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That is bad player behavior, but I've seen Railroad GMs handle it well.
"That's not the campaign you agreed to play. That character goes off and does that stuff, but I'm not running it. Sit out today's session and make a character that's part of this campaign."
I've had something along this line happen before, but instead of having to say anything the other players said, "So what is your next character going to be? And hurry up, we wanna play soon."
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I've had something along this line happen before, but instead of having to say anything the other players said, "So what is your next character going to be? And hurry up, we wanna play soon."That is bad player behavior, but I've seen Railroad GMs handle it well.
"That's not the campaign you agreed to play. That character goes off and does that stuff, but I'm not running it. Sit out today's session and make a character that's part of this campaign."
Yep. It's important to remember that when you dick around the GM like that you also dick around the other players too.
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I've never had a prepared adventure survive contact with the PCs. Its why I just get APs to mine ideas.
Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke: "The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle.
Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
That is bad player behavior, but I've seen Railroad GMs handle it well.
"That's not the campaign you agreed to play. That character goes off and does that stuff, but I'm not running it. Sit out today's session and make a character that's part of this campaign."
In general, I don't like splitting the party. Emphasis on the "in general". Twice the work for the DM, half the fun for the players.
So if one guy is doing it for no reason, I run the main group for a bit, turn to the solo guy and say "You encounter nothing". Repeat until he gives up. Remember, the DM sets encounters, not the players.
Also, more groups of players need to occasionally say OOC "Naw, sorry, we dont want that character as part of the party." IC: "Hey Bo'b the Backstabber, thanks but not thanks, we can get along without you."
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I've never had a prepared adventure survive contact with the PCs. Its why I just get APs to mine ideas.
Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke: "The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle.
Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."
Thousands of years of Asian strategy disagrees with this approach, where having the larger plan and being ready for multiple outcomes was drilled into the generals and strategists. It is in Sun Tzu, Cao Cao was a man of forward plans and ambition, seek and ye shall find in these sources.
You think many moves ahead, like in chess and many strategy games.
Those that used many skirmishers like the Mongols particularly had to be ready for what comes next after contact, and after that, and after that. Plan it ahead, with the leaders of the armies or warbands acting with a strategy in mind. Do they keep harassing, do they withdraw, do they push harder. The Mongols were apparently very good at this with their flexibly plans after first contact with the main hostile force. Where they could not be effectively retaliated against due to mobility they could just go through their plan of attack, skirmish, lance, repeat, rout the enemies.
Looking at that quote, I can't fathom why Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke does not have plans in place for victory or defeat.
I wonder if this quote does him justice.
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I've never had a prepared adventure survive contact with the PCs. Its why I just get APs to mine ideas.
Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke: "The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle.
Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."Thousands of years of Asian strategy disagrees with this approach, where having the larger plan and being ready for multiple outcomes was drilled into the generals and strategists. It is in Sun Tzu, Cao Cao was a man of forward plans and ambition, seek and ye shall find in these sources.
You think many moves ahead, like in chess and many strategy games.
Those that used many skirmishers like the Mongols particularly had to be ready for what comes next after contact, and after that, and after that. Plan it ahead, with the leaders of the armies or warbands acting with a strategy in mind. Do they keep harassing, do they withdraw, do they push harder. The Mongols were apparently very good at this with their flexibly plans after first contact with the main hostile force. Where they could not be effectively retaliated against due to mobility they could just go through their plan of attack, skirmish, lance, repeat, rout the enemies.
Most APs don't plan to that extent however. They rely on the 'social contract' theory a bit much, which relies in turn on good communication from the DM.
If a DM sat down and said of say, Skull and Shackles, this game is contingent on you being a pirate, an enemy of authority and a rampaging wolf of the sea type in line with Pirates of the Carribean, for example, I'd have had less issue. Instead the explanation was 'Its a game of pirates!' I went in expecting to be Captain Blood.
I make plans and develop adventures, but I keep things fluid, open and adaptable to change. I also try to avoid ever doing the schroedinger's dungeon situation.
Some people seem to think I dislike railroading, I do.
But I have no problem with the plot train. Like the DMPC situation, things are tools. Players like to ride the plot train until they get invested enough in site they see, or characters they interact with, where they can go and do their own thing.
Prepared adventures don't tend to do this (some from the dungeon days stand out as being different). Prepared adventures tend to keep the PCs in a reactive situation. My current high level group still reacts to problems, but they also create them, or initiate them on their own.
I tend to get around things by developing personalities that react to new stimuli in certain ways based on the resources they have available. It creates reactive situations.
Most prepared adventures don't do this. The most I've seen in most published adventures is 'if blah in room 3 gets killed then...'
And I do have to make one statement, its one about civility.
The players deviating from a set adventure to pursue what entertains them, does not make them 'dicks' no matter how much cash one spends on a pre-packaged adventure.
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GM Thinking: I have statted out a group of thugs in town that the party will have to deal with.
Party: We are done in this town, we are going to leave and head to the mountain area.
*GM erases some words and writes new ones in*
GM Thinking: I have statted out a group of highwaymen that the party will have to deal with.
It's removing the details that aren't critical but have changed and replacing them with ones that match circumstances - as long as they didn't leave to avoid whatever it is, and indeed don't even know it was there to avoid, I really don't see the issue. If getting ambushed by the bandits and finding a letter in their stuff is critical, it doesn't necessarily matter if it happens in towns or in the mountains.
The issue with changing details on the fly is when the players take one of the bandits alive, charm them and interrogate them. Then you have a problem, because you are changing the game on the fly without having considered the consequences and you now run a serious risk of being blindsided by clever questions from the PCs. Questions like why a random group of thugs that shouldn't have known they were coming happen to have a letter that is of vital importance to the PCs.
If you from the start set it up so that this band of thugs was tracking the PCs by bribing locals to inform them of their movements, you could justify them following the PCs into the mountains by the thugs getting told by a gate guard that they left town on X road. You can also set up intentionally undefined areas from which you can draw your "fiat". When you do make adjustments on the fly, it is much easier to do so in a way that is logically consistent with the rest of the story. The thugs could hire a shady tracker type they know that is familiar with the area to follow the PCs and show them a good ambush point for jumping them. This would be one of those undefined areas - a pool of low level schrodinger NPCs that you can give to the thugs when they need certain capabilities and justify as contacts the thugs have made over a period of years. That way, when the PCs ask how these random people with this random letter jumped the PCs in an excellent ambush location despite not being from this area, you have a perfectly reasonable answer that doesn't fall apart with any further investigation by the PCs. If the PCs get to the stage where they start asking about other contacts, you can make it up on the fly, because the default situation is that none of these NPCs have any story significance, so you are very unlikely to dig plot holes for yourself when you say that they sometimes hire a two-bit sorcerer from the slums for whatever reason but they haven't worked with the mage for a while.
It also means that if the PCs take any actions that should reasonably tip them off, you can actually give them pertinent info and let them act on it. Wouldn't it be cool if the party's face was real friendly with the local barkeep, and the barkeep warned his good friend that a shady type was asking questions about them. Wouldn't it be cool if the PCs could do a little investigating and find out that a few people around town were asked about the party. Wouldn't it be cool for the PCs to be able to go and leave town, get followed, and set up a trap of their own to dispatch their would-be-ambushers. This wouldn't be possible if you just wrote down on a sheet: "Party gets ambushed by thugs in alley mountains". It makes the world feel so much more alive.
I could be angry at my players expressing free will and agency, or I could just adapt.
Rolling with the surprises they give me is one of the personal joys of dming for me. One of the reasons I don't think "being put on the spot" is a wholly negative thing.
Be the water my friend... and the dungeons, monsters, traps and obstacles, both knight and bandit and much more.
I could be angry at my players expressing free will and agency, or I could just adapt.
Rolling with the surprises they give me is one of the personal joys of dming for me. One of the reasons I don't think "being put on the spot" is a wholly negative thing.
Be the water my friend... and the dungeons, monsters, traps and obstacles, both knight and bandit and much more.
I think the issue is that when you are "put on the spot" and you don't have a firm idea of the background behind the events you are GMing it is difficult to create an internally consistent story.
Lets have an example: a group of plot relevant bandits ambushing the PCs.
Scenario 1: The bandits do so out of the blue and the GM hasn't put any more forethought into the encounter
Scenario 2: The bandits followed the PCs out of town after some paid informants warned them and they trailed them with the help of a tracker and hustled through the wilderness to get ahead of them for the ambush (the tracker can be one of the thugs with some skill points in Survival).
Now, the ambush will go the same regardless of which of the two it is.
However, here is where it gets unpleasant for the GM.
One of the PCs says "My wolf has Scent can track - where did these bandits come from".
Now, in all likelihood the GM will go "...S***, I completely forgot that was a thing" regardless of the scenario. However, in scenario two the GM can describe the trail leading through the wilderness before leading back to the road they traveled on. Any further investigative actions by the PCs can be handled on the spot because the GM knows what actually happened and just has to reveal it to the PCs at the appropriate time, with a little filling in of minor details. In scenario 2...the GM has to make it up on the spot. If the trail leads back to civilization, there will be implications, like that people would have seen them. If the trail leads back to wilderness, then there should be a place they are staying at, and it raises the question of how they knew to ambush the PCs in the first place. There are consequences no matter the choice, and the GM has to figure out all of those consequences on the fly and avoid explanations that should have been visible to the PCs beforehand. Like the thugs asking the local barkeep for information about the barkeep's good friend the party face.
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I could be angry at my players expressing free will and agency, or I could just adapt.
Rolling with the surprises they give me is one of the personal joys of dming for me. One of the reasons I don't think "being put on the spot" is a wholly negative thing.
Be the water my friend... and the dungeons, monsters, traps and obstacles, both knight and bandit and much more.
I think the issue is that when you are "put on the spot" and you don't have a firm idea of the background behind the events you are GMing it is difficult to create an internally consistent story.
Lets have an example: a group of plot relevant bandits ambushing the PCs.
Scenario 1: The bandits do so out of the blue and the GM hasn't put any more forethought into the encounter
Scenario 2: The bandits followed the PCs out of town after some paid informants warned them and they trailed them with the help of a tracker and hustled through the wilderness to get ahead of them for the ambush (the tracker can be one of the thugs with some skill points in Survival).
Now, the ambush will go the same regardless of which of the two it is.
However, here is where it gets unpleasant for the GM.
One of the PCs says "My wolf has Scent can track - where did these bandits come from".
Now, in all likelihood the GM will go "...S***, I completely forgot that was a thing" regardless of the scenario. However, in scenario two the GM can describe the trail leading through the wilderness before leading back to the road they traveled on. Any further investigative actions by the PCs can be handled on the spot because the GM knows what actually happened and just has to reveal it to the PCs at the appropriate time, with a little filling in of minor details. In scenario 2...the GM has to make it up on the spot. If the trail leads back to civilization, there will be implications, like that people would have seen them. If the trail leads back to wilderness, then there should be a place they are staying...
This. So much this.
The slightest change from an entirely reasonable action can demolish a pre-planned adventure and put the party on an entirely new adventure.
Yes, you can have the planning capabilities of batman, and like Sun Tzu have full knowledge of yourself and players and thus have contingencies written in for everything, but in most cases players, by virtue of being players, step off of the track for them.
This is because that track is invisible, and when its too visible, certain types intentionally don't want to just follow the path set for them.
Let me use an example. Let's say you have an ongoing campaign.
Let's also say the pre-published adventure you want to run says that after rescuing this guy from orcs you accompany him, it turns out that the person in question got the orcs to attack him so you'd accompany him. Lets even say that the orcs were foot soldiers and didn't know what they were doing so speak with dead won't make it obvious.
The entire adventure hinges on them going back home, enjoying a feast, falling unconscious and waking up in his fungeon to deal with the teeth of the adventure. Its a big dungeon crawl, lots of interesting characters, etc.
The players look at the guy, wave their hands and say 'No, man, we have to be in blah by nightfall. We can escort you there, and you can travel home in the daylight.'
Did they intentionally bypass the adventure? No, but they still bypassed it.
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I think part of the problem with this is that the whole adventure relies on the PCs making a certain choice at some apparently non-important junction.
If you make the decision important and relevant to the plot, the PCs are likely to take a course of action that is at least generally conductive to having the adventure play out.
Instead of expecting the PCs to stop for water at a certain island(*cough*S&S*cough*) while they are sailing the high seas as pirates (which could be avoided in half a dozen different ways, including a frigging orison), make it something significant, like the PCs get a piece of information pertaining to a legendary treasure and the information strongly hints at that island holding important information or some artifact that is needed to get to the treasure or whatever. Something that the PCs are likely to go after on their own accord. In other words, if the PCs have little incentive to follow a certain course of action then you run the risk of the PCs not following that course of action. If the plot requires the PCs to do things, then the PCs need a reason to do them.
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The players deviating from a set adventure to pursue what entertains them, does not make them 'dicks' no matter how much cash one spends on a pre-packaged adventure.
Yes it does, if they all agreed on the set adventure.
(Of course, the degree of "deviation" - and how they communicate that deviation - is really what matters here.)
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...I think part of the problem with this is that the whole adventure relies on the PCs making a certain choice at some apparently non-important junction.
If you make the decision important and relevant to the plot, the PCs are likely to take a course of action that is at least generally conductive to having the adventure play out.
Instead of expecting the PCs to stop for water at a certain island(*cough*S&S*cough*) while they are sailing the high seas as pirates (which could be avoided in half a dozen different ways, including a frigging orison), make it something significant, like the PCs get a piece of information pertaining to a legendary treasure and the information strongly hints at that island holding important information or some artifact that is needed to get to the treasure or whatever. Something that the PCs are likely to go after on their own accord. In other words, if the PCs have little incentive to follow a certain course of action then you run the risk of the PCs not following that course of action. If the plot requires the PCs to do things, then the PCs need a reason to do them.
I agree, quite a bit. The problem is prepared adventures tend to make assumptions about their player base. A lot of old Dungeon adventures used to assume wealth as a principle motivator for example.
I generally find as a DM that prepackaged adventures don't fulfill the requirements ever when it comes to being prepared for choices, and my responses to those choices tend to result in the adventure getting irrecoverably changed.
Indeed, if they agreed on the set adventure then they're dicks for deviating from their own decision.
Now if they were invited to bring a character [likely with some guidelines] and sit down and play... that's a whole different ballgame.
Again, the issue here is how it gets presented.
When I presented Undermountain as a kid, I presented it as 'an opportunity to discover the secrets beneath the city of waterdeep!' which the players saw as being fulfilled in finding Skullport and doing Skullport and Underdark related things.
If the presentation doesn't clearly make the point to the players, they can come to totally innocent interpretations (see my Captain Blood thing) that totally go against the intended feel of the adventure.
Yes, a guy who sits down to a game about pirates with his hydrophobic dwarf paladin, crosses his arms and looks at you with a smug look, is likely not being a great guy, but a guy who sits down to a Reign of Winter game with a guy who despises the fey and Baba Yaga (without knowing the adventure is about Baba Yaga) isn't being a 'dick' he just hasn't been properly informed.
Also, if the set adventure you're trying to run is boring, well..
3.0 had just come out. The prospective DM comes to us and explains he's starting a campaign that involves a city in a weird pocket dimension, with kind of a dark overarching feel, sort of like Discworld or Gomenghast but darker and with no levity. We go along with this.
We find out that the entire campaign revolves around us being imprisoned and then us being expected to make very specific (stupid) choices to escape the prison and embark on our adventure of poorly thought out moral dubiousness.
We had two spellcaster types who, deprived of their paraphernalia had trouble staying alive (and were mocked for 'not properly understanding' the campaign), me as the gang member who intended to just lay low for his five year sentence and get out, and a guy who started developing escape plans day one taking advantage of the DM's inability to actually design a prison (who got no sold because 'that's not how you're supposed to escape.')
The DM had a very clear idea in his mind and his preparation on how things were supposed to go, but we (who built characters designed around his guidelines) weren't meeting it because we weren't telepathic.
We started doing crap in the prison to entertain ourselves as we found ourselves trapped there for nine sessions. And each of our attempts to keep ourselves entertain was derided because we 'had to escape the prison because...'
Ultimately the game dissolved with him complaining that we lacked sufficient artistic understanding of the great thing he created, and I took over and ran actually entertaining games for about three years (and was stuck being a DM again, grrr!!!).
Long story short. Like so many other things, its a communication issue.
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See, a guy sitting down in RoW who hates fey and Baba Yaga is perfectly fine - the premise of the game is "Baba Yaga is unapologetically horrible, but if you don't do this then your world is an ice cube. Hating Baba Yaga, Irrisen, and winter witches is completely fine, but pick your fights wisely."
(And frankly, by the time they're done with Book 1, it'd be acceptable for any PC to hate fey. Wintertouched fey are not your friends!)
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Contributor
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See, a guy sitting down in RoW who hates fey and Baba Yaga is perfectly fine - the premise of the game is "Baba Yaga is unapologetically horrible, but if you don't do this then your world is an ice cube. Hating Baba Yaga, Irrisen, and winter witches is completely fine, but pick your fights wisely."
(And frankly, by the time they're done with Book 1, it'd be acceptable for any PC to hate fey. Wintertouched fey are not your friends!)
** spoiler omitted **
Our group has been careful to say only the nicest things about Dear Grandmother. Just in case.
Plus, I have been assured that there will be cookies.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
See, a guy sitting down in RoW who hates fey and Baba Yaga is perfectly fine - the premise of the game is "Baba Yaga is unapologetically horrible, but if you don't do this then your world is an ice cube. Hating Baba Yaga, Irrisen, and winter witches is completely fine, but pick your fights wisely."
(And frankly, by the time they're done with Book 1, it'd be acceptable for any PC to hate fey. Wintertouched fey are not your friends!)
** spoiler omitted **
Our group has been careful to say only the nicest things about Dear Grandmother. Just in case.
Plus, I have been assured that there will be cookies.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
** spoiler omitted **See, a guy sitting down in RoW who hates fey and Baba Yaga is perfectly fine - the premise of the game is "Baba Yaga is unapologetically horrible, but if you don't do this then your world is an ice cube. Hating Baba Yaga, Irrisen, and winter witches is completely fine, but pick your fights wisely."
(And frankly, by the time they're done with Book 1, it'd be acceptable for any PC to hate fey. Wintertouched fey are not your friends!)
** spoiler omitted **
Our group has been careful to say only the nicest things about Dear Grandmother. Just in case.
Plus, I have been assured that there will be cookies.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I could be angry at my players expressing free will and agency, or I could just adapt.
Rolling with the surprises they give me is one of the personal joys of dming for me. One of the reasons I don't think "being put on the spot" is a wholly negative thing.
Be the water my friend... and the dungeons, monsters, traps and obstacles, both knight and bandit and much more.
I think the issue is that when you are "put on the spot" and you don't have a firm idea of the background behind the events you are GMing it is difficult to create an internally consistent story.
Lets have an example: a group of plot relevant bandits ambushing the PCs.
Scenario 1: The bandits do so out of the blue and the GM hasn't put any more forethought into the encounter
Scenario 2: The bandits followed the PCs out of town after some paid informants warned them and they trailed them with the help of a tracker and hustled through the wilderness to get ahead of them for the ambush (the tracker can be one of the thugs with some skill points in Survival).
Now, the ambush will go the same regardless of which of the two it is.
However, here is where it gets unpleasant for the GM.
One of the PCs says "My wolf has Scent can track - where did these bandits come from".
Now, in all likelihood the GM will go "...S***, I completely forgot that was a thing" regardless of the scenario. However, in scenario two the GM can describe the trail leading through the wilderness before leading back to the road they traveled on. Any further investigative actions by the PCs can be handled on the spot because the GM knows what actually happened and just has to reveal it to the PCs at the appropriate time, with a little filling in of minor details. In scenario 2...the GM has to make it up on the spot. If the trail leads back to civilization, there will be implications, like that people would have seen them. If the trail leads back to wilderness, then there should be a place they are staying...
But I know where the bandits come from.
I'm very happy for the players to use scent and track (wish they used it more actually). You can also take them on a bit of a merry-go-round while you put together the base in your mind and make it different to others that came before it (maybe it is old smugglers' caves in a series of ankheg tunnels from the last century. The fertilised soil also means there is limited underground agriculture the bandits have been experimenting in supporting).
By merry-go-round the trail doesn't immediately take them to the base (which you need a minute or two to be ready for), but you promise it is leading somewhere unknown (hook them with their own noses and curiosity). Say it leads to a minor river camp, you find their bedrolls and tucked away packs, then a hill where they survey the area (and often smoke a few local plants), then it gets to the caves, and by then you are ready.
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...I could be angry at my players expressing free will and agency, or I could just adapt.
Rolling with the surprises they give me is one of the personal joys of dming for me. One of the reasons I don't think "being put on the spot" is a wholly negative thing.
Be the water my friend... and the dungeons, monsters, traps and obstacles, both knight and bandit and much more.
I think the issue is that when you are "put on the spot" and you don't have a firm idea of the background behind the events you are GMing it is difficult to create an internally consistent story.
Lets have an example: a group of plot relevant bandits ambushing the PCs.
Scenario 1: The bandits do so out of the blue and the GM hasn't put any more forethought into the encounter
Scenario 2: The bandits followed the PCs out of town after some paid informants warned them and they trailed them with the help of a tracker and hustled through the wilderness to get ahead of them for the ambush (the tracker can be one of the thugs with some skill points in Survival).
Now, the ambush will go the same regardless of which of the two it is.
However, here is where it gets unpleasant for the GM.
One of the PCs says "My wolf has Scent can track - where did these bandits come from".
Now, in all likelihood the GM will go "...S***, I completely forgot that was a thing" regardless of the scenario. However, in scenario two the GM can describe the trail leading through the wilderness before leading back to the road they traveled on. Any further investigative actions by the PCs can be handled on the spot because the GM knows what actually happened and just has to reveal it to the PCs at the appropriate time, with a little filling in of minor details. In scenario 2...the GM has to make it up on the spot. If the trail leads back to civilization, there will be implications, like that people would have seen them. If the trail leads back to wilderness, then there should
I have tremendous respect for people who can either run free-flow adventures and meld to let the PCs go/do whatever they want or else do that much meticulous planning beforehand. I can read the AP, I have a phenomenal mental rule encyclopedia and I can RP the pre-built NPCs well enough, but the moment a player hits on one I'm like "... um, he falls in love with you" or if they are running down the wrong path I'm like "um... one of you roll a wis check - okay was it not a 1? good - you get the idea that maybe you should be doing something else."
fortunately the play group are all long-time friends that roll with the APs, but I'd often be at a complete loss for what to do without the DMPC or whatever questgiver NPC the AP has accompanying the PCs to remind them about what they're supposed to be doing.
I've been meaning to ask: are there any suggestions for how a DM might reorient players "in character" without one of those NPC/DMPCs present? assuming the players MEAN to explore the published adventure, of course, and this isn't blocking their desire to do something else.
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I've been meaning to ask: are there any suggestions for how a DM might reorient players "in character" without one of those NPC/DMPCs present? assuming the players MEAN to explore the published adventure, of course, and this isn't blocking their desire to do something else.
I will generally tell them the events that are happening around them, if they were supposed to be doing something then I will advance the news on that front to reflect that nothing is being done about the thing they are supposed to do.
Ie, players are meant to investigate a new cult that is rumored to be in town, but instead decide to go slay the great wereweasel of the cedarwood. When they get back from the woods (empty-handed, the wereweasel is a myth!) then they notice that a significant portion of people in town are wearing the symbol of Vecna.
Then they remember, "oh yeah! That cult thing. We had better get on it before it spreads some more."
Generally if you can show your players that something bad will happen if they ignore game hooks then they will go where they are meant to.
This is true. As a player nothing demotivates me more than when this is not the case.