Encouraging Player Participation

[EldritchWeaver]

I have a group where one player is an experience RPG player, while the other three had no prior exposure to roleplaying games. While they all have fun so far, it didn't escape my notice that the experienced player has become the one player who is interacting most with the world. It is understandable as the newbies don't know what might be possible. So to some extent it might fix itself.

Still I'd like to encourage more interaction of the more quiet members, to reduce the overall reliance on one member. But I'm not sure how. Having an NPC address the reluctant ones directly doesn't work while dungeoncrawling as well as it can in a city. So does anyone have some ideas what I could do?

[hymer]

Recruit the experienced player to help you; s/he can engage in PC to PC roleplaying, and it's nice to be informed why one is being bypassed.

You can engage the players by appealing to their real life interests, skills and tastes, and that of their PCs.

[Garimeth]

I have a group where one player is an experience RPG player, while the other three had no prior exposure to roleplaying games. While they all have fun so far, it didn't escape my notice that the experienced player has become the one player who is interacting most with the world. It is understandable as the newbies don't know what might be possible. So to some extent it might fix itself.

Still I'd like to encourage more interaction of the more quiet members, to reduce the overall reliance on one member. But I'm not sure how. Having an NPC address the reluctant ones directly doesn't work while dungeoncrawling as well as it can in a city. So does anyone have some ideas what I could do?

The suggestion of recruiting the other player to help is good. Other possible tweaks are:

1. Have the experienced player knocked out of commission for a bit. (Briefly captured, stuck in a meeting, etc.) Make it brief OR get the player on board ahead of time.

2. Give each of the other 3 moments where their character is placed at the forefront of the party and THEY have to make decisions. The High Priest will only have audience with the party's cleric for example.

[Geddy2112]

It is a common thing for newbies to be hesitant about pressing the buttons in the world. If they won't interact, have the world interact with them. It could be that a random NPC likes the color of their cloak, or whatever. You don't have to spoon feed them every interaction, but give em a few to help break out of their shell.

Also have skill checks and puzzles that play to their strong suite. If one of the newbies is a rogue, give them some traps to disable. If one is a bard, give them some knowledge checks. etc etc.

[LadyFoxfire]

You can also give the party a challenge that is very unsuited to the experienced player's character; for example, if he's a fighter in heavy armor, give them a stealth mission. But I definitely second talking with the experienced player and seeing if he can help nudge them out of the nest.

[Temperjoke]

Well, one way to encourage them to participate is to actively involve them in the participation. Ask them questions, like what are they doing or seeing? With permission from the experienced player, make it so they have to do things without him, like have him get sick or poisoned, and they need to figure out what they need and where to get it.

[EldritchWeaver]

Thanks for the ideas, I'll try to add some to my way of running things on my side. I did talk with the experienced player and he agreed with me that something needs to be done. He proposed that every player defines his role inside the group and acts it out. That's something I believe to pay off short-term the most, so next time we have a session I'll bring it up.

[NichG]

I find there's almost a sort of switch that gets flipped in people, when they realize 'hey, if I have a cool idea, its okay for me to go and cause it to happen, I don't need to wait for permission!'. I don't really know how to flip that switch reliably. I've seen, and tried, the various strategies in this thread on various occasions, but very often the person just doesn't come out of the shell, or worse, they become used to the idea that in order for them to do something the DM has to prompt them first by having an NPC approach them or whatever.

If I were to generalize over the cases of players on the other side of things - e.g. proactive, involved players - I'd say the key thing is that they usually have something they want before the scene even gets painted, and then much of their proactiveness and involvement comes from 'okay, I'm going for this thing, so what can I do to get it?' and so on. I suspect that the predecessor of that kind of feeling is the sentiment 'I think it would be cool if...'

So maybe the answer is to have someone run a few oneshots of a game that has more of a collaborative style - dramatic editing, shared narration, things like that - to get the players to be more comfortable with the idea of 'I can make things happen, and it's awesome'