Mired in the Quicksand: Being a Player when Nothing Happens

[ArtfulShrapnel]

It sounds to me that the fault doesn't lie so much on the GMs shoulders but on the players. Surely if you guys had given across a good idea of what you want to do then he would of acted on it, no?

This is a good point, but as I'd mentioned before, we have given him some strong "we want to do this" pushes. We started trying to investigate these missing supers, and the corruption in the police department. They have led to dead ends because they weren't part of his original plans. When the GM says "you find nothing" in response to every question, it tends to dead-end an investigation pretty fast. Our options to collect information was to start torturing people at that point, which would be especially illogical in the case of the police since (a) they're police and (b) we don't even know if there is overall corruption yet. That and we aren't really "torture-y" heroes. Yet.

After talking to him, he basically didn't know what to do, so he had the trail end because he didn't have anything prepared. I've explained the concept of "three quest monté" to him (the quest is ALWAYS along the route the players take) and he seems to realize how to handle things better in the future.


As should be obvious by now, I talked to him the other night. He genuinely seems to want to change. We're going to try again with a strong "we want to do this" statement in game and see what happens. I've referred him to some good podcasts and guides. Uncle Figgy's Guide to Good GMing, the "Good Gamemastering" and "Bad Gamemastering" episodes of RPPR, and the "Fight Me or Give Me a Quest" episode. I've also referred him to the "How to run a good investigative game" thread on these forums, which had some great advice in it.

[Dogfish]

Ah, I guess my little tirade was more denial on my part. Denial that another GM could put players through the same ordeal as I had playing in a 4th ed. D&D game. My apologies; I understand fully how annoying it is when you're trying to fight your way out of rail-roading.

[ArtfulShrapnel]

Ah, I guess my little tirade was more denial on my part. Denial that another GM could put players through the same ordeal as I had playing in a 4th ed. D&D game. My apologies; I understand fully how annoying it is when you're trying to fight your way out of rail-roading.

Completely understood. Unfortunately railroading is far more common than one might hope.

[robotkarateman]

Having only had this happen to me once, I can't comment with any depth on solutions. I can, however, tell you that in that one instance, our spontaneous group solution of paranoia and delusion definitely salvaged the fun for a few of us.

The basic plot of the game was that we were all mid-level nobles in a kingdom that being politically destroyed by another and we uncovered the plot by literally stumbling onto a body. That was the first and only death for two gaming sessions. The rest was political intrigue.

But in the third session, one of the NPCs made an off-handed remark about a noble woman who was involved in the plot, calling her a witch. He meant it as a generic insult, but one of the other players latched onto it and started looking for evidence that she really was a witch. Some of the other players caught on, and soon our characters were convinced that they weren't just saving the kingdom from political upheaval, but from the Vast Eternal Forces of Darkness.

The GM got frustrated when, instead of weedling information out of NPCs about the political crap, we started torturing them and trying to get them to reveal their blackened corrupt souls so we could dispatch them in the name of goodness. But after a while, he stopped trying to debate us into behaving the way he thought we should and just accepted that our characters were convinced Evil was afoot. The fact that we weren't actively trying to ruin his story line helped. In fact, we continued chasing the conspiracy he had developed, we just changed our characters motivations for doing so and were a lot more over-the-top in our actions. The game plot moved on in spite, or because, of the handful of us who went off the rails, and even the players who weren't "acting up" still had fun trying to keep us in line.

[ShotgunSurgeon]

I was running into this same issue during a current D&D campaign I was playing in. It was a city-based game, which the DM was using as an excuse to parade "entertaining" NPCs in front of us. Luckily, the players helped push him into more action, but it still made for a rough few sessions.

It's largely an issue of pacing and preparation.

1) The GM doesn't have a good idea of how to pace the game. Most of the time, the GM thinks things are going to take longer to play out than they actually will.

2) As a result of the bad pacing, the GM doesn't prepare nearly enough. If they don't have good improv skills, this results in the stand-still you described above.

Anywho- hope everything works out for you. Let us know about how the next session goes.

[malyss]

I find I end up preparing a little and still not getting to it all... damn role-playing is getting in the way of my story!

[ArtfulShrapnel]

Just had the a session. Things were better. Not great, but better. We actually got to do things, mostly players arguing with each other and making overly complicated plans. (typical "getting ready to attack a guy" stuff).

The GM  managed to avoid shoving many NPCs in our faces, and we ended the session in a room full of Triads and Yakuza, disguised, when the lights have just gone out. We need to get information out of one of the Yakuza guys, but we also need to make sure that nobody else knows we're involved because our "boss" at the police turns out to be involved with the Yakuza and Triads.

He also handled a bit of a curveball we threw him quite well, the first improvisation I've seen from him. He expected us to attack the mobster at his home, but we decided to wait for him to leave and attack him at a meeting with another gang. (So that if anyone died it could get blamed as gang violence.) He threw together a meeting and a location on the fly that were a bit generic (top floor of an office building, meeting over territory with a rival gang) but certainly not bad.

Overall he's got some work to do in terms of taking command of encounters (as in "hey. We're in rounds now. Everyone shut up and player 1 declare first.") and narrating the results of things. He spent a bit too long conferring with the technopath, such that the rest of us were left to bicker amongst ourselves for 15 solid minutes (!) at one point. And he stopped for 5 or 10 minutes at a time to draw overly elaborate maps for encounters that could easily have been run narratively. (The teleporting ninja trying to sneak through a house that had guards in it. Drawing the map and explaining it took longer than running the encounter.)

He also still doesn't think to ask for feedback after game. (My "endgame" pitch is remakably similar to Ross'. "So. What did you like? What didn't you like? Is there anything you want to see more or less of?") I think he's missing a chance to learn a lot from his first self-written campaign by not inviting input from the people playing in it.

I have faith in him now though. He's shown that he's willing to learn and change, and most of the problems he's having now are a result of being inexperienced and nervous about GMing. Apparently telling him "we're not having fun, you should let the players do something" was a good tactic.

[Dogfish]

Good to hear things changing, sometimes you need to be firm.