systems and GMs who don't all have the same idea of what is and isn't reasonable - as such the players don't really have a baseline for how difficult the feat they're attempting really is. Goodness knows I've played in games where the GM thinks opening the lock on a tool shed needs to be a very difficult task on par with cracking a professional security system.

But while the players often can't effectively gauge the difficulty of something, the characters often can - and I'll try to use them, and what they 'should' know to communicate to the players the difficulty. Often by simply stepping out of the game for a moment and saying "Okay, this thing you're doing is absurdly difficult - you're going to have to come up with something brilliant to make this one work". Or "this is probably going to kill you all, you know that, right?" which also covers situations where the characters are about to commit suicide because the players have misinterpreted something I've said.



A little unsolicited advice (sorry); if it makes your player feel better, and it advances the plot, it might be worth pointing out that they uncovered some important evidence and clues about the assassin in their pursuit. They have an increasingly good description from eye witnesses, and can find out where she was going by the trail of worn-out post horses she's left behind (also that she's wealthy enough to travel by post and/or ruin the post horses by overworking them) which means they don't need tracking skills to get a rough idea of where she's going - won't help with getting them a street address, just a "this city/area" unless she happens to return her final horse in the hands of a liveried/gossiping servant.



TL;DR: I'd recommend saying "this probably won't work unless you do something amazing, and even then your odds ain't great - but try if you want" as soon as a player says something like this again. It's more than possible the player is misreading the situation, and likelihood of success. Also, try and give them something for trying, otherwise it's a bit of a waste of time to spend so long on it.

Talakeal
2020-06-30, 02:28 PM
Seems pretty normal. The only thing I would have done differently is let them roll a dice and given them a small chance for something unforeseen allowing him to catch up, for example the assassins horse throwing a Shoe or encountering a place where the road was washed out.

fergo
2020-06-30, 05:48 PM
Hi guys, thank you for all of your excellent advice. If the situation were to be replayed, I would certainly (a) be clearer about the low possibility of success, and (b) have him fine something of use or interest, so that the sum experience isn't a total waste of time. It's a useful learning experience!

To clarify a couple of the more common points people picked up on:

I was in fact switching between this player and the other player. This was actually skewed much more in the other player's favour, time-wise, since simply put there was more for him to do. With the player in question, I asked him each time I cut to him whether he wanted to continue, which he always responded in the affirmative.

Both myself and the other player did point out the flaw in his logic regarding catching up with a quarry moving faster than him a couple of times along the way, but he disagreed. Perhaps I should have sort of told him out of character, voice-of-god style?

As I said before, I should have rewarded his efforts in some way, some clue as to the assassin's ultimate destination as Fleetflinger and a couple of others have said: some interaction with an NPC that could provide useful information. I think as a GM I was being a bit stubborn and short-sighted, which is definitely something I'll try and avoid in the future!

Tanarii
2020-07-01, 03:09 PM
No but you made a classic DM mistake: allowing a player to keep having their PC do one thing after the other hoping the player would give up, when the PC cannot succeed. It's much better to tell them they cannot succeed early on, and why.

Players regularly fall into the trap of 'the DM wouldn't have let me spend this much time on it / get this far' if you let them spend table time on something. If you're going to do that, you need to start off the campaign being explicit they can try to do whatever they like, can fail, and you won't save them from getting themselves killed. Or in this case 'wasting' time.

prabe
2020-07-02, 03:44 PM
As others have said, not a Bad DM, just one that made a mistake. Communicating the situation better at the start of it probably would have prevented the problems. I've found that admitting mistakes to the players, then apologizing, then fixing the mistakes (where possible) goes over well. Maybe you can talk with your players about what information they need to make reasonable decisions--different people need different kinds and amounts.

SpyOne
2020-07-03, 09:22 AM
It seems to me you had a valuable learning experience. You have decided that didn’t go well, that it was at least partly your fault, and to try handling things differently in the future. All good.
So no, you do not appear to be a "bad DM".





Should I have:


Not have had an assassin that the players would find it difficult to immediately catch?
Rolled with my player's ideas of, I don't know, mathematically proving her destination?
Retconned my own pre-laid plans for how well-equipped and well-prepared the assassin is, so the player was capable of catching her?
Just told him flat-out that it was impossible for him to catch her from the start, so he never left the city in the first place?
Something else?



My votes would be:
Maybe
No
Maybe
Maybe
Sure

That is, the one thing I would recommend against is supporting the player's notion that a high Intelligence can substitute for skills you don't have.
None of the other ideas are inherently good or bad.

Having the characters arrive in the immediate aftermath of the assassination (he went thatta way!) sets a certain mood, but it is easy to see that if the assassin had been long gone when they arrived, they wouldn't have given chase. It wasn't a wrong decision, but ... Investigating plane crashes gets into what they call an "event chain". Like, if it hadn't rained on Thursday the farmer would have plowed on Thursday, but instead he plowed on Friday and so was struck by debris falling from the sky.
The decision to plow tomorrow wasn't in any way wrong, but changing it means the farmer doesn't die.

Changing your plans based on the players' choices can be good but isn't mandatory. (A DM I know once ditched the design for the bad guy's home because the players expected him to have a greek style villa because his name sounded Greek. The DM had chosen the name on the fly, seeing "second level" in his notes he read "second" backwards and turned it into "Donassis".)

But it seems most likely that the player was expecting more immediate feedback about his ultimate failure. Not a railroading shutdown, but give him a minute, ask for a roll against something appropriate (perception, inspiration, whatever - the roll is mostly theater) and say something like "you've lost sight of her, you don't know how to track, she has a better horse than you and is an experienced rider and you aren't. This plan doesn't seem to be working"

BRC
2020-07-07, 12:15 PM
Both myself and the other player did point out the flaw in his logic regarding catching up with a quarry moving faster than him a couple of times along the way, but he disagreed. Perhaps I should have sort of told him out of character, voice-of-god style?


This is a key lesson here.

The Player seemed to be under the impression that "And then they catch the assassin" was part of your intended plan for the session, and communicating the difference between "A thing you are supposed to be able to do", "A thing that you will probably fail at" and "A thing that is supposed to be totally off the table" is a tricky skill for a GM, especially because succeeding at Difficult and Dangerous things is kind of part of the whole Fantastic Adventure package.

Of course the GM is going to describe the dragon as terrible and dangerous, that's to make you feel good when you kill it. Nobody gets excited about fighting a dragon that the GM describes as "Pretty tough looking, but well within your abilities".

You DID try to communicate this, both with the situation itself (Trying to catch up with somebody who had a faster horse and a head start), and, it sounds like, with NPC's discouraging them, but that apparently didn't get this across. So, some voice of god "You can keep trying, but your chances of catching up are basically nil" might have served to calibrate their expectations. It sounds like at some point they hit a sunk-cost , where you had let them spend so much time on the chase that they assumed you must have been planning something to make it worthwhile.

Jay R
2020-07-08, 08:46 AM
One fact worth considering. A horse cannot gallop for long. After one or two miles, the horse is fatigued and cannot run at all. it's true that a good rider can catch up, by using another gait.

If the assassin took off in a nice, easy canter, she'd be much harder to catch. She could be caught by a rider at a gallop, unless she is already too far ahead. Remember, the pursuing galloper would have to catch her in the first couple of miles.

The ideal, perfectly knowledgeable DM would have said, "Does your PC have the Ride skill?" If not, he will not catch up to the assassin, who presumably knows how to avoid capture. But no DM is perfectly knowledgeable on every relevant subject.

So the slightly more complex answer is that a well-trained rider might be able to catch up to an untrained rider. But if your assassin knows horses and the PC doesn't, he doesn't know how.

---

Now, get rid of the question "Am I a bad DM?" In fact, get rid of the phrase "bad DM". All DMs are imperfect. You will make mistakes. That doesn't mean you're a "bad DM". It means you're human.

DMing takes experience, just like anything else. You are a low-level DM, looking to gain experience points. And that's fine.

---

I'd like to offer some advice: one tool I've found useful as a DM. Once I've listened to the player's objections, and decided that there is no reason to change anything, and I can't get the player to move on, I will sum up the whole thing, including his points, as a conclusion.

"Look, the character with superior riding skill, on a superior horse that she chose for this getaway, and which she knows well, tried to escape from your character. She rolled the rolls she needed to roll, and succeeded at what she did. She knows more about horses than you do, and used that knowledge to successfully escape. Your character is on a strange horse that does not know you. It's a peasant's horse, not trained for the chase. You do not know what skills she has, and you did not see what happened after you lost sight of her. Yes, sometimes a better rider can catch a worse one by using a slower but steadier gait. That didn't happen here because she made the right choices and got the rolls she needed. I know where she is now, and you're not there.

"Nothing you have said suggests that I have applied the rules mechanics wrong, or that the rules mechanics shouldn't apply here. She has gotten away from you. That encounter is over. What does the party do next?"

vasilidor
2020-07-12, 05:33 PM
you should never assume that the villain will get away. yes, it would make sense for them to have a getaway plan, but sometimes those get countered. in this scenario it is apparent that the villains plan bore fruit. you should never just hand wave "and the villain escapes" if you have a combat system for the game you are running, I would have everything go in combat turns using relative skill checks and actions. in example if the characters are in a chase scene on foot, have both the player and the villain do athletics checks. if one of them gets an advantage, such as getting to a vehicle or horse, then the other needs to get something comparable or simply fall behind. you also need to have a way to resolve if the person running gets away. the easiest way to do this is determine if the fleeing person got away is if the pursuer would reasonably lose track of their quarry, such as having lost line of sight and are unable to track.

kyoryu
2020-07-13, 09:50 AM
you should never assume that the villain will get away. yes, it would make sense for them to have a getaway plan, but sometimes those get countered.

Never put a piece on the board you're not willing to lose.

I3igAl
2020-07-16, 12:51 PM
There was nothing wrong with what you did ...

... however a good idea would have been to give the monk (and maybe the rest of the group) some partial success.

He could have found the assasin's clothes, a used up disguise kit and a dead horse in front of a medium sized city for example. Or a burned out "Disguise Self scroll". Or a burned out scroll, that turns him into a bird. Now he knows the dude will be basically impossible to recognize, but he has a lot some new clues he can bring back to the group for further investigation.
Some peasants could turn out to be the assasin's henchmen and either try to rough him up or try to a (honey)trap him and invite him to dinner. After handling said encounter, he could question them for some new clues.
You could have had more assasins especially since you fed one to an NPC. Leave one to be taken out by the players as well, while the rest flees.

This way the assasins get away, but your heroes still get to feel good.