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| #1BarkyMar 13, 2015 19:53:53 |
A little story:
Last night in my game, I dropped a lot of clues that there were a number of mind-controlled, murderous men out there, and at least one who was clearly trying not to murder but was being forced to do so against his will. Multiple times, multiple clues, several times repeated. I even tried to make that "good guy" sympathetic by having the party meet his children in an incredibly memorable way, so they would remember to look for "our pappy". I didn't outright tell them "one guy will be a good guy", but I planted so many clues even Scrappy-Doo would figure it out.
Combat came, and the mind-controlled men attacked the party. There was clearly one man who stood behind the rest, clearly trying to resist the spell. I pantomimed out his expressions and hesitation. I said "he's not attacking yet." I intentionally plopped him at the bottom of the initiative. I wanted the players to dispel the effect so he could tell them what's going on, and give them the satisfaction of freeing a good man, and show them they can rescue any other victims of this curse without bloodshed. But I didn't want to railroad them or treat them like idiots. I played the combat like any other combat.
The mage saw the "5th zombie" and killed him with a spell.
Yeah, so much for that.
So, were the players stupid?
Um, no.
See, the thing to remember is this: the players are not YOU, they are THEMSELVES. I wrote clues that were obvious to me, not necessarily to them. They have their own thought processes and goals and problem solving skills. They react to stimuli different than I do. They focus on different things. Don't get mad at the players when they miss your clues. Don't get mad at yourself, either. Just roll with it, and adapt." In the end, this didn't change my story. It may make it a little more bloodthirsty, but in the end, it doesn't really matter. Relax & move on.
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| #2AaronOfBarbariaMar 13, 2015 21:03:08 | Great advice, especially the relax & move on part.
I will say this, however: it is okay for the DM to not try to hint at or provide clues for things, and straight up state what the person interpreting the hint/clue correctly would likely be thinking.
In this example of mind-controlled men and one that is fighting against the control, that could be something like saying "The one at the rear seems like he is fighting against mind control, and for the moment he has the upper hand."
It makes it a lot more plausible for a player to play their character like Sherlock Holmes if you provide them with the deductions their character could be making based on perceivable evidence than if you are only providing the evidence and leaving it up to the player to make the right deductions. |
| #3ChaosmancerMar 13, 2015 23:09:52 | I have to remind myself of this a lot. I don't know what it is about my sunday group, but they never get it. They even know they don't get it. I had one guy's father-in-law almost confront me about how bad a DM I was, becuase I kept spoon feeding my player's information, until he sat in enough sessions to realize they just weren't following the clues. I know I operate with perfect knowledge of the gamespace, and that makes some things painfully obvious to me that my players may never figure out.
Annoys the writer in me though who sees all the missed opportunities. |
| #4FrogReaverMar 13, 2015 23:27:26 |
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| #5BarkyMar 14, 2015 0:02:01 |
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| (Reply to #5)FrogReaver |
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| #7BoldItalicMar 14, 2015 0:17:03 | Rather than waiting for the players to figure it out, you could transfer the problem to their characters. Ask for a Perception or Insight check, and if they succeed, just tell them straight out what you want therm to know. A bit like this:
"You see five men moving to attack you. One of them seems to be reluctant. Roll me a Wisdom(Insight) check to see if you can guess why." "I roll ... 17. Is it enough?" "The one at the back is struggling to overcome some sort of magical mind-control. You can spend an action to roll an Intelligence (Arcana) check if you want to know how to dispel it." "Nah. I'll play to my flaw. I just Fireball the whole group."
It's spoon-feeding them a bit, but after a while they might get used to the idea and start doing it for themselves. |
| #8NoonMar 14, 2015 2:39:31 | Yeah, that was just railroading. You wanted a certain result to occur (one single result). Sure, you didn't use more heavy handed methods of railroading. But that just means you wanted to force a result but you didn't use heavy handed methods.
The further sign it's railroading is that the story DIDN'T change. You will just carefully overlook this and wait until you get the result you do want and you'll accept THAT as your story.
Why not have the story change, due to this?
The best bit here is having said such a bland thing as 'why not have the story change' is how people show what they are in their responce, if it happens to be vitriol toward such a harmless little idea.
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| #9Coredump00Mar 14, 2015 8:25:01 |
Good advice.
OTOH, sometimes the players *are* stupid. (And yes, I have been the 'player' in that sentence before...) |
| #10WanderingBardMar 14, 2015 10:54:04 | I warned the players 15 times about their likely immenent death as they walked into a den of a CR 5 monster as a lvl 3 party. I even explicitly told them they should NOT go in, and one of the players had a master who explicitly told him NOT to mess with Umber Hulks, which I reiterated. But they still went in, then got party wiped. Sometimes people just want to watch the world burn. |
| (Reply to #5)Chaosmancer |
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| (Reply to #7)Ranthalan |
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| #13iserithMar 17, 2015 8:28:10 |
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| (Reply to #13)Ranthalan |
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| #15iserithMar 17, 2015 10:55:20 |
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| #16NoctaemMar 17, 2015 10:56:22 |
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| (Reply to #15)Ranthalan |
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| #18iserithMar 17, 2015 11:50:32 |
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| #19BoldItalicMar 17, 2015 11:55:59 |
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| (Reply to #18)Ranthalan |
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| #21BRJNMar 17, 2015 15:53:27 |
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| #22akaddkMar 17, 2015 15:54:55 | Nope, not buying it. Players are stupid. I know. I'm one of them. |
| #23BarkyMar 17, 2015 18:05:00 |
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| #24iserithMar 17, 2015 18:12:20 |
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| #25iserithMar 17, 2015 18:16:29 |
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| #26iserithMar 17, 2015 18:20:34 |
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| #27PsikerlordMar 18, 2015 4:11:12 | Quite possibly the players didnt care and just killed the 5th guy coz they could, or they didnt have dispel magic handy, or didnt want to take the chance, etc etc etc.
I would have given the players a free Arcana check to understand the hesitant guy at the back was fighting against mind control. Just by observing him, they may have picked up on the tell tale signs/detected an enchantment aura in the air, to give them a tip off.
Even so, it was completely open to the players to just kill the guy regardless. For any number of reasons. |
| #28QwertyAzertyMar 18, 2015 6:00:00 | there a VERY simple test that I love to show to new DM to teach them exactly this : when you create clues, for a simple solution knowing the solution, those clue ALWAYS seem seasier then what they are.
Test 1: I'm giving you 3 number: 2,4,6 You need to find out what rule I used to create this series of number. Anyone who passed grade 1 in elementary school will tell you: "you are adding 2 everytime" If they pass high school they'll tell you that you are doing used the formula: "2n" But those are not MY rule.
Then they are going to try to dig deeper, try to figure out, multiply by 0,4 then put it to the power 5, then a logarithm cubic root, etc.... and go WAY too complex, when the answer was SUPER simple: Growing numbers.
Or those "What I am" question type stuff:
if you eat me you die Poor people have me Rich people need me I am greater then good and worse then the devil.
Who am I?
the answer is simple for me, since I know the answer and those clue seem SUPER simple, but let's see how many post it required untill someone find out the real answer (and when the answer is foudn everyone should say: OOHH make so much sense I could have figured it out myself |
| #29BoldItalicMar 18, 2015 6:44:58 |
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| (Reply to #25)Ranthalan |
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| #31iserithMar 18, 2015 8:40:25 |
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| (Reply to #26)Ranthalan |
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| #33iserithMar 18, 2015 9:11:59 |
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| (Reply to #31)Ranthalan |
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| (Reply to #33)Ranthalan |
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| #36iserithMar 18, 2015 9:23:33 |
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| #37iserithMar 18, 2015 9:32:02 |
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| (Reply to #36)Ranthalan |
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| #39BRJNMar 18, 2015 15:50:49 |
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| #40iserithMar 18, 2015 16:08:17 |
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| #41KarlBMar 19, 2015 9:18:31 | Well, here's the thing:
As a DM, you can present them with all the facts and story elements that you want. You can shower them with clues.
But it's up to the players to play their character's actions as they see fit. And deal with the possible consequences.
Don't force them to do anything as that would be railroading. And railroading is kinda bad. |
| #42RazintarrMar 19, 2015 16:16:26 | Sounds like a problem caused by trying to have your cake and eating it too.
You mentioned you tried to trick the players into thinking some of the mindcontrolled murderers were zombies, so they would attack them without hesitation. You succeeded in that. But that meant they took the othermindcontrolled guy for being a zombie too, so they killed him. But if you gave them too clear indications that it was the mindcontrolled good guy, they might figure out that all of these "zombies" were mindcontrolled victims, and your trick would fail.
What puzzles me is why you set this up so they would kill the attacking mindcontrolled victims, and only give them a chance to save the one resisting the mindcontrol. Are the ones that didn't manage to resist the mindcontrol less worthy of being saved? All they can be blamed for is (maybe) having less willpower (unless they were not murderous because of the mindcontrol, but actually mindcontrolled murderers freed from a prison or the like, that were by nature more inclined to kill).
I think you missed a chance due to this too. Think of the look on their faces if you revealed the "zombie staying behind" looks like the "pappy" they were described, and they realized they were actually in the middle of slaughtering mindcontrolled victims instead of zombies. Oh, how they'd hate the mindcontroller for putting them in that situation.
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| #43bmbollenMar 21, 2015 14:00:21 | LOL.
I love how some people are conflating calling for an ability check as rail-roading.
To the OP's original quandry: you can drop all the clues you want but you can't predict how the player's will interpret them. Always have a back-up scenario ready and just roll with the punches. |
| #44iserithMar 21, 2015 14:22:23 | Ability checks happen when a player describes an action with an uncertain outcome. Calling for an ability check without a player having stated an action of some kind could be seen as railroading to the extent you're telling the player he or she is, in fact, taking an action with an uncertain outcome. |
| #45bmbollenMar 21, 2015 16:35:56 | Like in everything, context matters.
In the encounter where one guy was being dominated and therefore exhibiting signs of being dominated, a DM could ask the wizard or warlock to make an arcana check. If the PC passes his check, he recognizes the signs of magical domination. If he doesn't pass his check, maybe he was sleeping during that lecture at wizard or warlock college. Now if the PC passes the check and the DM will no longer allow that character to attack the dominated NPC, that is most definetely rail-roading.
Now the more preferable situation would be where the player asks the DM if his PC can recognize the affilction affecting the NPC thereby taking the need for a hint away, but many players are new and they approach the game from a video-game inspired viewpoint. If there are no veteran players in the group, then it will probably fall upon the DM to teach them to ajust their mindset and get more creative.
In the case where the player asks if his pc recognizes the effect, a DM would decide whether to ask for an arcana check or not. Now some DMs would say you don't need a check because you've seen the same spell on a creature before. Other DMs would just say you've never encountered this particular spell in either your travels or your training so there's no chance for you to recognize it. Neither approach is wrong, and I tend to feel that there is a line for such automatic recognition or automatic uncertainity (a spell a PC has seen a million times and has used just as much versus an ancient and unspeakably powerful spell concieved in a long-forgotten age).
But isn't an uncertain outcome part of the fun of D&D? After all there is a reason characters roll to attack instead of using a passive offense and a passive defense.
Another issue that using checks helps with is curbing player knowledge. Knowledge and mental ability checks like insight are a good way to differentiate between player knowledge and character knowledge. Not only might a wizard from the DM's world have more knowledge of the symptoms of magical domination than the wizard's player, but by the same token, a veteran player probably knows that fire damage is needed to kill a troll, but his fighter PC may not know that. If that PC was trained in history, maybe that character would have the chance to recall the legend of a troll slayer who used fire to burn the corpse of every troll he killed. |
| #46iserithMar 21, 2015 17:52:01 |
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| #47BarkyMar 21, 2015 18:09:34 |
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| #48Archon007Mar 21, 2015 19:51:12 |
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| #49bmbollenMar 21, 2015 20:28:33 |
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| #50Byakugan01Mar 22, 2015 2:13:23 | Players rarely take hints in the way that you intend them to. Simple reason is you already know the answer and to a large degree they are basing their decisions on what they think of you(the DM) as a person, and by what else has happened to them in their other games. They are getting a bunch of signals from you that have nothing to do with the words coming out of your mouth. It is especially hard with published material cuz then it is impossible to read the DM and you can't tell what hints are informative, which ones are fluff, which ones are diversionary, which ones are warnings etc...
So the basic rule of thumb becomes 'Just assume anything you point out to the PCs and give 'special' meaning to is probably going to get poked with a sword.'
They go shopping and they buy some stuff and nothing happens....But if they go shopping and you point out that a shopkeeper seems untrustworthy or shady...you'll spend the next hour with the PCs trying every skill check in the book, trying to spy on him, trying to find out if he's cheated on his taxes, detecting magic to see if he's really a shapechanged dragon, ANYTHING to figure out if its safe to kill him and take his stuff. |