… and I find myself quite frustrated over it.
We have a semi-regular party and this is our fourth campaign, but they’re chaotic and make it difficult to DM for. (Sorry, rant incoming)
I put a lot of plot threads throughout the campaign. The party would find an important NPC that has been assassinated… But rather than investigating it, they opted to ‘not touch the crime scene’ and move on. They found a dwarven girl who was cursed, but decided to drop her off at a tavern. Lastly they found an unidentified plot related magic item but chose not to identify it until the last ~2 sessions, when it was largely irrelevant.
In the end, some of the players said they didn’t understand the story and wanted more narrative. They noted they were aware of some of the plot hooks but chose not to engage with them, but were also frustrated by suffering the consequences of ignoring quests/issues/NPCs.
One party member would frequently start big fights, and at one point walked up to the BBEG’S fort (noticing a massive row of archers, I made the danger very clear), he knocked on the front door and announced he wanted to fight.
The hail of arrows left two party members very injured and two on death saving throws, which led the party to be upset with me for an unbalanced encounter. (It wasn’t supposed to be an encounter)
He turned another low level encounter into a near TPK by yelling into a goblin cave as he wished to fight ‘all’ of the goblins at once.
The rogue couldn’t decide who he wanted to be and kept changing up his personality. At one point he was wearing heavy armor (without proficiency) and using a weapon he didn’t have proficiency in. He wanted to subclass into spellcasting, but also wanted to use a heavy crossbow. (He had 12 weapons he collected, and would randomly use a different one). He would often charge the enemy, and never got to use his sneak attacks bonus until 75% through the campaign.
When he very nearly died from these choices (probably around 4-5 near deaths, thanks to his party rescuing him each time), he proudly announced his next character would be the same rolled character, but with a 2 at the end of his name.
I had one player message me afterwards that it was the worst campaign so far, and wanted more roleplaying and narrative. Immediately followed by another player very excited for the next campaign.
I am at a loss.
On one hand, the party obviously enjoys the chaos but they also dislike the consequences and lack of narrative their chaos brings. What would you do?
What would you do?
- set clearer goals for the party (instead of letting them to set their own goals, allow them to choose their actions according to the current situation)
- introduce less plot hooks, but work more on their possible variations (assume that each of your plot hooks will be skipped/misunderstood and prepare the solution for such an occurrence)
- GUMSHOE rule: never give players the scene to search for the clues, give them straightforward clues and have them find the way to decipher them
- let players suffer the consequences of their idiotic actions, but don’t apply TPK - goblins kick the crap out of the party, but rather than die, the characters wake up in a cage, or slave pens
“But that’s not how D&D works!” I hear you scream.
Yes, you’re right. But that’s exactly how we prevented disasters from the times of Arenson & Gygax if the situation called for it. By bending the rules, thus introducing some order to the chaos that is the table like yours.
Best of luck, it’s still salvageable!
These are all great points, thanks!
It’s difficult to say with only a brief summary, but it sounds like you and your party all want different things from the game. I’m going to guess that you play with people who you were friends with before d&d, and not play d&d with people you have become friends with.
You clearly seem to have a murder hobo. You also have a player who sounds like he’s more interested in hanging out with the group than he is playing d&d. There’s a lot of advice on forums about how to deal with these types of players, and your threshold for what you’ll put up with is entirely up to you.
I encourage and tolerate a lot of silly shit, but if one of my players handed the same character sheet of their character that had just died with a 2 after it, I would direct them to the nearest LFG post and be on my merry way. That’s a dealbreaker for me.
The others don’t necessarily sound like a problem, but i think they want a little more railroad and guidance, while you want them to take initiative and make decisions. Neither of these are wrong, but they aren’t always compatible.
From our perspective as DMs, its easy to set the scene and say “what do you want to do”, then react because we know the whole tavern, encounter, story, world, everything and when we don’t, we’ll make it up. For a lot of players though, leaving things open ended like that feels very limiting. They don’t know what you are or aren’t prepared for and don’t want to be that guy. They like you, and if this murder is going to be important later they don’t want to fuck up the crime scene until they have permission.
As a side note, when I wanted my party to participate in solving a murder, I framed one of them for it. Also, the Gumshoe advice is great for running mysteries. They get the clue that tells them what’s next automatically and have to search for more information to gain context so the game doesn’t stall on one bad roll.
Ultimately, if you’re dissatisfied with the game, you should have a conversation with your players before preparing anything further. I would say something like this:
“Hey muderhobo, I know you like fighting tons of shit, so I promise I will give you challenging combat in the campaign, but I need you to exercise some common sense and let me bring it to you instead going off to find it on your own. You other guy, are you sure you want to play? You dont seem to be interested and we can just hang out sometimes without playing if you want to skip the sessions. The rest of you, I can be more direct in giving you options and plot hooks, what kinds of encounters would interest you most? I’m going to start preparing a new campaign, I’m thinking about (themes and flavor of next story) as being important, can you start preparing characters that would have a reason to engage with a story like that? While I begin preparing, would anyone like to run any one shots in between?”
These are all excellent points, thank you. I have a lot to think about but also discuss with the players.
I think you’d benefit from the Three Clue Rule.
For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues.
Why three? Because the PCs will probably miss the first; ignore the second; and misinterpret the third before making some incredible leap of logic that gets them where you wanted them to go all along.
Sound familiar?
As for the players, they might be doing stupid shit because they’re bored, or because they’re trolling. If it’s the former, some less subtle quest giving should get them back on track. If it’s the latter, you might want to stop playing with them.
I think its a bit of both. Some of the story beats were a little predictable (or at least seemed to be), but there are definitely times where I think (some of) the players are trying to actively prod around the rules and limits of the world.
As I kind of mentioned before, after we had finished the campaign, they were aware of some of the plot hooks but didn’t want to engage with some of them, which was a frustrating answer.
Why didn’t they want to engage with them? Seems like you need a little more group discussion about what kinds of plot hooks they’d be interested in engaging in.
They didn’t all greatly clarify on this point. One of them noted he did want to engage but didn’t want to lead the party, and another said he wanted to get to combat faster, as he was a combat only focused character. The others didn’t really say.
I did note in session 0 about what they may expect, but maybe I should talked on that point more.
So this is a two-pronged problem; Firstly, your players and their lack of initiative and desire for exploration, and Secondly, your choices as a DM for your players.
If your players are upset about the engagement of your story narrative while actively avoiding said narrative, I’m not sure what else they expect. A good way to circumvent situations like these is to prepare for such possibilities. For example, if you put a dead body as a plot hook for your party, have an investigator meet the party beforehand. He can then join/tail the party after asking if they’ll help him investigate a lost person. Regardless of their answer, you can still include him when the situation comes up to give your players more opportunity to invest in the plot hook. For magic items, maybe a mystic or attuner can sense the magic in the item.
It sounds like the problem is that you’re giving the players too much agency. Giving them a little less choice will help not only you hook the players into the plot, but also your players with their perceived lack of narrative. You said you’ve done three other sessions with these players. Did they just drastically change their play style in this campaign or did you change this campaign from the others in some way?
DM’ing is difficult. Aside from story- and world-building, you also have to accommodate for the playstyles of each of your players. This may be a controversial statement, but your world and story can be subpar if you keep your players engaged. The most important job as the DM is to make sure everyone is having fun. That should always take priority.
They’ve always been a little chaotic, but this campaign was definitely extra. Ironically some of the past campaigns were similar, if not more open.
Regardless I have a lot of good points to consider here, thanks!
There are some great points in here and some stuff I need to think about.
I think I am going to have a talk with some of the players and see if we can’t find some decent middle ground for future games.
The way to find that middle ground by default is to do three phases to your worldbuilding and campaign prep.
edit: I wrote up so much that I decided to make it into its own post!
