Teamwork and roleplaying.

[gbaji]

I am open to the suggestion, but I don't understand how this is supposed to work. It seems like this just gives a second opportunity for people to get lost or confused.

If you require the players to go around the table and verbally state what they plan to have their character do each round, it serves three purposes:

1. It forces them to think about what they are doing, and then remember it later. Because they thought about it, and then said it, which are two key things to do to remember things just like they taught us all back in grade school (the third is "write it down" btw).

2. It allows the other players to know what they are all doing. So if someone suddenly is going to do something unexpected, there's an opportunity for some table talk like "uh. Wait! Weren't you going to do X? Doing Y instead will cause problems because of...". It allows for the table to figure out ahead of time if there's a misunderstanding, or confusion, and maybe head it off *before* someone takes some random action which may cause calamity.

3. It allows you to keep track of what the players are doing, and "keep them honest". Also, you can enforce SOI's, so if the player does "forget" or decides to randomly do something else instead, you can say "your statement of intent was X, but now you're saying you want to do Y. Do you really want to do this? There will be an X penalty for this change" (penalty could be losing a half action, or x ranks of time, or whatever depending on game system). This also allows an additional back step potential where the rest of the table can turn to that player and say "Hey. You said you were going to do X, we agreed that was a good idea, and now you want to do something else". Again, if the default is "you must do what you discussed originally, and the table had the opportunity to tell you if that was a bad idea at the time, and you will be penalized for not following through", it reduces the frequency of players just randomly doing stuff that is harmful to the group.

Honestly, it sounds like your table would benefit enormously from implementing something like this.

In this particular case, it didn't actually occur to me that they would charge in, kill the royal family, and leave their spell-caster alive and in the room when they made their escape. At the moment counter spell seemed to be the obvious choice, but it was not premeditated in any way.

There was no discussion at all ahead of time? They just appeared in the room with the royal family somehow and thought "let's kill them"? You are the GM. Ask the players what they are planning to do. There should never be anything that happens that you didn't (at least in general) know they would/might do. Specific methodology may be a surprise, but something as broad as "we want to kill this group of people", followed by "we're entering the room with the people we want to kill", should not lead one to be surprised if it's followed with "Ok. We kill the people we already told you we want to kill". Unless this was just a random murder or something?

My players of course said that their plan was brilliant except that they happened to come up against the one thing that could directly counter it; I tried to tell them that there were a dozen ways that their portal could have been foiled, and they really shouldn't rely on plans where a single point of failure leads them to an inevitable TPK.

Again. How much planning? How much time? I'm having a hard time believing that you shouldn't have seen this coming a mile away.

How obvious should it be? How often should I do this? Should it only be real things or potential things?

Like, if their plan is to poison the BBEG, should I tell them it is possible for him to be immune to poison? Should I point this out even if I as the GM know that he isn't immune to poison, but it is a possibility?

This seems like good advice, but I am really afraid it will look like railroading to the players.

If it's reasonable for someone to have immunity to poison, then yeah, warning about that might be prudent if their entire plan is "poison him successfully or we all die". If the BBEG is a monster who might be immune, maybe have them make lore checks for stuff like that? There's a range between informing them of reasonable pitfalls to their plans, and telling them what secret steps they must do to defeat the bad guys.

I also tend to think that a lot of this can be avoided by not having creatures with odd special abilities. Just do straight fights. Monsters with X hit die, and Y damage, and Z ac or whatever. Maybe normal spell abilities. Stuff like that. In situations like that there's no need to hint about whatever special thing may matter, because there is no special thing. Just a tactical fight. I think that sometimes, in the pursuit of having "new and interesting" encounters, it's possible to make them appear arbitrary to the players, such that after a while they don't feel any sense of what is "normal" to the world they're running in. I'm just tossing out random ideas here, but based on many of the posts you've made about this group, it really does feel like they are searching each and every encounter for the magic clue to tell them what to do, and the "trick to win the fight, and it's possible that you've trained them to do this by having encounters in which there is one way to deal with it other than just having a straight up fight.

It's possible that the stuff you've talked about is the super rare exceptions, in which case the group is just not terribly flexible in their thinking. But if you are constantly throwing them curveballs, then that might be why they're going into each one looking for the "gotcha".

As a bit of a rant, my players are obsessed with me sticking to combat as sport. They insist that all encounters are mathematically balanced, and I go to a lot of effort trying to make them balanced. The problem is, the players then try and use combat as war tactics, which then unbalance the encounters again, and then they rant that it isn't fair. Like, one thing they do quite often is do something to trap a monster, walk past it, and then forget about it, only to have it come and ambush them later or cut off their escape on their way out.

Ok. Did they talk at all about the "trap" they put the monster in? And whether or how long it would hold? Did you maybe point out to them "That trap will only hold this monster for X time. It might just be angry and come looking for you once it gets out"? I mean, it should be obvious that this is a likely outcome, so how did they miss it?

Here's the thing about CAS/CAW. I see a lot of people talking about that and using those terms. It's nonsense (sorta). Ok. Let me explain. They are certainly approaches that players may *want* to take to any given encounter. But you are the GM. You should be balancing out a set of encounters and difficulties for a given scenario (or time period within the scenario, or whatever). Don't get caught up in terminology. If the players think up a clever way to bypass or defeat an encounter that makes it much easier, then they did that. No need for a special term. It's just "being smart". There's really no such thing as having one or the other type of encounter. Every encounter has the potential to be made easier by smart decisions, or harder by dumb ones. Period. There's no such thing as players saying they "want" one or the other, and certainly it is a poor idea for you to try to bend over backwards to provide it to them.

Every player who ever says "I want combat as sport" (or more realistically, they wont use such terms but will say "I want encounters balanced so that we have a thrilling time!", will, if the opportunity presents itself, use CAW tactics (again though, they wont use the term, they'll just take advantage of whatever comes along to make the encounter easier, cause... duh). No sane GM ever should plan for one of the other exclusively. It's just how the encounter actually plays out. You start with a set difficulty, then let the players determine whether things go easier or harder for them based on the decisions they make.

And certainly the GM can put in encounters that *require* that the players "figure out" the key/clue/trick/whatever to "solve the encounter". Which can be a lot of fun. Eh. But then one has to wonder why we bother with the stats and skills and items on our character sheets if this is all there is to it. So assuming that the skill points matter at all, every encounter should always be a mix of those two concepts. The idea of presenting them as separate things that you pick from a list, is just... strange. It's like asking someone whether they like horizontal more than vertical in their two dimensional constructs. Um... You kinda need both, right?

In this case, I prepared a series of four painstakingly balanced encounters involving them fighting their way into the palace and battling the king and his guards, but the players tried to bypass it by sneaking / bluffing their way in and then teleporting out, but when they forgot to take out the wizard first or to bring redundant escape methods, they are now trapped in a palace with 3.5 balanced encounters all laying siege to them, resulting in what could potentially be a very deadly encounter.

Wait! Is this the same one where they attacked the royal family and failed to take out their spell caster that you mentioned above? You said you didn't know ahead of time they were going to do this. How did you not know they were going to charge into the room and kill them, if they had already spent the entire portion of the adventure sneaking past all the defenders in their palace to get to the throne room or wherever they were? What did you think they were going to do once they found the royal family? Leave, roam the palace some more, kill the guards they'd already snuck past and *then* come back and kill them? I've got to assume they were the target, right? The first moment they decided to sneak/bluff their way in, you should have known where this was going.

I also think that you may be approaching the whole "balanced encounter" bit too literally. Don't balance each individual encounter to the party. Balance the difficulty of the objective to the party. You should assess X amount of party resources to get in to the palace, defeat/kill the targets, and then get out. And in that balance calculation, you absolutely should assume that if the entire palace guards attack the party in one grand fight that it will be too much for them to handle. Heck. Tell them this. Assuming they spent any time at all gathering information, they should have known this would be impossible to do.

I'm actually assuming that's why they decided to sneak/bluff their way in in the first place. I guess the questions is: "How did you expect them to do this?". Because from your "4 balanced encounters" statement it sounds like you expected them to fight their way in (or otherwise "defeat the guards", else why have the encounters balanced?), so the guards would be unable to attack them on the way out. Er. But why wouldn't that alert the guards just as much as attacking by surprise in the throne room (or even more so)? If the first sign of attack is a shout coming from within the palace (and not out on the walls or periphery where most are assuming trouble will come from), it should actually be easier for them to escape. Certainly there's a higher likelihood of that scenario then them fighting their way in (and their target will not be there when they get there, right?).

Sure poor execution on the whole "teleport out", but was there seriously no discussion of this at any point? I'm finding it beyond hard to believe that they coordinated on a series of 4 encounters in which they successfully bypassed every single guard, got to the room with the royal family undetected and then launched a surprise attack, but never once discussed why they were doing this, what their objective was in the palace, nor what they were going to do once they found it/them?

Or is the issue that they did discuss and coordinate all of this, but are so distrustful of you, and just assume that you will change the NPCs to thwart whatever they do, that they didn't tell you? Which, yeah, is a serious problem. And one that I'm not sure can be fixed if that's really the case.

Although there is always some measure of just how much "playing dumb" is to be expected. Like, when the players cast a protection spell that makes them immune to enemy attacks, there is always a bit of a negotiation about how many rounds the enemies have to stand their wailing on them ineffectively before taking the hint and changing tactics.

I wasn't talking about you roleplaying the NPCs not knowing what the PCs are doing. I was talking about you not telling the PCs what is going on around them if it's information they would reasonably know or observe. If they should be able to see and react to something, tell them what they see and let them react. If something they see is something their character should know is significant, then tell them it's significant. This doesn't mean you spill the beans on the bad guys plans or anything, but you should not require that they proactively say "I'm looking for clouds of black smoke" before you will inform them that there's a building on fire nearby.

But on the subject of what you said: NO. There is no negotiation. You are the GM. You decide how smart/dumb your NPCs are and you play out how long it may take them to notice something going on around them (like say that their weapons are completely ineffective against someone). Your players get no vote in this at all. Although you do need to be consistent in both directions. If you decide that your NPCs can realize this after one round and making any of a set of possibly relevant skill rolls, then the PCs should follow the same rules if they run into something like this. Although, that would most likely just tell them "yeah, your weapon did no damage". Doesn't tell them necessarily why though. So yeah, it's still always about "what do you do as an alternative to try".

So the players come up with a pretty good plan to have one person distract it, two people go in and grab the artifact, and the sorceress then cut off the vestiges pursuit with a wall of stone. Perfect, would work great.

But then they get in there, and the sorceress starts blasting the vestige, causing it to split, saying she forgot the plan.

Then one of the people who is supposed to be getting the artifact just starts doing random stuff.

This right here would have been the perfect time to use statements of intent. If the sorceress' SoI is "I'm going to blast the vestige" instead of the planned "I'm holding my spell action to cast wall of stone to block the vestige when we run for it", the entire party stops during the statement of intention phase and can have a conversation about the plan, and how necessary it is not to actually do violence directly to the enemy, and how maybe that's not a great idea for the sorceress to do. Right? This is not people saying what they *are* doing, but what they *plan* to do, and counts as "no time". Players can (and should) have a conversation right here if someone says they're doing to do something dumb. That's the whole point. And if the players don't say anything, you can.

And if the player said "I'm holding my spell action to cast wall of stone when we run away" during SoI, and then changes that to "I blast the vestige" when it's actually their turn to act, *then* you ask them if this is really what they want to do. That's a change from the statement. You make sure they know that this is not what they said they were going to do, and to which the entire table agreed was a good thing for them to do this round, and are doing something else entirely (and something in complete opposition to the plan as it happens). The point is to give them every opportunity to catch a mistake before making it and every opportunity to discuss and get everyone on the same page. Now, if they still flail around randomly after that point? Not sure what to say.

Her explanation is that she thought I was trying to trick the party OOC by playing word games, and that while it couldn't be destroyed by violence there was some super secret non-violent action that would cause it to spontaneously keel over dead.

What part of "blasting" made her think this was non-violent? And again, if she believed this, why didn't she bring this up during the planning stage instead of apparently agreeing with the plan, and then doing something else entirely once the actual combat started? I'm seeing a trend of your players doing dumb things because they think you are trying to tick them. Hmm...

Then, the other player who get the artifact weapon didn't run away with it as planned, instead he came back and killed one of the vestiges with it to see if it could permanently kill them, again assuming I was lying to them OOC about it not being able to be destroyed by violence.

So at this point I have three vestiges against a disorganized, confused, conflicted, and beaten up party.

They then finally agree to run, but aren't really in a good position to trap all three vestiges, and one of them *exactly* makes the strength check to bust through the wall of stone and continue pursuit. The players would later tell me that they thought I said it simply turned incorporeal and phased through the wall, but I am not really sure how they got that from my description.

They then decided the situation was hopeless, and they simply lay down and let the vestiges kill them.

Ok. I'm confused (not just by the players actions). So the entire plan to escape was to use wall of stone to block the vestige's movement, right? That's the thing the sorcerer was supposed to do, but went off script and blasted instead. But then, with just a couple more vestiges, they've still managed to get the artifact and are trying to escape and still use the wall of stone to block them, but you have one of the able to burst through the wall?

So it really didn't matter that she had her sorceress blast the first vestige, or the other guy whack one of the two with the artifact making a third. The plan would never have worked anyway since apparently these things are strong enough to ram their way through a wall of stone. Ok. Small chance, but it happened anyway. So exactly the same number of vestiges attacking them as if they hadn't bothered with "the plan" at all, right?


I'm also curious why they just lay down and died. They had many more of them the first time, yet they seem to have escaped. How did that happen, and why not on the second attempt (when they had more time to plan)? Was there some reason they assumed they couldn't escape without a wall of stone in the way? And why did they think that? As to the incorporeal thing, is it possible the language you used was confusing. If you say someone "Runs right through the wall", it would not be clear if he turned corporeal or not. I'd make a point of saying "there is now a giant hole in the wall where he smashed through it". Which would be relevant because you'd think the other two would now be able to run through the hole (unless walls of stone work differently in your universe).

And yeah, the thrust of this is that your players don't trust you. Again. Not sure if there's a way to fix that.

That is a pretty broad statement.

At face value, it seems to be saying that players are incapable of being unreasonable; which is obviously not the case.

Not incapable, but to do so consistently usually means something environmental is causing it. The GM creates the environment they play in, so to some degree you are responsible. Remember that the point of the game (and the objective of the GM specifically) is to craft an enjoyable play experience for the players, preferable utilizing a set of pre-agreed up on rules and genre, setting, etc. If the players aren't enjoying themselves...? Now, strangely, they seem to keep coming back, so maybe they actually do, and you're really on to something here.

In my experience a good percentage of people have some combination of paranoia and weak ego that will cause them to instinctively blame any loss on someone or something else, and in an RPG the GM is an obvious target. I remember one time playing Warhammer at the GW store and seeing someone who was clearly outplayed by his opponent go on a rant about how tomb kings light cavalry, which was almost unanimously agreed on to be among the worst units in the game, was ludicrously overpowered and his opponent was a cheesy power gamer for using it.

Of course, I don't think that's what you actually meant, but I am going to need you to spell the subtext out for me because I am missing it.

Sure. The GM creates the environment (as I said before), and the GM describes the environment to the players. That's why I spent quite a bit of my previous post (and this one) talking about the importance of informing the players, both about what their character sense *and* what their characters would/should know about what they sense. The way to avoid players blaming the GM when something goes wrong is to utterly avoid anything that could remotely be perceived as a "gotcha" action. If you do this correctly, the players literally can't blame you because every time they try, you can just say "I told you X. I told you Y.".

And yes, I get that you seem to have some players who just assume you are lying to them when you tell them direct truthful things. But I have to suspect that this is born of some sort of experience (with you likely) in the past. Don't get me wrong. It's possible to run into players who do think that the GMs job is to trick the players, and are looking for it, not trusting what you say etc. But after just a couple times in my game of them doing that actually hurting them, and the truth turning out to have been exactly what I said they learn that while my NPCs may lie to them, I never will.

That's all it takes to completely eliminate that sort of behavior by players. So if you have the same players, continuing to play game after game, and continuing to do this, and never changing or learning to trust you, then yes, you are doing something that is making them believe this. I can't say what it is, but it kinda has to be there. Players may be paranoid sometimes, but they ultimately also want to "win". If the pattern was "every time I assume the GM is tricking me, I'm wrong and my character gets hurt", they will rapidly stop doing that. That does not seem to be the case. So clearly they are getting some sort of reinforcement for that behavior. Or they wouldn't keep doing it.

[Talakeal]

I don't have a ton of time right now, I will respond to the first part of your post and then get back to you about the rest when I get a chance.

I appreciate the lengthy reply!

If you require the players to go around the table and verbally state what they plan to have their character do each round, it serves three purposes:

1. It forces them to think about what they are doing, and then remember it later. Because they thought about it, and then said it, which are two key things to do to remember things just like they taught us all back in grade school (the third is "write it down" btw).

2. It allows the other players to know what they are all doing. So if someone suddenly is going to do something unexpected, there's an opportunity for some table talk like "uh. Wait! Weren't you going to do X? Doing Y instead will cause problems because of...". It allows for the table to figure out ahead of time if there's a misunderstanding, or confusion, and maybe head it off *before* someone takes some random action which may cause calamity.

3. It allows you to keep track of what the players are doing, and "keep them honest". Also, you can enforce SOI's, so if the player does "forget" or decides to randomly do something else instead, you can say "your statement of intent was X, but now you're saying you want to do Y. Do you really want to do this? There will be an X penalty for this change" (penalty could be losing a half action, or x ranks of time, or whatever depending on game system). This also allows an additional back step potential where the rest of the table can turn to that player and say "Hey. You said you were going to do X, we agreed that was a good idea, and now you want to do something else". Again, if the default is "you must do what you discussed originally, and the table had the opportunity to tell you if that was a bad idea at the time, and you will be penalized for not following through", it reduces the frequency of players just randomly doing stuff that is harmful to the group.

Honestly, it sounds like your table would benefit enormously from implementing something like this.

It does sound like it might help.

On the other hand, my group's biggest problem right now is a lack of focus and poor time management. A lot of it is beyond their control and not anyone's fault, we are unfortunately adults and RL interferes, but on the other hand a lot of it is phones and other distractions; even looking up rulebooks related to the game during other people's turn slows everything down. I can't help but feel this would take a lot of time and add to turn order confusion.

Penalizing people for changing their action would, I think, result in riots at my table.

There was no discussion at all ahead of time? They just appeared in the room with the royal family somehow and thought "let's kill them"? You are the GM. Ask the players what they are planning to do. There should never be anything that happens that you didn't (at least in general) know they would/might do. Specific methodology may be a surprise, but something as broad as "we want to kill this group of people", followed by "we're entering the room with the people we want to kill", should not lead one to be surprised if it's followed with "Ok. We kill the people we already told you we want to kill". Unless this was just a random murder or something?

Again. How much planning? How much time? I'm having a hard time believing that you shouldn't have seen this coming a mile away.

I will write up a more detailed summary in my campaign log.

My ideas was for them to get to the palace (the how didn't really matter, I thought having allies freeing slaves in the enemy town) while the army was away.
Fight past the guards.
Fight past the behir who were guarding the palace.
Talk to the royal family to get some lore and information, then fight them.
Leave the city, and be ambushed by a recurring villain on the way home to tie up a loose end.

Four balanced encounters in an adventure. The CaS ideal the players say they want.

They buy a single scroll which creates a gateway to the mountains outside of town.

The group decided to sneak into the palace (and failed) and then changed their tactic to bluffing their way in and succeeded. No problem, they either bypass or delay the guard and behir encounter.

That's fine. I have no problem with some combination of brains, dice rolls, and expended resources bypassing a planned encounter.

So they enter the throne room, and instead of talking or anything, the abjurer throws up a wall of stone to block the entrance and then spends her following two turns fortifying the walls and putting up wards against teleportation, and everyone else draws weapons and starts attacking.

They are in the room with the three members of the royal family, their attendants, the few guards who accompanied the party, and a bound demon which they have serving as their court wizard / conjurer (and whom they have encountered before).

The party kills the three royals after a fine battle, but do not kill all of the guards, the attendants, or the bound demon and the few reinforcements he summoned before the wards went up.

So one of the party members opens the gate, the fighter and the healer jump through on their turns, then on his turn the demon conjurer counters the gate, leaving the other four barricaded in the palace the exterior of which is now swarming with guards.

Then, they spent an hour OOC stewing in how hopeless this was and coming up with ridiculous plans and dismissing them, although IMO they could have still won through force arms by utilizing choke points in the palace. In the end, they decided to simply have their chronomancer undo their last turn and kill the demon before opening the gate, and make their escape.

Its weird to me how often they work themselves into a state of hopelessness and waste an hour OOC rather than burn a single spell slot.


But to answer your question, no, I knew that it was very likely they would kill the royal family as that was their mission, I knew they planned on using a gate to escape, but not the exact details or timing, and indeed I don't think they had decided on those until the moment as I certainly didn't hear them discussing those aspects of the plan.

I also feel like they kind of put me in a no win situation, as they take suggestions and criticism and respond with swearing and name calling followed by sulking, and respond to silence with accusations of tricking them followed by sulking. Like I said, I really think weak egos and paranoia are a key component of the toxicity in most every gaming group I have been a part of. I can't change them, but I am working hard on identifying those elements in myself.

[Quertus]

Penalizing people for changing their action would, I think, result in riots at my table.

I’m just gonna poke at this one little thing.

First, at Talakeal’s table of “dogs too old to learn new tricks, with less emotional maturity (or tactical ability, or creativity, or…) than the 7-year-olds I’ve played with”? Yeah, negative feedback is all but guaranteed.

With me, a senile, insane, but otherwise generally capable of acting with maturity experienced gamer? You could probably expect negative feedback.

Now, if I thought it would solve more problems than it caused, and I just “accepted” it? Well, my character’s actions might be stated as “I shoot what makes sense to shoot in the moment, and dodge what makes sense to dodge in the moment”. (EDIT: or something equally Modular, with the specifics depending on the character and system)

What I mean is, one of the traps of such systems is that declarations of “X shoots Y” are often meaningless if Y goes first & moves under cover / out of range, or if Z goes first, and kills Y (or teleports the party away, or…). Penalizing actions you never actually got to take… “is dumb” (forces more planning than your players are capable of, and changes the tone of the game to one I’d not try at your table. (OK, actually, I would try it at your table, because I believe in bloody testing (perhaps literally, at your table))).

The other thing is, it opens a whole can of worms that very few people are really ready to address: the concept of level of focus, of roleplaying different personalities that operate at different levels. Obviously, I’m not ready to make good words about it.

So, a little story: when I play Zerg in StarCraft, I’m not micromanaging, I’m not looking at individual units, I’m zoning out, looking at the big picture. I’ll “randomly” throw a couple dozen units in a direction because that “feels” right. I have to rely on my allies telling me the details of what happened afterwards. “How did you know that I was about to be attacked, to send those reinforcements ahead of time?”

Anyway, there’s characters that, if you roleplay them correctly, live in the moment to moment decisions. There’s characters that have a strategy, and suffer when they have to abandon it, while there’s others who adapt easily. There’s characters who relentlessly pursue a single goal across the entire campaign.

Point is, once you mechanized something like this, it opens the floodgates in people’s minds about how well this mechanic “works” from a Simulation perspective. And the answer is, it doesn’t, not really. Some characters should work something like this, getting a bonus for “sticking to the plan”, or for other pattern-based thought, and penalties when they have to shift gears; others are at home in chaos, and get neither bonus nor penalty.

Me irl? Even more complicated and complex than what I’ve described.

So, if you suddenly implemented this new rule mid campaign, and the Simulation aspect was significantly at odds with the personality of the character I was playing, or the Gamist aspect of the rule was significantly at odds with the style of play? Yeah, I’d oppose the change. Heck, at this point, I’d oppose most any mid-campaign change on principle, saying it should go through a vetting process before being ratified. But it’s a good thing to discuss for the next campaign, or to test out in a series of training / testing one-shots between campaigns.

EDIT: missed explicitly stating something I implied: just offering a bonus for “sticking to the plan” can be mechanically identical to “giving a penalty for changing your actions”; the differences are not only psychological, but also you don’t have to make them identical, so “your players think that the game is too hard, and giving them free bonuses can be a concession to making the game easier for them”.

[icefractal]

Some systems do use up-front declaration though, with the ability to pre-empty someone else's action as an intentional advantage. So it's not that the character whose action became void is acting ineptly, it's that the other character with the declaration advantage thinks faster and outmaneuvered them.

IDK that this would be balanced for D&D, as it's turning initiative from something moderately useful to something combat-defining. But it's not an invalid idea, nor do I consider it an immersion-break. If anything, the fact that characters supposedly act "simultaneously" but can always perfectly respond to everyone else's action - even when it's unexpected - is what breaks immersion.

For example, the rogue runs over and flips a hidden switch nobody knew about, which opens big pits in the floor. The orc, next in initiative, whose intent has always been to kill the rogue, moves around the pits and attacks him. Despite that if they were really acting simultaneously, the orc would have been mid-charge across the now-pit and would either have fallen in or else reached the rogue before the lever could be pulled.

However, I'd be prepared for in-advance declaration to be significantly slower, especially if you have players obsessed with avoiding any possible disadvantage like Talakeal's are. Considering every possible enemy action and how it affects your proposed action is always going to be slower (sometimes much) than just reacting to the current situation in an atomic way.

[gbaji]

On the other hand, my group's biggest problem right now is a lack of focus and poor time management. A lot of it is beyond their control and not anyone's fault, we are unfortunately adults and RL interferes, but on the other hand a lot of it is phones and other distractions; even looking up rulebooks related to the game during other people's turn slows everything down. I can't help but feel this would take a lot of time and add to turn order confusion.

Adults should manage to stay off their phones during a game session, or at least have the maturity to focus on the game and not on anything less than an emergency on their phone. It's seriously not that hard. How do these people manage to maintain a job if they can't avoid fiddling with their phones constantly? Seriously. It's a basic skill. That's not "beyond their control and nobodies fault". It's absolutely within their control and absolutely their fault if they can't muster up enough attention span to play a game at a table with other people for a few hours at a stretch.

RL can interfere, but if you are at the table, you have blocked off time to play. I've played at a table where the host and his wife were taking care of an infant and a 1 year old. Amazingly, they still managed to play and pay attention to the game. It's just not that hard, and anyone who says it is isn't really trying.

Penalizing people for changing their action would, I think, result in riots at my table.

Eh. You don't have to penalize them, but at least make them have to state what they intend to do, then they and you and everyone else at the tables knows if/when they decide to change. You can even ask them "why are you changing". If it makes sense, that makes sense. But if it's just random change for the sake of doing something different, it might just clue the players into why they keep having these terrible outcomes. You can even point to it after the fact "You said you were going to do this. Everyone agreed that was a great idea. Then when it was your turn, you changed your mind and did the other thing instead. I asked you if you really wanted to change your plan, and you went ahead anyway". Again, the purpose of this is to actually force the players into vocalizing their actions before doing them, so that they can't later pretend that they didn't make that choice, or had no choice, or whatever.

My ideas was for them to get to the palace (the how didn't really matter, I thought having allies freeing slaves in the enemy town) while the army was away.
Fight past the guards.
Fight past the behir who were guarding the palace.
Talk to the royal family to get some lore and information, then fight them.
Leave the city, and be ambushed by a recurring villain on the way home to tie up a loose end.

Four balanced encounters in an adventure. The CaS ideal the players say they want.

I think I see the problem. It might just be the way you are writing this, but it looks a lot like you are scripting the scenario. As a GM you should never "plan" for them to "get to the castle", or "fight past the guards", or "fight the behir", or "talk to the family" or "fight them", and certainly not "leave the city and be ambushed by...". Those are events. Those should happen organically as a result of the environment you have created and the PC choices/actions. They should not be "planned" (but absolutely can and should be "planned for").

The PCs should have an objective (multiple objectives even!). And then you sprinkle clues and whatnot around that may lead them in different directions towards those objectives. But you don't decide what they do. Only plan for what they might. Now, yeah, if they had already planned to talk to and then attack the family, then that was the plan. You respond to that by filling in the details of what/who is in the palace. But you don't worry about how they're going to achieve the objective. Let them figure that out.

They buy a single scroll which creates a gateway to the mountains outside of town.

The group decided to sneak into the palace (and failed) and then changed their tactic to bluffing their way in and succeeded. No problem, they either bypass or delay the guard and behir encounter.

That's fine. I have no problem with some combination of brains, dice rolls, and expended resources bypassing a planned encounter.

So they enter the throne room, and instead of talking or anything, the abjurer throws up a wall of stone to block the entrance and then spends her following two turns fortifying the walls and putting up wards against teleportation, and everyone else draws weapons and starts attacking.

Ok. I'll ask the question: What was their objective here? Why did they go into the palace? If you expected them to talk to the family, why was that? You can't just decide in your own head that they have information the party needs to hear and then just hope they'll stop and talk to them. You present clues or other information in the game world and tell them that the royal family knows about X. That way they know that to get X, they need to go talk to these people. How they get in to talk to them is up to them and/or how they kill them is up to them, but that should be the objective, and "going to the palace" is the means to achieving that objective. Whether a fight breaks out or not, is really secondary.

Would they have achieved the same objective if they just came up with a reason to get an audience with these people and just, you know, talked to them? You presented the whole thing as "they will talk, then they will fight", but why? It's an easy trap to get into as a GM to have a vision in your head of how you want an encounter to go, but that's the kind of thinking you have to get rid of. If the PCs need the information, then that is why they are there. If they need to kill the royal family, then that is why they are there. If they need both, then that is... you get the point. But the players really ought to know this going in, right? So why on earth did they attack first? Did you actually provide them with "talk to them and get X information from them" ahead of time?

There might be a bit of a communication flow issue going on here. Again, if you write your scenario based on objectives and clues to follow, then it's going to flow better than if you write it as a series of conflicts you want to have happen.

They are in the room with the three members of the royal family, their attendants, the few guards who accompanied the party, and a bound demon which they have serving as their court wizard / conjurer (and whom they have encountered before).

The party kills the three royals after a fine battle, but do not kill all of the guards, the attendants, or the bound demon and the few reinforcements he summoned before the wards went up.

So one of the party members opens the gate, the fighter and the healer jump through on their turns, then on his turn the demon conjurer counters the gate, leaving the other four barricaded in the palace the exterior of which is now swarming with guards.

I'm a bit rusty on D&D spell mechanics (you are playing some version of D&D, right?). I thought counterspell had to be cast as a defensive action while the spell is being cast and prevents the casting entirely. How is this shutting down a gate once it's been opened? Or did he dispel the gate instead? Maybe just a semantic issue, but whatever. I'm also confused how the wards prevented the demon from summoning more help, but allowed them to gate out in the first place? Might just be game specifics I'm missing. Um... But it's also strange that they thought to ward against transportation spells, clearly knew that someone in the opposition had this ability, but didn't consider that their own transportation might be blocked or closed?

And yeah, guess what? This is where SOI would have saved the day here. A simple action of saying "we're all going to hold our actions until <person with gate scroll> opens the gate, then jump through" as the statements of intent would have resolved the entire issue. Right? Shocking how easy that is. And if you maybe suggest it to them? I mean, it's not like this isn't something the characters would know to coordinate. Again, if the plan for that round was "we're leaving now". Otherwise, when the person with the scroll says "I'm going to use the scroll this round", the rest of the table can say "Um. Wait another round while we clear the room a bit more, and allow us to prep actions to jump through the second the gate forms".

Again. Communication saves the day! And no, you don't have to wait for them to think of this. As the GM, gently suggest to them that if they want to gate out this round, maybe plan for it as a group. Tell them, if you don't all go at once, there's a spell caster who might close the gate and trap half the party in the palace. You don't (and shouldn't) tell the party plot stuff. You absolutely should tell them game mechanic stuff. And the correct way to coordinate initiative actions to escape through a gate is absolutely a game mechanic.

Then, they spent an hour OOC stewing in how hopeless this was and coming up with ridiculous plans and dismissing them, although IMO they could have still won through force arms by utilizing choke points in the palace. In the end, they decided to simply have their chronomancer undo their last turn and kill the demon before opening the gate, and make their escape.

Its weird to me how often they work themselves into a state of hopelessness and waste an hour OOC rather than burn a single spell slot.

Again. All avoided with some pretty simple heads up talk ahead of time. And you're allowing them a chronomancer with a "do over" button and they're still having this much trouble? Sheesh.

But to answer your question, no, I knew that it was very likely they would kill the royal family as that was their mission, I knew they planned on using a gate to escape, but not the exact details or timing, and indeed I don't think they had decided on those until the moment as I certainly didn't hear them discussing those aspects of the plan.

And you knew that the NPC caster had the ability to close the gate on them. You knew when the character with the scroll said "I'm going to use the scroll". You had the opportunity at that point to tell that player what the risks were, and let the entire party decide if that was a good way to go. You have to learn your table and head them off of stuff like this. Keeping the suggestion of the "smarter way to do this" mechanism secret is not helping. Again. The players will not think about stuff like that, but their characters presumably would. Part of your job is to make these sorts of suggestions. If they choose to ignore them, and get whacked as a result, that's on them. If you don't inform them, they're going to feel like you tricked them somehow.

I also feel like they kind of put me in a no win situation, as they take suggestions and criticism and respond with swearing and name calling followed by sulking, and respond to silence with accusations of tricking them followed by sulking. Like I said, I really think weak egos and paranoia are a key component of the toxicity in most every gaming group I have been a part of. I can't change them, but I am working hard on identifying those elements in myself.

Are you making suggestions before they have suffered the consequences of a choice, or after? If you're allowing them to make extremely poor choices, hitting them with the consequences of those choices, and only *then* telling them what they should have done, then yeah, they're not going to appreciate that at all. They're going to see that as you rubbing it in.

Now, if I thought it would solve more problems than it caused, and I just “accepted” it? Well, my character’s actions might be stated as “I shoot what makes sense to shoot in the moment, and dodge what makes sense to dodge in the moment”. (EDIT: or something equally Modular, with the specifics depending on the character and system)

What I mean is, one of the traps of such systems is that declarations of “X shoots Y” are often meaningless if Y goes first & moves under cover / out of range, or if Z goes first, and kills Y (or teleports the party away, or…). Penalizing actions you never actually got to take… “is dumb” (forces more planning than your players are capable of, and changes the tone of the game to one I’d not try at your table. (OK, actually, I would try it at your table, because I believe in bloody testing (perhaps literally, at your table))).

Sure. But to play devil's advocate here. Let's recall that we're (in theory) trying to somewhat simulate a real combat situation. If you are planning to shoot someone with an arrow, you first have to have your bow out, then you have to spend time pulling an arrow from your quiver, then nocking the arrow, then taking aim, then finally firing. If, between the time you decide "I'm going to shoot that guy with an arrow", and "I loose the arrow at that guy", that guy ducks around a wall, or is killed by someone else, you've still (in theory) spent the time doing the other 90% of the action of "shoot that guy with an arrow" already.

Even just changing your target (finding someone else to shoot at, tracking that person, determining if you have a clear shot, and then releasing) takes additional time. So yeah, having some sort of penalty if something changes during the round really does make sense. Is it going to be annoying to the players who just wants to be able to "do something" this round? Sure. But real combat is fully of opportunities that disappear before you take advantage of them.

To play the other side though, I would have no problem (especially in an initiative rather than timed round system), with having somewhat broad statements like "I'm going to have my bow out and shoot at someone in this general area", or "I'm going to have my sword out, and plan to head over thataway and attack whomever looks best there", or "I'm preparing to cast this spell, and will release it on a target in that direction".

Obviously, the level of detail required can be varied to the preferences of the table, but having some sort of structure to the round can help a lot in situations where you have players stepping on each others toes all the time. It would certainly minimize (or at least provide an opportunity to reduce) the frequency in which one player does something monumentally stupid/random when the entire rest of the table would not want them to do that, and maybe just one bit of warning about the intent to do so would at least spark a conversation about it ahead of time. What you don't want is someone saying "I do this", everyone else saying "Nooooo!", and the GM cackling and saying "Too late, you already did it" (or the player just stubbornly saying "I'm doing it anyway" or something). Having a SOI allows for the back and forth before the action is actually taken, and the GM able to arbitrate can prevent a lot of oopsie moments.

Point is, once you mechanized something like this, it opens the floodgates in people’s minds about how well this mechanic “works” from a Simulation perspective. And the answer is, it doesn’t, not really. Some characters should work something like this, getting a bonus for “sticking to the plan”, or for other pattern-based thought, and penalties when they have to shift gears; others are at home in chaos, and get neither bonus nor penalty.

It's a rule mechanic. It works the same for everyone. Some players will find it harder personally to stick to "the plan", but that's on them. Some characters may be played as though this is difficult, but that's roleplaying IMO. Even the most chaotic person still has to actually adjust their actions to things changing mid-round. Saying "my character love chaos" doesn't make them able to violate the same laws of physics and temporal reality that the rest of us have to comply with.

Oh. And BTW, in the game system I play the most, there are actually some advanced martial arts skills that allow you to do things like not pay a penalty for changing statement of intent. So we can simulate characters that are extremely flexible and able to react quickly to changing environments. But until you are good enough to do that, you have to spend a bit of extra time changing plans. Just like everyone else.

Or, heaven forbid, think a bit more intelligently when making your plan in the first place to actually allow for changing events. If you lock yourself into a very narrow statement, that's you having tunnel vision on the combat. It *should* result in a penalty in that case.

EDIT: missed explicitly stating something I implied: just offering a bonus for “sticking to the plan” can be mechanically identical to “giving a penalty for changing your actions”; the differences are not only psychological, but also you don’t have to make them identical, so “your players think that the game is too hard, and giving them free bonuses can be a concession to making the game easier for them”.

I'm presenting it as an option and a way to address the issues at this specific table. Obviously, everyone's free to implement this how they choose. I'm a bit hesitant to provide bonuses to people for merely being competent in the first place. But sure. If that's what works...

[gbaji]

However, I'd be prepared for in-advance declaration to be significantly slower, especially if you have players obsessed with avoiding any possible disadvantage like Talakeal's are. Considering every possible enemy action and how it affects your proposed action is always going to be slower (sometimes much) than just reacting to the current situation in an atomic way.

Yeah. That is a risk. However, if the players are seemingly spending hours after the fact complaining and arguing about one round of actions that went poorly...

[BRC]

I think I see the problem. It might just be the way you are writing this, but it looks a lot like you are scripting the scenario. As a GM you should never "plan" for them to "get to the castle", or "fight past the guards", or "fight the behir", or "talk to the family" or "fight them", and certainly not "leave the city and be ambushed by...". Those are events. Those should happen organically as a result of the environment you have created and the PC choices/actions. They should not be "planned" (but absolutely can and should be "planned for").

The PCs should have an objective (multiple objectives even!). And then you sprinkle clues and whatnot around that may lead them in different directions towards those objectives. But you don't decide what they do. Only plan for what they might. Now, yeah, if they had already planned to talk to and then attack the family, then that was the plan. You respond to that by filling in the details of what/who is in the palace. But you don't worry about how they're going to achieve the objective. Let them figure that out.

Eh, this "Script" sounds fine except maybe fore the bit about the villain ambushing them, and even that's not too bad

The PC's had a goal (assassinate the Royals), the other bits of the "Script" are perfectly acceptable predictions considering that is the goal. It sounds like that was more the expectation (What was Planned For) than anything Enforced, which is fine.



More generally, it sounds like you have a lot of problems with focus and toxicity in the group. A general "No Phones" rule can help with the focus bit, which might go a long way towards things, since a key part of teamwork is paying attention to what your teammates are doing.


As for "Roleplaying Flaws", I find it generally helps if players get in the habit of explaining their reasoning for taking certain actions. Don't have a great formula for encouraging this, but it helps a lot, both from a teamwork perspective and a Flaws perspective.

"It looks like the fighters have the Ogre covered, so I'm going to target my AoE on the hill to get those archers" communicates that you are counting on the fighters to deal with the Ogre while you are dealing with the Archers without framing anything as a Command.

Similarly saying "I see the Ogre is tattooed with the symbol of the raiders that destroyed my home, so I'm going to scream with rage, ignore the archers, and throw everything I have at the Ogre" communicates that yes, you're AWARE that you're making a sub-optimal play, but you've made this choice intentionally.

You don't need to do this on literally every action, but doing it whenever you make a strategic choice helps.


As a GM, occasionally asking the players "What are your goals here?" can be a useful trick as well. It can help you sanity check their actions ("I'm trying to collapse the bridge" "The bridge is made of stone, your axe isn't going to be able to damage it"), and generally align the Player's plans. It does require that other players be actually paying attention to what's going on however.

[gbaji]

Eh, this "Script" sounds fine except maybe fore the bit about the villain ambushing them, and even that's not too bad

The PC's had a goal (assassinate the Royals), the other bits of the "Script" are perfectly acceptable predictions considering that is the goal. It sounds like that was more the expectation (What was Planned For) than anything Enforced, which is fine.

Except when we combine bit A:

My ideas was for them to get to the palace (the how didn't really matter, I thought having allies freeing slaves in the enemy town) while the army was away.
Fight past the guards.
Fight past the behir who were guarding the palace.
Talk to the royal family to get some lore and information, then fight them.
Leave the city, and be ambushed by a recurring villain on the way home to tie up a loose end.

And bit B:

So they enter the throne room, and instead of talking or anything, the abjurer throws up a wall of stone to block the entrance and then spends her following two turns fortifying the walls and putting up wards against teleportation, and everyone else draws weapons and starts attacking.

And bit C:

But to answer your question, no, I knew that it was very likely they would kill the royal family as that was their mission, ...

I have to ask the question: What was "the plan" and did the players actually know what they were there to do? You say "assassinate the Royals", but was that actually what the players understood they were there to do? Talakeal doesn't actually say this. I'm not going to assume *anything* about what was told to the players. He also said his "idea" was that they would "talk to the royal family". So was that the goal/mission? Or was it to kill them? Both? Or did Talakeal have an "idea" of what the players would do, but that may or may not at all have been what the players thought or knew they were supposed to do?

Clearly, they didn't know they were supposed to talk to the royals either, so I think it's a stretch to assume they knew they were supposed to kill them. I'm not at all excluding the possibility that Talakeal just throws stuff at the players and then expects them to do "stuff", and assumes/guesses what they're going to do, and is perhaps wrong 80% of the time. I just don't know.

Until he posts and fully explains what information was provided to the players, what they were told, what decisions they made beforehand, and what they had decided they were actually trying to accomplish by entering the palace in the first place, I'm making zero assumptions. It's clear that there is a massive communication problem between the GM and players in this game. I just don't know where those problems lie. Maybe he told them "the royals have the information you seek and are evil, you need to get them to tell you where the <whatever> is, and then kill them", or he may have just told them "the royals seem connected to the plot somehow, and also seem evil", and just allowed them to flail around until they decided to raid the palace and kill the royals just out of no other clue what to do. Or it could be something else entirely. I have no clue.

I have seen GMs who suffer from "I-think-the-players-can-read-my-mind-itis. And yeah, they'll create huge and complex plots, including lots of moving parts, and lots of NPCs to get information from, and things to do, and see, and fight, and a beautiful and well thought out story. So the adventure goes along and the players just do random stuff instead of what the GM thinks they are going to do. It seems so obvious that they should do X, and find out Y, and then discover the awful truth of Z, and finally come to an amazing and thrilling conclusion, but they're not doing anything he's planned for them to do. And everyone is frustrated and upset, including the GM, who just can't figure out why they aren't making the right decisions. And if an objective observer were to watch and critique, they would discover that the problem is that the GM has failed to actually provide the players with anything remotely close to enough information to figure out anything about this huge story and plot he has in his own mind. He thinks he has because he knows the story. But to anyone not inside his mind, it's completely baffling. And then frustrating. And they they just start doing random stuff and breaking things to see what happens. And everyone gets upset.

I'm not saying that this is what's happening, but it's one possible explanation. Given the vagueness I'm getting just from the explanation of the plot in the posts already, I'm leaning this way. Maybe not hard core, but perhaps a bit. It's honestly a common problem for many GMs, especially when they are somewhat inexperienced. They want to do so much and forget that sometimes the best adventures and the best stories are very very simple. Complex plots work great in film and on TV. Not so much in RPGs. Keep it simple, at least until the players get a feel for how you run things.

Again. Can't say for sure what's going on, but there's a clear disconnect.

[Talakeal]

Wow. This thread is moving fast. Will respond to as much as I can, but I am falling further behind!

Again. How much planning? How much time? I'm having a hard time believing that you shouldn't have seen this coming a mile away.

How much time and planning for what?

The portal? About two hours I guess. They said they were going to use it to escape while prepping for the mission, and we worked out the details.

I just never dreamed that they were going to open it mid-battle while there were still enemies who could interfere with it still present and actively working to stop them.

If it's reasonable for someone to have immunity to poison, then yeah, warning about that might be prudent if their entire plan is "poison him successfully or we all die". If the BBEG is a monster who might be immune, maybe have them make lore checks for stuff like that? There's a range between informing them of reasonable pitfalls to their plans, and telling them what secret steps they must do to defeat the bad guys.

That works, but has three problems.

1: Calibrating the PCs expectations of what is vs. what might be. Saying "what if he has some obscure ability" might well lead to the players believing I am actively trying to trick them if it doesn't turn out to be the case.
2: This can feel like railroading. If I point out the flaw in their plan time and again, it might look like I am trying to railroad them into a single course of action.
3: Having their plans shot down is frustrating and insulting. They are very likely to get the idea that I am mocking their stupidity, and will likely react by either causing an OOC fight, going in with no plan, or deciding the adventure is impossible and abandoning it entirely.

Of course, that still might be preferable to them shutting down and stopping the session for an hour every time their plan doesn't work.

What I would really like, of course, is for them to learn to roll with the punches and realize that things will be ok even if they don't work out perfectly, but for some reason they seem to shut down when they come to a stumbling block, even if the solution is something really straightforward like casting a single spell (which it usually is).

It isn't just RPGs though. I may have already mentioned this, but this weekend I was playing a tabletop game with Brian, and he made a bad move, and then basically stopped trying for a few turns and saying that it didn't matter he had already lost, but I was eventually able to talk him up enough that he started trying again and ended up winning the game. I can't do that in an RPG, because in that case its six players feeding off each others' despair and drowning out my voice.

I also tend to think that a lot of this can be avoided by not having creatures with odd special abilities. Just do straight fights. Monsters with X hit die, and Y damage, and Z ac or whatever. Maybe normal spell abilities. Stuff like that. In situations like that there's no need to hint about whatever special thing may matter, because there is no special thing. Just a tactical fight. I think that sometimes, in the pursuit of having "new and interesting" encounters, it's possible to make them appear arbitrary to the players, such that after a while they don't feel any sense of what is "normal" to the world they're running in. I'm just tossing out random ideas here, but based on many of the posts you've made about this group, it really does feel like they are searching each and every encounter for the magic clue to tell them what to do, and the "trick to win the fight, and it's possible that you've trained them to do this by having encounters in which there is one way to deal with it other than just having a straight up fight.

It's possible that the stuff you've talked about is the super rare exceptions, in which case the group is just not terribly flexible in their thinking. But if you are constantly throwing them curveballs, then that might be why they're going into each one looking for the "gotcha".

This has been talked to death in previous threads, but it really depends on where you draw the line.

Breath weapons? Grappling? Hit and run? Flying? Spell-casting? Regeneration? Incorporeal? Reinforcements over time? Splitting when damaged? Energy immunity? Damaging Aura? Burrow? Swim? Climb? Jump? Fights in difficult terrain? Using coordinated tactics? Gaze attacks?

Personally, I would say that only about, maybe 1/50 of the encounters I run are gimmick fights. Of course, those few fights are the one's the tend to generate all the discussion.


But yes, I do agree that players are trained to see railroading everywhere. If there first approach doesn't work for whatever, they tend to assume I am intentionally trying to shut down every approach except for one super secret reason, the one player doing random things to try and destroy the undestroyable monster above is pretty much the epitome of that. But it isn't just combat either, like if they come to a locked door and fail their lock picking roll, rather than trying to find some other way to get through the door or go around, they will decide that there must be some secret key or password that they are missing and spend several hours of real time racking their brains for something that doesn't exist until someone, usually me, gets bored enough to break character.

Ok. Did they talk at all about the "trap" they put the monster in? And whether or how long it would hold? Did you maybe point out to them "That trap will only hold this monster for X time. It might just be angry and come looking for you once it gets out"? I mean, it should be obvious that this is a likely outcome, so how did they miss it?

This wasn't one occasion, but a repeated pattern. Normally its something like they cast a spell like maze, or hold, or entangle, the monster is incapacitated until the duration (usually a couple minutes) expires and they simply leave. There isn't usually much dialogue on either side, we really need to work on this.

If I had to guess, I would think its a sort of gamist tunnel vision. They are looking at it in terms of encounters, and once the encounter is won, they assume it is over and no longer relevant.

Here's the thing about CAS/CAW. I see a lot of people talking about that and using those terms. It's nonsense (sorta). Ok. Let me explain. They are certainly approaches that players may *want* to take to any given encounter. But you are the GM. You should be balancing out a set of encounters and difficulties for a given scenario (or time period within the scenario, or whatever). Don't get caught up in terminology. If the players think up a clever way to bypass or defeat an encounter that makes it much easier, then they did that. No need for a special term. It's just "being smart". There's really no such thing as having one or the other type of encounter. Every encounter has the potential to be made easier by smart decisions, or harder by dumb ones. Period. There's no such thing as players saying they "want" one or the other, and certainly it is a poor idea for you to try to bend over backwards to provide it to them.

Every player who ever says "I want combat as sport" (or more realistically, they wont use such terms but will say "I want encounters balanced so that we have a thrilling time!", will, if the opportunity presents itself, use CAW tactics (again though, they wont use the term, they'll just take advantage of whatever comes along to make the encounter easier, cause... duh). No sane GM ever should plan for one of the other exclusively. It's just how the encounter actually plays out. You start with a set difficulty, then let the players determine whether things go easier or harder for them based on the decisions they make.

And certainly the GM can put in encounters that *require* that the players "figure out" the key/clue/trick/whatever to "solve the encounter". Which can be a lot of fun. Eh. But then one has to wonder why we bother with the stats and skills and items on our character sheets if this is all there is to it. So assuming that the skill points matter at all, every encounter should always be a mix of those two concepts. The idea of presenting them as separate things that you pick from a list, is just... strange. It's like asking someone whether they like horizontal more than vertical in their two dimensional constructs. Um... You kinda need both, right?

Basically, my players expect the monsters to be both tactically dumber than they are and mathematically weaker than they are, otherwise they complain bitterly that the fight wasn't properly balanced.

The second one is a lot easier than the first as I can never anticipate what sort of tactics the players use. I generally assume that means a straightforward brawl, but this can result in disappointingly easy encounters if the players use a bit of tactics, and frustratingly difficulty if they do something to cause them to cause them to face the foes at a disadvantage such as facing multiple groups at the same time.

Wait! Is this the same one where they attacked the royal family and failed to take out their spell caster that you mentioned above? You said you didn't know ahead of time they were going to do this. How did you not know they were going to charge into the room and kill them, if they had already spent the entire portion of the adventure sneaking past all the defenders in their palace to get to the throne room or wherever they were? What did you think they were going to do once they found the royal family? Leave, roam the palace some more, kill the guards they'd already snuck past and *then* come back and kill them? I've got to assume they were the target, right? The first moment they decided to sneak/bluff their way in, you should have known where this was going.

I also think that you may be approaching the whole "balanced encounter" bit too literally. Don't balance each individual encounter to the party. Balance the difficulty of the objective to the party. You should assess X amount of party resources to get in to the palace, defeat/kill the targets, and then get out. And in that balance calculation, you absolutely should assume that if the entire palace guards attack the party in one grand fight that it will be too much for them to handle. Heck. Tell them this. Assuming they spent any time at all gathering information, they should have known this would be impossible to do.

I'm actually assuming that's why they decided to sneak/bluff their way in in the first place. I guess the questions is: "How did you expect them to do this?". Because from your "4 balanced encounters" statement it sounds like you expected them to fight their way in (or otherwise "defeat the guards", else why have the encounters balanced?), so the guards would be unable to attack them on the way out. Er. But why wouldn't that alert the guards just as much as attacking by surprise in the throne room (or even more so)? If the first sign of attack is a shout coming from within the palace (and not out on the walls or periphery where most are assuming trouble will come from), it should actually be easier for them to escape. Certainly there's a higher likelihood of that scenario then them fighting their way in (and their target will not be there when they get there, right?).

Sure poor execution on the whole "teleport out", but was there seriously no discussion of this at any point? I'm finding it beyond hard to believe that they coordinated on a series of 4 encounters in which they successfully bypassed every single guard, got to the room with the royal family undetected and then launched a surprise attack, but never once discussed why they were doing this, what their objective was in the palace, nor what they were going to do once they found it/them?

I knew they planned to kill them. That was their mission. Although making a deal with them is always on the table.

They bluffed their way in, which is fine. Not what I expected, but its fine.

They planned to teleport out. Again, not what I expected, but its fine.

What really threw a wrench into everything was them decided to open the portal while enemies who could dispel it were still in the room. This split the party and gave the guards time to coordinate a response. Again, its still fine, they could have still fought their way out, it just would have been a bit tougher than I expected. But for the players, this was unacceptable and they basically spent an hour bemoaning their fate and talking themselves into a TPK before finally giving the chronomancer permission to fix the problem with a single spell.

As far as I remember, there was absolutely no discussion of when they would open the portal or what they would do when they got into the palace.

Or is the issue that they did discuss and coordinate all of this, but are so distrustful of you, and just assume that you will change the NPCs to thwart whatever they do, that they didn't tell you? Which, yeah, is a serious problem. And one that I'm not sure can be fixed if that's really the case.

That always does appear to be the underlying assumption.

But I suspect they don't really believe this, it is just a way of projecting blame so they don't have to admit their own mistakes or failure to pay attention.

As I said, most people I have gamed with in my life (not just the current group, the current group is actually better about it than most) have some combination of paranoia and weak ego that makes it really easy to project blame.

I myself am not immune to this, you can probably tell from my forum posts that I can get overly defensive, but it is something I am trying hard to break.

I wasn't talking about you roleplaying the NPCs not knowing what the PCs are doing. I was talking about you not telling the PCs what is going on around them if it's information they would reasonably know or observe. If they should be able to see and react to something, tell them what they see and let them react. If something they see is something their character should know is significant, then tell them it's significant. This doesn't mean you spill the beans on the bad guys plans or anything, but you should not require that they proactively say "I'm looking for clouds of black smoke" before you will inform them that there's a building on fire nearby.

But on the subject of what you said: NO. There is no negotiation. You are the GM. You decide how smart/dumb your NPCs are and you play out how long it may take them to notice something going on around them (like say that their weapons are completely ineffective against someone). Your players get no vote in this at all. Although you do need to be consistent in both directions. If you decide that your NPCs can realize this after one round and making any of a set of possibly relevant skill rolls, then the PCs should follow the same rules if they run into something like this. Although, that would most likely just tell them "yeah, your weapon did no damage". Doesn't tell them necessarily why though. So yeah, it's still always about "what do you do as an alternative to try".

Agreed.

The problem is, that information is asymetrical. If the players are immune to weapons, I as a GM know this immediately. If the monsters are immune to weapons, the characters have no way of knowing this by default, they need to learn about it in some way, and then interpret those clues to come to the right conclusion.

I do, however, think I am a bit brow-beaten into being overly secretive about stuff; both because my players have a tenancy to metagame and have a tendency to look down on me if the NPC's don't follow the rules to the letter*. I need to work on this.


* I don't mean actually fudging, just simplifying stuff like having them use average damage instead of rolling or eyeballing their stats rather than actually giving them a full PC build. Or giving them a custom feat / spell / magic item.

This right here would have been the perfect time to use statements of intent. If the sorceress' SoI is "I'm going to blast the vestige" instead of the planned "I'm holding my spell action to cast wall of stone to block the vestige when we run for it", the entire party stops during the statement of intention phase and can have a conversation about the plan, and how necessary it is not to actually do violence directly to the enemy, and how maybe that's not a great idea for the sorceress to do. Right? This is not people saying what they *are* doing, but what they *plan* to do, and counts as "no time". Players can (and should) have a conversation right here if someone says they're doing to do something dumb. That's the whole point. And if the players don't say anything, you can.

And if the player said "I'm holding my spell action to cast wall of stone when we run away" during SoI, and then changes that to "I blast the vestige" when it's actually their turn to act, *then* you ask them if this is really what they want to do. That's a change from the statement. You make sure they know that this is not what they said they were going to do, and to which the entire table agreed was a good thing for them to do this round, and are doing something else entirely (and something in complete opposition to the plan as it happens). The point is to give them every opportunity to catch a mistake before making it and every opportunity to discuss and get everyone on the same page. Now, if they still flail around randomly after that point? Not sure what to say.

This took place over the course of several turns.

I have players who are both touchy about being criticized and afraid of the DM railroading them, so it is always like walking on a mind field to ask them why they are doing something weird.

I am going to have a talk about this and see if we can change our table culture.

Ok. I'm confused (not just by the players actions). So the entire plan to escape was to use wall of stone to block the vestige's movement, right? That's the thing the sorcerer was supposed to do, but went off script and blasted instead. But then, with just a couple more vestiges, they've still managed to get the artifact and are trying to escape and still use the wall of stone to block them, but you have one of the able to burst through the wall?

So it really didn't matter that she had her sorceress blast the first vestige, or the other guy whack one of the two with the artifact making a third. The plan would never have worked anyway since apparently these things are strong enough to ram their way through a wall of stone. Ok. Small chance, but it happened anyway. So exactly the same number of vestiges attacking them as if they hadn't bothered with "the plan" at all, right?

In my system it is slightly easier to break through a wall of stone than it is in standard D&D because I try and equalize the power between casters and martials by toning down the "no save just lose" spells. But even in standard D&D, breaking through a wall of stone is not something you decide to have an NPC do, it is listed in the spell and, while difficult, it is not something that is out of the realm of possibility for a mid level fighter.

But with three of them trying, it become a lot faster and more likely. But this was mostly an issue of timing and positioning; they only had so many choke points to use and they needed enough of a head start that none of their allies were on the far side.

IIRC The idea was not to trap it forever, although it might have been possible given time, but to simply stall it long enough to make their escape with the artifact.

What part of "blasting" made her think this was non-violent? And again, if she believed this, why didn't she bring this up during the planning stage instead of apparently agreeing with the plan, and then doing something else entirely once the actual combat started? I'm seeing a trend of your players doing dumb things because they think you are trying to tick them. Hmm...

The sorceress who "forgot the plan" and started blasting and the ranger who started doing random stuff in hopes of stumbling upon the secret method of killing it and said I was trying to trick them OOC were not the same person.

I suspect that in reality both of them were distracted and kind of tuned out during the planning session and then gave different excuses for why they didn't stick to the plan, but that's just my hunch and could well be wrong.

I'm also curious why they just lay down and died. They had many more of them the first time, yet they seem to have escaped. How did that happen, and why not on the second attempt (when they had more time to plan)? Was there some reason they assumed they couldn't escape without a wall of stone in the way? And why did they think that? As to the incorporeal thing, is it possible the language you used was confusing. If you say someone "Runs right through the wall", it would not be clear if he turned corporeal or not. I'd make a point of saying "there is now a giant hole in the wall where he smashed through it". Which would be relevant because you'd think the other two would now be able to run through the hole (unless walls of stone work differently in your universe).

And yeah, the thrust of this is that your players don't trust you. Again. Not sure if there's a way to fix that.

As for the incorporeal thing, they didn't tell me that until weeks later so I have no idea what I actually said to give them that impression. It is also possible only one of them actually thought that at the time, but convinced everyone else of that fact retroactively; I am told that is a common psychological phenomenon and one of the reason police do not let witnesses discuss events before giving a statement, but again that is just a theory and could likely be wrong. Man, I am doing a lot of wild guessing at why people do things in this thread.

The laying down and dying thing is gonna take a lot more explanation.

This was a game for a group that was majority new players. As a sort of training wheels thing, I was trying out a house rule where instead of character's dying, you instead roll on a mishap chart to see what fate befell you.
The first character to "die" rolled on the table and lost a random piece of gear. Now, the piece of gear he rolled happened to be one that Bob's character had bought for him as a gift, and Bob lost his mind over this and swore he would never do anything to help his party financially ever again. (And this caused further drama later, but that's a whole other story).
So I ditched the chart and replaced it with a fixed financial loss. The problem was, this made the players super cautious, for some reason the threat of losing gold scared them a whole lot more than character death, and they started abandoning adventures half way through because they "didn't want to chase good money after bad".
I explained to them that I came here to play adventure games, and really wanted to spend the allotted session adventuring rather than giving up a couple hours in because adventure is too risky. So I told them I would remove the penalty for death entirely. Instead of damage, HP represented exhaustion, pain threshold, and willpower, and that when you were out of HP you were demoralized and no longer in adventuring shape, and if everyone was out of HP the group would fall back and recuperate in town.

So, in this situation, they decided that they might as well just lay down and let the vestiges kill them for a "free teleport back to town" with the artifact firmly in their possession. IMO ignoring the monsters and grabbing the treasure doesn't make a whole lot of sense from either a narrative of gamist perspective, but fine.

What turned this into a horror show was that the party's hirelings and henchmen had no protection from death, and while the party lay down and died, they were butchered by the vestiges. At that point the player's decided I had tricked them into the situation and violated some sort of "gentleman's agreement" that their hirelings would also be immune to death (which was never my intention, stated or otherwise. I fully expected henchmen to die over the course of the campaign and it was indeed a plot point later on).

But yeah, even in games where death is fully on the line, suiciding characters when they get frustrated is not unheard of in my group. Bob and Dave used to do it all time when we were younger, usually in response to an NPC telling them not to do something. I assume this was some sort of juvenile lashing out at authority, or maybe it was testing the boundaries by seeing if I was really willing to wreck my own game by having consequences for their actions. But yeah, I can think of close to half a dozen times when a powerful NPC made a reasonable request of them, and they immediately provoked a fight they knew was out of their league and died as a result. My group now is a little better, but several of them, Brian especially, still simply gives up when they suffer a setback and convince themselves that it is hopeless and they shouldn't even try.

Not incapable, but to do so consistently usually means something environmental is causing it. The GM creates the environment they play in, so to some degree you are responsible. Remember that the point of the game (and the objective of the GM specifically) is to craft an enjoyable play experience for the players, preferable utilizing a set of pre-agreed up on rules and genre, setting, etc. If the players aren't enjoying themselves...? Now, strangely, they seem to keep coming back, so maybe they actually do, and you're really on to something here.

Sure. The GM creates the environment (as I said before), and the GM describes the environment to the players. That's why I spent quite a bit of my previous post (and this one) talking about the importance of informing the players, both about what their character sense *and* what their characters would/should know about what they sense. The way to avoid players blaming the GM when something goes wrong is to utterly avoid anything that could remotely be perceived as a "gotcha" action. If you do this correctly, the players literally can't blame you because every time they try, you can just say "I told you X. I told you Y.".

And yes, I get that you seem to have some players who just assume you are lying to them when you tell them direct truthful things. But I have to suspect that this is born of some sort of experience (with you likely) in the past. Don't get me wrong. It's possible to run into players who do think that the GMs job is to trick the players, and are looking for it, not trusting what you say etc. But after just a couple times in my game of them doing that actually hurting them, and the truth turning out to have been exactly what I said they learn that while my NPCs may lie to them, I never will.

That's all it takes to completely eliminate that sort of behavior by players. So if you have the same players, continuing to play game after game, and continuing to do this, and never changing or learning to trust you, then yes, you are doing something that is making them believe this. I can't say what it is, but it kinda has to be there. Players may be paranoid sometimes, but they ultimately also want to "win". If the pattern was "every time I assume the GM is tricking me, I'm wrong and my character gets hurt", they will rapidly stop doing that. That does not seem to be the case. So clearly they are getting some sort of reinforcement for that behavior. Or they wouldn't keep doing it.

Ok. That makes sense.

I don't think I have ever tricked them OOC, but I will talk to them and think back over my own behavior.

Now, in my experience a lot of gamers do have trouble separating IC and OOC. Getting mad at someone IRL for something their character did (or being mad about something IRL and taking it out on someone's character) or blindly trusting NPCs because you feel they are speaking with the authority of the GM. I have even had a DM who said it was ok to lie to your players OOC because the DM is expected to play devious characters in setting, and he couldn't see the difference.

I do have a fair number of plot twists, usually something involving a villain having understandable motivations behind their schemes or an ally having darker ulterior motives, or a quest giver not being who they pretended to be, but these don't usually screw the PCs or effect them on a mechanical level at all. I suppose I occasionally do misdirection, like the villagers will hire the PCs to hunt down a vampire when in truth the thing breaking into their houses and drinking their blood was a giant leech, but that is pretty rare and doesn't usually result in anything worse than a temporary setback.

I can't recall ever having actively tried to trick them OOC like the word games the player was describing. But I will ask my players and think back.

I think I see the problem. It might just be the way you are writing this, but it looks a lot like you are scripting the scenario. As a GM you should never "plan" for them to "get to the castle", or "fight past the guards", or "fight the behir", or "talk to the family" or "fight them", and certainly not "leave the city and be ambushed by...". Those are events. Those should happen organically as a result of the environment you have created and the PC choices/actions. They should not be "planned" (but absolutely can and should be "planned for").

The PCs should have an objective (multiple objectives even!). And then you sprinkle clues and whatnot around that may lead them in different directions towards those objectives. But you don't decide what they do. Only plan for what they might. Now, yeah, if they had already planned to talk to and then attack the family, then that was the plan. You respond to that by filling in the details of what/who is in the palace. But you don't worry about how they're going to achieve the objective. Let them figure that out.

Outlined maybe, but certainly not scripted.

I balance encounters around what I think are likely outcomes, but I try and avoid forcing the players into any one approach. Honestly, I think a lot of my issues come from me trying too hard *not* to force the players into a singular solution and as a result I let them get themselves into jams I didn't foresee.

Now yes, I do run fairly linear adventures. I would love to do it a bit more sand boxy and free-form, but that takes fairly proactive players to make work, and in the past when I try something of a sand box it tends to be a lot more work and a lot less fun. I also have players who demand 3-6 balanced combat encounters per session, which is a lot harder to do in a sandbox.

I am not sure why having a "random encounter" while traveling is unusual, especially if someone is actively hunting them. Having a single combat encounter on the road is a pretty common trope, OoTS has been lamp-shading it for years.

I expected them to talk to the royals because they were curious about their motivations and bantering with the enemy and "getting them monologuing" is a pretty standard way to fill in gaps in your understanding of the villain's plans. It was not their mission, and it didn't disrupt anything, I just expected them to do it and planned accordingly. It was a bit surprising that they would bluff their way in and then not try and do any sort of negotiation or deception, or even set themselves up into a more advantageous position while making a distraction; instead it was just step into the room and pull shotguns out from under their coats and start blasting like The Terminator. Surprising, but not in anyway disruptive or worthy of me trying to railroad or punish them for it.

I'm a bit rusty on D&D spell mechanics (you are playing some version of D&D, right?). I thought counterspell had to be cast as a defensive action while the spell is being cast and prevents the casting entirely. How is this shutting down a gate once it's been opened? Or did he dispel the gate instead? Maybe just a semantic issue, but whatever. I'm also confused how the wards prevented the demon from summoning more help, but allowed them to gate out in the first place? Might just be game specifics I'm missing. Um... But it's also strange that they thought to ward against transportation spells, clearly knew that someone in the opposition had this ability, but didn't consider that their own transportation might be blocked or closed?

And yeah, guess what? This is where SOI would have saved the day here. A simple action of saying "we're all going to hold our actions until <person with gate scroll> opens the gate, then jump through" as the statements of intent would have resolved the entire issue. Right? Shocking how easy that is. And if you maybe suggest it to them? I mean, it's not like this isn't something the characters would know to coordinate. Again, if the plan for that round was "we're leaving now". Otherwise, when the person with the scroll says "I'm going to use the scroll this round", the rest of the table can say "Um. Wait another round while we clear the room a bit more, and allow us to prep actions to jump through the second the gate forms".

Again. Communication saves the day! And no, you don't have to wait for them to think of this. As the GM, gently suggest to them that if they want to gate out this round, maybe plan for it as a group. Tell them, if you don't all go at once, there's a spell caster who might close the gate and trap half the party in the palace. You don't (and shouldn't) tell the party plot stuff. You absolutely should tell them game mechanic stuff. And the correct way to coordinate initiative actions to escape through a gate is absolutely a game mechanic.

Not D&D, but close enough for discussion's sake.

Yeah, I suppose dispel is the appropriate term.

Readied actions don't work like they do in 3.5 where you automatically act simultaneously. Of course, even if it did, I would still say that they players just bump into eachother and fall over if they actually tried moving through the same portal at the exact same time (its only a meter wide after all), and that would still leave the person who had opened it standing their until the next turn.

I have never stopped my players from making suggestions or telling one another to "hold on a second".

[gbaji]

The portal? About two hours I guess. They said they were going to use it to escape while prepping for the mission, and we worked out the details.

I just never dreamed that they were going to open it mid-battle while there were still enemies who could interfere with it still present and actively working to stop them.

Fair enough. Reasonable for you to have not considered they'd use it in that way, and not mention it. But you should have raised the issue the moment the player said "I'm going to use the gate scroll now", in the middle of combat. This falls squarely into the category of "information the player may not have considered, but the character would definitely be aware of". Even if you and the players didn't discuss it, we can assume that the characters *did* have some sort of "how exactly does a gate scroll work" conversation (off screen, so to speak). And part of that would have been some sort of caution/discussion about the risks of using such a thing in the middle of combat, and the potential for it to be dispelled by an enemy spell caster.

Just because a conversation didn't occur at the table by the players, doesn't mean that it didn't happen between the characters. This is information they should have known about with regard to the scrolls use. Warn them.

1: Calibrating the PCs expectations of what is vs. what might be. Saying "what if he has some obscure ability" might well lead to the players believing I am actively trying to trick them if it doesn't turn out to be the case.
2: This can feel like railroading. If I point out the flaw in their plan time and again, it might look like I am trying to railroad them into a single course of action.
3: Having their plans shot down is frustrating and insulting. They are very likely to get the idea that I am mocking their stupidity, and will likely react by either causing an OOC fight, going in with no plan, or deciding the adventure is impossible and abandoning it entirely.

It looks like your players seem to be assuming the presence of and looking for some sort of trick or gimmick to get through obstacles instead of just treating them as "normal" things. I can't say specifically why, but usually players respond to past experience, so my first guess is that you've thrown enough at them in the past, that they assume that's what's happening every time now. That may be fair, or may not be, but clearly *something* is making them think this. I'd recommend just not using tricks or gimmicks in the game at all. It clearly causes them problems.

Personally, I would say that only about, maybe 1/50 of the encounters I run are gimmick fights. Of course, those few fights are the one's the tend to generate all the discussion.

Yup. Then just stop doing this. Period. There are plenty of ways to make encounters and adventures interesting and challenging without a single "You need to use the one special gizmo to get past this" thing. That doesn't mean you can't have "keyed" things, but then make it absolutely clear "this is a magic door that is impossible to open without the key. Here is the map to the key. Here is the dungeon with the key. Here are the monsters guarding the key. Now you have the key and can open the door and get to <whatever>". Just don't put things in with less than absolutely clear instructions on how/when/where to use them if those things are even remotely required for success for the PCs.

Clearly, there is some combination of the players not grasping this sort of play and/or you not properly presenting the objects and how to use them going on. That's what seems to be causing the problem, so just stop doing it.

But it isn't just combat either, like if they come to a locked door and fail their lock picking roll, rather than trying to find some other way to get through the door or go around, they will decide that there must be some secret key or password that they are missing and spend several hours of real time racking their brains for something that doesn't exist until someone, usually me, gets bored enough to break character.

Communication is the key. Do you just tell them "this is too difficult a lock, you can't seem to open it" (making it absolutely clear that it's a normal lock, and they just failed to open it). Or do you just cryptically tell them "it doesn't unlock" or "you can't unlock it". Some of this can (should?) be eliminated by being more clear with the players as to what they actually perceive about the world around them. if it's a normal lock, and they fail their lock picking roll, their first next step shouldn't be assuming there's some magical secret to opening the door. It's just still locked. Break the lock. Break the door. What's complicated about that?

And yeah. I'm having a bit of a hard time not thinking that at least some of this is trained behavior on their part. If every single locked door that they couldn't unlock was just a normal door with a normal lock, there's no reason they'd be trying anything other than normal methods to get around that. Something else is going on here.

This wasn't one occasion, but a repeated pattern. Normally its something like they cast a spell like maze, or hold, or entangle, the monster is incapacitated until the duration (usually a couple minutes) expires and they simply leave. There isn't usually much dialogue on either side, we really need to work on this.

If I had to guess, I would think its a sort of gamist tunnel vision. They are looking at it in terms of encounters, and once the encounter is won, they assume it is over and no longer relevant.

Is it possible they are just assuming that, of course, they're going to kill off the helpless monster, but aren't bothering to actually say this to you? And you are assuming that if they don't explicitly state that, then they aren't doing it? Dunno. I still think this falls into a communication thing. And maybe you need to be proactive and ask them "What are you going to do about the monster you cast the [hold|maze|entangle] on? Are you just going to leave it there? It will only be held by the spell for X time."

Remind them of things they may have forgotten. Again. The players will forget stuff like this. They aren't standing in the room with the monster. The characters they are playing would never just "forget" about it though. Part of your job as GM is to bridge that knowledge gap for the players and prevent mistakes like this.

What really threw a wrench into everything was them decided to open the portal while enemies who could dispel it were still in the room. This split the party and gave the guards time to coordinate a response. Again, its still fine, they could have still fought their way out, it just would have been a bit tougher than I expected. But for the players, this was unacceptable and they basically spent an hour bemoaning their fate and talking themselves into a TPK before finally giving the chronomancer permission to fix the problem with a single spell.

As far as I remember, there was absolutely no discussion of when they would open the portal or what they would do when they got into the palace.

Which is maybe odd to begin with, but whatever. Again though, while the players may not have discussed it, the characters certainly would have had some conversation about how the scroll worked, how long it takes to open, what can close it, etc. Even if such details are not interesting to the players, the characters should know this. It's a game/spell mechanics issue. So yeah, the moment the player wanted to open the gate in the middle of combat, you should have informed him of the risks of doing so right then. Doubly so, since you clearly thought about and had the NPC cast a spell to close the gate on half the party, right? You clearly knew that was a danger. Why didn't you tell them about it?

One bit of conversation explaining that "If you use the gate scroll right now while there are still enemies about, it could be dispelled and some of you may be trapped here" would have resolved a whole lot of conflict. And honestly, there's only two reasons for you *not* to have done so:

1. It didn't occur to you that your players didn't already understand this was a risk. IMO, this is a mistake on your part and you need to resolve to improve your GM communication in situations like this. Clearly they *didn't* know this was a danger to what they were doing. The absence of player discussion about the scroll should also have clued you in.

2. You knew they were making a mistake, and kept it quiet because you wanted to "gotcha" them.

Neither of these are good. Both are bad GM actions. But guess which one your players are going to assume? (hint: it's number 2).

But I suspect they don't really believe this, it is just a way of projecting blame so they don't have to admit their own mistakes or failure to pay attention.

There's a difference between making a tactical/strategic mistake, and the "mistake" of not understanding how an action is going to work within the game system rules. The former is entirely on them. The latter? It's on *you*.

They may very well also be suffering from paranoia and weak ego. But in this case, you, the GM, dropped the ball. Own that. Work to correct it in the future.

The problem is, that information is asymetrical. If the players are immune to weapons, I as a GM know this immediately. If the monsters are immune to weapons, the characters have no way of knowing this by default, they need to learn about it in some way, and then interpret those clues to come to the right conclusion.

I do, however, think I am a bit brow-beaten into being overly secretive about stuff; both because my players have a tenancy to metagame and have a tendency to look down on me if the NPC's don't follow the rules to the letter*. I need to work on this.

This is kinda like the lockpicking example above. How you describe the outcome has an effect on player perception of the world, and what they may choose to have their characters do in response. You need to give clear and consistent descriptions of things so that the players are never confused about what is going on around them. If the players ask questions to get more information and make better choices, let them. If you are being at all secretive or misleading in how you describe things, such that the players are more likely to make mistakes, they will absolutely blame those mistakes on you. And they will be right. Their characters may not know something, and that's perfectly fine, but the players should never be unclear about what their characters do actually know. And if they are unclear about something their character should or does know, it's your job to make it clear to them. That way they can make the best choices about running their own characters possible and avoid "gotcha" stuff.

The sorceress who "forgot the plan" and started blasting and the ranger who started doing random stuff in hopes of stumbling upon the secret method of killing it and said I was trying to trick them OOC were not the same person.

I suspect that in reality both of them were distracted and kind of tuned out during the planning session and then gave different excuses for why they didn't stick to the plan, but that's just my hunch and could well be wrong.

Again though, if this is the case, it's your job to remind them of "the plan". Sure. In a perfect world, you shouldn't have to. But in cases like this I always ask this question: "Would this person's character actually have forgotten this, and be doing what the player wants them to do"? Just remind them. Right then. Present the risks of what they want to do. If they still go forward then that's them making that choice.

Did you tell the sorceress that she knows blasting the monster will only result in it splitting into more monsters and that would be a bad idea? If you didn't, then that was your mistake.

This was a game for a group that was majority new players. As a sort of training wheels thing, I was trying out a house rule where instead of character's dying, you instead roll on a mishap chart to see what fate befell you.
The first character to "die" rolled on the table and lost a random piece of gear. Now, the piece of gear he rolled happened to be one that Bob's character had bought for him as a gift, and Bob lost his mind over this and swore he would never do anything to help his party financially ever again. (And this caused further drama later, but that's a whole other story).
So I ditched the chart and replaced it with a fixed financial loss. The problem was, this made the players super cautious, for some reason the threat of losing gold scared them a whole lot more than character death, and they started abandoning adventures half way through because they "didn't want to chase good money after bad".
I explained to them that I came here to play adventure games, and really wanted to spend the allotted session adventuring rather than giving up a couple hours in because adventure is too risky. So I told them I would remove the penalty for death entirely. Instead of damage, HP represented exhaustion, pain threshold, and willpower, and that when you were out of HP you were demoralized and no longer in adventuring shape, and if everyone was out of HP the group would fall back and recuperate in town.

Honestly. This sort of rules on death is just rife for creating problems. As you have discovered. I'm not even sure how to respond to this, because every step in this process is something I would simply never do at my table, nor expect to happen at any table I've ever played at. If character's die, they die. Period. You have all the power as a GM to prevent it if you want. If the players have gotten so used to you giving them breaks and letting them get out of consequences for failure that they're doing this, and you're allowing it, well... Um... I can only suggest just not doing that.

If the players are that risk averse, then give them easy steamroll adventures. That's clearly what they seem to want. Let them have fun rolling through low level peons for massive wealth and items if that's what they want. Dunno. The whole thing just seems... strange. Figure out what the players want and then give it to them. Maybe that's the best advice I can give you here.

What turned this into a horror show was that the party's hirelings and henchmen had no protection from death, and while the party lay down and died, they were butchered by the vestiges. At that point the player's decided I had tricked them into the situation and violated some sort of "gentleman's agreement" that their hirelings would also be immune to death (which was never my intention, stated or otherwise. I fully expected henchmen to die over the course of the campaign and it was indeed a plot point later on).

Yup. Predictable consequence of that sort of strange "death is not really death" rule. If other people in your game can die, then the PCs should be subject to the same rule. Giving them an "out" creates this kind of problem. I would really really really strongly (add a list of other superlatives here) recommend not doing this sort of thing.

I do have a fair number of plot twists, usually something involving a villain having understandable motivations behind their schemes or an ally having darker ulterior motives, or a quest giver not being who they pretended to be, but these don't usually screw the PCs or effect them on a mechanical level at all. I suppose I occasionally do misdirection, like the villagers will hire the PCs to hunt down a vampire when in truth the thing breaking into their houses and drinking their blood was a giant leech, but that is pretty rare and doesn't usually result in anything worse than a temporary setback.

It's absolutely fair to have NPCs provide incorrect/misleading information to the party. Just be careful that you, the GM, don't get too invested in the deception. If the players get suspicious, and start asking questions, allow them to discover the truth if it's reasonable for them to do so. Maybe point out to them that the marks on the bodies are strange looking with multiple punctures coming in from all sides around circular bruising. Maybe they'll think the vampire has fruit punch mouth or something, but when it's later revealed that it was a giant leech, instead of being upset that you mislead them, they'll be like "Aha! that explains the odd bite marks", and move on.

Deliberately providing them no information at all, especially if they ask or spend some time investigating, is going to be perceived by the players as you deceiving them, not just the NPC. And yeah, if after the fact, when they discover the truth, and they realize there were obvious things that should have suggested it to them, they're going to be annoyed that you didn't tell them this. Doubly so if the lack of even suspecting that the thing they're looking for may not be what they were told or originally thought has any impact on their ability to succeed in the mission at all.

And to be perfectly fair, this is something that can happen to any GM, totally by accident. One of my friends (and long time player/GM) was running a scenario. The final bit of which was us tracking down this big bad monster guy who had been causing tons of trouble for some locals we were trying to help out (and I think we needed a favor from them, so we had our own motivations as well). We get to the monster, have it described to us, along with some minions to deal with, and the fight begins. We're going along, doing various things to the bad guy, and finding that we're not having any success actually harming him in any way. We're trying lots of things and struggling. We're also dealing with the minions and some spells that hit us along the way, so still making progress, but at a certain point, it was basically us and the remaining big bad monster guy, and we're still not able to hurt it (it was a semi-corporeal spirit type thing). After a round or so of this, we're becoming increasingly frustrated, and we've literally tried everything we can think of. At this point the GM is like "why haven't you used the <dodad> on the rune covered altar?". And we're like: "What dodad?". He had described that there were some runic markings on some stone altar or something, and we'd tried doing things to it (in the middle of an otherwise very tough fight, so not like exhaustively), but we had no idea what he was talking about.

Turns out that the villagers we were helping knew that the bad guy was semi-spiritual and so had their shaman create an object that would force him into full physical form if it was placed on his "runes of power". The villagers weren't powerful enough to fight their way to it, but figured we were, so handed it to us to use. So when he'd described the altar with the magic glowing runes on it, he assumed we'd know exactly what to do, and was utterly confused as to why we didn't. However, it turns out the GM had actually forgotten to run through that bit of dialogue, but was absolutely positive that he had. Literally the entire conversation was "I told you guys about this and what to do" and the entire table was like "Um... No. You didn't. If you had, we certainly would have remembered".

He was pretty chagrined about that one. And I kinda never let him live it down. But the point is that this can absolutely happen in a game. Heck. Does happen. Even to the best GMs with a long track record of running excellent scenarios and keeping everything straight. Some of the descriptions you have given about things at your table really do remind me of this. It's possible that they're all just forgetting (totally possible), but also possible that you are forgetting to always provide them with the information as well. Who knows?

The point is that at some point, when it's obvious that the players don't know what they're supposed to be doing, but clearly they (or their characters really) should. You should step in, stop the action, and clarify what's going on and provide them with any information that they should actually already have. This fixes cases where the players have forgotten stuff and also cases where you may have forgotten to provide it to them in the first place. Cause, you know, that does actually happen.

Now yes, I do run fairly linear adventures. I would love to do it a bit more sand boxy and free-form, but that takes fairly proactive players to make work, and in the past when I try something of a sand box it tends to be a lot more work and a lot less fun. I also have players who demand 3-6 balanced combat encounters per session, which is a lot harder to do in a sandbox.

I think there is a huge difference between "linear" and "railroad". You can absolutely run a scenario in which the players go to location A, get clue A, which leads to location B, with clue B, which leads to location C, with clue C, etc, etc, until they get to the final location and resolution. Nothing at all wrong with that. Heck. A lot of adventures are going to have a format at least somewhat similar to that, at least some of the time.

Railroading the players is when you literally force them to go in the direction you have decided to go. Having the adventure go that direction isn't railroading if they have a choice to do something else instead. I recently ran what was probably the most literally linear adventure I've ever done in my life. The scenario was a pirate treasure hunt, in which they had a map to vault A, with guards, traps, etc, and a map to vault B, with guards, traps, etc. So on and so forth. Seriously. That was it (it was a filler adventure to get a new player's character a bit up to speed/snuff, and I used it also as an opportunity to give him a primer about the area while traveling around. And also: Pirate treasure!). Point is that at any point, the characters could simply walk away if they wanted to. There would have been some in-game consequences (they wouldn't get the treasure, and there was another group that might have instead, with possible other affects down the line). But hey. If they didn't want to, no forcing at all. They could go back to hanging around somewhere waiting for a different adventuring opportunity to come along, I guess. A railroad would be if no matter which direction they went, or what they decided to do, they would find themselves running into the next planned set of guards and traps, and the same treasure.

I also think that many GMs out of a desire to "avoid railroading" provide too few clues or structure to their games, thus leaving the players wandering around aimlessly, or failing to figure out clues/hints, or basically not knowing what to do, all while being told they do have something to do, but need to "figure out what it is" or something. Don't do that. Present clear events happening around the PCs. Provide clear hooks to them that they can follow up on as possible adventures. Make each step in any given adventure pretty clear in terms of what it means, and what they can do with it if they so choose. That way, if they do decide to follow the bandit's trail into the hills, and find the bandit camp, and decide to attack the camp, and defeat the bandit leader, and find a map to the hidden bandit treasure, they can then decide to follow that and perhaps find the treasure. At every point, they know what they are doing, why they are doing, and maybe even what to expect when they get there.

And at every step, they can choose *not* to go through those steps if they don't want to. But it's a good idea as a GM to provide very clear paths for the players to follow. That way they don't get lost or confused about things.

I expected them to talk to the royals because they were curious about their motivations and bantering with the enemy and "getting them monologuing" is a pretty standard way to fill in gaps in your understanding of the villain's plans. It was not their mission, and it didn't disrupt anything, I just expected them to do it and planned accordingly. It was a bit surprising that they would bluff their way in and then not try and do any sort of negotiation or deception, or even set themselves up into a more advantageous position while making a distraction; instead it was just step into the room and pull shotguns out from under their coats and start blasting like The Terminator. Surprising, but not in anyway disruptive or worthy of me trying to railroad or punish them for it.

Ok. It's just that the way you wrote it made it seem like you expected them to talk or had some reason why they should talk to them prior to the fight. Honestly, unless you actually give them some information that tells them that they need to talk to an enemy like this, my expectation is the opposite. Why would they waste time talking? The enemy could be summoning assistance, or planning something, or plotting. If you're there to kill someone, you just kill them. As a player, I'd never give the enemy an opportunity to escape by talking to them if my mission was to kill them. Never know if they have some kind of suggestion powers or something that only work if engaged in conversation out of combat or something.

Readied actions don't work like they do in 3.5 where you automatically act simultaneously. Of course, even if it did, I would still say that they players just bump into eachother and fall over if they actually tried moving through the same portal at the exact same time (its only a meter wide after all), and that would still leave the person who had opened it standing their until the next turn.

I'll point out again that it really was up to you to clarify for the players at that moment how the gate spell functioned and make it abundantly clear to them the risk they were running if they used it at that exact point in time. If there was a way for them to hold actions, activate the scroll, and all get through before anyone could stop them, then you let them know this (it's a game mechanic question). If it's not possible, then you should tell them that too (still a game mechanic question) *and* follow up with a warning about potential for the gate being closed via magic and the party being trapped, and maybe using it prior to defeating all the bad guys in the room (especially the demon guy casting spells) would be a "really bad idea(tm)". That's not so much a game mechanic question, but it is something the characters should know about and be able to plan around.

It's no different then telling a player that his car just rolled down the hill because he didn't actually say that his character put the car in park and activated the parking break when parking on the hill. Um... Even if we didn't have a conversation among the players as to how to operate a car and properly put it in park on a hill, and even if my player didn't directly tell you the GM "I put the car in park, set the parking break, then turn off the ignition, take the keys out, put them in my pocket, and get out of the car", but rather just say "I stop the car, jump out, and chase after the bad guy", if there is at all a concern that the car may roll down the hill and crash, the default assumption is that the character knows how to properly operate the car. In the same way you should assume that the person who purchased the scroll read the instruction manual and knows how the spell works, how long it takes to cast, how long it stays open, what may close it, etc. You don't need to roleplay this out at the table and can/should assume it's known information.

And yeah. If a player says they're doing something in opposition to what their character should know not to do. You tell them. Don't keep quiet and then punish them for making the mistake.

You should have stopped the player at that moment and informed them in very clear language what the consequences and risks of using the gate scroll right at that moment were. You didn't. So yeah, your players were right to be upset at you for this.

[Talakeal]

I have to ask, does this conversation still have anything to do with teamwork?

While I am more than happy to continue the discussion, at this point we just seem to be going over my GMing style with a fine-tooth comb rather than actually discussing anything that has to do with motivating my players to work as a group.

Adults should manage to stay off their phones during a game session, or at least have the maturity to focus on the game and not on anything less than an emergency on their phone. It's seriously not that hard. How do these people manage to maintain a job if they can't avoid fiddling with their phones constantly? Seriously. It's a basic skill. That's not "beyond their control and nobodies fault". It's absolutely within their control and absolutely their fault if they can't muster up enough attention span to play a game at a table with other people for a few hours at a stretch.

We are gaming in a house with three kids, 6, 3, and 1. All of them grew up during quarantine and are used to parents who work from home and constantly give them attention. The oldest has been diagnosed with severe ADHD and I suspect the younger kids also have it. The kids (and the dog) constantly want attention, and if not given it will get up to mischief to keep themselves entertained which requires someone intervene and clean up the mess. We have two people who work the day before gaming (on wildly different shifts) and two people who work the day after gaming (again on wildly different shifts), people receive business calls and emails during the game, we have people who have medical issues requiring that they stand up and or use the bathroom frequently, people come to the door, and we game for 6-12 hours at a time so both the players and the kids in the house need to break for meal prep.

This is a pretty hectic environment to game in, and we have to make the choice between this or losing two players and a convenient place to play.

That being said, there are also a lot of avoidable distractions that I want to minimize. The worst is people on their phones. I have several players in my group who are addicted to mobile games which use predatory tactics to monopolize time, and if these people aren't allowed an environment where they can access their mobile games they simply won't show up. No idea how to correct this, because a large percentage of games appear to be legitimately addicted to mobile games and simply won't join any group that inhibits their addiction. In the past I have also had gamers who had chemical addictions and refused to show up to the group if they weren't allowed to show up under the influence and / or take periodic breaks to indulge, but fortunately my current group lacks this.

Fair enough. Reasonable for you to have not considered they'd use it in that way, and not mention it. But you should have raised the issue the moment the player said "I'm going to use the gate scroll now", in the middle of combat. This falls squarely into the category of "information the player may not have considered, but the character would definitely be aware of". Even if you and the players didn't discuss it, we can assume that the characters *did* have some sort of "how exactly does a gate scroll work" conversation (off screen, so to speak). And part of that would have been some sort of caution/discussion about the risks of using such a thing in the middle of combat, and the potential for it to be dispelled by an enemy spell caster.

Just because a conversation didn't occur at the table by the players, doesn't mean that it didn't happen between the characters. This is information they should have known about with regard to the scrolls use. Warn them.
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Actually, I would say the opposite here.

The characters are not experts in magic and are not conjurers themselves, and are in the heat of battle.

The players, on the other hand, have all read the rules and have played conjurers in the past and are looking down on the table from above.

Now, whether or not the DM should warn them is tangential to this, but I don't really think it is a clean case of "the characters should know better".

It looks like your players seem to be assuming the presence of and looking for some sort of trick or gimmick to get through obstacles instead of just treating them as "normal" things. I can't say specifically why, but usually players respond to past experience, so my first guess is that you've thrown enough at them in the past, that they assume that's what's happening every time now. That may be fair, or may not be, but clearly *something* is making them think this. I'd recommend just not using tricks or gimmicks in the game at all. It clearly causes them problems.


Yup. Then just stop doing this. Period. There are plenty of ways to make encounters and adventures interesting and challenging without a single "You need to use the one special gizmo to get past this" thing. That doesn't mean you can't have "keyed" things, but then make it absolutely clear "this is a magic door that is impossible to open without the key. Here is the map to the key. Here is the dungeon with the key. Here are the monsters guarding the key. Now you have the key and can open the door and get to <whatever>". Just don't put things in with less than absolutely clear instructions on how/when/where to use them if those things are even remotely required for success for the PCs.

Clearly, there is some combination of the players not grasping this sort of play and/or you not properly presenting the objects and how to use them going on. That's what seems to be causing the problem, so just stop doing it.

To clarify, I NEVER use situations where there is only one solution to a problem. On the extremely rare occasions that I do have some sort of "deus ex machina", it will either be clearly explained to the players and impossible to miss, or minor and optional.

What I mean by a "gimmick encounter" is one where the objective is something other than "deal damage until the other side dies"; examples would be trying to protect something or hold out for a certain amount of time, get past a monster without killing it, steal something and get away, kill the leader and get out before reinforcements overhwlem you, etc.

Although I may have enemies who have immunities, or obstacles that impede certain approaches, I will never put in something that can only be dealt with in one specific way.

Communication is the key. Do you just tell them "this is too difficult a lock, you can't seem to open it" (making it absolutely clear that it's a normal lock, and they just failed to open it). Or do you just cryptically tell them "it doesn't unlock" or "you can't unlock it". Some of this can (should?) be eliminated by being more clear with the players as to what they actually perceive about the world around them. if it's a normal lock, and they fail their lock picking roll, their first next step shouldn't be assuming there's some magical secret to opening the door. It's just still locked. Break the lock. Break the door. What's complicated about that?

And yeah. I'm having a bit of a hard time not thinking that at least some of this is trained behavior on their part. If every single locked door that they couldn't unlock was just a normal door with a normal lock, there's no reason they'd be trying anything other than normal methods to get around that. Something else is going on here.

It baffles me was well.

I will admit, I do have NVLD, which means that my brain processes language differently from neurotypical people, so what seems to be clear and straightforward to me is clear to my players and vice versa; so that may well be what is happening. I just think its weird that the players never ask follow up questions and always assume the worst case scenario.

Is it possible they are just assuming that, of course, they're going to kill off the helpless monster, but aren't bothering to actually say this to you? And you are assuming that if they don't explicitly state that, then they aren't doing it? Dunno. I still think this falls into a communication thing. And maybe you need to be proactive and ask them "What are you going to do about the monster you cast the [hold|maze|entangle] on? Are you just going to leave it there? It will only be held by the spell for X time."

Remind them of things they may have forgotten. Again. The players will forget stuff like this. They aren't standing in the room with the monster. The characters they are playing would never just "forget" about it though. Part of your job as GM is to bridge that knowledge gap for the players and prevent mistakes like this.

Unlikely. Most spells that trap or incapacitate a monster don't allow you to kill it while it is helpless. Maze and banishment puts it on another plane. Walls restrict your movement as much as theirs. Sleep and most mind control spells break on damage. Entangle and force cage block movement, but don't prevent monsters from attacking.

I have been having a similar problem though; because recurring villains exist, and some monster use hit and run tactics, they insist on killing everything they fight even if doing so puts them at a huge tactical disadvantage. Mostly it just makes them look like sadist both in and out of character, and forces me to have every fight be to the death.

I remember one time they were attacked by a hungry predator, did enough damage to it to drive it off, and then one player insisted on tracking it down and going into its den alone to finish it off because they couldn't take the chance of it following them (even though the monster was wounded and they were just passing through the area) and ended up dying as a result.

Really need to work on a way to communicate this.

Remind them of things they may have forgotten. Again. The players will forget stuff like this. They aren't standing in the room with the monster. The characters they are playing would never just "forget" about it though. Part of your job as GM is to bridge that knowledge gap for the players and prevent mistakes like this.

Which is maybe odd to begin with, but whatever. Again though, while the players may not have discussed it, the characters certainly would have had some conversation about how the scroll worked, how long it takes to open, what can close it, etc. Even if such details are not interesting to the players, the characters should know this. It's a game/spell mechanics issue. So yeah, the moment the player wanted to open the gate in the middle of combat, you should have informed him of the risks of doing so right then. Doubly so, since you clearly thought about and had the NPC cast a spell to close the gate on half the party, right? You clearly knew that was a danger. Why didn't you tell them about it?

One bit of conversation explaining that "If you use the gate scroll right now while there are still enemies about, it could be dispelled and some of you may be trapped here" would have resolved a whole lot of conflict. And honestly, there's only two reasons for you *not* to have done so:

1. It didn't occur to you that your players didn't already understand this was a risk. IMO, this is a mistake on your part and you need to resolve to improve your GM communication in situations like this. Clearly they *didn't* know this was a danger to what they were doing. The absence of player discussion about the scroll should also have clued you in.

2. You knew they were making a mistake, and kept it quiet because you wanted to "gotcha" them.

Neither of these are good. Both are bad GM actions. But guess which one your players are going to assume? (hint: it's number 2).
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This really isn't as black and white as you are making it out to be.

I have had a lot of negative reactions to advising players.

Some think you are calling them stupid and lash out accordingly. Some think you are trying to railroad them. Some of them resent being told what to do and go out of their way to do the opposite. And some people just enjoy a tactical challenge and like being allowed to make mistakes. I know I fall into the latter category, I would much rather fail under my own merits than succeed because the DM took pity on me.

There is also a broader question about whether or not it really is appropriate or better for the game for the GM to hold the player's hands. I have had a lot of people online tell me that I am overstepping my bounds by trying to help my players too much, and it is certainly possible that the players will grow bored of a game that lacks real risk of failure or fail to learn a lesson if the GM always steps in to show them the right path.


Also, a "gotcha" isn't about making the players lose or look bad, its about taking story in an unexpected direction. Failing forward is good for the game, it isn't something to be avoided.

There's a difference between making a tactical/strategic mistake, and the "mistake" of not understanding how an action is going to work within the game system rules. The former is entirely on them. The latter? It's on *you*.

They may very well also be suffering from paranoia and weak ego. But in this case, you, the GM, dropped the ball. Own that. Work to correct it in the future.

I'm sorry, what?

You appear to be contradicting yourself .

You say that there is a differance between tactical mistakes and rules misunderstandings, and I fully agree.
Then you say that rules mistakes are the GMs fault, but tactical mistakes are the players. While I don't think its that black and white, I mostly agree.

But then you say this is my fault in this case, even though it is clearly a tactical mistake and has nothing to do with anyone misunderstanding the rules.

What am I missing here?

This is kinda like the lockpicking example above. How you describe the outcome has an effect on player perception of the world, and what they may choose to have their characters do in response. You need to give clear and consistent descriptions of things so that the players are never confused about what is going on around them. If the players ask questions to get more information and make better choices, let them. If you are being at all secretive or misleading in how you describe things, such that the players are more likely to make mistakes, they will absolutely blame those mistakes on you. And they will be right. Their characters may not know something, and that's perfectly fine, but the players should never be unclear about what their characters do actually know. And if they are unclear about something their character should or does know, it's your job to make it clear to them. That way they can make the best choices about running their own characters possible and avoid "gotcha" stuff.

Agreed. Totally. I do not attempt to trick the players OOC.

And I don't believe my players honestly think I am doing that either, I think its just an attempt to deflect blame when they aren't paying attention or make a stupid decision because, as you said, that really would be the DM's fault.

Did you tell the sorceress that she knows blasting the monster will only result in it splitting into more monsters and that would be a bad idea? If you didn't, then that was your mistake.

In this case no, I didn't have to, the other players called her on it.

Although I do kind of resent the idea that the GM is responsible for acting as the players memory. The GM has a lot going on, a lot more than any player, and it isn't terribly fair.

It is also enabling bad behavior on the player's part, as I have already said the vast majority of these mistakes are caused by not paying attention during the other player's discussing the plan or the DM narrating the description.

I remember one player, for example, who always took the "eidetic memory" trait. He would then completely zone out of the game and play on his phone, only looking at the table when it was hist turn to make an attack role. But if he EVER needed to actually remember something, he would simply point at the GM and state that he was using "eidetic memory" and demand the GM tell him whatever information it was that was relevant at the moment, and promptly go back to his mobile games.

Honestly. This sort of rules on death is just rife for creating problems. As you have discovered. I'm not even sure how to respond to this, because every step in this process is something I would simply never do at my table, nor expect to happen at any table I've ever played at. If character's die, they die. Period. You have all the power as a GM to prevent it if you want. If the players have gotten so used to you giving them breaks and letting them get out of consequences for failure that they're doing this, and you're allowing it, well... Um... I can only suggest just not doing that.

If the players are that risk averse, then give them easy steamroll adventures. That's clearly what they seem to want. Let them have fun rolling through low level peons for massive wealth and items if that's what they want. Dunno. The whole thing just seems... strange. Figure out what the players want and then give it to them. Maybe that's the best advice I can give you here.



Yup. Predictable consequence of that sort of strange "death is not really death" rule. If other people in your game can die, then the PCs should be subject to the same rule. Giving them an "out" creates this kind of problem. I would really really really strongly (add a list of other superlatives here) recommend not doing this sort of thing.

Not really sure why you find this rule so strange or confusing. I have played plenty of games where death is not the default state for losing combat, mostly superhero games, and it works fine.

I think in this case though it was a weird case of me trying to tell the players "Just do your best and I promise nothing bad will happen to you" and the players finding different excuses to justify not wanting to do their best and instead take the lazy path; at first stating that they didn't want to press on because they were scared of danger, and then responding to lack of danger by simply walking in and grabbing the loot and suiciding, both result in them not having to put any thought into combat despite telling me that balanced tactical combats were what they were looking for in the game.

If the players are that risk averse, then give them easy steamroll adventures. That's clearly what they seem to want. Let them have fun rolling through low level peons for massive wealth and items if that's what they want. Dunno. The whole thing just seems... strange. Figure out what the players want and then give it to them. Maybe that's the best advice I can give you here.

That is not a game I would have any interest in running for a plethora of reasons, and I am pretty sure my players would grow bored and uninterested with it in short order.

I would much rather play in an exciting game that occasionally has someone get mad over a perception of unfainress, justified or not, than one which is bland and uninteresting week in and week out.

It's weird though, the player who is the most risk averse and most likely to throw a fit if he loses, is also the player who is the biggest proponent of games that are predominantly made up of balanced tactical combats.

And last night I had a conversation with him about how he always plays video games on the highest difficulty because "its not worth my time if I am not going to do it 'right'".

So I don't even know.

It's absolutely fair to have NPCs provide incorrect/misleading information to the party. Just be careful that you, the GM, don't get too invested in the deception. If the players get suspicious, and start asking questions, allow them to discover the truth if it's reasonable for them to do so. Maybe point out to them that the marks on the bodies are strange looking with multiple punctures coming in from all sides around circular bruising. Maybe they'll think the vampire has fruit punch mouth or something, but when it's later revealed that it was a giant leech, instead of being upset that you mislead them, they'll be like "Aha! that explains the odd bite marks", and move on.

Deliberately providing them no information at all, especially if they ask or spend some time investigating, is going to be perceived by the players as you deceiving them, not just the NPC. And yeah, if after the fact, when they discover the truth, and they realize there were obvious things that should have suggested it to them, they're going to be annoyed that you didn't tell them this. Doubly so if the lack of even suspecting that the thing they're looking for may not be what they were told or originally thought has any impact on their ability to succeed in the mission at all.

Clarification; are you talking about observations or conclusions?

Because I fully agree the GM should tell the players what their characters know, but whether or not the GM should tell them what it means is a bit shakier.

For example, if the players find footprints at the murder scene that were made by size 13 cowboy boots, and then finds a pair of mud-streaked size 13 cowboy boots at his borther-in-laws house, is the DM also obliged to tell them that they put the clues together and deduce the brother-in-law is the murderer?

And to be perfectly fair, this is something that can happen to any GM, totally by accident. One of my friends (and long time player/GM) was running a scenario. The final bit of which was us tracking down this big bad monster guy who had been causing tons of trouble for some locals we were trying to help out (and I think we needed a favor from them, so we had our own motivations as well). We get to the monster, have it described to us, along with some minions to deal with, and the fight begins. We're going along, doing various things to the bad guy, and finding that we're not having any success actually harming him in any way. We're trying lots of things and struggling. We're also dealing with the minions and some spells that hit us along the way, so still making progress, but at a certain point, it was basically us and the remaining big bad monster guy, and we're still not able to hurt it (it was a semi-corporeal spirit type thing). After a round or so of this, we're becoming increasingly frustrated, and we've literally tried everything we can think of. At this point the GM is like "why haven't you used the <dodad> on the rune covered altar?". And we're like: "What dodad?". He had described that there were some runic markings on some stone altar or something, and we'd tried doing things to it (in the middle of an otherwise very tough fight, so not like exhaustively), but we had no idea what he was talking about.

Turns out that the villagers we were helping knew that the bad guy was semi-spiritual and so had their shaman create an object that would force him into full physical form if it was placed on his "runes of power". The villagers weren't powerful enough to fight their way to it, but figured we were, so handed it to us to use. So when he'd described the altar with the magic glowing runes on it, he assumed we'd know exactly what to do, and was utterly confused as to why we didn't. However, it turns out the GM had actually forgotten to run through that bit of dialogue, but was absolutely positive that he had. Literally the entire conversation was "I told you guys about this and what to do" and the entire table was like "Um... No. You didn't. If you had, we certainly would have remembered".

He was pretty chagrined about that one. And I kinda never let him live it down. But the point is that this can absolutely happen in a game. Heck. Does happen. Even to the best GMs with a long track record of running excellent scenarios and keeping everything straight. Some of the descriptions you have given about things at your table really do remind me of this. It's possible that they're all just forgetting (totally possible), but also possible that you are forgetting to always provide them with the information as well. Who knows?

The point is that at some point, when it's obvious that the players don't know what they're supposed to be doing, but clearly they (or their characters really) should. You should step in, stop the action, and clarify what's going on and provide them with any information that they should actually already have. This fixes cases where the players have forgotten stuff and also cases where you may have forgotten to provide it to them in the first place. Cause, you know, that does actually happen.

Sometimes you also get into situations where people don't know what they don't know.

For example, I had a situation where a PC talked to someone near the north pole, and that someone later turned out to be a vampire.

The player insisted that they should have known it was a vampire by the lack of foggy breath.

The problem was, that method of identifying a vampire never occurred to me. And of course, the player had no reason to believe it was a vampire at the time so had no reason to ask if their breath was foggy.

I think there is a huge difference between "linear" and "railroad". You can absolutely run a scenario in which the players go to location A, get clue A, which leads to location B, with clue B, which leads to location C, with clue C, etc, etc, until they get to the final location and resolution. Nothing at all wrong with that. Heck. A lot of adventures are going to have a format at least somewhat similar to that, at least some of the time.

Railroading the players is when you literally force them to go in the direction you have decided to go. Having the adventure go that direction isn't railroading if they have a choice to do something else instead. I recently ran what was probably the most literally linear adventure I've ever done in my life. The scenario was a pirate treasure hunt, in which they had a map to vault A, with guards, traps, etc, and a map to vault B, with guards, traps, etc. So on and so forth. Seriously. That was it (it was a filler adventure to get a new player's character a bit up to speed/snuff, and I used it also as an opportunity to give him a primer about the area while traveling around. And also: Pirate treasure!). Point is that at any point, the characters could simply walk away if they wanted to. There would have been some in-game consequences (they wouldn't get the treasure, and there was another group that might have instead, with possible other affects down the line). But hey. If they didn't want to, no forcing at all. They could go back to hanging around somewhere waiting for a different adventuring opportunity to come along, I guess. A railroad would be if no matter which direction they went, or what they decided to do, they would find themselves running into the next planned set of guards and traps, and the same treasure.

I also think that many GMs out of a desire to "avoid railroading" provide too few clues or structure to their games, thus leaving the players wandering around aimlessly, or failing to figure out clues/hints, or basically not knowing what to do, all while being told they do have something to do, but need to "figure out what it is" or something. Don't do that. Present clear events happening around the PCs. Provide clear hooks to them that they can follow up on as possible adventures. Make each step in any given adventure pretty clear in terms of what it means, and what they can do with it if they so choose. That way, if they do decide to follow the bandit's trail into the hills, and find the bandit camp, and decide to attack the camp, and defeat the bandit leader, and find a map to the hidden bandit treasure, they can then decide to follow that and perhaps find the treasure. At every point, they know what they are doing, why they are doing, and maybe even what to expect when they get there.

And at every step, they can choose *not* to go through those steps if they don't want to. But it's a good idea as a GM to provide very clear paths for the players to follow. That way they don't get lost or confused about things.

Agreed.*

Which is why I think its kind of weird that you are surmising that the "scripted" nature of my scenario is causing the problems when, if anything, it is my lack of structure and fear of being labelled a railroad that is causing the issues.


*Well, except for the idea that it is railroading to not want players to just bugger off entirely. People came to the session to play, and the GM put a lot of work into preparing a scenario. Unless you have a damn good reason, it is a **** move and rude to everyone involved to just have your character leave the bounds of the scenario or refuse to interact with it.

Ok. It's just that the way you wrote it made it seem like you expected them to talk or had some reason why they should talk to them prior to the fight. Honestly, unless you actually give them some information that tells them that they need to talk to an enemy like this, my expectation is the opposite. Why would they waste time talking? The enemy could be summoning assistance, or planning something, or plotting. If you're there to kill someone, you just kill them. As a player, I'd never give the enemy an opportunity to escape by talking to them if my mission was to kill them. Never know if they have some kind of suggestion powers or something that only work if engaged in conversation out of combat or something.

Not a bad philosophy, except for the term "never". As a wise man once said "Not every situation requires your patented approach of shoot first, shoot later, shoot some more and then when everybody's dead try to ask a question or two."

I personally prefer knowledge over tactical efficiency, especially if the fight can be avoided entirely, so I lean on the side of talking more, but I judge every situation based on its individual merits and sometimes, as both a PC and a GM, I think ruthless silence is the optimal choice.

It kind of reminds me of another gaming story where, during a negotiation, someone snuck up behind the party and extinguished their lantern, plunging them into darkness. The sorceress responded by blindly launching fireballs into the group they were negotiating with and very nearly wiped the party. Their explanation was that, if it appears someone is trying to get a strategic advantage on you, it is ALWAYS both smart and ethical to attempt to take them out as hard and fast as possible. Which, while it might make sense in certain situations, just seems crazy in others.

I'll point out again that it really was up to you to clarify for the players at that moment how the gate spell functioned and make it abundantly clear to them the risk they were running if they used it at that exact point in time. If there was a way for them to hold actions, activate the scroll, and all get through before anyone could stop them, then you let them know this (it's a game mechanic question). If it's not possible, then you should tell them that too (still a game mechanic question) *and* follow up with a warning about potential for the gate being closed via magic and the party being trapped, and maybe using it prior to defeating all the bad guys in the room (especially the demon guy casting spells) would be a "really bad idea(tm)". That's not so much a game mechanic question, but it is something the characters should know about and be able to plan around.

It's no different then telling a player that his car just rolled down the hill because he didn't actually say that his character put the car in park and activated the parking break when parking on the hill. Um... Even if we didn't have a conversation among the players as to how to operate a car and properly put it in park on a hill, and even if my player didn't directly tell you the GM "I put the car in park, set the parking break, then turn off the ignition, take the keys out, put them in my pocket, and get out of the car", but rather just say "I stop the car, jump out, and chase after the bad guy", if there is at all a concern that the car may roll down the hill and crash, the default assumption is that the character knows how to properly operate the car. In the same way you should assume that the person who purchased the scroll read the instruction manual and knows how the spell works, how long it takes to cast, how long it stays open, what may close it, etc. You don't need to roleplay this out at the table and can/should assume it's known information.

And yeah. If a player says they're doing something in opposition to what their character should know not to do. You tell them. Don't keep quiet and then punish them for making the mistake.

You should have stopped the player at that moment and informed them in very clear language what the consequences and risks of using the gate scroll right at that moment were. You didn't. So yeah, your players were right to be upset at you for this.

As was with you until this last bit.

No, those two situations are not in any way equivalent, and no, my players were NOT upset with me over this situation. They made a tactical decision and, as immature as they can be, recognized that they got themselves into a bad situation and that it would be unreasonable and immature to try and foist the blame onto someone else.

[gbaji]

Gonna try to trim this down a bit, and maybe try to take things in a more productive direction.

I have to ask, does this conversation still have anything to do with teamwork?

While I am more than happy to continue the discussion, at this point we just seem to be going over my GMing style with a fine-tooth comb rather than actually discussing anything that has to do with motivating my players to work as a group.

The entire table is a team. Yeah, I get that you started this talking about lack of teamwork among the players, but I also feel that the GM is part of that. And if it appears as though I'm going over your GMing style with a fine toothed comb, it's not about you personally, but that you are posting here, and your players are not. I can only address the players actions through the filter of your posts, and I can only respond to those things through you. So yeah, a lot of that is going to be about how you may make changes to your game that may improve things for your players.

If a player were posting here talking about their GM, I would be discussing ways that player could change their own actions to help improve things with the GM running their game. Cause I can only speak to the person posting, not the person/people they are talking about.

The worst is people on their phones. I have several players in my group who are addicted to mobile games which use predatory tactics to monopolize time, and if these people aren't allowed an environment where they can access their mobile games they simply won't show up. No idea how to correct this, because a large percentage of games appear to be legitimately addicted to mobile games and simply won't join any group that inhibits their addiction.

Yeah. That's a toughie. Most of those games have a "you get X amount of time each day to play" scheme (and you have to run the full session in one block of time). Can't they play on their own time? Or are they addicted to so many different games that they don't have enough hours in the day to play a full session and get their time in? Dunno. I would do everything in my power to require that players commit to the time for the game session. No playing other games on phones.

The characters are not experts in magic and are not conjurers themselves, and are in the heat of battle.

They weren't in the heat of battle when they obtained the scroll. They anticipated this use, planned to use it, and took action to obtain the scroll with the specific plan of working their way into the room with the royals, killing them, and then using the scroll to gate the entire group out. Even if the players didn't roleplay out the conversation it's somewhat assumed that the question of "how does this scroll work?" came up at some point, and would have been included in any plan that depended on it working as intended.

The fact that I'm not a trained soldier increases the odds that if my plan involves obtaining a hand grenade and using it somehow, that I would ask absolutely detailed questions about how to operate it, what the pin does, the handle does, what triggers it, how long I have after it's triggered, what the blast radius is, what sort of structures/substances will block the blast, etc. And I will plan around that information.

The idea that a group of people who know nothing about how a gate spell works would obtain one, with the specific intention to use it as they planned, and *not* have asked questions like "How long does it take to activate the scroll? How long does it take the gate to form? How long does it stay open? How big is the gate? How fast can we all get through it? Is it possible to be interrupted, or closed on us before we can all exit?". Again, even if the players didn't have this conversation at the table, it's reasonable to assume that the characters would have had to, in order to plan around using the gate scroll in the first place.

The characters should have known that there was a risk of it being dispelled before they could all transit through the gate if there was an enemy spellcaster in the area. Even if the players didn't know, the characters would have.

Unlikely. Most spells that trap or incapacitate a monster don't allow you to kill it while it is helpless. Maze and banishment puts it on another plane. Walls restrict your movement as much as theirs. Sleep and most mind control spells break on damage. Entangle and force cage block movement, but don't prevent monsters from attacking.

I have been having a similar problem though; because recurring villains exist, and some monster use hit and run tactics, they insist on killing everything they fight even if doing so puts them at a huge tactical disadvantage. Mostly it just makes them look like sadist both in and out of character, and forces me to have every fight be to the death.

Ok. I guess my best suggestion is again just for you to engage in providing the players with as much information as you can. Don't try to control their actions, but give them every bit of information to make the most informed decision possible. So yeah, if they use such spells on an opponent and are leaving the area, just tell them "just to remind you guys. Once that spell wears off, that monster may come after you". Obviously, if they're on games and not paying attention, this may fall on deaf ears though (another reason to just not allow that at the table, but that may not be possible in your case).

I would also caution against making it seem like everything they bypass will come back to get them. Not everything will. I can't tell if this is the case, but if there's at all a sense in your head that "I created this monster, so they have to fight it at some point", you need to really stop and think about what that monster would really do once it gets free. Some might come after them. Many wont. If you are regularly having trapped monsters come after the party, then it's not surprising that the party is doing everything they can to eliminate those threats.

And while it's not necessarily fair, you need to consider how the players are going to perceive things. In the case of the palace raid, if they at all think that you dispelling the gate with half of the party trapped was capricious or unfair, there's going to be a secondary suspicion that you did it *because* they bypassed the guards and whatnot and you are forcing them to fight them because those were the encounters you had planned for the session. This may absolutely not be true, and you were fine with them bypassing the fights, and the dispel was just a logical thing for the spell caster to do at the time, but from the players perspective this can look like you are forcing fights and not allowing them to use clever plans to do things.

Unfortunately, for the players, perception can be reality. Only thing I can suggest to avoid this perception is to provide absolutely clear information about every single pro and con of any plan the players come up with. Don't do it as a means to discourage them from doing so (this will appear as you railroading them into a more straightforward approach), but as a means to help them come up with the "best plan possible". Yeah, it takes a bit of mental gyration as the GM to do this, but it's really important. You need to also act as their "game mechanic advocate" when they do things like this. Help them with their crazy plans. It may seem counterintuitive, but it will go a long way towards table unity.

Some think you are calling them stupid and lash out accordingly. Some think you are trying to railroad them. Some of them resent being told what to do and go out of their way to do the opposite. And some people just enjoy a tactical challenge and like being allowed to make mistakes. I know I fall into the latter category, I would much rather fail under my own merits than succeed because the DM took pity on me.

There is also a broader question about whether or not it really is appropriate or better for the game for the GM to hold the player's hands. I have had a lot of people online tell me that I am overstepping my bounds by trying to help my players too much, and it is certainly possible that the players will grow bored of a game that lacks real risk of failure or fail to learn a lesson if the GM always steps in to show them the right path.

There's a difference between "helping" the players after the fact by bending the rules to make something they do succeed, or a failure to be less painful, or whatever and "helping" the players plan their actions by informing them of the rules and how they apply to what they're trying to do, so that they don't make a mistake in planning. Allow them to make mistakes in terms of tactics, but if there's an actual game rule or action that they may not have thought of, but that will make their plan fail, tell them.

You say that there is a differance between tactical mistakes and rules misunderstandings, and I fully agree.
Then you say that rules mistakes are the GMs fault, but tactical mistakes are the players. While I don't think its that black and white, I mostly agree.

But then you say this is my fault in this case, even though it is clearly a tactical mistake and has nothing to do with anyone misunderstanding the rules.

What am I missing here?

I'm using the term "tactical" to be about planning for physical objects/opponents/actions in the game. If, for example, their plan is to gain entrance to the throne room, then attack the royals, and then gate out using a scroll, a tactical mistake would be turning left when the throne room is to the right. You don't tell them "if you go to the left, you wont find the throne room" because (assuming they don't have a map or something), they would have no reason to know this. A tactical mistake is thinking "surely this sewer drain will take us right into the throne room", when it wont. Or even, opening a door that has a bunch of guards behind it, who will sound an alarm. They don't know that room has guards in it. They don't know that opening it will result in an alarm being sounded. You as the GM do not have to warn them about these things (although I might actually question why they think the sewer would take them to the throne room, but that's just me).

Rules based mistakes are when the players are unaware of how the game rules/mechanics will apply to any given situation. So if the player running a character with a zero bluff skill says "I'm going to try to bluff my way past the guards", your response as the GM should be "Um. You don't have a bluff skill, so odds are you wont succeed". A rules mistake is thinking that he can jump over a wall, if the rules and whatever applicable skills say he can't. The GMs job is to tell players when they think their characters can do things in the game that they actually can't (or have a very low chance of success). It's also the GMs job to tell them the game mechanic consequences for attempting and failing such things "if you try to jump the wall and fail, the rules say you take x damage, are prone for a round, etc" or "if you try and fail to use bluff on the guards they will be aware of this and treat you as an enemy and will likely attempt to arrest/detain you".

And yes, in this scenario, I consider the lack of considering the possibility that the gate could be dispelled to be a game mechanic/rule mistake, not a tactical mistake. They clearly believed that they could use the scroll to escape after sneaking/bluffing their way to the throne room. They clearly believed that they could get the entire party out of the palace using this gate scroll so as to not have to actually fight all the guards in the palace. The tactics they were using were sound. They were clearly unware (or didn't consider) the possibility that a spell caster with a dispel could trap half the party in the palace. That's where you should have stepped up and told them "if you use the gate scroll right now, while there's a spell caster around, it could be dispelled and trap some of the party in the room".

If they continue with the action anyway, that's now on them. But if you stay silent, whether it's fair or not to you, they will view it as you tricking them. Yes. In a perfect world you shouldn't have to do this. But given the circumstances, I'd highly recommend you start doing this.

And again, make a clear distinction between warnings designed to help them improve their chances, and warnings that will be perceived as you contriving things to force them into actions you want them to do. It's a tough balance to play.

Although I do kind of resent the idea that the GM is responsible for acting as the players memory. The GM has a lot going on, a lot more than any player, and it isn't terribly fair.

It is also enabling bad behavior on the player's part, as I have already said the vast majority of these mistakes are caused by not paying attention during the other player's discussing the plan or the DM narrating the description.

Yeah. It's not perfect. And I don't think you should need to be the players entire memory. But reminding them of key plot points and cluing them in on possible pitfalls of actions they are planning to take, doesn't take much time, and will save a lot of drama.

And yeah, I think implementing some sort of SoI method may help focus players a bit.

I think in this case though it was a weird case of me trying to tell the players "Just do your best and I promise nothing bad will happen to you" and the players finding different excuses to justify not wanting to do their best and instead take the lazy path; at first stating that they didn't want to press on because they were scared of danger, and then responding to lack of danger by simply walking in and grabbing the loot and suiciding, both result in them not having to put any thought into combat despite telling me that balanced tactical combats were what they were looking for in the game.

Yeah. Give an inch, they take a mile. There are other GM techniques for avoiding or at least minimizing PC death that don't require completely changing the death rules to some sort of respawn thing. I would personally avoid respawn. It feels way too video-gamey.

It's weird though, the player who is the most risk averse and most likely to throw a fit if he loses, is also the player who is the biggest proponent of games that are predominantly made up of balanced tactical combats.

And last night I had a conversation with him about how he always plays video games on the highest difficulty because "its not worth my time if I am not going to do it 'right'".

And that's the interesting balance question. Do you put in "tough fights", that include a chance of TPK, and then put in a respawn/safety system to prevent character death, or do you put in less risky fights, with almost zero chance of TPK, but if they die, they die? I tend towards the later rather than the former. Again, there are tons of ways to make fights interesting and challenging without there actually being much risk of character death at all. Just make them engaging. Give them levels of interaction. Obstacles they have to overcome. But each individual thing they are encountering does not have to have much of a chance to cause actual death.

I think there can be a bit of self fulfilling prophesy bit going on here. If you play a game where the risk of death is high, but have removed/eliminated the penalty of death, the players are more likely to take ever more extreme risks for minimal advantage (or just "because"), since they believe there's little or no penalty. They are gaming the system. I think you are running into this, in spades, in your game.

On the flip side, in my game, I have a sort of unwritten rule that I will never kill a character off due to just a single bad roll. They have to have made a decision, fully knowing the risks involved, and even then often have second or third chances to change what they are doing before it's likely to result in a real death. A series of bad rolls in combat could kill them, of course, but that's extremely rare, and also often requires that there be no other character action to save the character that is "in danger". That's not to say that there aren't risks. And if they do make really poor decisions, and I warn them, and they still make that decision, they can absolutely die. But I think that because I run things this way, the players have learned to avoid bad decisions. They think through what they are doing, and make sure that they find ways to succeed that don't put a character so far out on a limb that there's not much hope of survival.

Players will change the way they play based on how you run the game. And yes, if you give them opportunities to game the system, they absolutely will. The trick is to prevent that while still providing fun and stimulating game play. And IMO, you get more of that via well planned out scenarios, with interesting NPCs and environments, and significant challenges, than by putting them into overly dangerous fights every week.

Because I fully agree the GM should tell the players what their characters know, but whether or not the GM should tell them what it means is a bit shakier.

For example, if the players find footprints at the murder scene that were made by size 13 cowboy boots, and then finds a pair of mud-streaked size 13 cowboy boots at his borther-in-laws house, is the DM also obliged to tell them that they put the clues together and deduce the brother-in-law is the murderer?

No. You don't have to draw the conclusion for them. But make sure that all the information is there for them to put the pieces together. And be aware that sometimes something what you think is an "obvious clue" may not be to the players (I've yet to run into any GM who's run for any length of time who hasn't encountered this). If the players are clearly struggling, and you think they have the clues to put it together, don't hesitate to have the characters make some sort of lore or intelligence roll to put the pieces together.

In the case of your example, if the scenario absolutely hinges on the PCs at some point observing both the tracks and that they match the boots at the brother in laws house, and that this is what will cause them to go to his cabin in the woods to find him, only to discover <insert story finale here>, and you have described the prints, and told them the size, and then have described the boots, and their size, and that there is mud on them, and they still haven't put this together, then yeah... you need to just nudge them along. Keep the adventure moving. If it's completely stalled, and they aren't getting it, and they literally have every bit of information possible for them to gather that should have informed them of what to do, and they just.. aren't, you must consider that your clues aren't as clear as you thought, or the players are forgetting something (which falls back into the "people actually living this world will pay more attention than players just playing those characters").

Now, if they have failed to follow up on something, or failed to look somewhere, or talk to someone you told them about, then you remind them that they saw <clue to follow up on> or still haven't talked to <witness> or still haven't looked at <location>. There's a balance to be had between requiring that the players figure out where to go and what to do and reminding them of things they have already done and where they've not yet gone.

Which is why I think its kind of weird that you are surmising that the "scripted" nature of my scenario is causing the problems when, if anything, it is my lack of structure and fear of being labelled a railroad that is causing the issues.

I spoke about this earlier. The fact that you wrote up the guards and planned out the number of balanced encounters for them to make their way into the palace, and they bypassed it, but you then dispelled the gate, forcing them to have to fight through those encounter objects anyway can be seen as you railroading the players into those encounters. Yes, I get that you were trying to avoid this, but whether it was a subconscious act on your part or totally fair decision made in the moment, the decision to have the caster dispel the gate creates a situation where the players now have to deal with the encounters you initially prepared for them to fight. The perception in the players minds may be that this is what you are doing (that or "punishing" them for bypassing the encounters). Even if it's honestly not.

To be perfectly honest. In that situation, even if I had a caster who could dispel the gate, I would not have had him do so. The players came up with a plan. They executed the plan. Let them succeed. Decide that the caster just didn't think to dispel the gate in the heat of the moment (NPCs can make mistakes too, right?). Again, you as the GM have to decide which direction you're going to go with this. Either plan to have the NPC cast dispel in that situation and warn the players that if they use gate while the caster is still up and running, this is something that will happen. Or just don't have it happen. Pick one of those two.

Fair or not, doing it the way you did makes the players think you are just waiting for them to make a minor mistake, licking your chops, and then springing some nasty thing on them when it inevitably happens. And that will create an antagonistic environment between you and the players. I don't know if this is what's happening (again, I'm not speaking to your players, just you), but from what you have reported, it does make me suspect this may be at least a factor in all of this. I'm not saying to just allow ridiculous plans to succeed, but if they come up with a plan, and you work with them on the plan (you're the game-mechanic advocate, remember?), then they should reasonably expect that, at least from a "what the games rules allow for", the plan should succeed. If they get used to the idea that your role in this is to advise them about game rules interpretations both during the planning and execution phases of their play, then they will see this in a positive and not a negative light.

And hey. You can also act as an advisor in the more strategic/tactical aspects of play. That's a bit trickier though. I'd focus on the game mechanic bits first, since that's what appears to be an area where you table is struggling.

[Talakeal]

Yeah. That's a toughie. Most of those games have a "you get X amount of time each day to play" scheme (and you have to run the full session in one block of time). Can't they play on their own time? Or are they addicted to so many different games that they don't have enough hours in the day to play a full session and get their time in? Dunno. I would do everything in my power to require that players commit to the time for the game session. No playing other games on phones.

My understanding is that most of them work on an addiction model where you have to log in periodically or miss out on rewards. I know World of Warcraft started doing it like that, with daily and weekly content that puts you permanently behind if you don't log in to do it in the required time. I also think a lot of the mobile games have periods where other players can attack you if you don't log on to defend yourself in response, but I don't play them so I can't say for sure.

snip

I think at this point we are going to have to agree to disagree on a lot of stuff rather than going back and forth line by line.

Its funny, in the past I have said I always feel like the GM is like a coach, not actually part of the team and not actually an opponent, but someone who has to at times fill both the roles because they want the players to succeed, and I have always been told that this is a terrible viewpoint and it is absolutely not my responsibility to get involved in the player's affairs or help them get better.

I have also had a ton of people tell me that the GM's job is not to beat the players, but give them the opportunity to beat themselves. Enough rope to hang themselves with as it were.


My issues are that my players don't communicate with one another, and that they freeze up when they suffer a setback.

I don't think pulling my punches will help with either of those things; it might sidestep them in the short term, but I think in the long term it will make it worse.

You and I also seem to fundamentally disagree with what a tactical game means; to me it means going back and force countering one another's strategies until someone makes a mistake and the other side capitalizes on it; that's typically how chess or tabletop wargames go.

I don't see how just sitting back and letting the players win is really tactical. And, imo, the deck is already stacked so heavily in the PCs favor that their win percentage is higher than any real-life sports team or military or even Marvel superhero, I just don't see how stepping in and protecting them from the few setbacks they do suffer really improves the narrative, in my experience its the failures that actually take things in new and interesting directions.

You also keep saying that the characters are in the world and know what's going on better than the player's do, but doesn't that also apply to the NPCs? It really hurts my verisimilitude when the NPCs aren't allowed to use the abilities at their disposal because it would disrupt the PC's power fantasy, and it really makes me think that people expect campaign worlds to run like Idiocracy, where the person of average intelligence manages to take over the world because everyone else is so stupid in comparison.

[gbaji]

Its funny, in the past I have said I always feel like the GM is like a coach, not actually part of the team and not actually an opponent, but someone who has to at times fill both the roles because they want the players to succeed, and I have always been told that this is a terrible viewpoint and it is absolutely not my responsibility to get involved in the player's affairs or help them get better.

I have also had a ton of people tell me that the GM's job is not to beat the players, but give them the opportunity to beat themselves. Enough rope to hang themselves with as it were.

Sure. But I think the underlying issue here is that maybe you still think that, using one method or the other, your "job" is to "beat the players". It's not. Yes. You allow players to beat themselves, but you give them every opportunity to avoid it by informing them ahead of time (as I've suggested). That way, when/if they beat themselves, they literally have no one to blame but themselves. I can only glean bits of information from what you post, but from what I've read, it does sound like you are somewhat setting them up for failure (whether directly or indirectly), such that when those failures occur, they are angry at you.

If this is behavior you don't like, then you can do things to prevent it.

My issues are that my players don't communicate with one another, and that they freeze up when they suffer a setback.

I don't think pulling my punches will help with either of those things; it might sidestep them in the short term, but I think in the long term it will make it worse.

I'm not suggesting you "pull your punches". In fact, pulling the punches (via your death/respawn method) is the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that you provide them with warnings/suggestions ahead of time, so they have every opportunity to avoid the failure conditions, so most of the time you don't have to in the first place. And on the rare occasions when the hammer falls, they know it was expected and they chose to ignore the warnings, and did something dumb anyway.

There are a couple different broad approaches to GMing. You can run an "open world", where everything is just out there, and anything could be encountered at any given time. With this approach, it's entirely possible for your entry level characters to stumble upon a high level threat, and just get wiped out. If you are playing this style, then you either allow characters to just die at a high rate, or you provide warnings of some sort that what they are getting themselves into is too tough for them. Contriving rules to avoid the consequences if/when they encounter such things is always going to be problematic, if for no other reason than it's teaching them to regularly "punch above their level".

The alternative is playing a "plotted adventure" world. I read a thread on this forum some time ago, where someone linked to a site where the author made a big deal about "don't plan plots" or some such (was in one of the railroading threads). I actually disagree. Write plots. Don't write scripts. If we assume that the GM is writing "level appropriate" adventures for the players to run their characters through (which is supported by a vast amount of canned scenario packs out there), then the GM does write a "plot". There's something going on (or multiple somethings), and the PCs are going to somehow be exposed to hooks that they can follow to get involved in those plots. What they choose to do, and how they progress is (or should be) up to them. The point is that you have balanced this one set of things to the PCs capabilities, such that it's already entirely possible (probable even) that, barring terrible decisions along the way, they should succeed.

I've played in (and run in) both styles. I tend to prefer the latter one though, since it allows me to create different levels of things for different PCs to do in my game world, ensures that PCs are appropriately challenged at all times, yet allows for minimal likelihood of abject failure on the part of the players, and (not surprisingly) greater enjoyment by all at the table. That's not to say that I don't put lots of things in my world that aren't threats outside the PCs current weight class. But they are "things over there", that are generally not the focus of the current adventure. And yeah, if they decide to go off and attack those things, they will get appropriately slapped down. But at any given time, I will be presenting them with "things to do" that are interactive and level appropriate (and tell some sort of decent story along the way).

More on this concept later. I'm just introducing it as a means to explain where I'm coming from.

You and I also seem to fundamentally disagree with what a tactical game means; to me it means going back and force countering one another's strategies until someone makes a mistake and the other side capitalizes on it; that's typically how chess or tabletop wargames go.

I don't see how just sitting back and letting the players win is really tactical. And, imo, the deck is already stacked so heavily in the PCs favor that their win percentage is higher than any real-life sports team or military or even Marvel superhero, I just don't see how stepping in and protecting them from the few setbacks they do suffer really improves the narrative, in my experience its the failures that actually take things in new and interesting directions.

Yeah. That's the funny thing though. Unless you are playing in a somewhat vicious open world game, that's kinda exactly what you are doing. It sounds counter intuitive, but on some level, unless you are just hitting the players with stuff they can't deal with, and you are "writing adventures" at all, then the adventures you are writing are the story of how the PCs defeat the bad guys. Yup. You are including within your own "plot" the methods (or potential methods) of the NPCs downfall.

That doesn't mean you have your NPCs just fall on their own swords or something, but at the end of the day, the moment you wrote the BBEG and his minions, and his current evil plan, you also wrote the method(s) by which the PCs will thwart that plan. And yes, this seems "wrong" somehow. And some GMs will decry this as "gimme gaming" or something. But the alternative is PCs who struggle to have any success at all (again, you can run games this way btw). The players will constantly be complaining that "we can never win". Because, at the end of the day, you are the GM. You control the NPCs and their actions. If you want the players to lose, they will always lose. It can never be you playing tactically against them, because the deck is 100% stacked in your favor. So yes, on some level, you are writing a "plot" of how the player characters defeat the NPCs you have created.

The adventure exists because the PCs have something that allows them to "win". Otherwise, they can't, so you don't write the adventure. The fellowship wont form unless the One Ring just happens to appear, giving them the opportunity to defeat Sauron, right? You write your adventures the same way, even if you aren't aware that's what you are actually doing. The PCs are able to take out the local band of slavers because they stumble upon an escaped slave, and decide to help, and now have information that allows them to sneak up on the bad guys and take them out. The PCs are able to topple that evil baron because they encountered his former second in command, who has decided he's just too evil and is engaged in evil things which must be stopped, and provides them with key information and assistance that allows them to win. The PCs find the journal of sir whatshisname, felled by the random Orc chieftan in a raid 20 years ago who the party just defeated, and said journal details the location of a long lost artifact, which if found and activated properly is the sole weakness of the super powerful evil overlord currently spreading death and destruction on the lands.

Know what each of these adventure hooks has in common? Both a method to get the PCs into the adventure *and* a means to succeed. You can also add in motivation and scene setting, and a ton of other steps in between as you wish. But you are always writing with an eye towards "this evil thing will be stopped at some point, and I'll put something in at some point for that to happen". Obviously, how much prior information and scene setting you have is going to be dependent on how persistent the world is. In a one shot, you just present the hook(s) and go. In a long term persistent world, you may introduce the slavers as a thing, or the baron as a thing, or the evil overlord as a thing, all in the background that exist, but up until you are ready (and your PCs potentially powerful enough to handle it) to launch said adventure, you don't write much more than the background stuff.

The most difficult thing to do as a GM is balance those things so that they feel natural to the players. But if you can do it, the world will feel real. It'll be full of "things to do", but behind the scenes, you have crafted the specific "in focus" things to be as doable for the PCs and enjoyable for the players as possible. This does not at all preclude the players coming up with specific things they want to do. And yes, as the GM I will advise them in terms of relative power level and difficulty. If they decide to go charging after the evil overlord, but don't have any means to actually do it, I'll tell them. I have no problem at all telling my players if something they want to do is above their weight class. And yes, there are tons of things in my game that are outside their capabilities. But if they think they can do something, and want to do it, and I've determined it's within their power level to accomplish, I'll write the details for them to deal with. Obviously, in a player initiated adventure, I'm not putting in any special hooks or any special powers, knowledge, whatever for them to use. They have to figure it out themselves.

But to make this style of gaming work, you absolutely have to be very open with conversations with your players. Be willing to provide OOC stuff. Let them know if something they are planning is a mistake. Heck. I'd do this even in a more open world as well (more or less the same, I'm just not writing any scenarios but always letting the players chart the course). Failing to do this as a GM will just result in constant failure and death by the PCs. And IME, this does not make for a happy table.

You also keep saying that the characters are in the world and know what's going on better than the player's do, but doesn't that also apply to the NPCs? It really hurts my verisimilitude when the NPCs aren't allowed to use the abilities at their disposal because it would disrupt the PC's power fantasy, and it really makes me think that people expect campaign worlds to run like Idiocracy, where the person of average intelligence manages to take over the world because everyone else is so stupid in comparison.

There's a huge range in between. Absolutely play your NPCs intelligently. But be willing to allow them to lose. I know. It's one of the hardest things to do as a GM. But you have to do this for your table to be successful. You have to be very careful to maintain a distinction between "what would the NPCs reasonably know and be able to do", and what you know as the GM would be very effective for them to do.

And yeah, this sometimes (often!) also plays into the "warn the players about dumb decisions" bit. One of the trickiest things to deal with in a game world is that (in most game systems at least) offense is much stronger than defense. That band of thieves that your party can wipe the floor with if you know where there hideout is and assault it, can absolutely just plain murder the PCs in their sleep if given a chance. So a lot of PC success is that the NPCs don't see them coming, or know who they are, until it's "too late". It's a pretty common theme. But be *extremely* aware of what will happen if that isn't the case, and warn the heck out of your players to avoid such things. I've found that the number one game killer is when the PCs have done something that should reasonably put them in the crosshairs of some powerful enemy, and it's pretty much impossible to rationalize why said enemy wouldn't come after them, using methods that they aren't likely to be able to defend against.

You need to be proactive and try to prevent things like this coming up in the first place. Yeah. Give the players rope to hang themselves with (just to bring this around full circle), but also give them every warning possible that they are stringing that rope out there in the first place. Waiting until they make a mistake, then hitting them with the (quite reasonable) consequences, and then telling them after the fact that "you shouldn't have done X, because they can do Y in response", while perfectly reasonable and rational, isn't going to make for a happy table.

At our current table, we more or less shift GMing duties between myself and another player. Many years ago, there was a third guy who would GM occasionally, but I (as the lead GM) basically had to remove him because he kept doing this. He would put the PCs into situations where there was effectively not only no victory condition, but no way to avoid lethal retaliation. The entire table was incredibly unhappy about this, because he was basically having NPCs come after random PCs and attempting to kill them (and succeeding in a couple cases), because he'd violated the basic rules of "bad guys shouldn't know who the good guys are until late in the adventure". He would just have the bad guys "discover" who the PCs were, early on, and have them escape. He had a bad habit of *never* allowing his head bad guys to be killed. They always escaped. I think he thought how wonderful having recurring villains would be, but didn't really think through the realistic consequences of this. This was annoying at first, but when he introduced a bad guy who was a master assassin/sorcerer, it became a problem because we had no ability to ever track him down, and he could basically attack "known" PCs at whim, always when they were most vulnerable, and with predictable outcomes.

It was incredibly not a good thing to do at the table. No one was happy with this. There was no challenge. It was "ok. Who's character got attacked and maybe killed this week". It got worse when, on a major adventure to defeat this super powerful world ending bad guy, who should happen to have for some reason hitched his wagon to the new top bad guy? The same freaking assassin/sorcerer who'd been randomly targeting and killing folks in the past (and whom we'd never found, basically had to have the survivors go into hiding to avoid him). Worse, we "encountered him" by having the GM basically decide that he happened to be in the port city we'd chosen to land in (out of a dozen choices, and picking one that was actually on the far side of the large sub-continent from the BBEG, but nearby some other city where we'd hoped to get some information/assistance), saw us getting off the ship (cause apparently he had nothing better to do than happen to be sitting at this one port city watching the docks all day on the off chance people he knew appeared), and had him set up an assassination attempt against us, leaving his calling card (but of course, escaping himself).

I actually had to pull the GM aside and ask him how on earth he expected the party to succeed. The bad guy we were after was monumentally powerful. Like could scry and die pretty much anyone from a thousand miles away if he knows who to target. And he's just ensured that the second in command to this guy knows exactly who we are and that we've arrived, and seemed to be able to dog us and snipe at us at will (but we could never ever spot him or do more than survive him). This goes to your "NPCs should take rational actions" bit. Why wouldn't the assassin guy just tell his boss about us, who we are, where we are, etc? No reason at all, right? And having provided that information, there's basically zero chance of success. We can't possibly travel the several hundreds of miles we have to go to get to him, if he already knows who we are and can attack us remotely at whim. It would be exactly like Sauron knowing Frodo has the ring, what he looks like, and where he is, except that in LotR, Sauron didn't actually have the ability to just kill people magically from where he was and had to work through minions. Not this guy, and not in this game system. And in this case, we did have a powerful artifact thingie that would make him vulnerable to attack and make it possible to defeat him, but we had to get close to him and activate it. That was "the plan". Having a highly placed minion make us while we're hundreds of miles away made "the plan" somewhat difficult to enact. And yes, when I talked to him, he actually had no clue how we were supposed to succeed. He'd just put the guy there because he wanted to challenge us, but hadn't really though through that having done that, he would have to logically follow up with the main bad guy knowing we were coming and targeting us directly himself. What's funny is that he acknowledged, once I pointed it out, that of course that's exactly what his NPCs were going to do with this information. He just couldn't see that this was effectively an automatic TPK, created because he'd just arbitrarily decided to put this one guy in this one location and have him spot us. He was just playing his NPCs as individuals doing what he thought they should do with the abilities they had. Which, seems perfectly logical, but when you're the GM you can make this effectively into an automatic lose condition for the players. Which is exactly what he had (somewhat inadvertently) done.

The lesson? You, as the GM, have to avoid putting the PCs into this sort of situation. Or, if you do, you have to have "a plan" for success for them. Something designed to counter what you have done. Because yeah, while it might seem perfectly reasonable to you for your NPCs to do stuff like this, unless it's the result of a monumental failure on the part of the players (which in my example it absolutely was not), then it's absolutely going to make the players feel like they have no chance and are just subject to the whims of the GM. And even if you do put something in there to "save them", if it feels too much like "other random thing saving us from first random thing", the players are going to feel helpless and powerless in the game. And worse (as in the case with this specific GM), if you combine that with a GMing style of "if the NPCs can do it, they will", it's just plain deadly to the PCs. One of my players actually took the time to assemble a list of this GM's adventures, showing that every single one was either a loss for the party, or at best a very costly victory (with multiple character deaths). Again, that's fun for one shot scenarios (this GM was great at CoC or Paranoia adventures where we don't really care if our characters die horrific/heroic/foolish deaths), but not at all for this particular gaming table where it's supposed to be more of a heroic high fantasy game with an expectation of PC advancement and growth over time.

From long years (decades) of experience, I've learned what sort of things to just not have happen in my game. Again, unless your table really really wants to play super gritty, with death around every corner. And if that's the case, then let it happen (don't "save" them via a contrivance either). I don't get the feeling that's what your table wants though, so my suggestion is to avoid things like this. Obviously, I'm presenting somewhat extreme examples here, but the basic theme is what you need to address. Anytime the players are heading into a "no-win" situation, you need to head them off. Don't tell them they can't do things, and don't adjust the results to allow them to succeed anyway, but warn them of the likely results ahead of time, and give them the opportunity to make different choices to avoid those situations. The palace example is a classic case of this. There was no reason not to warn them about casting the gate spell. This is not about PC choices, it's about implementation of those choices. So, if there's some obvious flaw to a plan, especially one that's going to result in a major failure of their plan, just tell them.

What would that have really cost you? The PCs succeed in their plan and escape. Maybe the demon caster guy comes back in some other fashion in a later adventure. Heck. Even if you didn't warn them ahead of time, you could have him later show up and tell them that they only succeeded because he let them escape. He's a demon, right? Maybe once they killed of its "masters", he decided that fighting to the death was silly, since the PCs have freed him up to seek other opportunities or something. Not every fight needs to be a fight to the death. There are a number of different ways you could have handled this. But the way you did effectively stepped on the Players sense of accomplishment and otherwise gained nothing at all from a game play perspective. If you're going to contrive something in response, why not contrive something that makes the players feel better about themselves *and* allows for future gaming scenarios instead of doggedly dragging out the current encounter?

So yeah. You do just have to let the players win (assuming reasonable actions/choices). As I said earlier, it's actually somewhat the point of running these sorts of adventures in the first place. Pulling victory away from them at the last moment is never going to go over well IMO. Just let them win, and move on to the next thing.

[Talakeal]

snip

Again, I agree with 99% of what you are say, to the point where a lot of it just gets a sort of a "well duh" from me, but then I am still left scratching my head at the confusion.

Sure. But I think the underlying issue here is that maybe you still think that, using one method or the other, your "job" is to "beat the players". It's not. Yes. You allow players to beat themselves, but you give them every opportunity to avoid it by informing them ahead of time (as I've suggested). That way, when/if they beat themselves, they literally have no one to blame but themselves. I can only glean bits of information from what you post, but from what I've read, it does sound like you are somewhat setting them up for failure (whether directly or indirectly), such that when those failures occur, they are angry at you.

I am setting them up to exist in a plausible world which posses a reasonable challenge. This means that they sometimes make mistakes or get unlucky, and there are realistic consequences for it. My players only fail 2-7% of the time, depending on the metrics used (as I do a lot of play-testing, I actually keep records about these sort of things), so I wouldn't really call that setting them up to fail.


The idea that players can be in fair situations where they have no one to blame but themselves seems naive, as many times I have encountered players who will intentionally do the opposite of my OOC advice because they don't like being told what to do and / or believe I am intentionally trying to trick them really dispels that idea for me.

(via your death/respawn method)

I still think its weird that people refer to it as either respawning or teleportation.

If the players said "We run away." and I responded with "Ok, you fall back and regroup at your base camp three hours later" nobody would think that.

But when I explicitly tell them "In this game, HP represent morale rather than health, and once you run out you are forced to flee" everyone refers to it as dying and respawning or casting town portal.

I assume that's because people have a fixed image in their minds of what HP represent?

At our current table, we more or less shift GMing duties between myself and another player. Many years ago, there was a third guy who would GM occasionally, but I (as the lead GM) basically had to remove him because he kept doing this. He would put the PCs into situations where there was effectively not only no victory condition, but no way to avoid lethal retaliation. The entire table was incredibly unhappy about this, because he was basically having NPCs come after random PCs and attempting to kill them (and succeeding in a couple cases), because he'd violated the basic rules of "bad guys shouldn't know who the good guys are until late in the adventure". He would just have the bad guys "discover" who the PCs were, early on, and have them escape. He had a bad habit of *never* allowing his head bad guys to be killed. They always escaped. I think he thought how wonderful having recurring villains would be, but didn't really think through the realistic consequences of this. This was annoying at first, but when he introduced a bad guy who was a master assassin/sorcerer, it became a problem because we had no ability to ever track him down, and he could basically attack "known" PCs at whim, always when they were most vulnerable, and with predictable outcomes.

It was incredibly not a good thing to do at the table. No one was happy with this. There was no challenge. It was "ok. Who's character got attacked and maybe killed this week". It got worse when, on a major adventure to defeat this super powerful world ending bad guy, who should happen to have for some reason hitched his wagon to the new top bad guy? The same freaking assassin/sorcerer who'd been randomly targeting and killing folks in the past (and whom we'd never found, basically had to have the survivors go into hiding to avoid him). Worse, we "encountered him" by having the GM basically decide that he happened to be in the port city we'd chosen to land in (out of a dozen choices, and picking one that was actually on the far side of the large sub-continent from the BBEG, but nearby some other city where we'd hoped to get some information/assistance), saw us getting off the ship (cause apparently he had nothing better to do than happen to be sitting at this one port city watching the docks all day on the off chance people he knew appeared), and had him set up an assassination attempt against us, leaving his calling card (but of course, escaping himself).

I actually had to pull the GM aside and ask him how on earth he expected the party to succeed. The bad guy we were after was monumentally powerful. Like could scry and die pretty much anyone from a thousand miles away if he knows who to target. And he's just ensured that the second in command to this guy knows exactly who we are and that we've arrived, and seemed to be able to dog us and snipe at us at will (but we could never ever spot him or do more than survive him). This goes to your "NPCs should take rational actions" bit. Why wouldn't the assassin guy just tell his boss about us, who we are, where we are, etc? No reason at all, right? And having provided that information, there's basically zero chance of success. We can't possibly travel the several hundreds of miles we have to go to get to him, if he already knows who we are and can attack us remotely at whim. It would be exactly like Sauron knowing Frodo has the ring, what he looks like, and where he is, except that in LotR, Sauron didn't actually have the ability to just kill people magically from where he was and had to work through minions. Not this guy, and not in this game system. And in this case, we did have a powerful artifact thingie that would make him vulnerable to attack and make it possible to defeat him, but we had to get close to him and activate it. That was "the plan". Having a highly placed minion make us while we're hundreds of miles away made "the plan" somewhat difficult to enact. And yes, when I talked to him, he actually had no clue how we were supposed to succeed. He'd just put the guy there because he wanted to challenge us, but hadn't really though through that having done that, he would have to logically follow up with the main bad guy knowing we were coming and targeting us directly himself. What's funny is that he acknowledged, once I pointed it out, that of course that's exactly what his NPCs were going to do with this information. He just couldn't see that this was effectively an automatic TPK, created because he'd just arbitrarily decided to put this one guy in this one location and have him spot us. He was just playing his NPCs as individuals doing what he thought they should do with the abilities they had. Which, seems perfectly logical, but when you're the GM you can make this effectively into an automatic lose condition for the players. Which is exactly what he had (somewhat inadvertently) done.

I had a similar experience a few years ago.

I was playing in an urban gang. My character was a retired knight with a tragic backstory and a lot of PTSD, sort of a cross between Roland in The Gunslinger and Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. I was expecting the game to be something like The Equalizer.

Anyway, I was being threatened by a gang of high level rogues and told to work for them or else.

After long deliberation, I decided I had the following options:

Leave town (which would wreck the campaign)
Work with them (Which would be totally out of character for me)
Refuse to work with them (which would be a death sentence)
Attack them (which would also be a death sentence).
Run to the town guard and beg for help (which would be totally out of character for me)

In the end, I chose to attack them, as I figured that I had a better shot against a gang of rogues in a straight fight instead of waiting for them to ambush me. And I died. End of campaign.

The thing is, the GM wasn't actually planning on playing them intelligently if I refused, instead they would attack me one at a time and put me in easily escapable traps, but by attacking them in their lair I sort of forced his hand.

So, if there's some obvious flaw to a plan, especially one that's going to result in a major failure of their plan, just tell them.

The thing is, it wouldn't have been a "major failure". It would have been a setback which they would have had to fight / think their way out of, and it would have been both more interesting and more challenging than a flawless run.

Especially in this situation where they had two characters in the party who could undo their mistake. Which they eventually did, and then proceeded to drive off the demon in a matter of minutes and then gate out.

The problem isn't that they have setbacks, or that the setbacks are insurmountable, its that when they suffer a setback they prefer to wallow in their failure and waste a couple of hours real time rather than pushing on using one of the myriad methods at their disposal.

Honestly, a lot of my problems kind of come from this weird inability for my players to find a middle ground in resource usage; they either spend hours debating using a single spell, or they rush in headlong and throw caution to a wind. The no death mechanic was a similar issue, when death was on the table they refused to take any risks at all, but when it was off the table they refused to put any care into their plans whatsoever.

What would that have really cost you? The PCs succeed in their plan and escape. Maybe the demon caster guy comes back in some other fashion in a later adventure. Heck. Even if you didn't warn them ahead of time, you could have him later show up and tell them that they only succeeded because he let them escape. He's a demon, right? Maybe once they killed of its "masters", he decided that fighting to the death was silly, since the PCs have freed him up to seek other opportunities or something. Not every fight needs to be a fight to the death. There are a number of different ways you could have handled this. But the way you did effectively stepped on the Players sense of accomplishment and otherwise gained nothing at all from a game play perspective. If you're going to contrive something in response, why not contrive something that makes the players feel better about themselves *and* allows for future gaming scenarios instead of doggedly dragging out the current encounter?

Directly, the only thing I have to lose is my time (which ended up getting wasted anyway). I set aside my whole Saturday to game, and if the players skip most of the scenario that doesn't end up happening. If the players were more proactive or less concerned with balance, I could have improved something or just spent the evening RPing, but these guys aren't really for that type of game.

Now indirectly; the players could realize that my NPCs are playing dumb to let them win and then come to rely on that in the future and / or mock me about it, doing it too often could snowball into a Monty Haul game, or.... shoot I came up with half a dozen different worst case scenarios in the care between reading your post and getting to my PC, but I can only remember these two. I will get back to you if they come to me.


As for using it as a future hook, yeah that is good advice. In fact, this actually WAS a future hook, as that is pretty much what happened the last time they encountered said demon. But now we are two sessions from the end of the campaign, and I am trying to tie up dangling plot threads rather than create new ones.

So yeah. You do just have to let the players win (assuming reasonable actions/choices). As I said earlier, it's actually somewhat the point of running these sorts of adventures in the first place. Pulling victory away from them at the last moment is never going to go over well IMO. Just let them win, and move on to the next thing.

And again, your conclusion leaves me puzzled.

You spend the whole post describing nuance and different options, and then end with a weird absolute that just seems totally out there to anything in either my RL experiance or anything I have ever read online or in a rule-book.

I think a more rational statement would be "You should set up scenarios where the players have a reasonable chance of success," but even that isn't an absolute depending on the scope of the task, the nature of the failure, or the type of game you are playing.

And of course, it depends on what "reasonable chance of success" means. Its also funny, if I ask my players directly, they say that they should have a 10-20% against a "balanced" encounter, but in reality they win ~98% of them but still complain bitterly in the remaining 2 about how they got screwed.

[gbaji]

I am setting them up to exist in a plausible world which posses a reasonable challenge. This means that they sometimes make mistakes or get unlucky, and there are realistic consequences for it. My players only fail 2-7% of the time, depending on the metrics used (as I do a lot of play-testing, I actually keep records about these sort of things), so I wouldn't really call that setting them up to fail.

is that failure rate the rate at which they fail to achieve an objective, or the rate at which they die (Total or partial party wipe out)? If it's the former, that's fine. The latter, maybe not so much.

I still think its weird that people refer to it as either respawning or teleportation.

If the players said "We run away." and I responded with "Ok, you fall back and regroup at your base camp three hours later" nobody would think that.

But when I explicitly tell them "In this game, HP represent morale rather than health, and once you run out you are forced to flee" everyone refers to it as dying and respawning or casting town portal.

I assume that's because people have a fixed image in their minds of what HP represent?

No. It's because the mechanism you are using is pretty much like respawning. The game system has movement rules, which normally would govern whether the party could travel "home/to-town/whatever", and these rules also apply while in combat. So, normally, if you lose all your HPs, even if you decide this means you lose morale and flee, you'd have to actually physically be able to move to where you are fleeing to. What happens if they lose all their HPs while at the top of a tower, with solid walls around them, and guards between them and any exits? Do they still "flee"?

I had a similar experience a few years ago.

I was playing in an urban gang. My character was a retired knight with a tragic backstory and a lot of PTSD, sort of a cross between Roland in The Gunslinger and Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. I was expecting the game to be something like The Equalizer.

Anyway, I was being threatened by a gang of high level rogues and told to work for them or else.

After long deliberation, I decided I had the following options:

Leave town (which would wreck the campaign)
Work with them (Which would be totally out of character for me)
Refuse to work with them (which would be a death sentence)
Attack them (which would also be a death sentence).
Run to the town guard and beg for help (which would be totally out of character for me)

In the end, I chose to attack them, as I figured that I had a better shot against a gang of rogues in a straight fight instead of waiting for them to ambush me. And I died. End of campaign.

The thing is, the GM wasn't actually planning on playing them intelligently if I refused, instead they would attack me one at a time and put me in easily escapable traps, but by attacking them in their lair I sort of forced his hand.

Yup. Exactly. The GM has to be consistent with how they play NPCs. They are either intelligent and act on their knowledge and abilities, or they are not. Unless you *always* play the NPCs as morons, then any case where you put the PCs into a "no-win" situation is death for the scenario. It's one of the things that is very easy to accidentally find yourself trapped by as a GM, and the unfortunate only "solution" is to do what this GM was planning on doing (having the NPCs just not act intelligently on the information about your character). Which, of course, breaks immersion for the players, but also results in significant inconsistent behavior by the GM (and obvious at that). It also breaks player trust in the GM a bit, or they come to expect this "special behavior" all the time, and get upset when it doesn't happen.


It's just "bad" all the way around, and can be avoided. But the GM has to realize when something is heading that direction and make a choice to prevent it from happening. And yes, sometimes stuff like this will happen anyway. But if that is the result of player choices and actions, knowing full well the consequences, then that's just fine. The GM needs to avoid putting PCs into this situation where they have no realistic way to avoid it. And that does mean sometimes massaging your scenario to make this work out.

Suppose a side point to this is "never let your players know how much you are really saving their bacon in the background".

The thing is, it wouldn't have been a "major failure". It would have been a setback which they would have had to fight / think their way out of, and it would have been both more interesting and more challenging than a flawless run.

Especially in this situation where they had two characters in the party who could undo their mistake. Which they eventually did, and then proceeded to drive off the demon in a matter of minutes and then gate out.

The problem isn't that they have setbacks, or that the setbacks are insurmountable, its that when they suffer a setback they prefer to wallow in their failure and waste a couple of hours real time rather than pushing on using one of the myriad methods at their disposal.

Then yeah. I'm totally baffled by the behavior. If they had this chronomage guy who could just undo something, why was it a big deal. Seems like you've given them a pretty powerful mistake cleaning mechanism (no clue how that works, but seems like a near "I win" button for the players), and they're still having issues?

Directly, the only thing I have to lose is my time (which ended up getting wasted anyway). I set aside my whole Saturday to game, and if the players skip most of the scenario that doesn't end up happening. If the players were more proactive or less concerned with balance, I could have improved something or just spent the evening RPing, but these guys aren't really for that type of game.

Now indirectly; the players could realize that my NPCs are playing dumb to let them win and then come to rely on that in the future and / or mock me about it, doing it too often could snowball into a Monty Haul game, or.... shoot I came up with half a dozen different worst case scenarios in the care between reading your post and getting to my PC, but I can only remember these two. I will get back to you if they come to me.

To the first point: Always have more stuff ready to go. That way you don't feel obligated to run something you've already written. I don't like to write too far ahead (cause players will always throw a wrinkle into things), but it's a good idea to come to each session with two sessions worth of material ready to go. That way, if they decide to totally bypass something you wrote, you have something else to do.

The second point: If they didn't even realize the caster could close the gate on them, I doubt they'd have thought the NPC was "playing dumb". And if it does occur to them that "hey! Why didn't that guy dismiss the gate on us?", that's when you do the "gee. That's an interesting question...", and you begin writing the additional plot/scheme of the demon caster and just why he maybe was just fine with the party taking out his former masters, and now that he's free he has <insert fiendish plot here>, and it's all thanks to the PCs freeing him from his previous obligations". Feel free to have him twirl his moustache as well.

As for using it as a future hook, yeah that is good advice. In fact, this actually WAS a future hook, as that is pretty much what happened the last time they encountered said demon. But now we are two sessions from the end of the campaign, and I am trying to tie up dangling plot threads rather than create new ones.

Fair enough. I tend to play primarily in a very long running persistent game world, so literally any time I can take advantage of a dangling thread, oh... it's totally on. Those are exactly the things that players tend to love. When a side character from X years ago, shows up again, in a completely different situation and they're like "Hey. Didn't we defeat your former boss back then?". And it's not even like this guy's necessarily holding a grudge (so doesn't break the "problem" case I spoke of earlier). He's just now a free agent or something.

And again, your conclusion leaves me puzzled.

You spend the whole post describing nuance and different options, and then end with a weird absolute that just seems totally out there to anything in either my RL experiance or anything I have ever read online or in a rule-book.

My statement came with conditionals: "(assuming reasonable actions/choices)". If the players have made reasonable choices, and their characters have succeeded in the actions associated with those choices, then yeah, they should win. They certainly can lose (bad rolls, random stuff, etc), but if the plan is solid and they executed it correctly, they should succeed. If the plan was doomed to failure, and they should have had some way to know this, then you should warn them of this. My "reasonable actions/choices" statement includes the possibility that they simply don't know all the information, are making incorrect assumptions, and thus are going to make a "mistake". Again though, I make a clear distinction between game mechanic stuff and internal character knowledge stuff.

If the mistake is due to not remembering some detail, or not remembering some game rule or ability/effect/whatever, you should warn them. If the mistake is that they never bothered to ask the bad guy if his butler would be at home when they decide to sneak in, utterly relying on no-one being there, and they don't bother to use any abilities/spells to determine if someone is in the home, then yeah, getting caught breaking in by the butler is their fault and you're under no obligation to save them from that. But if they "forgot" that the butler has an amulet that protects him from detection spells, which they were told he had, and they used a detection spell specifically because they were worried the butler might be there, the wrong answer is to say "you don't detect anyone". The correct answer is to remind them (or give them a roll to remember) that "You don't detect anyone, but you also know that the butler wont show up on that spell".

See the difference?

[Talakeal]

is that failure rate the rate at which they fail to achieve an objective, or the rate at which they die (Total or partial party wipe out)? If it's the former, that's fine. The latter, maybe not so much.

Its the rate at which they either lose a fight or fail to meet their objective.

Honestly, actual TPKs are super rare in my group, and normally only happen the first time we play a new game and nobody really has a firm grasp on the rules or what our characters can do.

Or when its intentional I guess, either the DM doesn't want to play anymore and wipes us out rather than just saying he is tired of the game or one of the players suicides the group because they don't like being told no, but those don't happen so much now that we are older.

No. It's because the mechanism you are using is pretty much like respawning. The game system has movement rules, which normally would govern whether the party could travel "home/to-town/whatever", and these rules also apply while in combat. So, normally, if you lose all your HPs, even if you decide this means you lose morale and flee, you'd have to actually physically be able to move to where you are fleeing to. What happens if they lose all their HPs while at the top of a tower, with solid walls around them, and guards between them and any exits? Do they still "flee"?

In that case the players would be captured. Although, I guess in my player's mind that can't happen because we had a "gentleman's agreement that there can be no consequences at all for defeat".

But again, its kind of weird to me that you are saying I should let the players plan to escape using the gate scroll succeed even if it doesn't make sense in world, but I can't just say they manage to escape/evade their pursuers without a dice roll after being forced to retreat from a fight.

Yup. Exactly. The GM has to be consistent with how they play NPCs. They are either intelligent and act on their knowledge and abilities, or they are not. Unless you *always* play the NPCs as morons, then any case where you put the PCs into a "no-win" situation is death for the scenario. It's one of the things that is very easy to accidentally find yourself trapped by as a GM, and the unfortunate only "solution" is to do what this GM was planning on doing (having the NPCs just not act intelligently on the information about your character). Which, of course, breaks immersion for the players, but also results in significant inconsistent behavior by the GM (and obvious at that). It also breaks player trust in the GM a bit, or they come to expect this "special behavior" all the time, and get upset when it doesn't happen.


It's just "bad" all the way around, and can be avoided. But the GM has to realize when something is heading that direction and make a choice to prevent it from happening. And yes, sometimes stuff like this will happen anyway. But if that is the result of player choices and actions, knowing full well the consequences, then that's just fine. The GM needs to avoid putting PCs into this situation where they have no realistic way to avoid it. And that does mean sometimes massaging your scenario to make this work out.

Suppose a side point to this is "never let your players know how much you are really saving their bacon in the background".

True.

Again, its kind of one of the annoyances with my group, they want me to play my enemies at the appropriate intelligence level so that they can experience "balanced tactical combat" but don't extend me the same courtesy, so we get weird situations where my enemies act really dumb when the PCs just charge in but really smart when the PCs try and bypass a fight.

Basically, none of us can ever anticipate how smart the others are going to be.

Then yeah. I'm totally baffled by the behavior. If they had this chronomage guy who could just undo something, why was it a big deal. Seems like you've given them a pretty powerful mistake cleaning mechanism (no clue how that works, but seems like a near "I win" button for the players), and they're still having issues?

Baffles me as well.

As best as I can tell they don't like being told "no" and will pout or withdraw into self pity when their first approach doesn't work.

They also have a weird feast or famine approach to resource expenditure.

[Satinavian]

Its funny, in the past I have said I always feel like the GM is like a coach, not actually part of the team and not actually an opponent, but someone who has to at times fill both the roles because they want the players to succeed, and I have always been told that this is a terrible viewpoint and it is absolutely not my responsibility to get involved in the player's affairs or help them get better.

I have also had a ton of people tell me that the GM's job is not to beat the players, but give them the opportunity to beat themselves. Enough rope to hang themselves with as it were.

Your job is not to beat your players, sure.

But your job is also not to educate your players. You are not their teacher. At least they don't see you as one, you don't have the authority you would need or the respect. And your players don't think they have to learn something from you.

This is why the "coach" metaphor is horrible in your case.

I mean, given the situation, how could you try to be a coach ?

- Enforce your view of good gaming : This won't work because you lack authority
- Give them advice and directions : This won't work because they don't think you have better knowledge than them or that they lack anything
- Show them that their way is lacking and leads to failure : This won't work because they will perceive it as you abusing your GM authority to sabotage them if they don't do what you want.


Just forget about being a coach. You won't ever succeed and only produce arguments.

[gbaji]

Yeah. I was kinda bypassing the whole "coach" bit. I agree that your job isn't to teach the players how to be better players. However, I will throw in the counter that if you want them to learn to be better players over time, you do have to run your games in a consistent manner. They will learn the "rules" and how to work well within them over time as a result. Well. At least in theory. And hey. Just to bring this thread back to the beginning, they may just learn that working together generates more positive outcomes than not. Again though, you have to be consistent with your rulings, otherwise they will not learn what works and what doesn't, and will just kinda flail around doing random/dumb stuff.

I will repeat, however, that I'm a firm believer in warning the players when they are about to do something monumentally foolish. Again, they can do what they want with that warning, but it's important to do so. As I've said before, a lot of the time, these mistakes are due to the players having an imperfect view or memory of the environment they are playing their characters in. You, as the GM have (at least in theory) a perfect view of such things. This isn't "coaching" so much as "pre-arbitrating". You know ahead of time what the results of a really poor decision on their part will be. You know that "if they do X, I will rule Y as a result". There's no harm in telling them the "Y" consequence ahead of time, and letting them factor that in to their decision making.

Again. If that decision (or lack of a good decision) falls into the "they are forgetting something they should know" category. If they have no way of knowing that door number one leads to the ancient red dragon and door number two leads to a vault full of treasure, then you can't/shouldn't warn them or tell them which door they should open. Doing so will appear as though you are "guiding" their characters through the adventure and will not be appreciated (even if they measurably benefit as a result). Now, if they were told which door had which thing behind it and just plain forget, that's a whole different story.