DMing question - how to irritate your PCs without annoying your players

[valadil]

Hey folks. I was DMing last night and ran into a problem. The quest that I ran involved the players entering a rigged tournament. They fought hard, but in the end lost to a team of cheaters. In the process they found out that the other team was cheating and eventually called them on it.

I think this is an effective and reasonable storyline. By the end of the session the players agreed with me. But for the duration of the game when they were in a losing fight, the players and their characters alike were rather unhappy.

So my question is, how do I tell that kind of story without annoying my friends in the process?

(For the record, this particular match in the tournament was set on a wooden platform 20 feet in the air. The object was to knock out or knock off the other team all at once. There were sections of the platform that would fall through if stepped on. The other team knew exactly which sections would fall, and had previously dominated a PC who turned on the group at the last moment. It was a harsh fight, but made sense plot-wise and wasn't just me beating down the players because I could. I wouldn't have GM fiat'ed away a victory on their parts if they really earned it.)

[Lord Tataraus]

The best thing to do is warn your players before hand, don't tell them exactly but just say that there might be some irritating parts for the PCs to further the story so just be mature about it and have fun anyway.

[Tren]

One thing might be to drop hints earlier on that the other team might be cheating. That way they're not sitting their thinking "Why is the DM doing this to us?" and instead they have a place and plot reasons to focus their frustration in-character. Suddenly it's not you trying to ruin their fun, it's those dang cheaters, lets go get 'em!

[Bender]

A little bit of irritation can result in much more satisfaction when they can beat the guys in an honest fight later on...

[valadil]

A little bit of irritation can result in much more satisfaction when they can beat the guys in an honest fight later on...

See, that's my general philosophy in DMing. The problem is that until the players get that revenge they're unhappy. There's a duration of unhappy game time between them getting beat up/realizing they were cheated and then getting revenge.

I should point out that I did let them have their revenge later that session. I may beat down the players during the session, but I like players to go home happy so I let the session end on a positive note.

[Sleet]

You could introduce a sympathetic NPC who shares the players' annoyance. If in this tournament, they PCs overheard one stablehand chatting with another along the lines of "Those SOBs are cheating' again, I just knows it. 'S pathetic, 'swat it is. I hope someone takes 'em down a few pegs, no mistake."

Thus implying that you're not giving your players the shaft, it's the bad guys giving the PCs the shaft, and that you fully expect the PCs to give 'em what they have coming' to 'em.

[Hal]

I guess what I would say is to not let that feeling of frustration fester for too long. It's a natural result of being thwarted in trying to accomplish something. You can't stop it when someone rolls single digits all night, so why change your story to accommodate it?

But, as I said, don't let it sit too long. Resolve the "cheaters" aspect right away. At least, don't let them leave the session feeling frustrated, if nothing else. Let them know there's a story reason a bunch of level 1 NPCs kicked their butts, not just because you like to push them around.

[Raum]

So my question is, how do I tell that kind of story without annoying my friends in the process?You have a couple of options, first, as Tataraus mentioned, don't surprise the players. Surprise the characters but leave clues the player will pick up on even when the character doesn't. I had a character hallucinating in a recent game...the player was suspicious by the second hallucination and knew what was going on by the third even though the character still had issues. One advantage to the player knowing what was happening was his input...he could add some of his own hallucinations.

The second option is to make the 'irritation' interesting to the player. In your situation, you could have made the cheating noticeable but unprovable...which leaves the players challenged to either find proof or to find a way to win in spite of the cheating. Either way it becomes an interesting challenge for the players while leaving the irritation to the characters.

Any method you can find of making the situation interactive rather than scripted will help. Player frustration usually stems from the inability to affect the situation their character is in rather than the situation itself.

[Lord Herman]

I agree with Sleet. A sympathetic NPC shows the players you're not out to get them.

[valadil]

Any method you can find of making the situation interactive rather than scripted will help. Player frustration usually stems from the inability to affect the situation their character is in rather than the situation itself.

That's actually a really good point. I think the frustration came from the fact that they thought they had no chance as much as from their being cheated against. Even though the cheating happened in game, they still felt like the outcome of the fight was limited out of it. In retrospect, giving them somewhere to go with the frustration as soon as it started (rather than sitting through a fight they felt was doomed) would probably have helped a bit.

[FlyMolo]

You could introduce a sympathetic NPC who shares the players' annoyance. If in this tournament, they PCs overheard one stablehand chatting with another along the lines of "Those SOBs are cheating' again, I just knows it. 'S pathetic, 'swat it is. I hope someone takes 'em down a few pegs, no mistake."

Thus implying that you're not giving your players the shaft, it's the bad guys giving the PCs the shaft, and that you fully expect the PCs to give 'em what they have coming' to 'em.

I'm with Lord Herman and Sleet on this one.

Not only does it serve an OOC purpose, it's verisimilitude/realism and sounds really damn good.