Heh. Once a friend and I were playing with our DM but without the rest of the group on a solo adventure. The DM had been complaining loud and long about the rest of the group, who were hack-n-slashers, while he wanted to do real role-play like my friend and I liked to do.
So we were given the task of caring for a young boy NPC, escorting him to headquarters or something. We started arguing about how best to protect him, then how best to integrate him into the party, then how best to raise him. The DM let it go, since we were totally into it, getting really heated like we’re the boy’s actual parents, and he was getting the RP he wanted. He came to regret it as we went on for nearly an hour until he threatened to take off XP if we didn’t shut the hell up already, and How Best to Raise the Boy became a running theme in every session for about a year and a half.
Eventually he decided to kill the kid off, and brought in his girlfriend as a new player to do the deed. They spent the entire time passing notes back and forth, and we were railroaded into being responsible for the kid’s death. Fun.
Actually, it seems like there isn’t anyone else in Knoxburg, and only a handful in Tennessee. Doesn’t matter. Post yourself there, and some day your ideal group will come.
Have you thought about switching genres? Maybe to superheroes or something? The advantage of superheroes is that the players can customize their characters to their heart’s content, and all you have to do to defeat the fire blaster is to have a water blaster show up. Or vice versa. And springing unbeatable traps on the characters is a comic book staple. And it’s always fun to present the superhero team with a supervillain team that’s ostensibly at their exact same power level, but the supervillain team is custom designed to take advantage of their vulnerablilities. And the villains grind the team into the dust a couple of times. Of course, the way the heroes eventually win is to stop letting the villains match their strengths against the heroes weaknesses, and instead match the villains weaknesses to the heroes strenghts.
The other problem is that the players don’t seem to have even close to the same goals as players. If everyone wanted a hack and slash then it’s easy to accomodate them, but if one guy wants to solve puzzles and the other guy wants to be a munchkin and the other guy wants to hack and slash then you’ve got a problem. Actually it seems you don’t really have a roleplaying group at all.
If you want someone to be impressed with your skill, you let them choose any card in the deck, as long as it’s the seven of diamonds, but you don’t tell them the last part. You just give them absolute choice, and whatever they choose ends up being the card that you happen to have prepared ahead of time.
Same thing applies to being a DM. Next bar they go into WILL be the one that has the fight sequence in it. The fork in the road they take WILL be the one that leads to the haunted house. Whoever they talk with next WILL be the duke’s disgruntled lycanthropic ex-girlfriend. They can wander anywhere, but wherever they wander, there the plot is. Done subtly, this works wonders.
The second important point, and I’ll restate it, is that the world is dynamic. The bad guys need to have a plan, and you need to have something of a timetable for that plan. It can also include the resistance of other good guys, if you’re feeling adroit, but that’s tricky to pull off well; the basic level is to assume that the villains are going to win, absent action by the PCs. For jokers like your group, the villains needs to have graduated obviousness: start off insidious, but get increasingly overt and awful until the PCs either take the hint or they die. Either option is acceptable. They find the plot or it finds them.
A third point is one that prevented me from teaming up with an excellent DM to write an adventure and try to get it published. I had a lot of fun running a story very loosely based on The Maltese Falcon (briefly: PCs find themselves owners of a powerful magical item, placing them in the center of a lot of political struggles, which is made all the more difficult by the fact that the item is a forgery), and I wanted to write it up with this guy. My philosophy is that an adventure should have some problems that require roleplaying finesse. He disagreed: he said that, to satisfy all gamer types, every adventure should be solveable if the PCs accumulate a big enough pile of bodies, a la Payback or any Sam Peckinpah movie.
I couldn’t write like that; it went too much against my DMing grain. But I suspect he’s right.
Maybe I was being quite clear about it. They’ll not just bypass one section of a ddungeon, or one aspect of a plot. They’ll just ignore the entire game. They don’t really care what happens. They just wander around until they happen to hit upon something amusing. They might literally jump across to the other side of the world, or engage in several hours of tedious gaming the system to find a way to do an amplification of a teleport until they can get there. They’re really unpredictable. Most of the time, they just ignore any plot I create. Even saving the world is not a good enough motivation. Heck, saving themselves is often not enugh of a motivation.
For example, in one game, a player simply decided, out of the blue, he didn’t want to play in the plot. I warned him he was kinda taking himself out of the game, but he didn’t care. I gave him another way to get involved, which was ignored totally. I then “tricked him” (with a ludicrously blatant ruse) into joining the villains. Whom he later betrayed and got into a mess and joined the party and left again and became a security guard ( :dubious: ) then when I got him BACK in the game AGAIN he went berzerk and wrecked half the plot by massacring everything in sight, then suiciding the character. He proceeded to repeat this process with his new character several times over. Granted, he was the worst one, but here’s the point: I don’t want to GM for them. It’s a soul-draining experience. I’ve tried every trick in the book and written a few new ones. I know I’m not the greatest Gm in the world but it’s like they live to make my life hard. There is no part of this which is fun.
Suffice it to say I sincerely hope the fate of the world does NOT depend upon them, unless someone’s holding a good strong leash. I do like superhero stuff. There is, in fact, a superhero game running. For pesonal reasons, I can’t join.
Yeah, I agree: you were being quite clear about it. I mean it. What I hear, as an outside observer, is that your plots tend to be very railroady. When players try to leave the plots you create, you come up with ludicrously blatant ruses to force them back in line, instead of seeing where their interest takes them. No wonder they rebel!
Try the combination of tricks I suggested instead. When possible, put the plot where they are, instead of putting them where the plot is. And have a rough timeline that doesn’t especially care about them: if they spend the entire time gaming the system, then bad things happen. Don’t get apoplectic about it; smile and breathe deep and let the bad things happen. Eventually they’ll see that you’ve unlocked the doors to the cattle car, and maybe they’ll follow the tracks of their own accord.
As long as you lay the blame entirely at their feet and don’t examine how you’re playing, you’ll be pleased at your own innocence, but unhappy with the game.
What’s not being clear here? I’m not GMing. I don’t like GMing, and I don’t want to GM. I don’t even want to like GMing. I did so because other people wanted it.
When I was GMing, I stopped actually making plots a long time ago, which makes it rather hard for me to railroad people with them. Some of these people actively fight being included in the game at all, only to pop up again randomly and mess with things.
This is “they ignore the monsters scratching at the walls of the world entirely and open a common pizza shop” level of randomness. I am not joking either - someone actually did that, and refused to have anything to do with the game. I think he expected me to tell him all about how ordinary his life at the pizza shop was. This is a “they make a nuclear weapon and fire it at the enemies, obliterating all clues and leads” level of play. Yes, I can and have dealt with it. No, I don’t enjoy it. It’s draining and exhausting.
The last two games I GM’d, six years apart, the group went down in flames, blame and pain and I broke off with everyone involved. Because they devolved into wanting to do nothing more than wander in circles until they hit something, then demand loads of treasure for their “efforts”. Nothing I did to try to convince or coerce them back to some semblance of a plot did any good.
That’s pretty much the point where I question why people are playing paper and pencil in a group. If that’s the kind of thing you want to do, go play WoW. Don’t waste my time as GM.
The Pizza Shop thing? Get the fuck out of my house and never come back. You’re either here to be a part of the game, or you’re not here. Got it?
Been there, done that twice. Both of the games that went down in flames. Because they were “heroes” and nothing bad was ever supposed to happen. The game was supposed to be “easy” and cater to their every whim. When horrible bad things happened because of their failure to deal with things, they got angry with me and got personally offensive about the whole thing.
Bad guy got away because you decided to run back to town for 20 days to rest and resupply between taking down his key henchmen and storming his lair? Sorry, tough shit. (whereas the players seemed to think I was deliberately fucking with them.)
Army of Trolls stormed your key ally’s town and killed everyone but him and a handfull of his top people and now he’s no longer your ally? Because you wandered away from a major plot point and didn’t deal with the trolls? Because your wandering took you right past his town and you never warned him? Maybe you’re not the heroes you think you are!
The Bard School that runs the Theater and Inn that you just attempted to kidnap one of their major clients out of managed to thwart your plot and have you arrested because you tried a brute force kidnapping right under their noses? Sorry, I have no sympathy. When you threaten to kill the guy (who was an innocent and a potential source of information, btw) in the common room earlier that same day, they might take it as a personal challenge to protect him from your brutish ways.
So yes, allowing consequences may be the Ideal. But when people lose their ability and interest in actually playing a game, it ceases to work.
In the last session, we went up to a group of obscenely powerful wizard-lords. As in, they’re the best around as a group. And they control a large province. There was a lot of hash, but it boiled down to: we wanted them to do something, they did, with very little persuasion or fuss. There was a huge friggin monster we could fight, and it was wiped out by said wizard lords, since they pretty much out-damaged us by a factor of 100 to 1.
I was kinda hopeful of getting at least one shot in on the monster, but it was intangible. Apparently I do have a weapon which can hit it, I just didn’t know it. But it didn’t matter much.
Why don’t you find another gaming group in your area? Isn’t Knoxburg a college town? There should be tons of them. You’re always complaining about your group, when it seems like there must be plenty of others to try. You should be able to find some decent gamers on meetup.com, or in any college club where geeks congregate.