DM Help Players complaining the game is too difficult. DM isn't having fun. [Archive]

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PretzelCoatl

2021-10-21, 03:25 PM

Hey, all, I'm new to the forum, I looked around a bit and I see a few threads along similar veins so I hope I'm in the right place. If I'm not, I apologize deeply and I will scurry off elsewhere and try again later.

I'm hoping to get some advice on an issue I've been having for a while now. Basically, I'm DMing a homebrew Pathfinder game, and the players are only intermittently having fun; they are complaining the game is too difficult. As the DM, I am having issues providing the kind of content I feel they are looking for, and what they say they want doesn't seem to be what they actually want (they say they want a challenging game, but when I give it to them, we've had sessions practically explode, break down, tears and screaming, that sort of thing).
What are some things I can do?

• I’ve dropped the CR of all encounters pretty drastically to make fights easier.
• I’ve stopped using spellcasters other than simple blaster casters and only use those sparingly.
• I’ve stopped using any kind of complex tactics. I’m trying to make sure most monsters don’t do anything more complex than “five foot step and attack” to keep it simple for them. If monsters (like demons) have spell like abilities, I just don't use them.
• I’ve stopped using combat maneuvers whenever possible, unless it’s part of the essential kit of a monster, and I try to avoid using monsters with those kinds of abilities wherever possible (I.e., no monsters that specifically eat people, since this stresses them out).

The players seem to have the most fun when they can just run through a whole dungeon slaughtering everything without ever taking any damage and are never threatened, so I’m trying to give them this experience, but it’s not always easy, since my natural inclination leans towards complex tactical encounters and difficult battles, and sometimes I mess up, leading to everyone being upset.

When I do manage to do the above (a whole dungeon where they just slaughter everything with no challenge), I’m left feeling empty, bored, and unfulfilled. I spend a week or weeks making a dungeon, with maps and lore and puzzles and traps for it to just get run over in a few nights with no challenge and no interest, the lore ignored, the puzzles brute forced (because they’re out-CRed and it’s easier or they have the HP to tank the damage and don’t want to/don’t care to think it through etc.). Sometimes they even make fun of the dungeon saying it makes no sense, because they couldn’t pick up the more subtle bits of lore and clues that were hidden or scattered about as they killed their way through innocents, traps, or monsters.

So if you’ve read this far, I guess I have a few questions.

TLDR: How do I resolve this situation of players only wanting to roflstomp everything and me feeling bored and unfulfilled? How do I provide content that is both fun for my players and fulfilling for me? Does anyone have any tips, tricks, or prior experience on handling this kind of situation? I’ve been playing and DMing for a long time, and stuff like this has come up before, but I would rather not just pack my bags and move away. I would value any insight anyone has.

dafrca

2021-10-21, 04:59 PM

TLDR: How do I resolve this situation of players only wanting to roflstomp everything and me feeling bored and unfulfilled? How do I provide content that is both fun for my players and fulfilling for me? Does anyone have any tips, tricks, or prior experience on handling this kind of situation? I’ve been playing and DMing for a long time, and stuff like this has come up before, but I would rather not just pack my bags and move away. I would value any insight anyone has.
When faced with a similar situation when running a Shadowrun campaign, I paused the campaign and had each player run a session for the rest. This allowed two things to happen, I got a four week rest and was allowed to just play and they all four seemed to re-evaluate their play in my game. Was it magically better? No. Was it somewhat better? Yes.

King of Nowhere

2021-10-21, 05:21 PM

TLDR: How do I resolve this situation of players only wanting to roflstomp everything and me feeling bored and unfulfilled?
How do I provide content that is both fun for my players and fulfilling for me?
Pretty much impossible. What you want and what your players want are different things. so you need to have a good talk about what you want, and then everyone has to compromise a bit. that, or you have to find a new group. Or a new dm.

Does anyone have any tips, tricks, or prior experience on handling this kind of situation?
talekeal has a lot of experience in those kind of situations. he's been posting detailed stories for years, and most of them fit squarely under "horror". And 90% of the people was telling him to just quit the game.
Though he had some happy experiences later, so maybe there is hope.

I’ve been playing and DMing for a long time, and stuff like this has come up before, but I would rather not just pack my bags and move away. I would value any insight anyone has.
I'd say that you have to take a stand somewhere. it doesn't mean necessarily quit, but you decide what style of gaming you would play, and what you wouldn't. just catering to your players is going to leave you unhappy, and the problems won't disappear by themselves if you don't face them.

KorvinStarmast

2021-10-21, 05:23 PM

When faced with a similar situation when running a Shadowrun campaign, I paused the campaign and had each player run a session for the rest. This allowed two things to happen, I got a four week rest and was allowed to just play and they all four seemed to re-evaluate their play in my game. Was it magically better? No. Was it somewhat better? Yes. My gut reaction to the OP was "have one of the other players GM for a while." And you backed your answer up with experience.
+ Many! :smallbiggrin:

HidesHisEyes

2021-10-21, 07:28 PM

My gut reaction to the OP was "have one of the other players GM for a while." And you backed your answer up with experience.
+ Many! :smallbiggrin:

Yeah I’d also recommend seeing if anyone else wants to GM for a bit.

Also, it sounds like you’ve talked to them about it already, but maybe have a proper sit down in depth chat if you haven’t yet. Tell them exactly what you’ve told us, ask them what they think the solution is. Make it clear that you’ll get burned out on the campaign if it goes on like this, and try to come up with a plan for the new approach and get everyone on board with that plan. It will mean both you and the players compromising somehow.

It really does sound tough. I’m honestly wondering what these players want out of RPGs if it’s not lore or narrative, not puzzles and exploration, and not challenging combat. But hopefully you can get to the bottom of it and make it work. Wish I could offer more in the way of advice.

False God

2021-10-21, 10:23 PM

When I had this issue I stopped DMing. Made up some excuse, can't remember what, didn't really matter.

Rynjin

2021-10-21, 10:31 PM

Your players are either *******s (in which case you should just drop the game), or they don't want to play Pathfinder. They sound more like they want to play something like 5e, or a system that is even simpler.

GentlemanVoodoo

2021-10-21, 11:02 PM

TLDR: How do I resolve this situation of players only wanting to roflstomp everything and me feeling bored and unfulfilled? How do I provide content that is both fun for my players and fulfilling for me? Does anyone have any tips, tricks, or prior experience on handling this kind of situation? I’ve been playing and DMing for a long time, and stuff like this has come up before, but I would rather not just pack my bags and move away. I would value any insight anyone has.

First order of business is to discuss the situation with the players. Some form of middle ground has to be reached. But it sounds like they are in the wrong game and would enjoy something more akin to a D&D style board game (Descent, Gloomhaven, are the ones that come to mind). More so I would ask them what do they consider challenging about your current aspects? If no mutual conscientious can be reached then it is time to stop. Otherwise both you and the players will be miserable and frankly there is no point to continue if one side must be as such all the time. I would first make the attempt to show a good gesture but there are times when the group cohesion is not their. In such cases it is best to call it quits.

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-21, 11:13 PM

Yeah IÂ’d also recommend seeing if anyone else wants to GM for a bit.
OK, a lot of suggestions for this so far. Not something I'd thought of, so that's good. I will consider how to implement this. We mostly do a long-running story campaign, so maybe we could have everyone run a one-shot session or something. Do you all think that the forced perspective from the other side of the screen will help, or something? Is that the idea here?

Also, it sounds like youÂ’ve talked to them about it already, but maybe have a proper sit down in depth chat if you havenÂ’t yet. Tell them exactly what youÂ’ve told us, ask them what they think the solution is. Make it clear that youÂ’ll get burned out on the campaign if it goes on like this, and try to come up with a plan for the new approach and get everyone on board with that plan. It will mean both you and the players compromising somehow.
The problem is that I have done so in varying degrees of certain and uncertain terms, and have gotten kickback such as, "Pretzel, it's not fair, you're being too hard on us," and "Pretzel, you're smarter than us, we can't think tactically like you can," or "Stop telling us what we're doing wrong, you're just making us feel stupid and criticizing us" when I'm trying to help them get through something tough or "What are you talking about, I like challenging games" immediately before said person gets upset before a challenging encounter.

I think I sometimes come off as condescending, which is probably my fault, sometimes mocking (again probably my fault, but it's hard not to get caught up in the fun when a particularly diabolical trap goes off perfectly...DMs, you've all been there, I'm sure... and then everyone is mad at me for "making fun" of the party and making me feel as if I'm not allowed to enjoy a well-laid trap or encounter, and the whole evening just spirals downhill, with everyone guilt-tripping me and making me feel as if I'm literally not allowed to have any fun at the table at all while playing).

But as for talking to them about what they want, them wanting an easier game is fair. A core difference in a desired game archetype is not inherently bad, just different. The difference between our playstyles is just something I hope to be able to remedy, because the gap has somehow grow so big that I don't know how to bridge it.

But yes, you're right, we've talked about it at length numerous times, and this weird aversion to difficulty is new. We've been playing together for about two years and it's only in the last three to six months that this has cropped up. For the previous 18 months before that I was (I think) operating at the same level of difficulty the entire time. As far as I'm aware, nothing has changed in the style of my DMing or the relative difficulty of encounters. I like to do irregular surveys of the players' preferences on things like game difficulty, world preference, and stuff like that, and the majority stated a preference for medium-challenging difficulty, but recently their actual actions have belied this and have instead indicated a strong preference for, well....wanting to roflstomp everything in their way. And as I said, pouring a month's worth of writing into a creative work that gets literally completely ignored is just... soul wrenching.

It really does sound tough. IÂ’m honestly wondering what these players want out of RPGs if itÂ’s not lore or narrative, not puzzles and exploration, and not challenging combat. But hopefully you can get to the bottom of it and make it work. Wish I could offer more in the way of advice.
Well they seem to genuinely enjoy the roflstomping, and there is a big social element to the game, the joking around and tomfoolery and socializing that's always fun.

When I had this issue I stopped DMing. Made up some excuse, can't remember what, didn't really matter.
Well, I am hoping to avoid simply quitting DMing. I genuinely enjoy playing and DMing, and I enjoy this group. I'm just not particularly enamored with the negatives of this particular situation. I've always envisioned a gaming group a lot like a relationship due to how socially inclined it is. You get out what you put in, and sometimes it is work to keep it healthy. And sometimes, unfortunately, it's not healthy. I'm just hoping this isn't a break-up scenario and I can figure out something to make things a bit better. I think the main problem is that communication is harder in a situation like this because not everyone approaches this kind of situation the same way, so a more oblique approach is necessary. Ideally, we could all sit down and hash the problem out without feelings being hurt, but in real life...unfortunately that doesn't work. Hence why I'm here, hoping for some more oblique approaches, since the direct methods have literally resulted in "What are you talking about, I LOVE challenging encounters, are you calling me a liar???"

Reversefigure4

2021-10-22, 12:18 AM

Mr Beer

2021-10-22, 12:35 AM

I'm happy to run combat heavy games but if players just want to curbstomp any and all foes, I'm not running that game. While I want my players to enjoy the games I run, since I'm the one putting in the lion's share of the effort, if anything they can compromise with me rather than the other way around. If we want incompatible games, fine, I won't run them. My bar for playing in a game is lower than running it, so if they want to run a curbstomp game, I might play in it.

dafrca

2021-10-22, 01:17 AM

OK, a lot of suggestions for this so far. Not something I'd thought of, so that's good. I will consider how to implement this. We mostly do a long-running story campaign, so maybe we could have everyone run a one-shot session or something. Do you all think that the forced perspective from the other side of the screen will help, or something? Is that the idea here?
Bottom line is yes. But also to offer others the chance to step up and provide more fun for you as well. As a GM it is good to once in a while take a break and just play. Let others help shoulder the burden for a period.

That was what I found worked for me and my friends at the time. Hoe it helps with your situation as well. :smallsmile:

Satinavian

2021-10-22, 04:01 AM

You could try to switch to a system with some simple combat system where the challenge really comes down only to having bigger numbers instead of moving and acting tactically smart.

Altheus

2021-10-22, 06:24 AM

Both you and the players aren't having fun. Why are you doing this at all?

This does sound like you and the players have different ideas of what would be fun so I'd say fold the game and let someone else run things for a while, or run something else.

I've had games that didn't land with my group and I've folded them after 2 sessions, there's not much point persisting in a thing that is making all of you unhappy.

TheStranger

2021-10-22, 08:37 AM

Rotating the GM position is a good idea. Another thing you could try, IF it’s appealing to you as a GM and if your players are on board, is running a published adventure, like one of the Paizo APs. There can be something strangely compelling about material written by professionals. The encounters (and the story) aren’t necessarily better than what you come up with (and sometimes they’re kind of awful), but they’re “official” and sometimes that matters. There’s an implied idea that the APs represent the intended play experience, so there’s a possibility that if the encounters are designed by “experts” instead of you, your players will adapt their expectations rather than complaining about everything.

I put things like “expert” in quotes because the only qualifier to be a professional AP writer is finding somebody to pay you to do it. There’s plenty of homebrew with better encounter design and more cohesive plot than anything Paizo has done, some of it by people on this forum. So the suggestion has nothing to do with the quality of published material, it’s just an idea that running encounters that represent the “intended” challenge level might encourage your players to moderate their expectations.

Of course, this could also blow up in your face if your players have a couple tough combats and decide that published adventures are crap. But you’re already not having fun so you might as well try something.

Nice username, btw.

Xervous

2021-10-22, 08:44 AM

Could we have a condensed play by play of a problematic encounter as an example?

Easy e

2021-10-22, 09:35 AM

This is a tough challenge, as the GM you are also allowed to have fun. The idea about letting others run once or twice is a good idea.

Other than combat, is their part of the RPG experience they gravitate towards? Do they prefer social, exploration, politics, heists, etc? If there is, you may need to tailor your games that route. You may also want to think about running a system where combat is less crunchy, and is instead simplified?

Otherwise, maybe you just need to take a break and switch up GMs and game systems for a bit?

This situation is always a tough one.

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-22, 12:47 PM

Obviously the two goals of 'difficult fights' and 'stomp everything' are contraindicated, so you'll have to find a something in the middle that works for both if you want to keep going with this group, and more so if you're already tried talking through the problems. It sounds like you're already trying the smart plays and getting nowhere, so it's time to try something out of left field.

One thing: Keep in mind that you quite certainly are tactically smarter than them, if nothing else then by virtue of being the DM.
Well I don't think that's necessarily true. I've met players that are tactically brilliant and smarter than me. While knowing the terrain that I'll be playing with ahead of time is a big advantage because it means I effective have "contingency plans" set up, I try very hard to not think in terms of how I will react if the players do X or Y in a combat situation tactically, instead letting the monsters be reactive, even going so far as to force reactions that make logical sense for the monsters when they're not the right tactical play, though obviously there does have to be some strategic thinking when it comes to map planning due to the online nature of games and planning out how the spread of maps will work (will the players need 300 feet of maps in this direction, etc). But I have had players that are both smarter than me and tactically clever, and I don't think being the DM alone is a sole advantage. A good player group can make their own contingencies for a variety of conditions if they choose to do so.

(This is often exacerbated by homebrew, where you can do whatever you please, and particularly if you're mocked them for not quickly spotting solutions that you made up and have had weeks to think about). This can be part of the problem, I will admit. Though I will defend with two points. I mean it as good natured ribbing which is then misinterpreted as mocking when tempers flare up as people get frustrated, and the "quickly spotted solutions" are more like "the same problems that have occurred multiple times," such as the same player getting tripped during an AOO when trying to move out of a threatened space or provoking an AOO when forgetting to cast defensively.

As for practical goals... I'd suggest trying redefining your goals based on the direction you're already going in of lowering CRs. Lower them further again,
At the moment, the current adventure is APL-4. The party is level 12 and I'm using mostly CR 8-9 encounters on them. Most fights are being easily beaten. A few of them go poorly for a round or two before they rally. The "bossfight" CR 12 almost killed them. The challenges are so low that the entire dungeon only moved then a quarter of the way to the next level.

Turn the tactical difficulties on yourself and try and hit self imposed challenges. Try and get a monster to escape the conflict alive, fleeing through the PCs to escape by it's best method instead of trying to kill them. Can Wizard Wally buy just 3 rounds with his allies to finish his ritual to send some power to his brother (his goal is not to greater tactically oppose the PCs with his stronger brother, but merely doing it out to pay off his life-debt)? Can the brigand king get revenge on the NPC who killed his brother before the PCs can stop?
That's an interesting idea. I can consider that. I worry that a lot of this might go poorly though. Some of this might seem really scripted to the group if I were to succeed, especially if some of those scenarios had negative consequences.

If you're both enjoying the story, To my understanding, they do enjoy the story aspects, but they're a heavy hack-and-slash group. While they enjoy the story aspects of the game, they aren't a heavy roleplay group and don't particularly enjoy roleplaying. They like seeing the story unfold, but the actual nitty-gritty of roleplaying is...harder for them. I have to nudge a lot and carry a lot of the roleplaying and do a lot of... I guess you could say...cinematic sequences? to really progress the story. The idea of a heavy roleplay campaign like what you're describing would not be interesting to them, I think.

Another option is putting in big piles of hero points / action points for the players (then not adjusting monsters to compensate), giving them control over their own rolls and destiny.
We actually do have a hero point system in play. It's a modified M&M one, but it's not too dissimilar. They get one point a session and can store them up indefinitely, so they can influence the story and rolls pretty substantially if they're smart about saving, roleplaying well, or earning points.

Bottom line is yes. But also to offer others the chance to step up and provide more fun for you as well. As a GM it is good to once in a while take a break and just play. Let others help shoulder the burden for a period.
Well, I do genuinely enjoy DMing. It's just that the current situation is somewhat unfulfilling. I think that the main things are that the creative license is essentially being spat upon, and that I'm essentially being disallowed from having fun. As mentioned previously, if I express any enjoyment at an encounter "going well" the party takes it as a personal attack on them, as if I calling them stupid, saying their inept, or making fun of them, but that's really not how it is. It's just the enjoyment of well-made plans coming to fruition. In my opinion, this game has never been DM vs. Players, it's DM and Players working together to enjoy the game and make a fun story, so if an encounter turns Harrowing, that's not bad, that's actively good, because it makes for an engaging story. That's how I've seen it as a player, because it makes for challenging, gripping gameplay, and that's how I see it as a GM, because it makes for the same, plus it means plans comes to fruition, which is very fulfilling. By my players instead see it, for some reason, as a personal attack, and I can't reconcile that difference.

So I'm hoping that your idea will be the bridge that does help reconcile that difference, but my followup question would be, should I play in their game, or not? I worry that I might contaminate the experience at this point, for various reasons. How do I handle them running a game if they feel I'm going to be too tactically inclined? Do I sandbag it? Make characters that are purposefully incapable of fully contributing to a tactical/puzzle situation?

Both you and the players aren't having fun. Why are you doing this at all?
You don't understand, it's not that easy. My CDs are in his truck. xD
But realistically, like I said, these problems are relatively new (3-6 months in a 2 year campaign), so I'm hoping they can be solved rather than just packing my bags and moving away. It's also worth noting that I am, of course, really only stating the negative things here because that's what I need advice with. There are positive things that I don't need help with that I haven't mentioned. It's not all doom and gloom. We have had good sessions recently, and not all of the players are negative, just enough of a majority for it to be an issue.

Another thing you could try, IF it’s appealing to you as a GM and if your players are on board, is running a published adventure, like one of the Paizo APs
This was...maybe the...fourth thing I tried? I've honestly lost track of the exact number of things, but it went...honestly not great. I tried a published adventure and it started out ok. The group was actually loving it. They were cruising through the upper levels of the dungeon, absolutely slaughtering everything they came across (I specifically chose a module that was two levels lower than them). They must have tripled the normal number of expected daily fights without resting by this point, each day, and then they got to the boss of the module. The boss of the module was.....just so badly written. SO badly written. He had NO offensive abilities. Zero. He had virtually NO capacity to deal damage. All of his magic was clouds and delaying magic and a mediocre melee attack. So reading this monster I'm trying to figure out how to use him, so I'm throwing up clouds and using him tactically to delay and harry the group, while his minions just bombed the area. And the group absolutely couldn't handle it. They failed on him three times, teleporting out each time before I instituted a devil may cry easy mode and said he ran out spells and the clouds dissipated and they walked up to him and he stopped running and they just beat him up to death. They also had an ice caster in the group and didn't think to use ice magic on the fire minions (which were weak to ice - it caused them to freeze up and petrified them for the whole fight) which were 90% of the damage). This was the easy module. At this point they asked that we stop doing such hard adventures.

Could we have a condensed play by play of a problematic encounter as an example?
Sure. In addition to the above description, here's a brief description of a trap the PCs encountered. The PCs enter a room. The entire dungeon the PCs have been in has been "Sun" themed the entire time. The room they enter has four doors facing North, East, South, and West. Inscriptions above each door say to greet the rising dawn or be cast into darkness. They choose the west door. The trap triggers, the floor disappears, they drop into the pit. A hungry darkness spell triggers and they start taking damage and con damage every round.
They freak out, reasonably so, because this trap is actually nasty. Since they're now in a sealed room taking con damage every round with no way out (a suitable punishment for mixing up east and west in my opinion - this was the most deadly trap in the dungeon).

The players' solution to the trap was to bust through the ceiling and escape. A perfectly feasible solution (I've long learned my lesson that traps/puzzles must have at least three or more possible solutions). Brute force is a fine, albeit slow, solution to being trapped, since the ceiling was fairly well reinforced against just this solution. In the process, one of the players with low constitution (I believe he was an elf and a bit of a min/maxxer) died. He was absolutely furious about having died, and quit the session very vocally. The reason he was so furious was two-fold.
1) While they were trapped in the box, the group used true seeing to see through the darkness. In an effort to make it very clear that they should attempt to DISABLE THE TRAP, I described the floor of the room as being covered in magical runes. The soon-to-be-dead player responded to that by using explosives to attempt to destroy them rather than a disable check. I thought about it, but made the ruling that since magical traps required disable device checks, an offensive attack could not be used as a substitute, so that did not disable the trap, so the trap continued. Also, it is worth noting that I improvised the rune/floor description specifically to encourage him to disable device; it wasn't something I had prepared ahead of time, so "anti-destruction precautions" weren't something I had prepared ahead of time either. Was it the right call? I'm not sure. But it's worth pointing out that the Disable Device DC was only 15, because the trap makers assumed that no one would be able to see in the magical darkness.
2) The player dispelled the magical part of the trap before they broke through the ceiling. It took him three tries to beat the caster level check, but he eventually got it. However, this trap was on a one minute reset timer. The problem comes in here with the following. I like to call at least one major break during the halfway point of our sessions, and sometimes a few minor breaks every now and then so everyone has a chance to stretch their legs or get a snack or use the restroom, and we'd had a stressful situation, so when they dispelled the trap and it had been two hours, I called a break here. We came back ten minutes later, and apparently the player in question had told me that he completely destroyed the trap while I was AFK, without getting confirmation from me that he was successful, and assumed that he was without that confirmation. So when everyone came back, I counted their actions, gave everyone ten rounds worth, then started the trap back up, and he was furious because he had thought the trap was completely inoperable.

Eventually, they did manage to break through the ceiling, but that was the chain of actions that resulted in the player's death due to his low constitution.

This is one of the more recent altercations. I admit that player death is never a fun thing to deal with, and I'm not certain that I adjudicated the trap properly, but what it came down to was that he tried to disable a magical trap via an attack, which is not something condoned by the rules (or common sense in the context of this situation to me), then did not ask for clarification afterwards; he simply got upset). Had he asked for clarification if the runes were a part of a trap and could be attacked, I'd've clarified and told him in no uncertain terms that he should not have attacked and I was being "flavorful" and they he should use disable device, but that didn't happen.

I'm trying to walk the line between giving "hints/help" so the players can solve things on their own/feel good about their accomplishments and just giving them the answers, and I know I don't always do a great job, but I just...I don't know. It wasn't a good night. I'm not sure I did well that night. I was pretty close to quitting for good that night for sure. Sometimes you never know if a ruling you make on the fly is the right call or not, especially when it makes a player so upset, and doubly so if it results in a player's death down the line, regardless of whether or not there were a bunch of other things that also resulted in their death.

Nice username, btw.
Thank you. :) The PretzelCoatl's mighty cheesy breath weapon and salty scales are a sight to behold. ;)

Other than combat, is their part of the RPG experience they gravitate towards? Do they prefer social, exploration, politics, heists, etc? If there is, you may need to tailor your games that route. You may also want to think about running a system where combat is less crunchy, and is instead simplified?
They definitely prefer combat, but I am starting to think they would prefer a system like 5e. Which is not a system I like. So that would be an issue. xD

icefractal

2021-10-22, 02:24 PM

TheStranger

2021-10-22, 02:53 PM

Seconding what icefractal says about giving your players more information. Remember, the players only know what you tell them and it’s not railroading to make sure the players understand the things their characters should understand. Sometimes that might feel like you’re spoon feeding it to them, but it’s incredibly easy to assume that what’s obvious to you is obvious to other people too.

If you’re uncertain what level of information a character should have, start with the assumption that the character fully understands all the mechanical options available to them, even if the player doesn’t. Also consider calling for knowledge checks when a character would have some relevant information rather than waiting for the player to announce it. For instance, ask for a Knowledge: Nature check after your sunrise clue and tell anybody who rolls more than a 5 that the sun rises in the east (if they *still* go west I can’t help you). Or call for a Knowledge: Arcana check as soon as any character interacts with the magical runes and give them information accordingly. I don’t consider that to be interfering with player agency, more like calling for a Perception check to determine if they know what it is rather than if they can see it.

If you find that the challenge is trivial as soon as they know the relevant information (sidenote, guessing what’s relevant is rarely fun), or that a potential botched knowledge roll would make it impossible to proceed, you might want to reconsider the challenge/encounter/obstacle entirely. “Make a DC 20 check to continue playing” is lousy, if depressingly common, adventure design.

MoiMagnus

2021-10-22, 02:58 PM

or they don't want to play Pathfinder. They sound more like they want to play something like 5e, or a system that is even simpler.

Not necessarily.
I can totally see players who like to have a huge toolbox to build their big killing machine, and the more tool for it the better. A lot of peoples play sand-box-like strategy games where there is no real opposition and they're just toying with complex options against virtual punching bags.

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-22, 03:45 PM

It does sound like they might prefer a simpler system, or at least more "slack" in this one. There are two separate issues, from what I'm reading:
1) They're either incapable of thinking tactically, or choose not to (some people want to turn off their brains and chill when they're playing a game).
I think this is a big part of it, honestly. The latter, that is. Not everyone wants to play games on "hard mode" and be challenged, and that's not a bad thing. People look for different things when the play games, and I think they just want to cruise through and smash baddies, for the most part. But I, personally, have a hard time reconciling tabletop play, and especially pathfinder 1e, with that mindset. The game is built for a very nitty-gritty, number-crunching playstyle, for eking out advantages and for optimization and tactics and strategy. It's one of the reasons I like the system so much. Heck, one of the players builds just so. All of his builds are extremely min/maxxy. It's actually why he died, because this constitution was kind of dump-statty in favor of a high casting stat.

2) They don't know the details of the system and so they do stuff like forgetting to cast defensively. This one, you can fix.
Ah, but any attempts by me to remind them of the rules fall under the "stop criticizing us, you're making us feel stupid" umbrella :\ No matter how gently I coach, if they're not in the mood for it, once tempers start flaring and people start getting stressed out, it just starts going badly.

Fix it by assuming the characters are competent and understand the situation, even if the players aren't demonstrating the proper alertness. For example, it's almost always the right choice to cast defensively when threatened. It's usually more of a "Simon says" box to check than a meaningful tactical choice. For your group in particular get rid of Simon says.

If they're going to cast in melee, ask them "Are you casting defensively?" If they try to attack a trap that can't be physically attacked, then if they have any experience with magical traps: "The runes are a lattice of magic, not a physical object, smashing the floor wouldn't destroy them." Even if they don't, they should realize that after trying once.
Hmm, alright, I could do that. This is a very non-CR based way to decrease the difficulty that I hadn't considered. A sort of.....CR-metaphysical approach to doing so. I will admit, it rankles heavily with me to do so, because it goes against a lot of what I consider to be "earned" information, and as I a player, I wouldn't want to be coddled like that, but I think you're right. I will need to get over that personal viewpoint. I think this would help decrease the "difficulty" of the game and basically softball it a bit for them. Thank you. This isn't something I would have considered myself.

Basically, telegraph a whole lot more information, and if the player decides an action which is bad for mechanical reasons, and there's a mechanically-good action which would produce the same result, ask/inform them about that - or just assume they do it that way. Admittedly, I did used to do exactly this for the brand new player in the group for the entire first year he was playing with us, so it wouldn't even be a new experience. I just fell out of the habit of it as time wore on and he grew more used to the game. The rest of the players are supposedly at least intermediate players, some veteran players with years of experience, so I didn't think it necessary, but you're right, I think this will smooth things over a lot and decrease the difficulty curve of the game quite a bit if I do it, as long as I can ride the line of doing it respectfully without being patronizing about it, which I think I can.

There's an argument to be made that learning to dot your I's and cross your T's is part of "player skill" and should be part of the game. Maybe, but from experience
it's definitely not a part your players enjoy, nor does it really matter if they learn to or not (skill at 3.x doesn't necessarily transfer to other RPGs), so I'd suggest ditching it as much as possible.
Yes, you're right. That's a fair point. I'll work better to implement this suggestion. Thank you.

And also, consider spending less effort on your dungeons, at least until you work things out. If they're just going to ignore the lore, don't include much lore. If they're going to brute-force the puzzles, just have obstacles rather than puzzles. IDK if you want to run a game like that, but it'd at least be less wasted effort for the time being.Another fair point. I'm going to talk to them about shifting to some one shots run by them instead of me for the next few sessions, but for the next adventure I'll make it lore-light and see if that helps. Thanks.

Seconding what icefractal says about giving your players more information. Remember, the players only know what you tell them and it’s not railroading to make sure the players understand the things their characters should understand. Sometimes that might feel like you’re spoon feeding it to them, but it’s incredibly easy to assume that what’s obvious to you is obvious to other people too.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with this one. There is a certain base of common knowledge that can be agreed upon. Sure, some points of knowledge aren't common, but the fact that the sun rises in the east is something at least one of my six players has to know. Looking back, if I were very clever, I'd've seeded the information ahead of time subtly somewhere in the dungeon, but as they say, I am not a clever man, so that's that.
The problem with what you're saying is ultimately that any kind of riddle should be provided a relevant knowledge check to give the answer, and I just can't agree with that. At it's core, this was a riddle. An extremely easy riddle, but a riddle nonetheless. The problem here was that they saw it, the took ten seconds on it, and they jumped at the wrong answer without thinking it through. If we were to examine one of the class Hobbit riddles:

What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?

and say that the DM needs to provide a knowledge nature check at DC 5 to make sure that all players are aware that mountains are taller than trees, go up, and do not grow, under the premise that we're "not spoonfeeding them and aren't railroading them," that would completely ruin whatever encounter this is based around.

Ultimately, I'm down for giving the players more information within the realm of common sense, but saying that they only know what I tell them isn't accurate, I think. All people have their own inherent knowledges, too, and the players are also welcome to ask for more. Knowledge checks aren't purely reactive. I think that's something we forget about a lot. Anyway, I will definitely work on giving the players more information, especially in the context of what has been discussed so far. This discussion has definitely made me feel like I've been failing on that point. I guess I felt like the players were more intermediate-to-advanced than they were, or something. I don't know. Maybe I held too high a standard. Definitely makes me feel pretty bad about it.

tyckspoon

2021-10-22, 04:40 PM

So, my day job is in tech support, which requires developing a skill in sussing out what somebody means or wants as opposed to what they actually said, because very few people know how to accurately report their own problems. This is not something I would expect everybody to be practiced in, but I do believe it is also a valuable skill for a DM interacting with their players..

In the given case with the trap, when the player says 'I want to explode the runes', what I hear is 'I want to break this trap.' I might respond to that with something like "Ok, give me a check to see if you can spot the best place to put your bombs." Then a successful Search or Spot or Disable Device or whatever can direct the player to the trap's actual central mechanism, which they can then determine whether or not it can be broken with just physical force. Or the player might respond "No, I'm just gonna break EVERYTHING" in which case they succeed at smashing the trap but at cost of spending way too many consumable resources/potential collateral damage/friendly fire problems to do so.

Your players may perceive this kind of response as overly coaching or condescending, but the other extreme is the sort of 'You starve to death because you never said you were stopping to eat' kind of approach which I don't believe I have ever seen somebody argue in favor of.

The problem with what you're saying is ultimately that any kind of riddle should be provided a relevant knowledge check to give the answer, and I just can't agree with that. At it's core, this was a riddle. An extremely easy riddle, but a riddle nonetheless. The problem here was that they saw it, the took ten seconds on it, and they jumped at the wrong answer without thinking it through. If we were to examine one of the class Hobbit riddles:

So this is an ancient, ancient argument in roleplaying games, and the central disagreement is about how much or when it is ok to have a player challenge instead of a character challenge. Riddles and similar puzzles are fundamentally player challenges; they are solved by what the player knows, not by applying the skills and resources of the character.
Some people are ok with that; the default position of Gygaxian D&D, for example, is that the game is just as much player challenge as character challenge. You navigate dungeons with player knowledge and care, you handle combat with character traits (and the big advantage the Thief class offered with its Thief skills was instead of convincing the DM that you were taking adequate precautions to successfully sneak and maybe making a Dexterity check, you could just roll Move Silently and if you succeeded that was it, you were Moving Silently. If you rolled Disarm Trap, then you disarmed the trap, you didn't have to go through the exercise of figuring out how it worked and explicitly telling the DM 'we plug the holes the darts come out of with corks to bypass the trap.')
Other people hold that if the characters are being challenged, in-world, by something, then there should be something the characters can do to help resolve the challenge - there should be something on the sheet they can refer to to help adjudicate whether or not they can do something about it. For a riddle, that comes down to 'ok, what does my character know? What would they connect to these words?' And the way D&D offers to do that is Knowledge checks. (And if it's 'common knowledge' then you just Take 10 on your Knowledge check and you know it automatically.)

And while I understand the viewpoint that doing it that second way kind of takes something away from the game - if you can solve the riddle by rolling Intelligence at it, or Know: History to remember that this is a reference to a famous battle and the solution is the name of the King's favorite horse that died at that fight, then you don't get the joy of that moment of comprehension when everything clicks and you solve it yourself - there's also the perspective that if your players wanted to be solving logic puzzles or doing sideways thinking exercises, then.. that's what they'd be doing. They're not, they're playing D&D with you, and they probably didn't sign up to that for an hours-long argument about what the 'box with no hinges' is referring to. Within the context of D&D, I believe the more right approach is probably to just allow an appropriate roll for hints or even the outright solution if the players themselves don't come up with a workable answer quickly. (One of the other parts of how to resolve this, specifically with regards to riddles or lock-puzzles, is to not get hung up on the 'right' answer. If your players can come up with a solution and give a reasonable argument for how they got there, cool, it's correct enough even if it has nothing to do with what you originally thought should be correct.)

TheStranger

2021-10-22, 06:54 PM

There's an interesting discussion to be had about player challenge vs. character challenge, but that's not where I was going. I think the point I was really trying to make is that riddles just don't belong in RPGS because it rarely works out right. In theory it's a fun non-combat challenge, but in reality one of several things happens:
1. The players solve the riddle and proceed with the adventure (rarer than you'd think, as you've seen)
2. The players jump to the wrong conclusion, frustrating both them and the GM
3. The players spend freaking forever debating it, growing increasingly frustrated and wasting a bunch of game time
4. One of the players already knows the answer, making the whole thing pointless

GMs use riddles imagining that the players will think about it for a minute, talk it over, have a satisfying a-ha moment, and move on. But as you've seen, even the simplest riddle isn't guaranteed to get that result. Yes, if you asked it straight out, most if not all of your players would say the sun rises in the east. And if you then asked what direction would "greet" the rising sun, they'd say east. And if you then asked what door they wanted to go through, they'd say east again. But obviously the extremely simple riddle just didn't lead them to connect those dots, leading to both you and them being frustrated and unhappy with the session. So my point with the Knowledge: Nature check, which I should have said to ask for only if they seemed confused, was to give a hint to keep things moving in the right direction.

To be clear, I don't hate riddles per se. Outside of a RPG, riddles are generally fine because you can either get them or not, then drink more beer and argue about whether a cane is really like a leg. But when you *need* to get the answer to move forward with the real game, there's just no fun to be had. They're either trivial and pointless or frustrating and unrewarding, with very little in between. And there's basically nothing you can do as a GM to change that, because it has basically nothing to do with whether the riddle is easy or hard. (Yes, I'm sure somebody will have a counterexample from their table, but I've seen a lot of "GM advice" threads about riddles gone wrong, too)

As for passive knowledge vs. active knowledge, there's a time and place for both. But many times, it's another "simon says" issue. If an enemy casts a spell and I'm playing a caster, I reflexively announce that I'm rolling Spellcraft to identify it (usually before the GM even has a chance to say what happens). But if you're a new player and don't know to do that, that doesn't mean your Wizard doesn't know what the spell is. Same with magical runes - a character who knows what they are knows what they are, whether the player thinks to roll Knowledge or not. So if your players don't know to do that, ask for the roll so they know what their characters should know. There are times a Knowledge check represents actively trying to recall something or figure something out, but a lot of time it just represents what you know about a thing when you see it.

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-22, 07:42 PM

I think I'm more of the school of thought that, to use this as an example, while there's only one "right" answer to the "riddle," (specifically in this case; that isn't necessarily true in all cases) there are many paths around it. I remember reading something once about critical points of failure in puzzle design and how it's extremely important to always design puzzles to allow for multiple avenues of escape, otherwise you create a situation where the party becomes stymied, which is what you've essentially described. At no point in this situation was the party completely stymied. Did they take a suboptimal path? Yes. But it was a workable one. The most optimal one would have been to apply a little more than ten seconds of thought, but they could have...

Used one of their several divination spells to check which of the doors lead to an actual corridor rather than just being a blank door.
Used a divination spell to get guidance on which door to check.
Used a divination spell to ask for guidance in general.
Asked for a knowledge check. I know I disagreed with volunteering for one, but again, they leapt at a door in ten seconds. If they'd stopped and paused to think about which direction was east, I'd've given them one.
Attempted to teleport past a door.
Attempted to break down a door.
Searched for traps.
Disabled traps.
Broken something.
Detected magic.
Generally taken more care with the lore in the dungeon up to then and compiled their ongoing information.
Probably other stuff, this is just the things I can think off of the top of my head.

Any of these would have either given them information to help solve the puzzle or solved it outright. Almost a dozen solutions out of hand. And if the players fail, it's not a game over, because they're back up to the top of the room with the knowledge of how the trap works (in theory) and are likely to be able to avoid triggering it again (in theory).

So, my day job is in tech support, which requires developing a skill in sussing out what somebody means or wants as opposed to what they actually said, because very few people know how to accurately report their own problems. This is not something I would expect everybody to be practiced in, but I do believe it is also a valuable skill for a DM interacting with their players..
That makes sense, and it's not something I actively cultivate in the game because I expect them to be able to communicate their own needs and wants rather than translating for them. But I will keep this in mind moving forward and work on translating it for them for the sake decreasing the difficulty of the game. I'm not sure how I feel about it on a personal level, but I will do my best at giving it a shot to see if it helps.

As for the concept of character vs. player challenges, I hear you both, and you make good points. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but riddles as challenges are just too iconic a staple of RPGs for me to just not have them in there. That's like saying Roleplaying shouldn't be in Roleplaying games because it's too player-oriented a challenge. That analogy seems ludicrous, and to some extent it is, but it's not dissimilar from what you're saying. They both pull on player knowledge and player skills. Even combat pulls on player skills since the tactics and strategies involved can't be said to be solely derived from the character. So while I get what you're saying, in theory, this argument is...I don't know. As right as you are, it seems hollow. Riddles and puzzles are ingrained into tabletop roleplaying as roleplaying and combat. You can give a list of 1, 2, 3, 4 that players are frustrated about riddles, but I have pages of reasons right now that players are frustrated about combats. I don't think riddles are any different from combats or roleplay. They're just a different axis. It's all about how well they're designed, handled, and received. Everyone's different and everyone wants different things.

tyckspoon

2021-10-22, 08:17 PM

That's like saying Roleplaying shouldn't be in Roleplaying games because it's too player-oriented a challenge. That analogy seems ludicrous, and to some extent it is, but it's not dissimilar from what you're saying.

This is actually the context where the argument usually comes up and gets a lot more heated, yeah. But even there this is a field where D&D at least tries to have some character-based interaction (it's not especially *good* at it, IMO, but it tries) - you can use things like Diplomacy, Bluff, Sense Motive skills to influence your roleplaying or help guide the result of your roleplay, and other games go far more into providing a rules structure for intrapersonal interactions. And much like "I roll Diplomacy to make him like me" can resolve the encounter but feels very, very hollow to a lot of people, "I roll Intelligence to know what the heck the riddle is talking about" can get the character past the riddle but feels like it just kind of ruins the point of the thing... (And 'just don't use riddles' is also A Solution, but throwing out something that features so prominently in the inspirational reading source material also feels really really bad.)

KorvinStarmast

2021-10-22, 09:19 PM

Thank you. :) The PretzelCoatl's mighty cheesy breath weapon and salty scales are a sight to behold. ;) Laughed, I did. :smallsmile: Best tool a DM has is a sense of humor. Make sure to use yours to diffuse tense at-table moments.

TheStranger

2021-10-22, 09:21 PM

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but riddles as challenges are just too iconic a staple of RPGs for me to just not have them in there. That's like saying Roleplaying shouldn't be in Roleplaying games because it's too player-oriented a challenge. That analogy seems ludicrous, and to some extent it is, but it's not dissimilar from what you're saying. They both pull on player knowledge and player skills. Even combat pulls on player skills since the tactics and strategies involved can't be said to be solely derived from the character. So while I get what you're saying, in theory, this argument is...I don't know. As right as you are, it seems hollow. Riddles and puzzles are ingrained into tabletop roleplaying as roleplaying and combat. You can give a list of 1, 2, 3, 4 that players are frustrated about riddles, but I have pages of reasons right now that players are frustrated about combats. I don't think riddles are any different from combats or roleplay. They're just a different axis. It's all about how well they're designed, handled, and received. Everyone's different and everyone wants different things.

As I said, I'm not making an argument about player challenge vs. character challenge. I'm saying that riddles, specifically, rarely work as intended in RPGs. I assume at some point in your life, somebody has asked you a riddle that you thought about and thought about, and eventually you gave up and asked them for the answer, or googled it, or just gave up and forgot about it. (If not, go find a website of riddles and try a few until this happens.) Now, imagine that none of those things were options - your only choice is to either bang your head against that riddle far past the point where it's fun or guess and be punished if you're wrong. There's nothing fun there.

Now, imagine the inverse - you intuit the answer to the riddle almost instantly. Great! If you're playing a single-player game, that is. But in a TTRPG, the other thing that's happened is that the rest of the party isn't engaged at all. Every once in a while you'll hit the sweet spot and the players talk it over for a few minutes and come up with an answer, but that's really rare. And it's not necessarily wrong to have challenges that only engage one player, like a locked and trapped door for the rogue to open (though IMO that's not great either). The problem is that there's a really high risk of things going badly. And unlike combat or skill challenges, you can't really predict what will happen because difficulty is entirely subjective. You gave your players what you probably thought was a ludicrously easy riddle (and I agree), and they screwed it up. You could have given them the hardest riddle you can think of, and they might have solved it instantly because somebody's mind just happened to run in that direction.

Now, if your group sincerely enjoys solving riddles and that's one of the things they enjoy about TTRPGs, by all means, use riddles. But my sense is that for most people (and by all indications your players are in this group), the riddle is like a captcha you have to solve to get to the real game with no particular reward otherwise. I agree that there's a tradition of riddles in RPGs, but that doesn't mean they're actually a good idea. Aside from the issues I've raised, they rarely make much sense in-game. I mean, who builds a room where three of the four doors lead to deathtraps instead of just buying a good lock? Even if they were going to do that, why would they then carve the right answer in the doorframe? It's like putting the most convoluted encryption imaginable on your PC, then engraving your password on the case. Not that I'm picking on your dungeon in particular - most riddles in RPGs don't make much sense from any perspective other than "I want to challenge my players with a riddle," or if they do it's probably an after the fact justification for putting a riddle in.

I think you've done a good job identifying some other ways your players could have solved the problem, though, and being open to one of those solutions from your players is definitely a good GM trait. The fact that I don't agree with using a riddle in the first place doesn't mean that I don't agree that your players seem to be frustratingly dense.

Composer99

2021-10-22, 10:43 PM

Sounds like it might be time to take a break. If no players are willing to step up to run a one-shot session or two, then assuming you would like to continue hanging out with them, any of your group can find other games to play for the time being. And, if time permits, perhaps you can set up a table with other players where you can enjoy yourself.

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-23, 01:00 AM

This is actually the context where the argument usually comes up and gets a lot more heated, yeah. But even there this is a field where D&D at least tries to have some character-based interaction (it's not especially *good* at it, IMO, but it tries) - you can use things like Diplomacy, Bluff, Sense Motive skills to influence your roleplaying or help guide the result of your roleplay, and other games go far more into providing a rules structure for intrapersonal interactions. And much like "I roll Diplomacy to make him like me" can resolve the encounter but feels very, very hollow to a lot of people, "I roll Intelligence to know what the heck the riddle is talking about" can get the character past the riddle but feels like it just kind of ruins the point of the thing... (And 'just don't use riddles' is also A Solution, but throwing out something that features so prominently in the inspirational reading source material also feels really really bad.)
Hm, yeah, I see what you're saying. But literally all of third edition D&D/pathfinder's skills follow this same concept. What is a disable device skill check but an abstraction of the knowledge and execution of disabling a trap that the character would have that the player does not? How is that different from diplomacy being an abstraction of the knowledge and execution of the art of dealing with people in a sensitive and effective way. This is just what skills are. To take out riddles is to take out the word-logic aspect of the game and to refuse to do so for the others, I think. But anyway, we're moving far afield and off topic. xD I'm not sure I want to do this because my players actually do enjoy aspects of riddles, at least in moderation. They just didn't handle this particular one well. Most of the group generally agrees they just went off on this one half-cocked.

As I said, I'm not making an argument about player challenge vs. character challenge. I'm saying that riddles, specifically, rarely work as intended in RPGs. I assume at some point in your life, somebody has asked you a riddle that you thought about and thought about, and eventually you gave up and asked them for the answer, or googled it, or just gave up and forgot about it. (If not, go find a website of riddles and try a few until this happens.) Now, imagine that none of those things were options - your only choice is to either bang your head against that riddle far past the point where it's fun or guess and be punished if you're wrong. There's nothing fun there.
If those were truly your only two options, then I would agree with you, that's not fun at all. That's bad game design. Good riddle design in games doesn't work like that. Like I mentioned before, that's a critical point of failure and that causes a game to come to a screeching halt. I can't be the only person that's read or experienced the concepts of the rule of three when it comes to puzzle design in games and how critical points of failure works. So for example with your situation, you need at least three different ways to solve your given puzzle, such as some soft workarounds for it. A hard pass/fail scenario is not good design. Coming to a wall with a riddle that is life or death, solve the riddle or die is not a good scenario. Coming to a Wall that has a riddle on it, and each time, let's say..... the players shout out a guess, a portion of the wall crumbles a way and manifests into whatever the players guess. If they are incorrect, it attacks them. If they are correct, it's a magical item, and the wall crumbles away, revealing the passage they need to progress. After three unsuccessful guesses, enough of the wall has crumbled away that the wall has lost too much magic to function, it no longer bars their passage, and they can pass through freely. If the PCs get the riddle on the first guess, they get the mcguffin valued at 3x gold. If they get the riddle on the second guess, their mcguffin is worth 2x gold. On the third guess, it's worth 1x gold. That's just off the top of my head, but that's an example of a semi-decent riddle with a set time limit that allows for either A) brute force B) magical finesse (teleportation would work here, but you wouldn't get a mcguffin) C) destruction ( breaking the wall would work, but again no mcguffin) or D) properly solving the riddle. That's four ways through, based on how the party wants to solve. So, I'm sorry, but I really do disagree with your premise that riddles do not work in RPGs. Although I do wholeheartedly agree with.....

Now, if your group sincerely enjoys solving riddles and that's one of the things they enjoy about TTRPGs, by all means, use riddles. But my sense is that for most people (and by all indications your players are in this group), the riddle is like a captcha you have to solve to get to the real game with no particular reward otherwise. I agree that there's a tradition of riddles in RPGs, but that doesn't mean they're actually a good idea...large swathes of this. I have seen this many times, where the riddle goes out and you can just see 80% of the group immediately check out. Phones come out, light bulbs turn off, and they're immediately not paying attention. Those groups I will definitely say are not interested in riddles, and as a GM I do my best to not present those groups with riddles when I can, or to limit how often they get them. But this particular group is not really so riddle-averse. I wouldn't say they love them. But they don't hate them.

I mean, who builds a room where three of the four doors lead to deathtraps instead of just buying a good lock? Even if they were going to do that, why would they then carve the right answer in the doorframe? It's like putting the most convoluted encryption imaginable on your PC, then engraving your password on the case. Not that I'm picking on your dungeon in particular
That is fair. I actually do see this a lot in modules. I can answer this question directly. This temple the PCs are in is an old testing gauntlet, a rite of passage where the worthy were tested for an old god, the god of the sun, specifically. So the place is filled with traps designed to test knowledge, skill at arms, worthiness of heart, courage, loyalty, things like that. And of course, things like.... knowledge of the sun. Unfortunately, they didn't pick up on any of the lore at all. So when they got to the "riddle" which would have been an obvious gimme to anyone in the religion's order, they goofed it.

I think you've done a good job identifying some other ways your players could have solved the problem, though, and being open to one of those solutions from your players
In my opinion it's always important to be open to the possibility of an unexpected solution. I always try to anticipate possible solutions, but it's impossible to anticipate them all. But in my opinion the best solutions are the unanticipated ones. To say that a player's solution isn't permissible just because I didn't think it up ahead of time is both arrogant and nonsensical. I still feel bad about ruling against the casual bomb damage to disable a trap, largely because it was one of the steps resulting in a player death, but whenever I think about it, it's the abstractness of trap disabling that gets me. How are traps set up and how are traps disabled? Since these concepts are kind of nebulously defined, it means I have to define them (or keep them nebulous). We've always kept trap disabling somewhat nebulous for sanity's sake, especially magical traps. Since the runes were a sort of on-the-fly description, I felt justified in applying on-the-fly protections against casual area damage. After all, the trap was meant to hold angry, rampaging adventurers doing their best to storm around, break out, cast spells, and rampage, all while giant phantasmal teeth are tearing up the room. It only makes sense that the delicate magical runes on the floor would be significantly warded against attacks. But that makes me regret calling out the description that way, as mentioned.

Laughed, I did. Best tool a DM has is a sense of humor. Make sure to use yours to diffuse tense at-table moments. Well, the kobolds that have taken over the temple have tuned most of their traps to fire off at crotch level, if that tells you the tone of the current adventure. :)

Thrawn4

2021-10-23, 02:15 AM

Slipjig

2021-10-23, 09:25 AM

You indicate that this is a relatively new problem for your group. One thing to consider is that the world is a pretty messed up place right now, and your players may be in a fragile place. If they feel like everything else in their lives is out of control, maybe the power fantasy of ROFLstomping some monsters is what they need. This doesn't solve your problem, but the changes may have nothing to do with your game.

Another thing to consider is that even if you provide some environmental levers that you expect the PCs to use to make the encounter easier, they may not pick up on the potential in the description. Also, your players may just not be interested in tactics to the same degree you are. Maybe include some potential uses for the environment when you are describing the room: "there is a pile of crates precariously stacked, that looks like a good push could send it over" or "the trees have branches that look climbable".

You mention that your players just tank the damage on traps rather than solve the puzzles, and that makes you sad. One potential fix for this would be to have a non-damage consequence for not solving the puzzle. The failure condition shouldn't preclude completing the adventure, but can still be significant. Maybe whatever treasure the trap is guarding is destroyed if it the trap is triggered. Or the trap collapses the passage, forcing the PCs to take another route, or sets off an alarm, summoning reinforcements or giving the bad guys time to prep/escape.

Finally, it's totally normal to gloat when the PCs stumble into your perfectly laid trap/ambush. Go ahead and gloat, but do it IN CHARACTER as the villain. If the villain isn't present, maybe even do it via the Message spell or a Magic Mouth. This will redirect the players' annoyance toward the villain, and make it all the more fun when they defeat him.

Quertus

2021-10-23, 09:32 AM

Well, I see "Talakeal", "rotate GMs", "talk to the players" and "low CR foes" have already been mentioned.

So let me build on that to what I've found works best: vocabulary calibration one-shots.

You've already got some sessions in, so you can leverage those in place of the one-shots to some extent. However, you can *also* have the other players run one-shots: "run what *you* consider a 'challenging' one-shot", for example.

Were I one of your players? I might respond, "stop making the *combat* challenging - let me roflstomp the foes, but move the challenge to 'you have a maximum payload of 1000 kg - what do you take from the space station before it explodes' or some such". And whether or not I used that budget to bring the triggermortis readykill and/or the Point of View gun determines how challenging certain encounters will be. Actually, my BDH party, their biggest challenge was "convince the NPCs that we're the good guys… or, failing that, that we're the lesser of two evils".

Point is, people can use the same words to mean different things.

Other point is, game isn't just combat. It can be hard to get people to give a full-spectrum explanation of what they like & dislike. Like… I want to be able to lay the Dragon and slay the princess, if that's WWQD. That is, I want the option to approach any problem from any direction. And I want the results of my actions to be… reasonable, predictable, and fun. What do I mean by that? Well, if we were playing together, we'd have to hammer all that out.

So having one-shots, where people have examples to talk about… well, it's more fun than you've been having. And it will facilitate having informed conversations with your group.

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-23, 04:01 PM

One other thing:
Have the characters choose between different difficulties.
"We want to stop the evil cult, but I guess we could also look for unnecessary but potentially valueable books in that haunted library" (with a ghost and its special abilities).
Well the campaign is completely sandbox, so this is always the case. I've also been experimenting with doubling up on pivotal encounters to make a difficult and an easy version and giving them the option of choosing the hard or easy version when they trigger the encounter, but it's a pretty huge increase in workload, so I don't know how I feel about it.

Which exactly are you suggesting? More towards the sandbox side or more towards the difficulty choice side?

You indicate that this is a relatively new problem for your group. One thing to consider is that the world is a pretty messed up place right now, and your players may be in a fragile place. If they feel like everything else in their lives is out of control, maybe the power fantasy of ROFLstomping some monsters is what they need. This doesn't solve your problem, but the changes may have nothing to do with your game.
This is an interesting point. The psychology of this isn't something I had considered. Just running some roflstomp for a while to get spirits up is something I guess I could do as long as it's not interminable, all things considered.

Another thing to consider is that even if you provide some environmental levers that you expect the PCs to use to make the encounter easier, they may not pick up on the potential in the description. Also, your players may just not be interested in tactics to the same degree you are. Maybe include some potential uses for the environment when you are describing the room: "there is a pile of crates precariously stacked, that looks like a good push could send it over" or "the trees have branches that look climbable".
Understood. I can make notes to give briefings on viable usable elemental effects that are important for an encounter, a la,
"For this encounter you will notice there is lava in this room. As a reminder to everyone, Lava does X.
For this encounter you will notice crates in this room. Crates can be picked up and thrown with X action dealing Y damage to opponents, since crates are considered medium objects.
For this encounter you will notice the floor is covered in slick slime. All affected squares cost two movement but make you slide to a nearby random square."
etc etc.

For both known and unknown effects.

You mention that your players just tank the damage on traps rather than solve the puzzles, and that makes you sad. One potential fix for this would be to have a non-damage consequence for not solving the puzzle. The failure condition shouldn't preclude completing the adventure, but can still be significant. Maybe whatever treasure the trap is guarding is destroyed if it the trap is triggered. Or the trap collapses the passage, forcing the PCs to take another route, or sets off an alarm, summoning reinforcements or giving the bad guys time to prep/escape.Noted. I do this sometimes, as mentioned in the previous message. I think I've started doing it less because it got frustrating for them to repeatedly have the negative results happen. I'm not sure this is positive. I mean, I personally like this. I think it's interesting from a story perspective, and it's a good result, but the players don't like to have 5 treasure destroyed in a row and be forced to take 5 detours in a row and to be reminded five times in a row that "they're bad" (from their point of view, I don't necessarily agree - failure does not make one bad). They ended up getting stressed out and upset by outcomes like things.

Finally, it's totally normal to gloat when the PCs stumble into your perfectly laid trap/ambush. Go ahead and gloat, but do it IN CHARACTER as the villain. If the villain isn't present, maybe even do it via the Message spell or a Magic Mouth. This will redirect the players' annoyance toward the villain, and make it all the more fun when they defeat him.
This is an interesting thought, and I will admit, not one I have used much. To be fair, I'm not sure how easily I could put it into action without them simply killing said villain. I'm sure there are some scrying/magic ways I could have the villain gloat, but those would only be usable a few times before they get a bit repetitive. If every villain is watching them through a scrying portal and using a magic mouth to gloat every time they make a mistake, they're going to call me out on that pretty quickly as that just being me gloating.

Also, I think you're overestimating their ability to compartmentalize player/character knowledge. Sadly, they have a habit of displacing their game anger on me, so I just don't think this would work. If they didn't displace their game anger on me, none of this would be an issue. As I've said before, in a well-adjusted tabletop game, it's DM and players working together to craft a game and story, not DM versus players. We currently definitely have players vs. DM, and that's a serious problem. They feel very against me all the time, and I'm working to fix that but don't know how. They see every trap, monster, and encounter that goes badly as an attack on them. :(

So let me build on that to what I've found works best: vocabulary calibration one-shots.OK you've piqued my interest here.

You've already got some sessions in, so you can leverage those in place of the one-shots to some extent. However, you can *also* have the other players run one-shots: "run what *you* consider a 'challenging' one-shot", for example.
Can you clarify to whom the red "you" is referring? Am I the red you? Or are the players? Referent unclear.

Point is, people can use the same words to mean different things.

...
So having one-shots, where people have examples to talk about… well, it's more fun than you've been having. And it will facilitate having informed conversations with your group. Alright, I'm going to be honest, there were a fair amount of acronyms and references in your post I simply didn't understand xD But I think I got the gist, which is that having players run oneshots will give me some insight into what they ACTUALLY want, rather than what they're SAYING they want, I think. Which is a good point. A lot of people give what they think others want, rather than actually asking others what they want and trying to deliver. I'm on board with this. Hopefully I can get everyone to run something and get some good data on what they're looking for. Thank you. :)

TheStranger

2021-10-23, 05:56 PM

Mechalich

2021-10-24, 12:33 AM

I think one thing that's useful to mention here is that often when players say 'this is too hard' they aren't actually talking about difficulty, they're talking about effort. Specifically they complain about challenges that require a greater level of intellectual effort and engagement than they wish to expend - a bar that is usually considerably below their actual intellectual capabilities.

This is one of the big divides between players and GMs, many players do not want to expend effort while gaming. They want to relax, and that means 'turning the brain off' to some degree. They don't want gaming to feel like work. Puzzles and riddles require the players to actually think, and for many players, especially of combat focused games like D&D which have a certain reputation (whether that's fair or not) that simply isn't what they signed up for.

Several posters have already suggested switching systems, and I agree with this. Pathfinder, as a system, has a very high effort baseline for players, it has a zillion little fiddly bits that have to be tracked from round to round with a whole batch of complicated subsystems that constantly demand consideration in terms of the tactically optimal move at any given moment - ex. deciding whether or not to use maneuvers like bull rush requires remembering how they work, which many players often don't. A system with simplified character sheets and systems might make it significantly easier for these players to engage with the game itself rather than the mechanical choices presented to them.

Quertus

2021-10-24, 06:05 PM

OK you've piqued my interest here.

Can you clarify to whom the red "you" is referring? Am I the red you? Or are the players? Referent unclear.

Alright, I'm going to be honest, there were a fair amount of acronyms and references in your post I simply didn't understand xD But I think I got the gist, which is that having players run oneshots will give me some insight into what they ACTUALLY want, rather than what they're SAYING they want, I think. Which is a good point. A lot of people give what they think others want, rather than actually asking others what they want and trying to deliver. I'm on board with this. Hopefully I can get everyone to run something and get some good data on what they're looking for. Thank you. :)

Apologies, you're absolutely right. That was very rude of me to do to a new poster, throw in all that confusing "me". Even if I did it on purpose, to make you realize what linguistic "low gear" feels like (darn senility), it's still a high-risk, low reward riddle. But doing that doesn't sound like something I'd do, does it?

I'm glad you were able to grok most of it.

The red "you" (and, note, red is often used by moderators, but they're really great, and won't get grouchy IME, it's just confusing at times for *me*)… anyway, the red "you" definitively refers to… Hmmm… "not the speaker", where the speaker *presumably* is you, PretzelCoatl, but… well, I suppose theoretically one of your players could be talking to you (or even to another player!). But the default case is PretzelCoatl talking to a player, asking for a definition clarification demonstration.

And… what I was saying… was what you heard… plus… that having mutually known examples is beneficial for communication… and so, therefore, intentionally and intelligently engineering such examples will aid your communication.

Dang. Now I'm hoping I *did* do it on purpose. But I'm too senile to remember! :smallredface:

The Insanity

2021-10-25, 11:38 PM

Personally I deal with such issues by playing with mature people. Crying, screaming or hissy fits are just things that don't happen in my current group. And to be clear, the people I play with aren't perfect, but they know very well that such behavior is unacceptable.

Kardwill

2021-10-26, 08:28 AM

Ah, but any attempts by me to remind them of the rules fall under the "stop criticizing us, you're making us feel stupid" umbrella :\ No matter how gently I coach, if they're not in the mood for it, once tempers start flaring and people start getting stressed out, it just starts going badly.

May be a simple problem of presentation. You don't "remind them of the rule", you just ask them a relevant question so you can adjudicate them.

"Remember that you can cast defensively" or worse, "Why don't you cast defensively?" can sound bad, since that sounds like le GM is trying to teach the players a lesson.
"Do you cast defensively? Okay, make a concentration check." sounds better, since the GM is simply clarifying something to get a better picture of the situation.

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-26, 07:11 PM

I’m not going to quote your whole post about how you run riddles/puzzles, but I want to acknowledge that everything you said is spot on. Assuming you’re doing what you said, you’ve done everything right. But I think you’re overlooking an important point:

It. Didn’t. Work.

Well, see, this is where we disagree. I think it did work. The nature of the encounter is such that if the players fail to solve the riddle on the first go, they deal with the trap, then get back up and have multiple additional chances. At that point, they succeeded and got out of the encounter. The encounter worked exactly as it was supposed to. They were given the opportunity for an easy solution, failed it, took the damaging route, chose the longer, brute force option, it worked, and through that series of events, they eventually lost a party member.

The encounter worked. It was a difficult encounter that the PCs triumphed over that did not result in them being completely stymied by a riddle. The failing isn't in the execution of the encounter, it's in the psychology between myself and the party member that rage quit afterward, and possibly my rulings that he judged unfair that eventually resulted in harsh feelings. The hurt feelings and anger is what I want to address and mitigate.

I think one thing that's useful to mention here is that often when players say 'this is too hard' they aren't actually talking about difficulty, they're talking about effort. Specifically they complain about challenges that require a greater level of intellectual effort and engagement than they wish to expend - a bar that is usually considerably below their actual intellectual capabilities.
This is a good point, and I think you're right. I don't believe my players are stupid, but they certainly do prefer to put in a bare minimum level of effort. Sort of like playing a videogame on the easiest level while getting high and just cruising through it, would be a good analogy. This is something I will definitely consider, moving forward. Thank you.

The red "you" (and, note, red is often used by moderators, but they're really great, and won't get grouchy IME, it's just confusing at times for *me*)… anyway, the red "you" definitively refers to… Hmmm… "not the speaker", where the speaker *presumably* is you, PretzelCoatl, but… well, I suppose theoretically one of your players could be talking to you (or even to another player!). But the default case is PretzelCoatl talking to a player, asking for a definition clarification demonstration.
Noted. I will avoid the color in the future. Thank you.
And understood. I've talked with the players and most of them seem in varying degrees of on-board and excited at the prospect.

--------------

So, update, we had a session this weekend and I put into place a number of things I learned so far from this thread and things improved a fair bit.

I reminded them of rules at every turn, rather than being hard-nosed and "trapping" them if they failed to forget about something, thereby lowering the effectively difficulty of the campaign substantially.

Actions that did not turn out the way a PC liked I allowed a complete redo. For example, one PC threw a bomb, missed, and expected that miss to still be a diercted cone according to his directed bomb talent. I ruled in the moment that since he missed, he would not logically get to control the direction that the cone oriented, since that obviated the miss entirely, and the bomb would revert to a normal bomb explosion. He vehemently disagreed since he had paid for the talent, and he had devoted his entire turn to this action. Rather than forcing him to keep the turn and making him upset, I let him redo the turn entirely, which seemed to placate his ire somewhat. I've since taken the time to look up his ability and see how it really works, and I wish I'd done that in the moment, but I guess I assumed he knew the ability better, so that's my mistake.

I offered the proposal of allowing anyone interested to run something after the current adventure ends. The players seemed interested, with interest ranging from mild interest to high enthusiasm, so this looks pretty good. Unfortunately, it does not look like I will be able to play much, if at all, since the medium through which we play (roll20) is not something many of my players are familiar with, and I will need to teach almost all of them how to set up their individual adventures, precluding me from actually playing in said adventures. But this should eventually give me a pretty good idea of what kinds of games they're looking for.

I tried giving them direct advice during the fight as to how they should tactically handle the scenario, but got direct backlash from them and anger, so that didn't go well. (They've been struggling on one scenario for...too long)

Overall, the session went a bit better than the norm so far due to the implemented changes. Spirits were up a bit and that gives me hope for the future. We'll see how that works out as they overcome the hurdle that is their current difficult fight and I continue to modify how I handle things and better implement what everyone has proposed and improve how I handle things.

Thanks a ton for the help and advice, everyone. :)

TheStranger

2021-10-26, 07:16 PM

Well, see, this is where we disagree. I think it did work. The nature of the encounter is such that if the players fail to solve the riddle on the first go, they deal with the trap, then get back up and have multiple additional chances. At that point, they succeeded and got out of the encounter. The encounter worked exactly as it was supposed to. They were given the opportunity for an easy solution, failed it, took the damaging route, chose the longer, brute force option, it worked, and through that series of events, they eventually lost a party member.

The encounter worked. It was a difficult encounter that the PCs triumphed over that did not result in them being completely stymied by a riddle. The failing isn't in the execution of the encounter, it's in the psychology between myself and the party member that rage quit afterward, and possibly my rulings that he judged unfair that eventually resulted in harsh feelings. The hurt feelings and anger is what I want to address and mitigate.

I think we're using a different definition of "work" here. Yes, the encounter worked in that it resolved according to the rules you had set and the game continued. What I'm saying is that it didn't work in that it led to frustration and rage instead of fun and satisfaction (which should be the DM's real goal in any encounter).

In any case, I'm glad to hear things are going better.

Kardwill

2021-10-27, 02:48 AM

Well, see, this is where we disagree. I think it did work.

Depends how you rate your game. If your goal is "designing an adventure", it could count as a success. But I tend to think the main goal is "Both the GM and the players have fun", in which case it's a clear failure : The players didn't enjoy it, and their reaction destroyed your own enjoyment as well. So it didn't work for your game, even if it could work in theory.

KorvinStarmast

2021-10-27, 08:27 AM

The encounter worked. It was a difficult encounter that the PCs triumphed over that did not result in them being completely stymied by a riddle. The failing isn't in the execution of the encounter, it's in the psychology between myself and the party member that rage quit afterward, and possibly my rulings that he judged unfair that eventually resulted in harsh feelings. The hurt feelings and anger is what I want to address and mitigate. Some people maybe should not play D&D if that is their reaction to PC death. One can always roll up another one.

This is a good point, and I think you're right. I don't believe my players are stupid, but they certainly do prefer to put in a bare minimum level of effort. Sort of like playing a videogame on the easiest level while getting high and just cruising through it, would be a good analogy. This is something I will definitely consider, moving forward. Thank you. The game I am DMing tonight has 8 players, 5 or 6 of whom show up on a given night. Their level of immersion/investment varies from my brother and my buddy from Oakland, who are into the party and what they do next, to the Barbarian player who is very 'success oriented' to the guy in Maryland who gets stoned and strums on the guitar during play (we play over discord and roll20) to the drunk in Florida who gets up set if we aren't fighting. He loves to kick butt with his monk.

We've been close to character death for four of them at various times, and the general consensus is "I'll roll up another one if they can't get me rezzed ...)"
--------------

So, update, we had a session this weekend and I put into place a number of things I learned so far from this thread and things improved a fair bit.
{snip}

Thanks a ton for the help and advice, everyone. :) I tip my cap to you for the tenacity you've shown in trying to improve things for your table. That's you 'going the extra mile' as the GM to make the game experience better.
Bravo! :smallsmile:

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-29, 07:02 PM

I think we're using a different definition of "work" here. Yes, the encounter worked in that it resolved according to the rules you had set and the game continued. What I'm saying is that it didn't work in that it led to frustration and rage instead of fun and satisfaction (which should be the DM's real goal in any encounter).

Depends how you rate your game. If your goal is "designing an adventure", it could count as a success. But I tend to think the main goal is "Both the GM and the players have fun", in which case it's a clear failure : The players didn't enjoy it, and their reaction destroyed your own enjoyment as well. So it didn't work for your game, even if it could work in theory.
Hmmm, alright, point taken. These are fair points. I acknowledge this. However, I will also point out that, by the same token, no encounter really "works" by the metrics you are stating, at least not in this particular case. Meaning your metrics must be taken to be equally broken, as they cannot be logically applied.

The game I am DMing tonight has 8 players, 5 or 6 of whom show up on a given night. Their level of immersion/investment varies from my brother and my buddy from Oakland, who are into the party and what they do next, to the Barbarian player who is very 'success oriented' to the guy in Maryland who gets stoned and strums on the guitar during play (we play over discord and roll20) to the drunk in Florida who gets up set if we aren't fighting. He loves to kick butt with his monk.

We've been close to character death for four of them at various times, and the general consensus is "I'll roll up another one if they can't get me rezzed ...)" That sounds like a very interesting and diverse group. I think that would be very strange to listen to. xD I can't imagine how chaotic the interactions must be. It seems like everyone must constantly be at cross purposes. But the outlook seems very mature. On the one hand, it is nice that my players are very attached to their characters. It's good that they care about them so much. But on the other hand, well, you know.

Rynjin

2021-10-29, 07:07 PM

Hmmm, alright, point taken. These are fair points. I acknowledge this. However, I will also point out that, by the same token, no encounter really "works" by the metrics you are stating, at least not in this particular case. Meaning your metrics must be taken to be equally broken, as they cannot be logically applied.

How so? It is absolutely possible to design encounters that satisfy both the GM and player. This is the norm, not an anomaly.

TheStranger

2021-10-29, 08:03 PM

How so? It is absolutely possible to design encounters that satisfy both the GM and player. This is the norm, not an anomaly.

This. Most of us have fun in the vast majority of the encounters at our tables. I mean, the GM shouldn't expect to *win* most encounters, but you should have fun designing and running them. The players should have fun interacting with (and probably overcoming) the encounters. If everybody isn't having fun, why are you even playing the game?

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-30, 12:58 AM

How so? It is absolutely possible to design encounters that satisfy both the GM and player. This is the norm, not an anomaly.
Because, quite simply, you are applying you metric to my specific situation for me, but broadly for yourself. I.e.,

"Depends how you rate your game. If your goal is "designing an adventure", it could count as a success. But I tend to think the main goal is "Both the GM and the players have fun", in which case it's a clear failure : The players didn't enjoy it, and their reaction destroyed your own enjoyment as well. So it didn't work for your game, even if it could work in theory. "

This states that the encounter I set up was a failure specifically for my campaign, not on a broad design standpoint. It admits that from a broad design standpoint it is fine, but that it fails specifically for my campaign due to the psychological issues occurring.

You go on to say, "It is absolutely possible to design encounters that satisfy both the GM and player. This is the norm, not an anomaly."

So, I quite agree with this, and agree it should be the norm. But again, this is a broad statement. You can't say that I'm failing in a specific manner and that that is what makes it unacceptable, then say in the next breath it is possible to design encounters that satisfy both the GM and player.

I am well aware that it is possible to generally satisfy encounters that satisfy both the GM and player, of course. Generally speaking, any encounter can, theoretically, satisfy both the GM and player. In a general sense, this encounter does. Specifically it did not do that, and that is the problem, and why I was called out. That is the "How so," here.

This. Most of us have fun in the vast majority of the encounters at our tables.
Obviously I agree, which is why I'm here looking for tips on how I can manage some of the issues I see cropping up. But again, you can't call me out on specific versus general like that. Either I'm wrong in the specific or I'm wrong in the general. You can't call me out on one then cite the other. The encounter is generally sound, but, and I do admit this, specifically invalid. But again, all of my encounters are specifically invalid due to the imbalance between myself and the players at present. The players take umbrage at almost literally every single encounter. One of the players threw a fit because he missed throwing something at a door.

Basically you're simultaneously holding me accountable for general and specific requirements that, while not mutually exclusive, do not have perfect overlap. Yes, ideally they overlap perfectly, but the entire point of this thread is the fact that there is a disconnect between myself and the players, so by definition they are mutually exclusive, so holding these two together does not make sense.

Rynjin

2021-10-30, 01:08 AM

I think you're spending a lot of time arguing semantics (poorly, but certainly long-windedly) with people trying to give you help that you could instead turn to more productive ends.

TheStranger

2021-10-30, 12:09 PM

Because, quite simply, you are applying you metric to my specific situation for me, but broadly for yourself. I.e.,

"Depends how you rate your game. If your goal is "designing an adventure", it could count as a success. But I tend to think the main goal is "Both the GM and the players have fun", in which case it's a clear failure : The players didn't enjoy it, and their reaction destroyed your own enjoyment as well. So it didn't work for your game, even if it could work in theory. "

This states that the encounter I set up was a failure specifically for my campaign, not on a broad design standpoint. It admits that from a broad design standpoint it is fine, but that it fails specifically for my campaign due to the psychological issues occurring.

You go on to say, "It is absolutely possible to design encounters that satisfy both the GM and player. This is the norm, not an anomaly."

So, I quite agree with this, and agree it should be the norm. But again, this is a broad statement. You can't say that I'm failing in a specific manner and that that is what makes it unacceptable, then say in the next breath it is possible to design encounters that satisfy both the GM and player.

I am well aware that it is possible to generally satisfy encounters that satisfy both the GM and player, of course. Generally speaking, any encounter can, theoretically, satisfy both the GM and player. In a general sense, this encounter does. Specifically it did not do that, and that is the problem, and why I was called out. That is the "How so," here.

Obviously I agree, which is why I'm here looking for tips on how I can manage some of the issues I see cropping up. But again, you can't call me out on specific versus general like that. Either I'm wrong in the specific or I'm wrong in the general. You can't call me out on one then cite the other. The encounter is generally sound, but, and I do admit this, specifically invalid. But again, all of my encounters are specifically invalid due to the imbalance between myself and the players at present. The players take umbrage at almost literally every single encounter. One of the players threw a fit because he missed throwing something at a door.

Basically you're simultaneously holding me accountable for general and specific requirements that, while not mutually exclusive, do not have perfect overlap. Yes, ideally they overlap perfectly, but the entire point of this thread is the fact that there is a disconnect between myself and the players, so by definition they are mutually exclusive, so holding these two together does not make sense.

I mean, what do you want us to say? "You're doing everything perfectly. It's not your fault, you just have problem players." Even if that is the answer, it's not very helpful because your only options there are endure it or find new players and all we can do is commiserate.

For whatever reason, it seems that both you and your players aren't really having fun (or aren't consistently having fun, or what's fun for you isn't fun for them and vice versa). That's not great, and there are a number of possible reasons for that. As the GM, you presumably want to be designing and running encounters that are fun for you to run and fun for your players to overcome (IMO, this is secondary to challenging, realistic, varied, etc., except to the extent that those things make for fun encounters). People in this thread have given you a bunch of excellent advice on how you can bridge that disconnect with your players and figure out what's fun for everybody. You're not accountable for everybody's fun, but that doesn't mean that everybody having fun shouldn't be your goal (and the goal of all your players too, but they're not here to hear it).

And if you get to a point where there's really no way around the fact that what's fun for your players is no fun for you and that what's fun for you is no fun for them, it's time to find a new group. Because you shouldn't be forcing yourself to run a game you don't like, and you shouldn't expect to force your players into something they don't enjoy.

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-30, 12:12 PM

I think you're spending a lot of time arguing semantics (poorly, but certainly long-windedly) with people trying to give you help that you could instead turn to more productive ends.

Alright. I apologize.

How would you suggest I design that encounter to be, as you said, both challenging to players and GM? Both specifically to my party and generally to all players and GMs? I followed all the rules of the articles I've read and seen for encounter and puzzle design over the years. It had multiple through routes, I designed an original difficulty then scaled it down substantially, the puzzle aspect was solvable at what could be considered a child's level, it wasn't over CR-ed, I was open to additional player adaptation, etc.

It seems as if I am being criticized for the encounter which has been stated as being potentially enjoyable for a normal group, but then told that this isn't acceptable because my group isn't the normal group. I feel as if it's unclear which standard I'm expected to maintain. Do I provide encounters that will make a normal group happy (challenging encounters that provide risk and reward, thereby making players and GM happy)? Or do I provide encounters that make just the players happy (easy encounters with no risk, thereby making the players happy and leaving the GM unhappy)? It seems to me to be a mutually exclusive situation. I am seriously asking you, how do I do both at the same time?

I mean, what do you want us to say? "You're doing everything perfectly. It's not your fault, you just have problem players."
Obviously not. That's neither helpful nor likely true. I have my own faults. The problem is that it's harder to illuminate those because so much of this situation is being described through my own bias.

. (IMO, this is secondary to challenging, realistic, varied, etc., except to the extent that those things make for fun encounters).
I think this is good advice and something I struggle with. The realism is an important aspect to me, and something I will have to keep in mind. Thank you.

And if you get to a point where there's really no way around the fact that what's fun for your players is no fun for you and that what's fun for you is no fun for them, it's time to find a new group. Because you shouldn't be forcing yourself to run a game you don't like, and you shouldn't expect to force your players into something they don't enjoy.
Alright, noted.

I am serious about wanting a solution on that puzzle/riddle/trap encounter, though. But I just can't take "don't run puzzles" as a legitimate answer. They're too much a part of the game, in my opinion, and even though the party got upset, they generally [claim] to like them and have even chosen them before when given the option between several choices. I can't personally run a campaign that is 100% combats with never a puzzle to be seen. That's just not a viable option for me.

TheStranger

2021-10-30, 12:53 PM

It seems as if I am being criticized for the encounter which has been stated as being potentially enjoyable for a normal group, but then told that this isn't acceptable because my group isn't the normal group. I feel as if it's unclear which standard I'm expected to maintain. Do I provide encounters that will make a normal group happy (challenging encounters that provide risk and reward, thereby making players and GM happy)? Or do I provide encounters that make just the players happy (easy encounters with no risk, thereby making the players happy and leaving the GM unhappy)? It seems to me to be a mutually exclusive situation. I am seriously asking you, how do I do both at the same time?
What is it about running challenging encounters that makes you happy as a GM? If you feel like you need to have a certain level of success against the players (even if you expect to ultimately lose), that may be contributing to a sense that there's a "players vs. GM" dynamic at work, leading your players to feel like you're making things too challenging so you can have fun at their expense. Even if the encounters aren't objectively difficult based on the CR system, that's not an unreasonable perception if your players feel like you have fun when they struggle. If it's something else about challenging encounters that you enjoy, maybe you can figure out a way to scratch that itch without actually making the encounters challenging. There's no inherent virtue in running encounters at the "expected" difficulty level, it's just a guideline to have combats that *most* groups will enjoy.

I am serious about wanting a solution on that puzzle/riddle/trap encounter, though. But I just can't take "don't run puzzles" as a legitimate answer. They're too much a part of the game, in my opinion, and even though the party got upset, they generally [claim] to like them and have even chosen them before when given the option between several choices. I can't personally run a campaign that is 100% combats with never a puzzle to be seen. That's just not a viable option for me.
I'm not going to tell you not to do something that you feel is essential to your enjoyment of the game. And I don't doubt that your players enjoy puzzles when they are able to solve them and feel smart. The problem, as you've seen, is that it doesn't work out that way as often as you'd think, and *failing* to solve a puzzle is generally more frustrating than solving one is satisfying. If you want to use puzzles, I'd suggest thinking about making failure not be punishing, since your players obviously don't like that. Maybe have it so that solving the puzzle gets you a shortcut past a combat, an extra bit of loot, or some lore that hints at what's coming next - basically reward success but don't punish failure. As I said in an earlier post, spend some time thinking about how these things play out at the table and where the fun comes from.

Jay R

2021-10-30, 07:07 PM

(they say they want a challenging game, but when I give it to them, we've had sessions practically explode, break down, tears and screaming, that sort of thing).

First of all, ignore a lot of their reactions during the session; pay strict attention to their reactions afterwards. From my Rules for DMs:

3. What the players want today is a quick, easy victory. But what they will want tomorrow is to have brilliantly and valiantly turned the tables to barely survive a deadly encounter where it looked like they were all about to die.

But by itself, that's too simplistic. This one is equally true:

19. There are players who see the world as a series of activities they can safely and straightforwardly defeat, and there are players who see the world as a dangerous world with life-threatening risks behind every bush. You cannot run the same game for both sets. Neither is inherently bad, but know which kind of players you have.

a. If the term "CR" is a common part of the players' conversation, assume that you have the first group, and plan accordingly. Never count on them deciding to run away from an encounter.

Also, not all players have the same level of tactical skill. Many players believe that in modern D&D, the players' abilities and intelligence have been eliminated, and it's just the PCs' abilities that matter. This is simply untrue. A party of PCs who all target the same monster first until it can no longer attack, and then all focus on another monster, will do better than a party of PCs who each choose a separate target. A party who sets an ambush, or arranges for the encounter to take place where they can do more damage than the enemy can, will likewise do better than a party who does not. And, players who carefully consider clues will do better than those who just want to fight monsters.

You need to aim encounters at the players' actual ability, not at the theoretical ability based on the PCs' level.

Another consideration: the word "challenge" is vague and generic. I suspect that what you are hearing is not what they are saying. You may hear that they want a challenge, and think they want a risky adventure that will be difficult. They may say they want a challenge, meaning that want to face a serious menace that they alone can easily defeat.

Finally, some people really don't want a challenge. They are there to feel like they are bad-*ss. A group like this almost always thinks they want a challenge. They don't; they want to believe that the encounter would be a challenge for other people but not for them.

When I do manage to do the above (a whole dungeon where they just slaughter everything with no challenge), I’m left feeling empty, bored, and unfulfilled. I spend a week or weeks making a dungeon, with maps and lore and puzzles and traps for it to just get run over in a few nights with no challenge and no interest, the lore ignored, the puzzles brute forced (because they’re out-CRed and it’s easier or they have the HP to tank the damage and don’t want to/don’t care to think it through etc.). Sometimes they even make fun of the dungeon saying it makes no sense, because they couldn’t pick up the more subtle bits of lore and clues that were hidden or scattered about as they killed their way through innocents, traps, or monsters.

Stop designing these dungeons, now that you know that they don't enjoy them.

How do I provide content that is both fun for my players and fulfilling for me?

Find fulfillment in providing them what they want, or stop running games for them. There is no answer that does not hinge on providing the customers what they want. The measure of a DM is the players' joy.

TLDR: How do I resolve this situation of players only wanting to roflstomp everything and me feeling bored and unfulfilled?

It may be that you are not a match for these players. You may be the wrong DM for them, or (which is the same thing) they may be the wrong players for you.

And there's nothing wrong with that. My primary recommendation is that you tell them you're tired, and ask somebody else to DM. You may learn something from the new DM -- or the new DM may learn something from the experience, or the group may start doing something else.

PretzelCoatl

2021-10-31, 07:47 PM

What is it about running challenging encounters that makes you happy as a GM? If you feel like you need to have a certain level of success against the players (even if you expect to ultimately lose), that may be contributing to a sense that there's a "players vs. GM" dynamic at work, leading your players to feel like you're making things too challenging so you can have fun at their expense.This is entirely possible. As mentioned, I really enjoy strategic gameplay, strategy games, that sort of thing, and I enjoy it far more than the players. So strategy based combat might be a lot more enjoyable for me than them (though not according to what they say).

As for what I enjoy, there are a number of things.
As mentioned, I really enjoy the strategic challenge of tabletop games. I enjoy challenging games and strategy games in general, actually.
I enjoy roleplay of course, but my favorites are explorations of psychological conditions, magical systems, religions and faiths, and especially moral quandaries. I'm specifically aware that I don't like "shooting the breeze" with the "everyman," as I have been called out before on being lacking in this area.
I enjoy puzzles, especially word puzzles and riddles.
I enjoy worldbuilding, writing, character building, and backstories.
For encounters specifically, there is a beauty to seeing a properly engineered encounter come to fruition that is very satisfying. An encounter or trap that fails feels like a loss of potential that is disappointing and saddening. A missed opportunity. Obviously I am aware that the goal is not to kill the players and not to "beat" or "Win" over the players. The goal of a well-designed encounter is to create just the right amount of fear, drama, tension, worry, excitement, hope, etc. in the players as they fight and struggle to overcome it. It's in these moments that I feel happiest and most fulfilled as a GM, when the players defeat an encounter through their cleverness or tenacity or skill or even just luck and are celebrating and smiling and joyous and are just glad to be playing. I don't feel that I need to have a specific level of success against the players to be happy (though I can see how that could easily be misinterpreted since the line is somewhat fine); as mentioned, I believe the game is a cooperative effort believe players and GM where we work together to craft a story, and encounters are a part of that.

Even if the encounters aren't objectively difficult based on the CR system, that's not an unreasonable perception if your players feel like you have fun when they struggle.
Fair. But this has been addressed before. Without resorting to "BBEG laughs at them from a magic mouth every time they're losing," how do I get to enjoy encounters that are working well without the players falling into the "DM vs. Players" feeling? Also again, it's worth pointing out, I like the encounters working well, not when the players are losing. Players losing is actually quite troublesome.

I'm not going to tell you not to do something that you feel is essential to your enjoyment of the game. And I don't doubt that your players enjoy puzzles when they are able to solve them and feel smart. The problem, as you've seen, is that it doesn't work out that way as often as you'd think, and *failing* to solve a puzzle is generally more frustrating than solving one is satisfying. If you want to use puzzles, I'd suggest thinking about making failure not be punishing, since your players obviously don't like that. Maybe have it so that solving the puzzle gets you a shortcut past a combat, an extra bit of loot, or some lore that hints at what's coming next - basically reward success but don't punish failure. As I said in an earlier post, spend some time thinking about how these things play out at the table and where the fun comes from.[/QUOTE]A reasonable point, alright. I will see about implementing this for future builds. Thank you.

First of all, ignore a lot of their reactions during the session; pay strict attention to their reactions afterwards.
Interesting. I see where you're going with this. The psychology behind it is interesting. Unfortunately, I don't always have much of a rapport with the players in question after the fact. If and when a player storms off or leaves the session, I generally don't get an opportunity to talk to them about it before the next session, and it doesn't ever get brought up again. I suppose that is a failure on my part. I should probably be more proactive in reaching out and talking to them after such an episode, but sometimes I'm just tired after dealing with those things and don't feel up to it. But that is my failing. I will work on that.

From my Rules for DMs:
OK. Where can I get this full list. Do you have it available for others to read somewhere? I'm very interested in reading more.

3. What the players want today is a quick, easy victory. But what they will want tomorrow is to have brilliantly and valiantly turned the tables to barely survive a deadly encounter where it looked like they were all about to die.Yes, I see. A fair point. It seems simple on the surface, but you make a good point. I'm not sure how to give them the former and the latter simultaneously.

19. There are players who see the world as a series of activities they can safely and straightforwardly defeat, and there are players who see the world as a dangerous world with life-threatening risks behind every bush. You cannot run the same game for both sets. Neither is inherently bad, but know which kind of players you have.
a. If the term "CR" is a common part of the players' conversation, assume that you have the first group, and plan accordingly. Never count on them deciding to run away from an encounter.
[quote]OK. I think this is really poignant and hits the nail on the head. I'm definitely camp B. They're all definitely camp A. I think this sums up the situation very nicely. So the corollary to this is, Can a DM run a game for As when he's a B? Or will his opinions and feelings on how encounters and the danger of the world be bleed over too much into said world?

[quote] You need to aim encounters at the players' actual ability, not at the theoretical ability based on the PCs' level.Of course. This is fairly hard to qualify, though, which is why the CR system exists. I suppose I've never tried to qualify it before. What would you recommend? How would you advise scaling encounters for players of below average tactical skill? I mentioned things I'm doing in a previous post. What about those?

They may say they want a challenge, meaning that want to face a serious menace that they alone can easily defeat.

Finally, some people really don't want a challenge. They are there to feel like they are bad-*ss. A group like this almost always thinks they want a challenge. They don't; they want to believe that the encounter would be a challenge for other people but not for them.Yes, I am gradually coming to this conclusion. Any advice on how to provide them with this illusory "challenge" without hurting their feelings?

Stop designing these dungeons, now that you know that they don't enjoy them.
Alright. But what do I do instead? "Don't do it" isn't sound advice without an alternative to offer in exchange, I feel. Unless of course, we are back to the "Pack your bags and move away" scenario, which is still on the table, but which I would like to be my final resort.

Again, thank you all for the advice so far. I apologize for the difficulty of the topic, and how frustrating it can be at times. And for any frustration my replies have caused.

Quertus

2021-10-31, 08:30 PM

The problem, as you've seen, is that it doesn't work out that way as often as you'd think, and *failing* to solve a puzzle is generally more frustrating than solving one is satisfying. If you want to use puzzles, I'd suggest thinking about making failure not be punishing, since your players obviously don't like that. Maybe have it so that solving the puzzle gets you a shortcut past a combat, an extra bit of loot, or some lore that hints at what's coming next - basically reward success but don't punish failure. As I said in an earlier post, spend some time thinking about how these things play out at the table and where the fun comes from.

Very much this. If you're going to include puzzles for your group, you need to do so in such a way that the stakes make the experience more fun than frustrating.

Heck, I *love* puzzles. So much that I'll tend to back their inclusion even when their inclusion is a bit of a stretch. But only for the right stakes. The classic Bilbo / Golum battle of riddles would rarely be something I'd remember fondly in an RPG setting.

Two rival adventuring teams having a battle of wits to determine who gives whom the other half of the map? Much more fun! (Especially if "us losing" is actually an option)

Also, not all players have the same level of tactical skill. Many players believe that in modern D&D, the players' abilities and intelligence have been eliminated, and it's just the PCs' abilities that matter. This is simply untrue. A party of PCs who all target the same monster first until it can no longer attack, and then all focus on another monster, will do better than a party of PCs who each choose a separate target. A party who sets an ambush, or arranges for the encounter to take place where they can do more damage than the enemy can, will likewise do better than a party who does not. And, players who carefully consider clues will do better than those who just want to fight monsters.

Oh man. Armus' introduction to "the party", he boggled as they deployed haphazardly, choosing targets randomly rather than with any rhyme or reason (let alone such optimized actions as you describe), and completely ignored the greatest threat (the Drow priestesses). Realizing that gulf of ability in character… I can scarcely imagine what it must be like for a GM to realize and have to account for it of their players (as GM, I generally run "monsters": most are dumb brutes, and, even the intelligent adversaries, approximately none have ever gathered intelligence on "the party". Also, I've never had a group exclusively of clueless players. Even when the max age was "preteen". So it's just not an experience I've had.)

KorvinStarmast

2021-11-01, 09:46 AM

I think you're spending a lot of time arguing semantics (poorly, but certainly long-windedly) with people trying to give you help that you could instead turn to more productive ends. We have another (GM) poster who does this with some frequency.

Also, not all players have the same level of tactical skill. Many players believe that in modern D&D, the players' abilities and intelligence have been eliminated, and it's just the PCs' abilities that matter. This is simply untrue. Bingo.

My primary recommendation is that you tell them you're tired, and ask somebody else to DM. You may learn something from the new DM -- or the new DM may learn something from the experience, or the group may start doing something else. A repeat of the advice given in numerous posts, but worth repeating.

Pretzel, I think that you'll find your batteries recharged if you just play for a few sessions.

TheStranger

2021-11-01, 10:45 AM

I should clarify that I don’t actually know whether there’s a “GM vs players” perception at your table, it’s just one possible factor in your players getting upset when combat gets challenging. Other people’s comments about them just not liking difficult combat may be more accurate. That said, we all like to roll 20s and that doesn’t go away from behind the DM screen. That doesn’t mean you want to TPK your party, but the perception of that can be almost as much a problem as the reality. Sometimes a GM just needs a good poker face.

To the extent that this is a problem I think a lot of it comes down to the social dynamics between you and your players rather than anything in the encounter design or mechanics. As such, it’s not something we can really help with except to say that how you interact with your players can do a lot to set the tone of the table and make the same encounter feel either difficult and frustrating or fun and challenging. Keep in mind that tone doesn’t translate well online, so your players may be perceiving something different than you intend.

Also, if you enjoy tactical combat and your players do not, your monsters are likely to punch above their weight in terms of CR. Which can be really frustrating as a player when you find yourself struggling to defeat enemies that you know are weaker than you and you can never quite get into position to use your best tricks. Be sure that you’re not using OOC knowledge to set up the enemy tactics or having mindless monsters fight smarter than they should, though. You might also need to pull your punches a little bit tactically - have the ogre roar in fury and turn to attack the fighter that just stabbed him instead of finishing off the wounded rogue or charging the squishy wizard, that sort of thing. But in general, if you want combat to be a very tactical game of positioning and attrition and your players just want to line up and roll big numbers, that’s going to be tricky to reconcile.

One idea might be to set goals around the experience you want your players to have in combat and use your tactical acumen to achieve them instead of playing the enemies like they’re trying to win. For instance, intentionally charge the sword and board fighter and end turn in a position that begs the rogue to flank and sneak attack. The fighter’s investment in AC (or HP) pays off, and the rogue gets to roll a bunch of damage dice. They think they won the fight because they’re awesome, but you know that you engineered every part of that. That’s different from intentionally using bad tactics - it’s using tactics well to accomplish your goal. Not something I’d advise if your players enjoyed tactical combat, but in this case redefining your goals during combat might let you engage with those parts of the game while your players don’t. Or maybe not exactly that, but if you and your players enjoy different things about the game you’ll probably need to think outside the box a little bit for all of you to get what you want.

But we’re getting pretty far down in the weeds here, and I think it’s worth going back to the very good advice of rotating GMs for a few sessions. Sometimes a change of perspective is a big help.

Yakk

2021-11-02, 01:17 PM

While they were trapped in the box, the group used true seeing to see through the darkness. In an effort to make it very clear that they should attempt to DISABLE THE TRAP, I described the floor of the room as being covered in magical runes. The soon-to-be-dead player responded to that by using explosives to attempt to destroy them rather than a disable check. I thought about it, but made the ruling that since magical traps required disable device checks, an offensive attack could not be used as a substitute, so that did not disable the trap, so the trap continued. Also, it is worth noting that I improvised the rune/floor description specifically to encourage him to disable device; it wasn't something I had prepared ahead of time, so "anti-destruction precautions" weren't something I had prepared ahead of time either. Was it the right call? I'm not sure.
If the floor was not magically reinforced, then destroying the runes would destroy the trap.

However, this trap was on a one minute reset timer.
So, would someone skilled in knowledge of magic know that there are traps that, when dispelled, regain power after such a short period of time?

Would someone who dispelled an effect be able to tell that the dispell was temporary, and not full?

Would someone with true seeing be able to see that the runes where sleeping, not dead?

This is one of the more recent altercations. I admit that player death is never a fun thing to deal with, and I'm not certain that I adjudicated the trap properly, but what it came down to was that he tried to disable a magical trap via an attack, which is not something condoned by the rules (or common sense in the context of this situation to me), then did not ask for clarification afterwards; he simply got upset). Had he asked for clarification if the runes were a part of a trap and could be attacked, I'd've clarified and told him in no uncertain terms that he should not have attacked and I was being "flavorful" and they he should use disable device, but that didn't happen.
?!?! Anything with physical existence can be attacked. If that physical existence is required for it to work, and you destroy it, it isn't going to work.

The lack of specific rules describing what happens when you destroy something doesn't mean destroying it is impossible or ineffective.

This really is reading like a bad case of "read DM's mind", where the approach that works is a single one (either in the module, or in the DM's mind) and all others don't work. Playing "read DM's mind" is amazingly frustrating.

...

Note that the same trap can happen in combat. Where players come up with something novel; this isn't the strategy that the DM anticipates the players use. The DM thinks, and decides the monsters have a counter plan for what the PCs do.

This can be as simple as effectively responding to a flanking attack, or dealing with a darkness spell by moving out of it, or a myriad of other things.

...

Finally, note that puzzles are insanely harder to solve than they are to write.

There is a rule in making an adventure; the rule of 3. If you want players to pick up on some fact or clue or solve some puzzle, you need 3 strong clues for what the solution is in the adventure. Not 3 clues that can together solve it, but 3 clues such that if you had *any* of them you could solve it.

...

Next, lets look at this trap. It is a really boring failure state.

Either (a) the players solve the riddle, and the trap is gone, or (b) they don't solve the riddle, and they take a pile of damage.

(b) is a consequence, but the game *isn't very interesting*. Even (a) isn't interesting. So now you have a riddle, leading to 2 results, neither of which are interesting.

Remove the riddle; imagine it was just (a) or (b) with no riddle. Would that be a fun game to play? (a) is boring, (b) is boring with damage.

You could have made the trap drop them into an interesting death trap, but instead it was an uninteresting one. I mean, there was stakes I guess.

And for the purpose of recycling content, the interesting death trap could be content that you'd approach from a different angle if you went through the correct door (eventually).

...

Now, if you want to have consequences, but players don't like in-combat gotchas, consider making the consequences on a different level.

Provide multiple approaches for PCs -- plot hooks to interact with. The things they interact with, they'll usually beat.

The ones they don't interact with cause in-world consequences. Plot consequences not combat ones.

Defeating a given encounter isn't the problem. Defeating the right one, fast enough, is the problem.

PCs are under pressure to do more than they can. Every time they take a rest or a break, the protagonists (the DM's BBEGs) advance their plots. Fights get dangerous when they keep on pushing past the point of being exhausted.

You, the DM, plan for the players giving up and retreating. Not with "the monsters are tougher", but with "the BBEG plot advances". This isn't punishment; this is plot advancement. The players stop some bad things from happening, but other bad things they could have stopped happen because they took a break. And now they have more bad things to deal with.

Now, when your elementals deal more damage than they "should", even if the PCs aren't defeated, you score a victory for the BBEGs; the players are more likely to rest.

Jay R

2021-11-02, 05:39 PM

Interesting. I see where you're going with this. The psychology behind it is interesting. Unfortunately, I don't always have much of a rapport with the players in question after the fact. If and when a player storms off or leaves the session, I generally don't get an opportunity to talk to them about it before the next session, and it doesn't ever get brought up again. I suppose that is a failure on my part. I should probably be more proactive in reaching out and talking to them after such an episode, but sometimes I'm just tired after dealing with those things and don't feel up to it. But that is my failing. I will work on that.

The best advice I have for that is probably not that useful to you. I prefer to run games for my long-term friends. I see them regularly away from the table, and there are lots of opportunities to discuss the game.

OK. Where can I get this full list. Do you have it available for others to read somewhere? I'm very interested in reading more.

Here's a two-year old version of my Rules for DMs (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?592257-Rules-for-DMs). It has 28 rules, and I'm now up to 39. I may bring them back to let people see the current version, but not until I have time to track the thread pretty closely. That won't be at least for two weeks, since I am preparing for a fencing tourney on the 13th.

Yes, I see. A fair point. It seems simple on the surface, but you make a good point. I'm not sure how to give them the former and the latter simultaneously.

Well, step one is for there to be a way to brilliantly and valiantly turn the tables, and it needs to be a way that they can figure out. It's not enough for the insanely strong monster to be vulnerable to kryptonite; they need to have some way to find that out in combat.

And it needs to be a way that these players will pick up on.

How? Well, another of my rules is this:
5. b. The purpose of a death trap is not death; it is to make the players feel clever. Don't build one to cause death, and more importantly, don't build one to make them feel stupid.

You need traps and weaknesses designed to make them feel clever. With a group that isn't very clever, that might not be easy. Sometimes, let the idea they come up with work, even if that isn't what you thought would kill the monster, find the treasure, or solve the puzzle. Do this a few times, and you may start understanding their thought process well enough that you can build traps and puzzles that they will actually solve.

19. There are players who see the world as a series of activities they can safely and straightforwardly defeat, and there are players who see the world as a dangerous world with life-threatening risks behind every bush. You cannot run the same game for both sets. Neither is inherently bad, but know which kind of players you have.
a. If the term "CR" is a common part of the players' conversation, assume that you have the first group, and plan accordingly. Never count on them deciding to run away from an encounter.
OK. I think this is really poignant and hits the nail on the head. I'm definitely camp B. They're all definitely camp A. I think this sums up the situation very nicely. So the corollary to this is, Can a DM run a game for As when he's a B? Or will his opinions and feelings on how encounters and the danger of the world be bleed over too much into said world?

Yes, you can, just as somebody whose favorite game is football can learn to referee a baseball game. But you need to decide to run a baseball game, not try to dumb down a football game so baseball players can play it.

They aren't playing the same game you're running, even if they are both called D&D. You need to recognize that they aren't the same game, and then actively decide to run the game that they are playing.

Of course. This is fairly hard to qualify, though, which is why the CR system exists. I suppose I've never tried to qualify it before. What would you recommend? How would you advise scaling encounters for players of below average tactical skill? I mentioned things I'm doing in a previous post. What about those?

Several ideas:
1. When goblins attack, they shouldn't all be visible at once. It's easier to beat ten goblins and ten more than to beat twenty, and also, you can decide that the remaining ten are only five, or none.
2. They don't know how many hit points the monsters have, so you can have them die when it's best for the story.
3. Monsters can surrender, or run away. Your players aren't very good fighters, so make them some enemies that are more frail, or cowardly.

This is not the permanent solution. The long-term solution is to learn from these encounters how big, or powerful, or brave, the threats need to be, so you can build the game for these players.

Yes, I am gradually coming to this conclusion. Any advice on how to provide them with this illusory "challenge" without hurting their feelings?

First, don't let them catch you at it. This isn't as hard as it sounds, if they are not very good at picking up clues.

Second, praise their modest victories. "Oh, well done! Yes, you're right; the door they ran through is probably the one that's still ajar."

Alright. But what do I do instead? "Don't do it" isn't sound advice without an alternative to offer in exchange, I feel. Unless of course, we are back to the "Pack your bags and move away" scenario, which is still on the table, but which I would like to be my final resort.

Run the game they want to play, or don't run a game for them. I would prefer to play the kind of game you're running now, but I'm not one of your players. Your game has no purpose except to entertain those players. So make that your goal.

Again, thank you all for the advice so far. I apologize for the difficulty of the topic, and how frustrating it can be at times. And for any frustration my replies have caused.

No problem. I enjoy a challenge.

And finally, as I said before: It may be that you are not a match for these players. You may be the wrong DM for them, or (which is the same thing) they may be the wrong players for you.

And there's nothing wrong with that. My primary recommendation is that you tell them you're tired, and ask somebody else to DM -- at least for a couple of sessions. You may learn something from the new DM -- or the new DM may learn something from the experience, or the group may start doing something else.

Lunari et Ciel

2021-11-04, 02:55 PM

I have 4-5, points to make, and I'm surprised they haven't somewhat been brought up.

Take my advice with a grain of salt - actually it'd be good if other ppl commented on it too and availed of its solid/valid.
I've been a lurker here for a while, but I'm also a newbie when it comes to posting. Mainly because I haven't DMed or heck, even played for more than a decade, and only now I finally landed a group.

So again, take it with a grain of salt/gather other ppls thought first.

First, about the riddles.
Give them PUZZLES and mysteries NOT riddles.
If you really want to go with riddles, it should have a (quasi-)sentient being to judge it, and the answer should be open ended.

For instance, I'm sorry, but the easy peasy hobbit riddle you gave? I failed it. Yup, the one about the mountains. I don't know if it was the subcontext but you know what my first answer actually was?

What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?

Ego.

Now fight me, tell me it doesn't fits XD

And that's the things about riddles, and partly why I never saw the fun. It can be any any number of things, unless you give hints to at least give context/heard the thoughts in a certain direction, it could go anywhere.

IMO, riddles are fun when: it engages a group/generates debate, and doesn't have a "punishment"/strings attached. When it becomes more of an open philosophical question, than say a timer to impending doom.

So, give them a sentient (or quasi) being to be the judge. A sphinx, a magical sentient door (or lock), a djin, a faery. A pirate's parrot. A mage' s familiar anything.

Leave it open ended, and give them something that can evaluate the answer they gave. So say, sure, I didn't get the answer you wanted: mountains. But if my answer makes sense, and I can show you my train of thought and how it fits and convince you of it, let it pass.

OR
restringe the possible answers.
For instance, the riddle is on the door, and to open it, you've got to press one of the figures on the panel. There are six figures, one is of a mountain, the other of the sea, the third of grass... Etc.
This way, they'll look at the possible answers and their thoughts will make the way back.

Usually with - any sort of question, really. Imo the best way to take is to keep going from deductive to inducive thought paths, trying to meet in the and bridge the middle.

Like those labyrinth puzzles where you see the whole labyrinth. To do it faster/easier you don't only think/follow the beginning. You look at both the start and the ending and try to figure the middle.

So, give them hints like this. Perhaps the adventurers before them were in the middle of tackling the puzzle when something (monsters? Failure?) happened to them.
They might have left the puzzle incomplete, have left hints or notes

You said it was an ancient testing ground right? Why not even sarcastic notes? "I bet Rolf took forever on this one" "Forever? I bet he was permanently stuck" "Guys! I'm not THAT bad, I know it isn't X" if they need more the guy after Rolf left "only X? Z was the most obvious trap and he didn't notice! Did you think he noticed there are traps?" "I don't remember there being a Rolf in the names that passed the test" - which can probably not only entertain (notes like "Mark, Eric and Helen were here" "Rolf certainly wasn't" in the right path) but also make them feel good about themselves.
After all past ppl (npcs) struggled with it. Heck, even more. Considering that skeleton there (Rolf? Is that you?) not everyone managed or even got out alive out of it.

Maybe the past adventures jammed in a piece of the puzzle in place and won't move, or it happened while they were fiddling with the pieces (and look, coincidentally that was one of the right moves and that made the puzzle easier).

But that's if you want to stick with riddles. As I said give them puzzles/mysteries, and attach them to exploration/story. Perhaps the map drawn in the wall shows a different layout, what does it mean?
Maybe they feel wind in what seemed a completely shut room. Or there seems to be a current in the water.
Maybe the writings in the wall stop in the mid of that line but the text continues on the next line/paragraph as if it had gone on.

All of this indicates there's a fake wall, hidden room/passage.
Maybe mid dungeon they strangely find a perfectly decorated dinner room, with food midway being consumed, still hot, and half filed glasses, but not a soul. The decoration/architecture doesn't match with the previous dungeon. What happened? Are there people? and if yes where are the people?

And don't let them ask for tests. They just walked in the room? Idk PF, but ask for an architecture, history, or intelligence test. Or even investigation. Depending on the success, tell them "you notice the architecture doesn't match. You were in a somewhat natural dungeon before, but this room? This seems like it was build for a court."
"You've never seen this style before" "you actually remember of a similar style had been used centuries, if not millennia ago. Actually, much of it has been lost, it's not something masons of nowadays can reproduce" "the materials used... You haven't seen anything like this around. Actually, you can't think of anyplace they might have gotten it in miles and miles around. Not even in the surrounding kingdoms"

Give them a puzzle, a mystery, not a riddle. Give them exploration, or story through it. Let them discover, interact and experience things. Not a solve or suck riddle/trap.

Which leads to my next points...
From what I'm seeing, the adventure/story is lacking wonder. Hence why my advice is puzzles/mysteries AND
You said you like building challenges/dgs/lore. This isn't working. So why not focus on building a story? A mystery? The world/npcs?

At least for now, focus less in the mechanics and more on plot, characters and world. Instead of battle/grid tactics, how about characters' tactics? What's their motivations? What gets them to tic? Who do they know, what are theirs relationships, the dynamics between them? What'd a npc be interested in bargaining for? How does that throw off other npcs plans and how would they pressure the party to make amends for them?

You said you like religions? Why not throw the party mid a pantheon' s politics, games?
Or have them be used by fae lords? Or walk in a demons x devils (or even devils x devils) machinations?

Put your tactical mind into power dynamics, onto greater beings all trying to get the jump on each other, and how that affects the world and the people. There are more to tactics than building a dungeon/battle. Use them on other things, like world and lore building.

From what I've seen, the players are jaded. As it's been brought up, the world is still messed up rn, or they may be having difficulties.
Plus it's been 2y you said?
Perhaps they're tired. They need something else.

From my pov, you need to get the sense of wonder back. And you also need to make it engaging and PERSONAL to them. Idk how effective this can be, because as you've said, they're not very keen on rp.

But try to get back to it. Get back to the story. Make it personal to them. What do they want to do? What do they want for their characters? Are they attached to a npc, place or even one of their items?
Or even their characters! What's their backstory? Or the group story? Or one aspect they like playing?

Build something, a story, around this. Something that is personal, that involves what they care for, and that engage their feelings. When they have feelings invested, they'll care.
Even if their feelings are, say, about their characters or a mcguffin, their weapon/magic item or something.

And talk to them about it. Ask them these questions, and see if an adventure on it would be okay.
Cause, if say, x character or npc is important to them, killing them to launch the party on a adv might not be okay. Likewise, if it's a weapon/magic weapon, taking it away from them (be it because it was stolen, or its magic is failing) might not be okay even if in the end said item might get a Power up.

I still got 2 important points to make but idk if I'll have time, so I'll try to be really brief about one of them and come back later or tomorrow.

So, challenging doesn't have to be difficult. Actually, it doesn't need to be hard or rather punitive.
Something challenging is something that keeps you engaged. Not that makes it difficult. If something is hard/difficult, but isn't engaging - then it's boring, a headache or not worth it. It becomes a task or a chore.
Think of endlessly, pointlessly grinding.
If it's pointless you'll have no interest in grinding just for the sake of grinding right?
Just like for you, making these dgs/battles is becoming soulless. It starts to drain on you.
Now, if it's engaging enough, what was grinding before suddenly doesn't seem so.
So a challenge, is something that keeps you engaged. It has to pick your interest or be personal.

It can be an intellectual challenge like you've been doing. But anything that grips your feelings, questions your determination, provokes your ego etc, dares you to do something and doubts if you can, or what are your values is a challenge.
If an intellectual challenge is NOT working, try other kinds of challenge.
Challenge their feelings, their characters' story beliefs moral compass etc.

Not their intelligence or self worth. From what we've seen, they can't handle it, at least not this moment.

The other thing I need to stress is, don't be punitive about it. Or rather, find where you can be punitive about it.
The character died. WHY is that an issue? WHY is it so final a player rage quit? Are you playing a low magic campaign?

A pc dying in some tables might be okay. In some tables just going on with it, and rolling/making another sheet is okay. In others it's a door to hell, you're opening a tin can of worms, you just don't.

Just like you spent months making a dg, perhaps someone spent months making that character, be it from a mechanical pov or rp/story. They've grown attached. They might have written the whole character life, relations, heck even a fanfic. They have time, feelings, hopes and expectations (and in so, fears - like, fear of the pc death) riding on it.

Even if they didn't go that far, as you've said, you've been playing for 2y or so, that's enough time to get attached and not want to part with it.

So why is death final? Or rather, why did he even have to die? RPG is a communal creative license. The setting may be yours, but the character is theirs. You need to meet halfway somehow.
Give the players a say in whether their character dies or not, or negotiate something to not let them die. Perhaps a God saved their butt, but said god/church etc IS going to call in this favor. Or not, perhaps they only want money. See what's okay with the player (aka, negotiate, find what they're okay with losing, which price they accept to pay, on what/where they accept to be punished)
Giving away their prized item might not be a way, but signing them up for proverbial slavery to pay their debt? Ok! Just give them a quest/throw them in another adventure, or bind them with a geass.

Don't take out the challenge, take out the punishment (or rather, as I said, find which punishments are ok). If death is trivial, and their characters aren't gone for good, who knows?
They might be more inclined to take an "actual challenge". It makes it more casual, and they might be more inclined to try other things and not get so hung up on failures.
Since it didn't have a consequence they actually dreaded, with time, this will be a funny/positive experience, and they'll even joke about it and poke fun on it "hey, remember that time when X almost blowed our heads trying to get out of the trap?" "Sure. Thankfully, X died before they actually managed to blow everything up" "guys. Next time I'm certainly taking you with me before going down" "so, there'll be a next time?".

There were some really good advice on reddit about pc deaths. I'll see if I find it again later.

Quertus

2021-11-05, 01:08 PM

The other thing I need to stress is, don't be punitive about it. Or rather, find where you can be punitive about it.
The character died. WHY is that an issue? WHY is it so final a player rage quit? Are you playing a low magic campaign?

Speaking (mostly) only for myself, anything where the GM has to engage in the dark magic of the retcon to make things right is an issue.

Anything that makes a character uncharacteristically pants-on-head, or that reveals information not available in character, cannot truly be fixed, even with a retcon.

Right or wrong, the player may well feel that the GM didn't run things by the rules, or by the rules that they should have, and that this made their character look foolish in the process.

Again, speaking (mostly) for myself, I'll argue against the PCs, my own included, because I care about how we get there, not just the destination. Wins and losses along the way are… good things, conceptually.

But the part we play, that's how we spent our time not engaging in a higher-quality instance of single-author fiction. That's the part we feel, the part we remember, the part that is important. That's the part that the GM has to get right.

Right or wrong, I'd say it feels like that player believed that the GM got that scene disastrously wrong.

PretzelCoatl

2021-11-06, 03:22 AM

Very much this. If you're going to include puzzles for your group, you need to do so in such a way that the stakes make the experience more fun than frustrating.

Two rival adventuring teams having a battle of wits to determine who gives whom the other half of the map? Much more fun! (Especially if "us losing" is actually an option)
May I ask how this is any different? If the party loses, they just end up frustrated because they've lost loot or some important macguffin they either need to advance the quest or that unlocks some aspect of....whatever it is that the map does. If the map is quest-critical, this is obviously extremely bad. If the map unlocks a ton of bonus loot, the party is going to be extremely upset that I ganged up on them. I don't see how this is any different or more beneficial in any way.

Oh man. Armus' introduction to "the party", he boggled as they deployed haphazardly, choosing targets randomly rather than with any rhyme or reason (let alone such optimized actions as you describe), and completely ignored the greatest threat (the Drow priestesses). Realizing that gulf of ability in character… I can scarcely imagine what it must be like for a GM to realize and have to account for it of their players (as GM, I generally run "monsters": most are dumb brutes, and, even the intelligent adversaries, approximately none have ever gathered intelligence on "the party". Also, I've never had a group exclusively of clueless players. Even when the max age was "preteen". So it's just not an experience I've had.)
To be clear.

I enjoy playing strategically. That does not mean I always do so. I always limit myself to the monsters' intellectual capacity, to the limit that I, myself, am capable. Animals target based off instinct, to the best that I am able to mimic. Stupid monsters go for vulnerable targets or simple objectives. Random targeting is actually fairly common and goes down to dice rolls, and could involve situations like, a goblin that is equidistant between two PCs and has no reason to choose between two of them, or a swarm in a similar circumstance choosing between several PCs. Or an archer choosing one of several targets with no specific intel on who is the most important target. I think this level of realism is important to the game. It's important that the monsters act in a realistic manner. A random goblin shouldn't be a tactical mastermind. A group boars shouldn't be moving to flank; they should be charging. Etc.

Pretzel, I think that you'll find your batteries recharged if you just play for a few sessions.
As mentioned, this is in the works, but it's going to be a few months before any of the players can manage to get this off the ground. None of them have GMed before in any meaningful capacity, so at best I have to walk them through how to set up an adventure, at worst I will have to make the adventure with them, which will most likely preclude my playing in that adventure with the rest of the party.

I should clarify that I don’t actually know whether there’s a “GM vs players” perception at your table,
I definitely think there is. If it hasn't been outright stated, I think it can be inferred by the frustration people have had at the table.
But more likely is that , as you said, it's a combination of factors. In my experience this is always the case. A single factor might be the overriding factor in a given circumstance, but a number of factors often pile up as stressors to really add to these kinds of situations. So as you go on to say, the difficulty of the encounters combined with this and a few other things creates a sort of melange of dissatisfaction, I think, which is why I want to mitigate as many of these factors as I can.

Also, if you enjoy tactical combat and your players do not, your monsters are likely to punch above their weight in terms of CR.Right. This is definitely somethings my players struggle with and something I keep in mind. Most of them only build in the sort of super optimized package you see lauded in most boards, and if they are denied the opportunity to five foot step and full attack, the entire build falls apart and they become very vulnerable. They're very much min/maxxed, so balancing around their builds can be a little tricky sometimes, but I think I have a good grasp on how to do so. After all, we have gone 10 levels and two years without any TPKs and relatively few character deaths.

Be sure that you’re not using OOC knowledge to set up the enemy tactics or having mindless monsters fight smarter than they should, though. Of course. Noted.

You might also need to pull your punches a little bit tactically - have the ogre roar in fury and turn to attack the fighter that just stabbed him instead of finishing off the wounded rogue or charging the squishy wizard, that sort of thing. Agreed.

But in general, if you want combat to be a very tactical game of positioning and attrition and your players just want to line up and roll big numbers, that’s going to be tricky to reconcile.Yes, I think we very much differ in this department, when you lay it out in black and white like this. Thank you.

One idea might be to set goals around the experience you want your players to have in combat and use your tactical acumen to achieve them instead of playing the enemies like they’re trying to win. For instance, intentionally charge the sword and board fighter and end turn in a position that begs the rogue to flank and sneak attack. The fighter’s investment in AC (or HP) pays off, and the rogue gets to roll a bunch of damage dice. They think they won the fight because they’re awesome, but you know that you engineered every part of that. That’s different from intentionally using bad tactics - it’s using tactics well to accomplish your goal. Not something I’d advise if your players enjoyed tactical combat, but in this case redefining your goals during combat might let you engage with those parts of the game while your players don’t. Or maybe not exactly that, but if you and your players enjoy different things about the game you’ll probably need to think outside the box a little bit for all of you to get what you want.That's an interesting level of psychological manipulation. I will think on that. Thank you.

But we’re getting pretty far down in the weeds here, and I think it’s worth going back to the very good advice of rotating GMs for a few sessions. Sometimes a change of perspective is a big help. I promise I'm working on this, but, as mentioned, none of the players have any experience DMing.
At the moment two players are working on adventures. One is making a zombie apocalypse adventure and the other making an adventure in the style of a classic pure hack and slash dungeon delve (think in the style of those first person dungeon games where it's endless generated dungeon delving) . Both will have no roleplay, pure hack and slash, if that gives you more insight into the players.

Here's a two-year old version of my Rules for DMs. It has 28 rules, and I'm now up to 39. I may bring them back to let people see the current version, but not until I have time to track the thread pretty closely. That won't be at least for two weeks, since I am preparing for a fencing tourney on the 13th.I will give this a thorough read later when I have a chance. Thank you for sharing. If the other rules are as insightful as the ones you shared, it will no doubt give me some good thoughts to chew on that will likely help my current predicaments.

Well, step one is for there to be a way to brilliantly and valiantly turn the tables, and it needs to be a way that they can figure out. It's not enough for the insanely strong monster to be vulnerable to kryptonite; they need to have some way to find that out in combat.

And it needs to be a way that these players will pick up on.
Sadly, I am slowly coming to the realization that this may not work in this group. If it's not "five foot step and full attack" or "five foot step and most damaging spell," it may simply not be an option.

How? Well, another of my rules is this:
5. b. The purpose of a death trap is not death; it is to make the players feel clever. Don't build one to cause death, and more importantly, don't build one to make them feel stupid.

You need traps and weaknesses designed to make them feel clever. With a group that isn't very clever, that might not be easy. Sometimes, let the idea they come up with work, even if that isn't what you thought would kill the monster, find the treasure, or solve the puzzle. Do this a few times, and you may start understanding their thought process well enough that you can build traps and puzzles that they will actually solve.
Alright, I admit that I'm intrigued by this. I'm generally opposed to this kind of concept because I feel like good work should be able to stand on its own merits, rather than being designed to laud itself, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Honestly, if I found out someone pulled this trick on me, though, I would feel horribly betrayed and I'd never want to run in that game again. It just feels like a dirty psychological trick, not actually a real accomplishment. But I am willing to consider it. However, what you've given me is very vague, and I can't envision what a situation like this would look like, maybe because it's very foreign to my way of thinking. Can you provide any examples for me?

Yes, you can, just as somebody whose favorite game is football can learn to referee a baseball game. But you need to decide to run a baseball game, not try to dumb down a football game so baseball players can play it.

They aren't playing the same game you're running, even if they are both called D&D. You need to recognize that they aren't the same game, and then actively decide to run the game that they are playing.
Alright, but I"m not sure this analogy fits perfectly, since we're talking about enjoying running the game, versus just knowing how to run the game. I can sit here and be miserable running the exact game the want, sure no problem. This I can do. The question is if I can learn to enjoy it, I think.

Several ideas:
1. When goblins attack, they shouldn't all be visible at once. It's easier to beat ten goblins and ten more than to beat twenty, and also, you can decide that the remaining ten are only five, or none.
2. They don't know how many hit points the monsters have, so you can have them die when it's best for the story.
3. Monsters can surrender, or run away. Your players aren't very good fighters, so make them some enemies that are more frail, or cowardly.

This is not the permanent solution. The long-term solution is to learn from these encounters how big, or powerful, or brave, the threats need to be, so you can build the game for these players.
Noted. Thank you.

If the floor was not magically reinforced, then destroying the runes would destroy the trap.The trap was magically reinforced. I apologize if this was explained poorly. I will try to explain better. In my original creation of the room, there were no runes on the floor. But when the PCs were struggling and did not know what to do and used True Seeing to attempt to visually figure out a method of egress, I ad-hocced the rune description for them. As such, I felt it appropriate to ad-hoc the necessary magical protections to such a delicate magical system, as it only made sense that such a thing would be protected against casual damage. So originally, no runes, no magical rune protection. Once the runes were added, the magical protections were added, and I ruled that a disable device skill check would be needed to bypass the trap.

So, would someone skilled in knowledge of magic know that there are traps that, when dispelled, regain power after such a short period of time?
Absolutely. Unfortunately, neither the player thought to ask that, nor did I think to give them a check for this.

Would someone who dispelled an effect be able to tell that the dispell was temporary, and not full?
Per the RAW, I'm not certain this is how dispel works. I do not believe there is such a thing as a temporary dispel magic, but there aren't a lot of traps that have this function, so I may be wrong. To my knowledge, the spell effect of the trap was completely dispelled. The trap then activates again a minute later, creating a brand new effect. Dispel magic does not have a sensory feedback aspect to it, to my knowledge, so there's no reason that the player would get any kind of alert or feedback of the kind you are implying. If you can cite RAW saying otherwise, I'd quite like to see that, since it means we've been playing that wrong for quite a while.

Would someone with true seeing be able to see that the runes where sleeping, not dead?True Seeing in no way confers any method of magic detection, so I see no reason why it would do this. However, had they cast a simple detect magic, I would have granted this information.

?!?! Anything with physical existence can be attacked. If that physical existence is required for it to work, and you destroy it, it isn't going to work.I agree, to an extent. The major point of disagreement I have is the arbitrary hand-waving that exists around traps (in this circumstance). If the trap's mechanism either can't be described or is in some way nebulous to the point where the GM is just calling for a trap disarming check rather than allowing it to be disabled, then, in my opinion, it needs to be disabled rather than destroyed. Can a trap consisting of a bucket on a ledge be destroyed rather than disabled? Certainly. The mechanism is obvious and prone to destruction. But for more complex traps that lack specific mechanisms, unless we are going to actually create a system of "how magical traps work" or force everyone to become engineers and force all rogues to learn how to disable traps in real life, there has to be a certain degree of hand waving on this issue that comes down to "roll a d20 to disable the trap," because we don't always know whether these elements even can be physically destroyed or not. Are the integral trap elements actually disguised thirty feet below in the rock? Are the runes up top just there to gather ambient mana? Are the runes that are visible just the ones that controlled the disappearing floor, and the ones controlling the room trap invisible? You don't know this, because you are not a scholar of magical traps. No one is. Because magical traps don't exist. Maybe you could make this judgement call if you were a mechanical engineer and the trap were mechanical, and we could say "Oh yeah, the pins would have to be exposed, the barbarian could wreck that trap," but do we want to have a 45 minute discussion replete with free body diagrams and and CAD drawings every time a trap comes up just because someone wants to destroy it rather than disabling it? This is why the disable device skill exists as a simplified roll rather than requiring people to explain how they are disabling it. It's a simplification of an existing real knowledge.

The lack of specific rules describing what happens when you destroy something doesn't mean destroying it is impossible or ineffective.I agree on this as well. That's why I feel a little bad about the ruling, but, well, see above.

This really is reading like a bad case of "read DM's mind", where the approach that works is a single one (either in the module, or in the DM's mind) and all others don't work. Playing "read DM's mind" is amazingly frustrating.I outlined something like a dozen routes that could have been taken. There are certainly more that would have worked as well that I didn't think of. I do admit that I wish I hadn't described runes on the ground in the hopes of getting the players to attempt to disarm the trap, but I'm not sure that I agree with your synopsis that they needed to read my mind to get through the encounter. Accusing me of forcing the players to read my mind when they tried one thing then gave up, and that one thing wasn't "disarm the trap" is a little far, I think.

Finally, note that puzzles are insanely harder to solve than they are to write.
Agreed. Well to a point. I wouldn't say insanely. I think that's somewhat hyperbolic. You seem very upset about the encounter.

There is a rule in making an adventure; the rule of 3. If you want players to pick up on some fact or clue or solve some puzzle, you need 3 strong clues for what the solution is in the adventure. Not 3 clues that can together solve it, but 3 clues such that if you had *any* of them you could solve it.I'm familiar. I mention it earlier in this thread. As mentioned previously, they ignored all the lore and clues in the adventure leading up to this point that would have helped them here. They also stepped into the room, read the riddle, discussed it for all of ten seconds, then chose and pushed forward.

Next, lets look at this trap. It is a really boring failure state.
OK.

Either (a) the players solve the riddle, and the trap is gone, I would have loved this. I would have been very proud of them and happy with this outcome.

or (b) they don't solve the riddle, and they take a pile of damage.A very dramatic and tense scene. The opposite of boring. In the weeks since, one of the players actually did come up to me and said he liked the encounter and apologized for the group reaction. "I hated it. It was awesome," were his words, or something along those lines.

(b) is a consequence, but the game *isn't very interesting*. Even (a) isn't interesting. So now you have a riddle, leading to 2 results, neither of which are interesting. OK.

Remove the riddle; imagine it was just (a) or (b) with no riddle. Would that be a fun game to play? (a) is boring, (b) is boring with damage. I would like it.

You could have made the trap drop them into an interesting death trap, but instead it was an uninteresting one. I mean, there was stakes I guess. Up until the player got frustrated they were actually having a really great time. I painted a picture of this horrifying darkness with spectral teeth shredding them to pieces. It was tense, dramatic, and terrifying.

And for the purpose of recycling content, the interesting death trap could be content that you'd approach from a different angle if you went through the correct door (eventually).I thought you said it wasn't interesting?

So it's pretty clear you are hating a lot on this encounter, or me, or my DMing style, or something, I'm not sure which. Whatever it is, I apologize for whatever I did to offend you. If you can clarify what I did to specifically offend you, I will apologize more specifically and attempt to make amends, if it is within my power.

Now, if you want to have consequences, but players don't like in-combat gotchas, consider making the consequences on a different level.

Provide multiple approaches for PCs -- plot hooks to interact with. They have this, unless I'm not understanding what you're suggesting. The campaign is sandbox and they are free to do as they please. Can you clarify for me?

The things they interact with, they'll usually beat.I'm not sure I understand. Can you clarify why they'll usually beat whatever it is they're interacting with, as opposed to normally?

The ones they don't interact with cause in-world consequences. Plot consequences not combat ones.Yes, we do this too. Anything can have consequences.

Defeating a given encounter isn't the problem. Defeating the right one, fast enough, is the problem.Can you give an example of what you mean? I don't really see how this applies to my situation. I'm currently attempting to scale the difficulty down, not up. What you're suggesting seems like it would be harder for them.

PCs are under pressure to do more than they can. Every time they take a rest or a break, the protagonists (the DM's BBEGs) advance their plots. Fights get dangerous when they keep on pushing past the point of being exhausted.Yes, this definitely seems harder rather than easier. This seems counter to the purpose here. I'm not saying it's bad general advice. Just counter to the primary purpose here.

If you really want to go with riddles, it should have a (quasi-)sentient being to judge it, and the answer should be open ended.I agree with this. I'll award credit to any riddle answer that fits. I had this happen the other day in fact.

For instance, I'm sorry, but the easy peasy hobbit riddle you gave? I failed it. Yup, the one about the mountains. I don't know if it was the subcontext but you know what my first answer actually was?I don't think anyone here was claiming that was an easy riddle. That's one of Tolkien's classics. I'm sure there are some literature buffs that will claim it was easy for them, but I'm not among them. Granted, I read it as a child, but I didn't solve it when I read it. That wasn't the riddle I was talking about at all. Mine was more like "Greet the rising dawn or be cast into darkness" and the PCs had to choose between three doors set at the compass points (excluding the door they'd come through). The correct answer was the east door. There was nothing else in the room.

What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?
Ego.

Now fight me, tell me it doesn't fits XDIt does fit somewhat well. I don't think it fits perfectly, however. Ego can definitely grow. As the sentient being in question, I wouldn't have allowed this answer to pass.

IMO, riddles are fun when: it engages a group/generates debate, and doesn't have a "punishment"/strings attached. When it becomes more of an open philosophical question, than say a timer to impending doom.

So, give them a sentient (or quasi) being to be the judge. A sphinx, a magical sentient door (or lock), a djin, a faery. A pirate's parrot. A mage' s familiar anything.

Leave it open ended, and give them something that can evaluate the answer they gave. So say, sure, I didn't get the answer you wanted: mountains. But if my answer makes sense, and I can show you my train of thought and how it fits and convince you of it, let it pass.
Alright.

You said it was an ancient testing ground right? Why not even sarcastic notes?As mentioned previously, they missed all of the lore in the dungeon. Well. Except the OOC red herrings about halflings. They picked up on that. xD

But try to get back to it. Get back to the story. Make it personal to them. What do they want to do? What do they want for their characters? Are they attached to a npc, place or even one of their items?
Or even their characters! What's their backstory? Or the group story? Or one aspect they like playing?It's hard to say. As I've mentioned, the campaign is sandbox, but I can't even generally get their input on what they want to do for each adventure until the session of. They generally have little or no direction or interest in doing anything specific, yet also got annoyed when I set them on a specific path, complaining that I was railroading them. I don't believe your many suggestions of forcing them down a specific road, while well-intentioned, would work for them. I genuinely think at this point that they just want hack and slash. Up until the more difficult parts of this dungeon, they responded fairly well to the pure-murder-hobo aspects of this dungeon, which was basically a drop-in-and-murder-without-thinking scenario.

The character died. WHY is that an issue?I feel like that is a fairly complex issue that isn't entirely my place to discuss. Ultimately the player was upset that I mishandled the situation and made a bad call that resulted in his death.

WHY is it so final a player rage quit?This I do not know.

Are you playing a low magic campaign?No. Fairly high magic, actually. Standard pathfinder plus a little extra.

So why is death final?It's not. They're high level at this point. Death is a minor financial setback.

Or rather, why did he even have to die?Because he min/maxxed his constitution/intelligence scores, generally speaking, and didn't bring any consumables to the dungeon.

RPG is a communal creative license. The setting may be yours, but the character is theirs. You need to meet halfway somehow.
Give the players a say in whether their character dies or not, or negotiate something to not let them die. Perhaps a God saved their butt, but said god/church etc IS going to call in this favor. Or not, perhaps they only want money. See what's okay with the player (aka, negotiate, find what they're okay with losing, which price they accept to pay, on what/where they accept to be punished)
Giving away their prized item might not be a way, but signing them up for proverbial slavery to pay their debt? Ok! Just give them a quest/throw them in another adventure, or bind them with a geass.
While I do generally agree with the sentiment behind this, I will point out again that the player literally left the table and this wasn't an option.

Don't take out the challenge, take out the punishment (or rather, as I said, find which punishments are ok). If death is trivial, and their characters aren't gone for good, who knows?This is a mindset I really struggle with. Is this something you all really believe? This is a horrible concept to me. For me, if there's no risk there's no reward. I can't even imagine playing in a game with no concept of dying. I would absolutely quit. If I played a game and I was about to die, and the DM picked me up and dusted me off and said "Sorry about that bud, don't want that to happen," I would walk out right then and there. With no realistic danger or threat, there's no reward and accomplishment to me. That's boring. I don't understand how that can be engaging (in terms of combat). There's no thrill.

I'm not saying I can't do this for the players. Just that I'm struggling to wrap my mind around this concept. Maybe this is what they want and this is really what I'm missing? Do you really recommend just taking death off the table? I literally had never even imagined a game where we just didn't have characters that died.

Right or wrong, the player may well feel that the GM didn't run things by the rules, or by the rules that they should have, and that this made their character look foolish in the process.
I don't think it was as much that I didn't handle it by the rules, so much as that I didn't handle it the way he wanted. Technically I think I handled it by the RAW, but it didn't turn out the way he wanted/expected, which was very frustrating. (Also he said he destroyed all the runes while I was AFK, didn't get confirmation from me [because I was AFK of course and couldn't give that confirmation], assumed they were all destroyed, so when the trap started back up because the runes weren't destroyed, that was a big cause for frustration)

Right or wrong, I'd say it feels like that player believed that the GM got that scene disastrously wrong. Yes, I think this is correct. As well as the other situations involving the player in question. It is worth pointing out, however, that while altercations with this single player are generally the most fractious, the group as a whole does suffer from all of what I've described.

HidesHisEyes

2021-11-06, 09:41 AM

Alright, I admit that I'm intrigued by this. I'm generally opposed to this kind of concept because I feel like good work should be able to stand on its own merits, rather than being designed to laud itself, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Honestly, if I found out someone pulled this trick on me, though, I would feel horribly betrayed and I'd never want to run in that game again. It just feels like a dirty psychological trick, not actually a real accomplishment. But I am willing to consider it. However, what you've given me is very vague, and I can't envision what a situation like this would look like, maybe because it's very foreign to my way of thinking. Can you provide any examples for me?

Just gonna pick at this one aspect of a very deep thread because I think, based on your posts here, this is pretty core to the problem you’re having. Let me know if I’m off base though.

It sounds like you have a commitment to the idea of “challenge” as a central part of RPGs. Like, for you as a player, you want the GM to put challenges and obstacles in front of you so that you can use your judgement and skill to overcome them and get the satisfaction of that. And in that case of course if the GM is sort of secretly adjusting things behind the scenes to make sure you overcome the challenge, that defeats the object and feels like a betrayal. This is completely consistent and reasonable.

I don’t know if you have any experience with very narrative-focused games like PbtA games (and if you do, apologies and I hope this doesn’t come across as condescending), but I’d offer them as a good example of a totally different model. These games don’t care so much (or at all, the way some people play them) about player-level challenge. They instead care about generating a cool and engaging narrative, and that typically means the player characters are being challenged, and not always coming out on top. As you’d expect, the process of GMing that kind of game is very different from the kind where the players pit themselves (and their characters) against a sort of challenge gauntlet devised by the GM. Instead the GM is much more reactive, controlling the pressure and danger to the characters in real time at the table, to produce an exciting ebb and flow of action. The end result, when it goes well, is a narrative that has the feeling of a series of trials and ordeals that the characters have to overcome, but isn’t actually built as such on a mechanical level. And the players know this, so it doesn’t feel like a trick. And they’re also not guaranteed to always succeed - sometimes that real-time ebb and flow of pressure really does go against the players and comes up against the hard mechanical system of hit points/harm/wounds etc, and player characters do die (and face other dire consequences) in these games.

I’m of course not suggesting you switch to running a PbtA game, or that you give up on challenge-based play altogether. I’m more just aiming to demonstrate how a very different approach can work. And of course, it doesn’t sound like your players would necessarily want a playstyle like the one I just described either (in fact I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t - a lot of D&D players who transition to PbtA have serious problems with what they see as a very high degree of GM fiat).

But it’s good that you’re willing to try a different approach, and I wonder if you could try splitting the difference in your game in future. Could you design challenges with an expected solution - your solution - in mind, but leave a couple of details out of your prep to leave room for the players’ ideas? Or design combat encounters that you could make difficult if you played the monsters a certain way, but which would become much easier if you simply chose not to use certain monster abilities? In other words, a less extreme version of the PbtA stuff I described, where the challenge exists in a relatively fixed way, but you leave yourself some leeway to control the level of challenge while you’re actually running the game.

I don’t know if that’s quite as insightful as I thought it would be before I started typing it up! But I hope it helps somehow.

PretzelCoatl

2021-11-06, 01:18 PM

Just gonna pick at this one aspect of a very deep thread because I think, based on your posts here, this is pretty core to the problem you’re having. Let me know if I’m off base though.

It sounds like you have a commitment to the idea of “challenge” as a central part of RPGs. Like, for you as a player, you want the GM to put challenges and obstacles in front of you so that you can use your judgement and skill to overcome them and get the satisfaction of that. And in that case of course if the GM is sort of secretly adjusting things behind the scenes to make sure you overcome the challenge, that defeats the object and feels like a betrayal. This is completely consistent and reasonable. This is the kind of thing I like, yes. I understand and recognize it's not for everyone, but it is what I prefer. I try not to push it on everyone, but since it's so ingrained into my personal preference (my default mode, or baseline behavior so to speak), it can be difficult to not make the assumption that others want this unless I actively work on it, I think. Even now I'm not entirely convinced that my players don't want this on at least some level. They respond very positively to succeeding at challenges and it seems very fulfilling and uplifting for them. Those seem to be their highest highs.

I don’t know if you have any experience with very narrative-focused games like PbtA games (and if you do, apologies and I hope this doesn’t come across as condescending), but I’d offer them as a good example of a totally different model. These games don’t care so much (or at all, the way some people play them) about player-level challenge. They instead care about generating a cool and engaging narrative, and that typically means the player characters are being challenged, and not always coming out on top.
I do. And that doesn't come off at all as condescending. I say this with all respect for those that like Powered by the Apocalypse. I absolutely abhor that system. I hate it so much. I'm not going to go into why I dislike it because that will derail the thread, but I absolutely abhor it. If I had to choose between only playing PbtA and never playing again, I would never play again. I respect the right of anyone to like a system, and if this is their system of choice, I'm happy for them that they've found it. But that one is not for me. It's just personal preference and I dislike the system intensely due to how it functions.

But it’s good that you’re willing to try a different approach, and I wonder if you could try splitting the difference in your game in future. Could you design challenges with an expected solution - your solution - in mind, but leave a couple of details out of your prep to leave room for the players’ ideas?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. When I design an adventure I essentially write it up like a module in a word document, detailing each room, with a text box description, a list of all the things in the room such as monsters, magical effects that can be detected, treasures, secret doors, skill checks that can be attempted to gain information, etc. If it's on open air encounters, it's much the same, but not in a room, with people involved as well and a list of their information, possibly conversational topics, major motivations, that sort of thing.

But that never precludes the players at any time from taking things off the rails. At any point the players could bust a hole in the dungeon walls and go mining, or query a random passerby for information I wasn't expecting and force me to improvise. That's always a possibility and welcome. I can prepare for the expected, but the players unexpected ideas can't be prepared for but are welcome and of course encouraged.

Or design combat encounters that you could make difficult if you played the monsters a certain way, but which would become much easier if you simply chose not to use certain monster abilities? In other words, a less extreme version of the PbtA stuff I described, where the challenge exists in a relatively fixed way, but you leave yourself some leeway to control the level of challenge while you’re actually running the game.
That is kind of what I have been trying lately. I've been throwing demons at them and not using their spell like abilities and they seemed to respond fairly positively to that. The nerf in power seemed fairly welcome.

Talakeal

2021-11-06, 05:11 PM

I heard my name!

Yeah, the OP seems to be in a very similar situation to my own, but doesn't seem quite as stuck in their ways. People always ask me why I don't just give in to my players and give them the easy campaign that they want, and one of the big answers is that I am afraid I would end up in the same situation, where they still complain about being treated unfairly at every minor setback, but also get frustrated by their lack of progress and forward momentum.

Not sure how much help I can be, but I will be glad to offer advice or answer questions.

I will say that I agree, puddles are no fun and riddles break immersion, and that I would try and excise them if it all possible.

Also, I generally ignore any feedback that includes "reading the DM's mind" as that is, more or less, just shorthand for not liking it when you are told "no".

Xervous

2021-11-08, 09:01 AM

My 39.5’ pole is clean of PbtA as well.

Though I’d like to challenge one statement. Builds that are locked into 5’ step full attack aren’t winners of high praise on these forums. Maybe for cute theoretical “how high can we go?” explorations, but practical 3.5 melee builds need mobility. This has been known for a decade at least. Has me wondering where the players are sourcing their builds from.

Yakk

2021-11-08, 03:33 PM

The trap was magically reinforced. I apologize if this was explained poorly. I will try to explain better. In my original creation of the room, there were no runes on the floor. But when the PCs were struggling and did not know what to do and used True Seeing to attempt to visually figure out a method of egress, I ad-hocced the rune description for them. As such, I felt it appropriate to ad-hoc the necessary magical protections to such a delicate magical system, as it only made sense that such a thing would be protected against casual damage. So originally, no runes, no magical rune protection. Once the runes were added, the magical protections were added, and I ruled that a disable device skill check would be needed to bypass the trap.
Sure. And the initial response to True Seeing was great.

Using True Seeing to deal with "you are in magical darkness" shouldn't result in "nothing that helps". So you added the runes; it is plausible that people setting up a trap won't make it deal with True Seeing (high level magic!) perfectly.

Now there are runes. The players engage with the runes. There are multiple ways they can engage with them; they can try to Disable Device, Dispel magic, or (in this case) damage them.

From the perspective of the players, all of these are reasonable options. When they grab at a reasonable option, and the result is "nothing happens", that is an example of "read DM's mind". Because, "you are in magical darkness trap with runes you managed to decode", a DM could justify that any one of "Disable Device", "Dispel Magic" or "Damage the Runes" is the wrong solution and the other ones are the right solution.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, neither the player thought to ask that, nor did I think to give them a check for this.
You are your player's eyes and ears in the game, and their access to their training.

The players aren't arcana experts, the characters are. They don't know how you interpret the magical system of D&D; in 5e, for example, there are few magical effects that are suppressed by dispel magic for 1 minute. By RAW, you cast dispel magic on almost any permanent magical effect, you beat the DC, and it is gone for good.

So even if your players had an encyclopedic knowledge of D&D rules, they wouldn't even know that the magical runes could refresh after being dispelled!

Per the RAW, I'm not certain this is how dispel works. I do not believe there is such a thing as a temporary dispel magic, but there aren't a lot of traps that have this function, so I may be wrong. To my knowledge, the spell effect of the trap was completely dispelled. The trap then activates again a minute later, creating a brand new effect. Dispel magic does not have a sensory feedback aspect to it, to my knowledge, so there's no reason that the player would get any kind of alert or feedback of the kind you are implying. If you can cite RAW saying otherwise, I'd quite like to see that, since it means we've been playing that wrong for quite a while.
There isn't such a thing as a non-creature who can create a magical trap. To do your trap by RAW, you'd have to have a captive wizard of some kind under suggestion.

So there isn't a RAW involved.

My point is that when players interact with the world, "I only tell them what they explicitly ask to learn" is a read DM's mind situation. They either (a) learn to read your mind (as human beings, you can get really good at that), or (b) ask a long series of tedious questions covering every possibility, or (c) give up.

They where in a trap. They did multiple sensible things, some of which had no effect based on your on-the-fly improvised model of what the trap designers did or did not anticipate, often in response to the players doing an action. Having defeated the trap, with no information that it was risky (you literally took a break after they defeated it and there was nothing apparently threatening around, which to me indicates that the tension was reduced), repeated the trap on them which killed a PC.

They either have to read your mind, do a ridiculously long boring checklist ("Do I know anything about such traps? Do I know anything about magical darkness? Is the trap actually disabled?") in order to ask the question you want to be asked so they can make a skill check to have a clue about what is about to kill them, or take whatever punishment you feel like giving them.

I agree, to an extent. The major point of disagreement I have is the arbitrary hand-waving that exists around traps (in this circumstance). If the trap's mechanism either can't be described or is in some way nebulous to the point where the GM is just calling for a trap disarming check rather than allowing it to be disabled, then, in my opinion, it needs to be disabled rather than destroyed. Can a trap consisting of a bucket on a ledge be destroyed rather than disabled? Certainly. The mechanism is obvious and prone to destruction. But for more complex traps that lack specific mechanisms, unless we are going to actually create a system of "how magical traps work" or force everyone to become engineers and force all rogues to learn how to disable traps in real life, there has to be a certain degree of hand waving on this issue that comes down to "roll a d20 to disable the trap," because we don't always know whether these elements even can be physically destroyed or not. Are the integral trap elements actually disguised thirty feet below in the rock? Are the runes up top just there to gather ambient mana? Are the runes that are visible just the ones that controlled the disappearing floor, and the ones controlling the room trap invisible? You don't know this, because you are not a scholar of magical traps. No one is. Because magical traps don't exist. Maybe you could make this judgement call if you were a mechanical engineer and the trap were mechanical, and we could say "Oh yeah, the pins would have to be exposed, the barbarian could wreck that trap," but do we want to have a 45 minute discussion replete with free body diagrams and and CAD drawings every time a trap comes up just because someone wants to destroy it rather than disabling it? This is why the disable device skill exists as a simplified roll rather than requiring people to explain how they are disabling it. It's a simplification of an existing real knowledge.
So, going back to the origin of D&D, before there was the thief there where traps. Players solved traps as puzzles. It very much was a bit of "read DM's mind", a bit of "ask a huge pile of repeated questions" and a bit of "take whatever the DM wants to happen". There where also some checks you could make to see if you found and/or disabled a trap without explicitly describing what you are doing.

The thief was added, and it had an increased chance to detect and disable traps without telling the DM explicitly what they are doing.

The fun part is, you don't need a free body diagram and CAD drawing every time a trap comes up. You just need to engage with what the players are trying to do using improv skills.

Someone uses their disable device skill, a success tells them how to disable it and ensures they have the skills to do it. Someone instead smashes it with a rock, you look into roughly how the trap works, and have that approach do an effect.

Runes hidden by darkness? Reinforcing them against a serious magical blast of some kind would require insane amounts of paranoia. But maybe it wouldn't shut the trap down; so you improvise a reasonable result from the effort. "Yes, and" is the default, not "no".

I outlined something like a dozen routes that could have been taken. There are certainly more that would have worked as well that I didn't think of. I do admit that I wish I hadn't described runes on the ground in the hopes of getting the players to attempt to disarm the trap, but I'm not sure that I agree with your synopsis that they needed to read my mind to get through the encounter. Accusing me of forcing the players to read my mind when they tried one thing then gave up, and that one thing wasn't "disarm the trap" is a little far, I think.
They did try to disarm the trap. Taking a physical part of a trap and physically destroying it makes every single trap in the real world not work.

The result was "nothing happens". The DM can always say nothing happens or "it does not work", and when a reasonable approach runs into "nothing happens", the choice is to try to read the DM's mind, try to play a game of 20 questions, or find another approach.

Agreed. Well to a point. I wouldn't say insanely. I think that's somewhat hyperbolic. You seem very upset about the encounter.
You asked for a possible explanation of what is going wrong and how to fix it. So I'm trying to do that.

I would like it.

Up until the player got frustrated they were actually having a really great time. I painted a picture of this horrifying darkness with spectral teeth shredding them to pieces. It was tense, dramatic, and terrifying.
Great! Now, the problem was they tried to interact with the horrifying darkness, and got back "failed" and "you made a mistake" instead of feedback.

Every action should result in feedback, a clue to interact with. "No" is boring. "It doesn't work" is boring.

"It doesn't work" with a clue about what could work isn't interesting. It doesn't even have to be an obvious clue, but it should be something they can engage with. It could even point them back towards an earlier clue they missed.

I thought you said it wasn't interesting?
I was talking about an interesting trap in the abstract.

So it's pretty clear you are hating a lot on this encounter, or me, or my DMing style, or something, I'm not sure which. Whatever it is, I apologize for whatever I did to offend you. If you can clarify what I did to specifically offend you, I will apologize more specifically and attempt to make amends, if it is within my power.
I'm trying to be critical. You asked what went wrong.

I'm trying to describe how you can have a problem much like this that wouldn't have felt quite so "rocks fall, PC dies".

They have this, unless I'm not understanding what you're suggesting. The campaign is sandbox and they are free to do as they please. Can you clarify for me?

I'm not sure I understand. Can you clarify why they'll usually beat whatever it is they're interacting with, as opposed to normally?
So one thing that people talk about "I want it to be challenging". But at the same time, they don't want to have their PCs die to a death trap. This seems like a contradiction.

I'm saying you can have a challenging campaign where the challenges aren't "can you survive this death trap", but rather strategic danger and tactically challenging things that aren't "you made a mistake, your PCs' story is over".

Even in a sandbox.

Introduce forces doing things that the PCs might not appreciate. Call them BBEGs. Give them motivations and a plan. Have them execute this plan over a reasonably long period of time. The end of the plan is some doom -- the bad thing (world-story-wise) that the PCs might not appreciate.

The Doom should be generally calibrated so that even if it happens, the world remains an interesting place to adventure in. It isn't a "sorry, you lose", it is "sorry, the elven nation's trees just all burned down, and the world is full of elven refugees". PCs could prevent that, or not prevent that, both lead to interesting stories.

Now, springing a Doom on players sucks. So to each doom you attach portents. These are steps along the way to the Doom that the players should almost certainly become aware of. Basically, adventure hooks.

Again, if the players don't engage with them, these portents should still leave an interesting world to adventure in. If the players do engage in them, they could manage to completely defeat the BBEG plot (maybe even unwittingly), or maybe they'll just get some clues and/or slow it down and/or reduce the harm it causes.

Next, have more than one BBEG/plot going on at once. Some should be connected, some should be disconnected; because **** happens, and sometimes **** sucks.

Players who engage with any one of these plots can win every encounter, and not stop the next step. They could get distracted by one plot, allowing another plot to advance towards its doom.

The players can be ... doomed to experience some of your dooms, unless they pull of significant strategic victories. And those victories should be on the table; it should be plausible to marshal the forces of the elven nation to attack the BBEG who is planning on burning down the woods if the players figure it out early enough.

With multiple plots by multiple BBEG going on at any one point, players winning against any of them is great. There is plenty of story still going on.

This kind of strategic-level BBEG play could let you get what you want, and it might be what the players want. They are up against challenges that they might not win, but at the same time they don't have to deal with death traps at every stage. What they engage with, they usually beat; the problem is engaging with the right stuff and stopping the strategic plans.

Now, as you are the DM and basically are in charge of cheating, follow rules to keep your bad guys in check.

It is plausible that the BBEG could have some horrible plot resulting in a doom that the players never see coming. But that is both boring, and far too easy to justify. Instead, you must have portents, and those portents must be exposed to the PCs before you are allowed to trigger the doom.

The portents need not be arrows pointing at what the doom is and how to stop it. They are just sparks flying off the train flying down the hill towards the crash.

This structure I am describing is stolen from Dungeon World. It is more formalized there, but you don't need that formal structure I don't think.

Talakeal

2021-11-08, 06:51 PM

Snip.

The OP is not playing 5E, he is playing Pathfinder, and AFAICT everything about the self resetting magical trap was perfectly accurate according to PF RAW.

From the perspective of the players, all of these are reasonable options. When they grab at a reasonable option, and the result is "nothing happens", that is an example of "read DM's mind".

This is why I can't take "read the DM's mind" seriously. As I said above, it has become shorthand for "being told no" and is just an excuse for players to not put in any effort.

If I try and go into the next room, opening the door is a reasonable idea. Finding the door is locked and nothing happening is a reasonable obstacle. Without obstacles, you don't have a game (you also don't have an interesting story, either in fiction or real life, you just have a boring ordinary day). Nothing about finding an alternate path (or another way to bypass the door) requires "reading the DM's mind", it just requires putting the minimal investment of effort into engaging with the fiction.

Now, one certainly CAN come up with a puzzle that requires intuition bordering on telepathy, but that almost never actually occurs at the table, and it is not (imo) what is happening in the OP's story.

icefractal

2021-11-08, 08:19 PM

Realism of obstacles is always a somewhat tricky balance, IME.

On the one hand, if something is supposed to be a legitimately defended location (as opposed to some kind of mystic test, say), then there's no reason that a convenient path for intruders would exist. It also makes sense that any kind of active defenses would be concealed to the extent possible, certainly not signposted or explained.

On the other hand, people don't realistically tend to engage with a hostile environment on that environment's terms. Archaeologists hitting a locked door in a tomb, for example, would start figuring out how to remove the lock with minimal damage rather than going on the hunt for a matching key. A SWAT team raiding a building is going to break down doors rather than try to guess lock combinations based on clues in graffiti.

So I think that when you're talking about puzzles which can be solved by general knowledge rather than passwords, you're already well into "We're doing this because it's fun, not because it's logical" territory. And so from that perspective I'd say traps that auto-reset without warning are undesirable, even if they're possible in-setting.

Quertus

2021-11-09, 08:50 AM

Also, I generally ignore any feedback that includes "reading the DM's mind" as that is, more or less, just shorthand for not liking it when you are told "no".

Being told "no" is terrible. Being told "no, because…" is educational.

Never tell your players "no". Tell them "no, because…".

May I ask how this is any different? If the party loses, they just end up frustrated because they've lost loot or some important macguffin they either need to advance the quest or that unlocks some aspect of....whatever it is that the map does. If the map is quest-critical, this is obviously extremely bad. If the map unlocks a ton of bonus loot, the party is going to be extremely upset that I ganged up on them. I don't see how this is any different or more beneficial in any way.

Two rival adventuring teams having a battle of wits to determine who gives whom the other half of the map? Much more fun! (Especially if "us losing" is actually an option)

Ah. The magic is in the "losing is an option" bit.

So maybe the party didn't go on the "gumdrop mountain" quest, because they lost the map. But they do go on the candy cane forest quest.

The players get a fun game either way. The PCs spend their time either way. But the *investment* they made in getting the gumdrop mountain map half is wasted if they cannot beat their rivals.

*That* is the stakes.

Sure, gumdrop mountain was better than candy cane forest in some way - that's why the party chose to go for gumdrop mountain in the first place.

But, most would agree, "second choice of adventuring site" has less teeth than "death".

To be clear.

I enjoy playing strategically. That does not mean I always do so. I always limit myself to the monsters' intellectual capacity, to the limit that I, myself, am capable. Animals target based off instinct, to the best that I am able to mimic. Stupid monsters go for vulnerable targets or simple objectives. Random targeting is actually fairly common and goes down to dice rolls, and could involve situations like, a goblin that is equidistant between two PCs and has no reason to choose between two of them, or a swarm in a similar circumstance choosing between several PCs. Or an archer choosing one of several targets with no specific intel on who is the most important target. I think this level of realism is important to the game. It's important that the monsters act in a realistic manner. A random goblin shouldn't be a tactical mastermind. A group boars shouldn't be moving to flank; they should be charging. Etc.

Agreed, play monsters to their abilities. I had gotten the impression that you had a preference for smarter monsters.

I don't think it was as much that I didn't handle it by the rules, so much as that I didn't handle it the way he wanted. Technically I think I handled it by the RAW, but it didn't turn out the way he wanted/expected, which was very frustrating. (Also he said he destroyed all the runes while I was AFK, didn't get confirmation from me [because I was AFK of course and couldn't give that confirmation], assumed they were all destroyed, so when the trap started back up because the runes weren't destroyed, that was a big cause for frustration)

Did you give "anti-confirmation" when you got back to K? Or just ignore his rune destruction? Or… I'm struggling with this timeline.

Yes, I think this is correct. As well as the other situations involving the player in question. It is worth pointing out, however, that while altercations with this single player are generally the most fractious, the group as a whole does suffer from all of what I've described.

Any group that leaps west at your puzzle has issues. I'd say a focus on communication is in order.

"Why?" "Why do you think that would be beneficial?" "What are you trying to achieve?" - these are some of the things i might say when I believe that there may be a communication breakdown.

"I fireball the runes" seems a good time to ask why they thought that would be a good idea.

Yakk

2021-11-09, 11:07 AM

This is why I can't take "read the DM's mind" seriously. As I said above, it has become shorthand for "being told no" and is just an excuse for players to not put in any effort.

If I try and go into the next room, opening the door is a reasonable idea. Finding the door is locked and nothing happening is a reasonable obstacle. Without obstacles, you don't have a game (you also don't have an interesting story, either in fiction or real life, you just have a boring ordinary day). Nothing about finding an alternate path (or another way to bypass the door) requires "reading the DM's mind", it just requires putting the minimal investment of effort into engaging with the fiction.

Now, one certainly CAN come up with a puzzle that requires intuition bordering on telepathy, but that almost never actually occurs at the table, and it is not (imo) what is happening in the OP's story.
Except:
"I try to go into the next room"
"You run a wooden object. Take 1d4 damage."
when there isn't darkness or anything that would prevent seeing the door, except the player didn't ask "is there a door in my way". And it isn't even described as a door, just a wooden object, unless the player asks "what is the wooden object".

"Reading the DM's mind" here refers to players doing reasonable things interacting with the fiction, and without any information about what interaction would work, being told "no" with no other feedback.

It also refers to the DM improvising ways for the player's actions to not work because they didn't match the plan the DM had for solving the problem. For example, attempting to physically destroy a trap instead of using a disable device check causing a magical ward to retroactively exist to prevent the physical destruction.

Improvising an obstacle is fine. But when a player does an improvised unanticipated action and is told "no" with no additional feedback (and retroactive justification why it wouldn't work) as to what would be an acceptable action, the player is literally reduced to guessing the right action that the DM has in mind.

That action in this case was one of "explicitly ask the DM to use one of a few specific skills (disable device, or a knowledge arcana)" or "cast a specific spell (dispel magic)". Of course, the next time this happens, the DM is free to make any of these actions be the wrong ones (there is a contingency on someone casting dispel magic! The disable device DC is 40, but the device is fragile, too bad they didn't ask to hit it. Spending time doing knowledge check is just what the trap needs to ramp up in difficulty, you should have immediately climbed out.)

Even "ok everyone, time for a table break. Ok, I'm back. I'm sorry, did the table break and the seeming safety make you think you had defeated the encounter? Sorry, no. Everyone take a pile of more damage as you didn't immediately get out of the trap while I was in the bathroom. Looks like that PC is dead." is an example of that; the out-of game "we are taking a break" implies that the in-game situation is not about to completely change. They appeared to have solved a problem. And then the game restarted, followed by "actually, despite it not looking like it, you where all in deadly peril when we took the break, and ... yep, that PC is dead. What do you do next?"

I mean, you may not have been attempting to lull the players into a false sense of security followed by killing a PC, but your actions you actually did couldn't really have been better crafted if you where trying to do it.

You shouldn't be surprised that the players got frustrated after doing that.

Jay R

2021-11-09, 12:57 PM

I will give this a thorough read later when I have a chance. Thank you for sharing. If the other rules are as insightful as the ones you shared, it will no doubt give me some good thoughts to chew on that will likely help my current predicaments.

Glad to help. Here's one that might apply directly.

5. It's your job to build the problem. It's their job to find a solution. If you create a death trap with only one solution, then then they cannot get out unless they figure out what your solution is. But if you build a death trap with no solutions, then any clever plan they come up with might work.

a. Do not confuse a death trap with no solutions with a death trap that cannot be solved. No resemblance.

If coming up with their idea was a challenge for them, then you should reward it with success.

Sadly, I am slowly coming to the realization that this may not work in this group. If it's not "five foot step and full attack" or "five foot step and most damaging spell," it may simply not be an option.

That's possible. Think about how old they are, how experienced they are, and how inventive they are. Like it or not, that's the group you are running this game for.

But even they with occasionally come up with something else. Let it work, early on.

Alright, I admit that I'm intrigued by this. I'm generally opposed to this kind of concept because I feel like good work should be able to stand on its own merits, rather than being designed to laud itself, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Honestly, if I found out someone pulled this trick on me, though, I would feel horribly betrayed and I'd never want to run in that game again. It just feels like a dirty psychological trick, not actually a real accomplishment. But I am willing to consider it. However, what you've given me is very vague, and I can't envision what a situation like this would look like, maybe because it's very foreign to my way of thinking. Can you provide any examples for me?

"Pulled this trick"? I am suggesting that you build the trap that they can solve. You may not know how to do so in advance. In that case, you need to listen to them try to solve it, and then make it the trap that they can solve during the running of the game.

I have taught graduate statistics at an elite university, and 1st year algebra at a community college. I had to learn to treat the students differently. These are first-level D&D players, not epic players. You have to treat them that way.

When I give an exam, I start building the answer key by taking the exam myself at the same time that they do. Occasionally, I discover that a problem is much more difficult than I intended, due to a typo or merely a mistake on my part. So I will stand up and announce a change.
"Students, there is a typo on the exam. Please change the 20 in problem 7 to 15." Or maybe "Class, please skip problem 8 on the exam."

This is simply making sure that I am testing them on their proper level. No student has ever told me that they felt "betrayed" when I made an unsolvable problem solvable. That's all I'm asking you to do.

Similarly, when I expected the players to stop the medusas by retreating to the room with the mirrors, but instead, they manage to trick them into a pit, that's great. Cleverness isn't inherently doing what I thought of. Sometimes it's thinking of something new.

The first time they try to push something back, it should work. And maybe the first time you should give them a hint. As the fighter's turn come up, ask her to roll a die. If it's not really low, say, "You notice that the pit is five feet behind your foe." Don't give them hard problems until they have solved easy ones.

In any event, these are the equivalent of first year students. They need tests for first-year students, not for graduates. At least at first, any time one of them comes up with an idea beyond "move five feet and use my strongest attack", you should reward that. If you don't, they won't do it again.

Alright, but I"m not sure this analogy fits perfectly, since we're talking about enjoying running the game, versus just knowing how to run the game. I can sit here and be miserable running the exact game the want, sure no problem. This I can do. The question is if I can learn to enjoy it, I think.

Step one is to recognize that running the exact game they want is the goal, and if you do it, you have succeeded. Recognize that as the challenge you are facing. You are dealing with a difficult DM challenge. Become the elite DM who can solve it.

Yes, I'd rather teach elite graduate students. But sometimes I have to teach first-year algebra. Then I need to accept the challenge, and feel rewarded the first time a student solves an equation with a method that I think is easy, but he's struggled with for a week.

Good luck with the challenge ahead.

KorvinStarmast

2021-11-10, 10:20 AM

It's your job to build the problem. It's their job to find a solution.

If coming up with their idea was a challenge for them, then you should reward it with success.

These are first-level D&D players, not epic players. You have to treat them that way. Bravo. All good DM advice for DMs at any level of mastery.

Xervous

2021-11-10, 10:29 AM

Bravo. All good DM advice for DMs at any level of mastery.

Help! My players are inventing problems and refusing to come up with solutions!

On a more serious note, if the players go probing down a valley of “huh i didn’t think about this area at all but nope” just tell them outright. If it wasnt your intent to confuse the players put some effort into making sure they don’t confuse themselves... too much.

PretzelCoatl

2021-11-12, 07:49 PM

Being told "no" is terrible. Being told "no, because…" is educational.

Sure, gumdrop mountain was better than candy cane forest in some way - that's why the party chose to go for gumdrop mountain in the first place.

But, most would agree, "second choice of adventuring site" has less teeth than "death".
I very much like this idea, but I'm not sure how actionable this is in practice. It would require me to essentially prepare two different adventures and only run one, which is a very considerable time sink. It takes me weeks to fully write and map out an adventure. I can't reasonably do that as a branching path that does not get taken. Before COVID, when I wasn't making the more elaborate maps on Roll20 I might have been able to do this, but it's a lot more time consuming to do this online now.

Agreed, play monsters to their abilities. I had gotten the impression that you had a preference for smarter monsters.I apologize for giving this impression. It can be heard to be as perfectly detailed as possible in these posts. I feel that I'm already being over-detailed as it is. But, yes, I play the monsters as their stats, behavior, and instincts dictate, and use the monsters as terrain and habitat would realistically require. No demons wandering the jungle, no hyper-strategists piloting any animal brains.

Did you give "anti-confirmation" when you got back to K? Or just ignore his rune destruction? Or… I'm struggling with this timeline.Unfortunately, I don't think I had my headset on when it was said. I don't remember it being mentioned, at least. It was a very hectic few minutes, so it might have just been missed, or maybe it was asked and I forgot in the hecticness of the moment, or perhaps the player was shouted down. I'm not entirely positive. I definitely did not give confirmation in any direction, and I don't recall having heard it. :\

Glad to help. Here's one that might apply directly.

5. It's your job to build the problem. It's their job to find a solution. If you create a death trap with only one solution...But that's the thing, the trap didn't only have one solution. It had multiple. Theoretically limitless. Yakk is focusing on the single solution that was blocked by the trap designers, physical trap destruction, since I deemed that an obvious foil they would want to cut off due to the types of people they expected to have fall into the trap (sort of a mental bias). Literally only one avenue was prevented. It's not an "only one solution" kind of thing, it's an "only one solution prevented" kind of thing, which is quite different. Yakk is focusing on entirely the inverse of this statement.

These are first-level D&D players, not epic players. You have to treat them that way.They aren't supposed to be, though. I've got six players. One is newish. He started with me when this campaign started two years ago. Three have 4-5(?) years of experience. One has 5+ years of experience. One has been playing for about 15 years. They aren't new players. It did not occur to me that I needed to treat them as such.

On that topic though, This is precisely what I have started doing. I usually run a holiday themed adventure in place of our normal campaign for any given holiday, that way whoever needs to miss a holiday session doesn't miss out on the session, so our most recent session was a Halloween adventure where the group fended off a zombie attack on a town, and I made then all CR+1 Spooky races (skeleton, zombie, dullahan, etc.), and I applied everything everyone has talked about in this thread, but the thing I did most of all was to treat everyone like a brand new player, basically going into DM teaching mode, even going so far as to let players retcon previous turns so they wouldn't get frustrated.

"That zombie hasn't made an attack of opportunity yet. If you move he will attack you."

"The range on your thrown weapon is X. Throwing into melee is -4 and your ally gives cover, so you're looking at a total penalty of -X if you want to make this attack. If you move here instead, you'll get a better bonus to attack."

"The range on that spell is only 35 feet since it's close range. The spell fails from where you're standing. You need to move up to cast it. Ah, but if you move there, you provoke an AOO. *Pause* You could move into this space safely and cast without provoking any AOOs."

One player got frustrated that he was out of position for a charge on one turn, so I let him retcon his previous turn and he was over the moon about it.

Everyone had a fantastic time. They want to continue the adventure instead of the regular campaign. They said they had an absolute blast steamrolling zombies with their powerful characters, and they also had a ton of fun roleplaying the secrets I hid in their character backstories about them all being monsters, too.

For me, it was miserable. It was like I was teaching an introductory course on how to play D&D again for 6 new players, except instead of being curious about new rules, they get frustrated if anything turns out of their favor (like the retcon situation). I actually don't mind doing that sometimes, for actual new players once in a while, but these are players that have decades of game time between them, not new players as I think some of you have surmised. [Edit: To be clear, a big part of the reason this isn't fun was because it was like I was playing 5 of the players' characters. When I dictate every action they take because they aren't sure what to do, I'm basically deciding how they act through every combat round. So I was effectively controlling both players and monsters through all the fights. It's like running a DMPC and just making them fight the monsters while the PCs watch. ]

So I think I am going to take the advice that everyone has been pushing me towards. I'm going to wrap up the current adventures, help them with their own adventures and walk them through how to run their own adventures so they have an idea on how to GM and then throw in the towel. I think you are all right and there's just too big a difference between what they're looking for out of a game and what interests me.

I want to sincerely thank all of you for the insights, advice, and assistance you've given me on this subject. It's really helped me quite a bit. Thank you very much.

Talakeal

2021-11-13, 02:35 PM

The DM's job is to describe what the players can see. It is not to explain why it happens, and it is certainly not their job to explain how to deal with it.

Players, of course, are free to ask questions or do research, but should not expect the GM to simply tell them what to do. In my opinion, that leads to railroading and removing player agency.

And yeah, the "reading the GM's mind" thing is almost always used as an excuse to flip the situation around. Turning an obstacle into a puzzle. For example, a monster that is immune to lightning is an obstacle, a monster that is immune to everything BUT lightning is a puzzle. "Reading the GM's mind" would be a fair critique of the latter, but is almost always brought up as a criticism of the former.