Players characters evading direct questions

[gbaji]

Speaking of semantic arguments, Gbaji, I am still really interested in hearing why you say this all stems from a misunderstanding "as most people predicted"?

Because I stated this several times:

Literally, the second and third paragraph from the very first post I made in this thread:

Did the PCs actuallly know that the werewolves were turning residents into fomori in preparation for an attack on the Woods? Or did they only know that residents in their tenement were being attacked and turned? It's really easy sometimes for GMs to get so caught up in the details of the scenario they are running, that they fail to realize that they didn't actuallly tell the players some key bit of information (or didn't make it significant enough for them to remember when it matters later).

The PCs may very well have thought that "bad guys doing bad things to folks in our building" was the main point of what was going on, and not at all thinking in terms of "then they're going to use the folks they transformed to do bad things to some other people in some other location", nor think that was important.

And in that same first post:

Which, again, points to them either not knowing about the planned attack on the woods, or not thinking it was relevant. You need to stop as a GM at this point and make sure your players know what's going on. Most of the time, I've found that this is about a miscommunication earlier in the game, which leads the players to make what appears to be a mistake later on.

Admittedly, in the first post, I focused most on "did you remember to tell them this", but even then included the possibility that they may have been told, but didn't think it was relevant/important/whatever.

In another post (also on page 3):

So yeah. I'm going to ask the question: Did the players actualy know this key bit of information (and/or its relevance/importance)?

So.. Still talking about "did they know this *and* know that it was relevant/important?".

But wait! There's more (on page 5):

I'll ask again: Did you straight up ask them (as the GM): "Do you tell them about the planned attack on the woods?". If you didn't do this, then you do not know if they withheld that information because they chose to withhold it, or they just plain didn't remember it, or didn't think it was relevant.

Note. Again, I'm covering several bases here, but repeatedly posted that the "solution" to all is the ask the players (while playing the scene) for clarification.

And another (in the same post):

You've repeated the same sequence multiple times. But I still don't have the answer to the question: Did the players intentionally avoid telling the NPCs about the planned attack on the woods, or did they forget (or not know? Or not realize it was signficiant? etc).

And another (also in the same post):

But my guess is that if you were to actually ask your players "why didn't you tell them about the planned attack on the woods", the answers would be a mix of "what attack on the woods" and "I didn't think they'd care about the woods, if they didn't seem to care about the city and the tenement building".

And then, finally, you answered the question about what the players thought:

The players claimed they didn't think it was significant.

They also said they were confused because they thought Caer (the Changeling word for castle) and Caern (the werewolf word for a holy place) were the same thing. Although this actually confuses me more, because if they thought the changelings were talking about the Werewolf caern, they should have been more likely to bring up the impending attack, not less.

So.... I was right, right?

What's strange is that when I later pointed this out, you spun off on a tangent on my use of the word "misunderstood" while ignoring the much more important point that your players, in fact, choose not to share the information because they didn't think it was important/significant/relevant/whatever.

Most misunderstandings occur as a result of people not placing the same weight on things that other people do. You tell me to turn off the main highway and take a surface street instead becuase you know that the bridge is out and we'll plummet to our deaths if we don't get off the highway. I think that you are just telling me to take a slightly shorter local route for convenience. That's a "misunderstanding", right?

In this case, you told the players about the bad guys plan because you knew that this would be important information they could use to get assistance from some of the Fae factions. Your players thought that it was just scenario/background/motivation fluff. That is a "misunderstanding". It's literally what the word means. Different people's understanding of something is different. One understands that "the bad guys plan to attack the woods is important to other fae factions", while the other understands "the bad guys plan to attack the woods is just fluff that establishess their motivation for what we care about, which is them attacking people in our tenement building".

You're making a strage semantic argument, while missing the much larger picture. What matters here is that your players failed to mention the planned attack because they didn't think it was important or would help them. That's not a mistake in the way that choosing to bring a knife to a gunfight is. It's a mistake made by people who don't know the difference between a knife and a gun in the first place. Part of your job as GM is to make sure they understand those game mechanic/setting things, so that they may make good decisions. And when it's abundantly obvious that they are making a huge mistake, you need to step in and make sure that the mistake is not made out of ignorance of the facts.

In this case, they didn't know that a piece of information you provided them earlier was important. It was your job to remind them about it, and then give them the choice as to whether/how to use it.

In this case, responding to “my house is on fire!” with “do you know where the fire is headed?” sufficiently violates human social norms to trigger the “Pod People” red flags.

Eh? I'm not getting your line of thinking here. If I'm a fire figther, and my job/purpose is to fight fires (or I'm superman, or whatever), then you are correct.

But, as someone who lives in an area occasionally hit by major wildfires, if someone's house is on fire, I'm very much interested in where the fire is headed, whether I need to evacuate, whether I'm at risk of losing my life/stuff, etc. My job is not to put out someone else's house, but I do still care about my house.

That is far more relevant to the scenario at hand. The various fae factions care about their own territories and interests. They may not care at all about the "fire" in the tenement building. The may very very much care if that "fire" is going to spread to Muir Woods though.

Why is it the GM's job to assume the players forget things?
Why isn't it the player's job to say they don't remember something?

It just seems weird that we have a presumed scenario where the players forgot an important piece of information, and then rather than come right out and say they forget, they act all evasive and cagey when asked a direct question. Right?

I just don't get why I am the one at fault for not forcing the issue.

Several other people have already answered this, but I'll reinforce that: As the GM, you have "perfect information" about what's going on. You know which details are important, and which are not. You also know which lines of action by the PCs will result in which outcomes.

So yes. It's absolutely your responsibility to make sure to veryify if they know about and understand some key scenario point. As others have said, the players don't know what they don't know. If they've forgotten (or dismissed) some important fact in your scenario, they aren't going to magically know to remember or place weight on it, just out of the blue.

You know the information. Remind them of it. It's just not that hard.

I've run lengthy, complex Call of Cthulhu campaigns. Players are largely attentive and interested the whole time. They take notes (ending the campaign with 50+ pages of them!). They keep a clue book with handouts in it. They strategize. I'd consider them highly intelligent. But they -still- make mistakes, like the above "kill the duke instead of the baron" example, or mixing details of an event in Cairo with one in London to draw an invalid conclusion. And it's a 10 second problem to solve when I-as-GM-with-better-information say "Do you mean the Duke? You have no reason to kill the Baron" or "actually, your characters discovered the London cultists didn't seem to care about star movements".

Are we talking Masks of Nyarlathotep here? Don't remember star movements in that way (but definitely remember London and Cairo. Gah!). Either way, yeah CoC is super brutal about what may be very very minor details. And GMs absolutely have to be able to detect when players are going off into the weeds because they're just pursuiing a wrong (but viable) idea, or have mixed up or forgotten some minor but significant detail.

Oh, yeah, and the GM is completely allowed to forget stuff or get confused, too. Especially if it's stuff told by a player 3 games ago. That's the reason why I'm not fan of the old "the GM is always right" proverb : Quite often, actually, he's not ^^

Yeah. I agree with that one as well. As the GM you need to be willing and able to accept when your players tell you "but that's not how things happened". Obviously, the GM is the arbiter of "what is" in terms of places, locations, and people in the game setting. But when it comes to "what happened", GMs may very much misremember or misinterpret things. I've definitely seen it happen. Heck, I've done it myself.

You must be able to account for and adjust to that. Part of the GMs job is to communicate all things that happen in the game world to the players through the senses of their characters. Sometimes, there is a miscommunication or confusion. IME, the most important thing is for the GM to detect and correct these things as quickly as possible. It's not about "fault" (or even "who is right/wrong"). The problem is that the GM and the players have a different perception of something, and that needs to be corrected. The hows may vary, but it must be done, or the game will suffer.

That being said, I think the thing to learn from this thread is: as a GM, if you get confused by what the players do or want, address it OOC immediately by asking them about it, without assuming anything, and explain things if it's something the PCs should be aware of but the players have forgotten, misunderstood when it was explained the first time, or simply ignored due to not paying attention.

Yup. This can't be repeated often enough. If at any point as GM you are thinking "why are they doing this? or "why aren't they doing <some other thing>?" instead of just sitting there quietly calculating what will happen as a result of these actions, freaking ask them those questions.. You're thinking it, right? So ask.

It's really not that hard. It doesn't break the game. And it will prevent a huge number of (often very very major) problems in a game. Just... ask your players!