Players characters evading direct questions

[Vyke]

I wouldn't say the players were entitled to support, but rather that the sequence of events that actually happened was strong evidence of a lack of connection between the GM's view of the game and the players' view of the game, its expectations, even its rules.

It's like... if you're playing chess, and you put the other player's king in check, you say 'check'. And if they fail to address the 'check' you don't just capture their king and say 'I win', you point out that their king is still in check. If everyone understands the rules, that particular convention shouldn't be necessary at all in theory - its an adversarial game, you made an attack, they failed to respond, its your win right? But it must have happened enough that the other player missed something obvious and lost and the winner felt like it was a cheap win that this convention of not letting someone who is even in an adversarial position to you in a competitive game make a blunder *that* bad.

Here we have a sequence that if everyone were satisfied by it, it would make sense and be perfectly valid. But instead we see both sides are unsatisfied with the outcome. So while its completely fair in principle within the perspective of a game or a challenge to say 'your challenge was to figure out what to say to the Seelie to convince them to help', what actually ended up happening at the table was that everyone went away from that with some kind of bad feelings about the interaction.

So its not about who was right, or whether the game was fair, or stuff like that. Making things much more explicit, asking well-chosen clarifying questions, etc are all strategies to diagnose the problem and fix it - once the problem has been addressed, game can return to being immersive and subtle and whatnot (if thats what people actually want to deal with of course). As opposed to what is IMO an unreasonable view of being unwilling to compromise the game whatsoever in the name of fixing a problem rather than letting it recur or fester. It'd be like a grandmaster trying to teach someone chess, but insisting on playing at their full strength with no handicap and not ever explaining anything at all or commenting at all during play, because 'in real competitive chess your opponent isn't going to tell you you're making a dumb move' or something like that.

It wouldn't be reasonable for someone to expect their opponent to narrate their train of thought in response to potential moves during a chess competition. But it would be unreasonable for a much stronger player to expect a weaker player to play at their strength and furthermore refuse to adjust their game to help teach them.

Sure I get that. And I agree that the ideal is that these events can happen again without the evident dissatisfaction.

However I will point out that your example of the chess game, while absolutely correct, isn't really what's happening here (or at least isn't what's supposed to be happening here) as chess is an obviously adversarial game (doubly so if I'm playing against my brother) while this isn't (or shouldn't be). And this isn't a misunderstanding of the rules. It seems, if anything, a misunderstanding of how social interaction works.

I am curious as to the age of the players.

I suppose it could be that they've misunderstood the game and think the challenge is "Find someone who can kill the werewolves" rather than "Find someone who can kill the werewolves and then convince them to do it". And is is possible that if Talakeal explicitly spells out what they need to say to who to win and then tells them they did well that they would be satisfied. But this thread suggests (again, Talakeal correct me if I'm wrong) that Talakeal would, in turn, be less satisfied by that approach.... and in this case the GM did appear to reach out to the players, to offer them the info that they haven't closed the sale and need to offer more and that the players refused to close the distance.

That said, the biggest thing I can say about finding out why they made the choices they did is the thing I said in my very post in the thread... ask them. Explicitly.

[Talakeal]

I'd be more interested in their ages.

Forty, give or take five years in either direction.

I suppose it could be that they've misunderstood the game and think the challenge is "Find someone who can kill the werewolves" rather than "Find someone who can kill the werewolves and then convince them to do it". And is is possible that if Talakeal explicitly spells out what they need to say to who to win and then tells them they did well that they would be satisfied. But this thread suggests (again, Talakeal correct me if I'm wrong) that Talakeal would, in turn, be less satisfied by that approach.... and in this case the GM did appear to reach out to the players, to offer them the info that they haven't closed the sale and need to offer more and that the players refused to close the distance.

Well... if that was the case they failed here as well.

Changelings are no match for werewolves in a fight, and when the werewolves are backed up by an army of fomori and banes, and have home field advantage... yeah, that would be a slaughter.

The only way to really beat them in combat is to negotiate an alliance between the various factions who are involved (there are several courts of changelings, several packs of werewolves, and a group of hunters all of whom have an interest in seeing them put down).

[Vahnavoi]

Every single game where the game master plays adversarial roles is an adversarial game. The fact that a game master might also play non-adversarial roles doesn't change that. To the contrary, it poses an extra challenge to the game master, because they have to figure out ways to make their adversarial roles and non-adversarial roles distinct from one another.

It is possible to make this easy: a game master can, literally, put on a white hat or a black hat to inform the players which side they are playing at any given moment. Talakeal's (self-created) problem is that he doesn't want to do this. He doesn't want to hand "metagame" information to his players, he wants his players to figure out which roles are which based on just what their characters know. That's not in itself illegitimate, but it may make the game more difficult than what Talakeal's players are willing and able to play. This a recurring problem with Talakeal's groups.

---

Forty, give or take five years in either direction

Well, sadly, this means they're past the age where you could reasonably expect the problem to fix itself in a few years when your players grow up. You are playing with some childish forty-year-olds.

Next question: do they play drunk?

[Talakeal]

It is possible to make this easy: a game master can, literally, put on a white hat or a black hat to inform the players which side they are playing at any given moment. Talakeal's (self-created) problem is that he doesn't want to do this. He doesn't want to hand "metagame" information to his players, he wants his players to figure out which roles are which based on just what their characters know. That's not in itself illegitimate, but it may make the game more difficult than what Talakeal's players are willing and able to play. This a recurring problem with Talakeal's groups.

What are you actually saying here?

It seems like you are saying that I invented the idea of keeping in character knowledge and out of character knowledge separate in RPGs? Which is, of course, ridiculous, but I can't think of any other way to parse this paragraph.

[Vyke]

Every single game where the game master plays adversarial roles is an adversarial game.

I absolutely don't agree.

[NichG]

Sure I get that. And I agree that the ideal is that these events can happen again without the evident dissatisfaction.

However I will point out that your example of the chess game, while absolutely correct, isn't really what's happening here (or at least isn't what's supposed to be happening here) as chess is an obviously adversarial game (doubly so if I'm playing against my brother) while this isn't (or shouldn't be). And this isn't a misunderstanding of the rules. It seems, if anything, a misunderstanding of how social interaction works.

The structure of my argument here is that even in an adversarial, competitive game sometimes you have protocols that call on you to help the other player. So for a cooperative game, it should be even less like 'cheating' to do so or expect someone to do so! E.g. the adversarial nature of chess vs a tabletop RPG makes the fact that you do it in chess a stronger example, unless you hold the position that its less natural to help out the other players in a cooperative game than it is an adversarial game.

I am curious as to the age of the players.

I suppose it could be that they've misunderstood the game and think the challenge is "Find someone who can kill the werewolves" rather than "Find someone who can kill the werewolves and then convince them to do it". And is is possible that if Talakeal explicitly spells out what they need to say to who to win and then tells them they did well that they would be satisfied. But this thread suggests (again, Talakeal correct me if I'm wrong) that Talakeal would, in turn, be less satisfied by that approach.... and in this case the GM did appear to reach out to the players, to offer them the info that they haven't closed the sale and need to offer more and that the players refused to close the distance.

The thing is, what I'm suggesting at least is to do this explicitly *as a diagnostic*, not just as a permanent forever new style of GM-ing. Its to avoid OOC cageyness. You frame a hypothesis like 'the players don't actually remember the detail that the Seelie need to hear' and then you test that hypothesis by actually reminding them and seeing if their behavior changes. Or the hypothesis that 'the players are afraid of contract magic'. Or the hypothesis that 'the players see NPCs as objects and want to roll social rather than actually have to talk'. Or any of these explanations people have raised.

So rather than just saying 'aha, I believe I understand, now I feel smart' and continuing to do the same thing, you actually try to elicit the information you're missing. And while I agree that 'asking the players explicitly' is the absolute first thing to do as you wrote, Talakeal did say they did that and got a non-answer. So to really figure out what's going on, you need to act differently and see if anything changes.

That necessarily means acting differently than your passive preferences of how to run game. But perhaps not forever - you're doing it to find out what you don't know, so when you know it you can re-assess at that point. Of course, if there is a systematic misalignment between the sorts of games Talakeal would like to run and the types of games the players would like to play, then yeah there will either be forever problems or forever changes.

If in that situation everyone is clear on why things are going wrong but no one wants to change and no one wants to stop, well, then basically nothing anyone says can possibly help anyhow.

That said, the biggest thing I can say about finding out why they made the choices they did is the thing I said in my very post in the thread... ask them. Explicitly.

Yes! Even if this was in some form done and didn't work, this is absolutely the first thing to do. And if it doesn't work, do it again! The counter-strategy to cagey communication is to pin down specific details with highly specific questions that don't leave any room for misinterpretation. If high levels of abstraction are being used to evade, ask about concrete things - 'what would you do if...?' rather than 'why?'. Make it necessary to say 'I don't want to answer' rather than leaving room to just say something that isn't an answer as if it is one, etc.

[KorvinStarmast]

However, the players know that the Seelie use oaths and promises as currency, and that the Fey are tricky, so they made it clear to every fey they met that they would not and could not offer anything in exchange for any information or assistance they might provide. Which is kind of an odd decision as their characters don't really know how fairy oaths work, and OOC all they are doing is trying to burn down future adventure hooks.

Which parses as "they are already meta gaming." And that's par for the course at your table, right?

I want to communicate. But I want to do it without meta-gaming.

That's an own goal. The caution against meta gaming is not a binary switch of off/on. The caution is to use as little as can be managed.

There is also a healthy dose of meta-gaming going on. The PC changeling is a master of contract magic, and constantly binds NPCs to oaths against their will.

And he's worried that NPCs might to that to him? Quelle surprise.

The previous scene they had captured and interrogated one of the werewolves and learned what they were planning. They absolutely had this information, and it was absolutely fresh in their minds. Now, whether or not they realized the important of what they learned, or had already forgotten it by the next scene, who can say?

Link to the Three Clue Rule goes here.

My players absolutely do not come up with plans as a group. They each act as individuals, with no cohesive teamwork or strategy, regardless of whether they are engaging in combat, exploration, or a social scene.

Which is a more profound and basic problem than your complaint about questions and answers with NPCs.

I'd be more interested in their ages.

Yeah.

Forty, give or take five years in either direction.

Kids these days (that jokes' on me, given my silver hair).

Every single game where the game master plays adversarial roles is an adversarial game. The fact that a game master might also play non-adversarial roles doesn't change that. To the contrary, it poses an extra challenge to the game master, because they have to figure out ways to make their adversarial roles and non-adversarial roles distinct from one another.

Yes, that is GM / DM 101, and requires a certain level of trust at the table.

You are playing with some childish forty-year-olds.

Next question: do they play drunk?

Is there any other way to play RPGs?

keeping in character knowledge and out of character knowledge separate in RPGs

If you take that principle to an extreme, you create your own problems. Back to my earlier allusion to "the myth of player / character separation" but that really is its own topic.

I absolutely don't agree.

It's a matter of degree, but this will be present since the DM / GM has to role play the adversaries.

[Vahnavoi]

What are you actually saying here?

It seems like you are saying that I invented the idea of keeping in character knowledge and out of character knowledge separate in RPGs? Which is, of course, ridiculous, but I can't think of any other way to parse this paragraph.

There is no such thing as character knowledge. Characters don't exist as independent entities that know things. Everything a character is supposed to know has to be known to some real person at the table. For things a character is supposed to NOT know, you have two options:
1) player doesn't know it either.
2) A player knows it but you are asking them to act as if they don't know.

There's a corollary to the above: if there's information that isn't know directly and should be deduced from other instead, but players aren't capable of carrying out that deduction, that information isn't known either. The only way that information can become playable is if you add more hints to make the information easier to deduce, up to and including flat out stating it to your players.

The point NichG has very elaborately tried to get to you is that you are unreasonably resistant to doing so. It isn't cheating when your players genuinely can't do it on their own. It's helping. Now, if you want to build up to them being able to do it without help, play simpler games first that teach asking and answering questions. If they refuse, accept your loss and move on. They're past their obligatory learning period, you (sadly) can't force them to do it until they pass.

[Talakeal]

And he's worried that NPCs might to that to him? Quelle surprise.

Oh no. He is actually a pookha and never gives straight answers anyway. (Pookha are prohibited from ever telling the truth.)

The problem is that the other three characters, who aren't pookhas and don't have any idea how changeling magic works, are also refusing to give any direct answers for no IC reason.

Which is a more profound and basic problem than your complaint about questions and answers with NPCs.

Trust me, I know it. I have created multiple threads on it in the past.

The point NichG has very elaborately tried to get to you is that you are unreasonably resistant to doing so. It isn't cheating when your players genuinely can't do it on their own. It's helping. Now, if you want to build up to them being able to do it without help, play simpler games first that teach asking and answering questions. If they refuse, accept your loss and move on. They're past their obligatory learning period, you (sadly) can't force them to do it until they pass.

Where do you draw the line between "helping" and "railroading" though?

If the GM is always willing to break character to show the players the "optimal" path, that really sounds like a bad railroad to me.

As is, the game is going in a different direction that I anticipated, with the players making deals with the fairy underworld to perform acts of goblin-sponsored terrorism, which, while maybe not as happy as a unified crusade to crush evil, is certainly an interesting and unexpected direction for the campaign to go!

Unless you have players who are intentionally failing and making sub-optimal decisions for the sake of drama of course, but as I said above, that is really less of an RPG and more of a collaborative storytelling game.

[Unoriginal]

Where do you draw the line between "helping" and "railroading" though?

If the GM is always willing to break character to show the players the "optimal" path, that really sounds like a bad railroad to me.

It's not a question of showing an "optimal" path, and it's not "breaking character".

A GM must go out-of-character all the time for a lot of different reasons. Making sure the players have understood what is going on is one of those reasons.

If a player misremember the title of the antagonist and says "my PC attacks the Baron" when the Baron is an ally when the antagonist is actually the Earl, are you not going to ask them "uh, do you mean the Earl?", or are you just going to let the PC do unprompted murder because the player did a mistake while speaking?

Same way if the Lord of the Fey tell the PCs they can name a magic item in his vault and he'll give it to them, as the reward they agreed on, and the players ask for the Sword of Fire instead of the Phoenix Sword, which is the item they need, are you going to make the PCs get the wrong sword because the players misspoke?


TTRPGs are games of communication. You can't go "I'm in-character right now, so I can't communicate with the players" and not expect troubles.

[Talakeal]

It's not a question of showing an "optimal" path, and it's not "breaking character".

A GM must go out-of-character all the time for a lot of different reasons. Making sure the players have understood what is going on is one of those reasons.

If a player misremember the title of the antagonist and says "my PC attacks the Baron" when the Baron is an ally when the antagonist is actually the Earl, are you not going to ask them "uh, do you mean the Earl?", or are you just going to let the PC do unprompted murder because the player did a mistake while speaking?

Same way if the Lord of the Fey tell the PCs they can name a magic item in his vault and he'll give it to them, as the reward they agreed on, and the players ask for the Sword of Fire instead of the Phoenix Sword, which is the item they need, are you going to make the PCs get the wrong sword because the players misspoke?


TTRPGs are games of communication. You can't go "I'm in-character right now, so I can't communicate with the players" and not expect troubles.

Misspeaking is not the same thing as suggesting action.

A better analogy would be "I attack the earl!" "You should threaten him instead." Or "I pick the Phoenix Sword!" "You should pick the ring of invisibility."

[NichG]

Where do you draw the line between "helping" and "railroading" though?

If the GM is always willing to break character to show the players the "optimal" path, that really sounds like a bad railroad to me.

You aren't breaking character to show the players the optimal path. You're breaking character because the players are failing at something they (said) they intended to do, due to misunderstanding the situation.

It would be railroading if you forced the players to do things your way. If you help the players understand what is necessary for them to succeed at doing things their way, its the opposite of railroading - you're enabling their agency rather than your own. You're making it clear what the actual choice is so they can make it, rather than making the choice for them.

Like, if you say 'if you want to get their assistance without offering things in trade, you need to tell them what you learned in detail' and they could say 'sure, we do that!' or 'no, we don't want to do that' and you're willing to run with it either way, its not a railroad. It's an informed choice. Agency only exists in the presence of informed choices.

[Mastikator]

Where do you draw the line between "helping" and "railroading" though?

If the GM is always willing to break character to show the players the "optimal" path, that really sounds like a bad railroad to me.

As is, the game is going in a different direction that I anticipated, with the players making deals with the fairy underworld to perform acts of goblin-sponsored terrorism, which, while maybe not as happy as a unified crusade to crush evil, is certainly an interesting and unexpected direction for the campaign to go!

Unless you have players who are intentionally failing and making sub-optimal decisions for the sake of drama of course, but as I said above, that is really less of an RPG and more of a collaborative storytelling game.

I am a different person than the one your asking, but I feel compelled to opine nonetheless, and I do think the player's shiftiness and lack of integrity that hangs them. But, I don't think you need be helpless against the players' counterproductive methods. Pause the game and ask the player. The player knows the magic words, the NPC asked them to say the magic words, the player is vague and refuses to say the magic words. The player is being obtuse.

You can pause the game and ask the player why they aren't saying exactly what the fomorians' plans are. You know that the player just needs to say "the fomorians were planning an attack on the werewolves in Muir Woods", the NPC asked what the fomorians plans were.

"Pause the game for a second, the changeling asked you what the fomorian's plans were, why didn't you say that they are planning an attack on the werewolves in the Muir Woods?". They might just give a reason, or give the changeling a straight answer. This is all in the interest of moving the game along BTW, you're not their therapist, you have no obligation to fix them. If they remain obtuse, kick them out of the group. They are obviously ruining your fun while not having any themselves and it doesn't really matter what their problem is. Because it's their problem, the only problem you need to fix is that some players at your table are at your table.

[Vahnavoi]

Where do you draw the line between "helping" and "railroading" though?

I don't. It's not useful juxtaposition. As with any other disability, you give as much support as the other person requires to complete a move. Then you gradually lessen the support.

If the GM is always willing to break character to show the players the "optimal" path, that really sounds like a bad railroad to me.

Nobody's suggesting you always do it. This isn't a binary. For any situation, you have a range of options for how much information to give to your players.

Also, and this isn't the first time I say this: both you and your players keep using "optimal" wrong and you should excise it from your vocabulary.

[Talakeal]

Also, and this isn't the first time I say this: both you and your players keep using "optimal" wrong and you should excise it from your vocabulary.

Please elaborate.

[Unoriginal]

Misspeaking is not the same thing as suggesting action.

A better analogy would be "I attack the earl!" "You should threaten him instead." Or "I pick the Phoenix Sword!" "You should pick the ring of invisibility."

It isn't a better analogy, you're talking about an entirely different situation.

Players will misspeak, players will misremember, and players will plainly misunderstand. And GMs will do the same too.

So it is important for the people around the table to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Ex: "I attack the earl!"

"Just so we're clear, you weren't given the signal to start the attack now, and your allies are waiting for said signal. Do you want to attack regardless?"

Ex:Player 1: "I pick the ring of invisibility, it's clearly the best item this guy has."

GM: "Are you sure? You can do that if you want, but remember your mission requires the Phoenix Sword."

Player 1: "Oh I thought PC2 would ask for it."

GM: "No, the agreement was one item for the whole group. You didn't take the deal for more."

Player 2: "Yeah, we didn't want to give the Fey Lord any more than what he already got."

[Vahnavoi]

Please elaborate.

Both you and your players repeatedly use "optimal" in the same way as the junior engineer in the joke about spherical cows in a vacuum.

As in:

"I have found the solution, provided we ignore all factors that would prevent my solution from working."

[Kish]

The only way to really beat them in combat is to negotiate an alliance between the various factions who are involved (there are several courts of changelings, several packs of werewolves, and a group of hunters all of whom have an interest in seeing them put down).

Well now wait.

Is that what they decided to do, or is it what you decided they need to do?

That is, do you have any plans for future gaming sessions that don't hinge on "the PCs beat the Black Spiral Dancers in combat"?

If it's what they decided to try, then what to do is simple. Say something like, "Given your paranoid unwillingness to share information with changelings, trying to get them to ally with you is probably futile." It's not GM metagaming because no part of it hinges on being the GM. This is an observation you could make as another player or as someone who wandered by a game that was taking place in a semipublic environment and watched for five minutes. If your "don't cheat" means "don't say anything at all out of character," well, then you have a problem.

If it's your plot outline, well. Anything that your plot needs them to do needs to be both obvious and effectively a gimme. It is, for whatever reason, not obvious to them that they need to actually treat at least some changelings as allies: if this is about them following plot rails then you need to up the level of information you're giving them about where those rails are, however baffling you find the need. (And in this case I can't wait to hear about what happens when they reach the part that actually sounds quite counterintuitive to me, where a group of near-helpless supernaturals are supposed to voluntarily approach a group of hunters.)

[neriana]

Another way to beat them popped into my head while I was reading the insistence that there was only one way. I'm sure others could think of other methods as well. But if the GM only allows One True Path, well...

[Talakeal]

If it's what they decided to try, then what to do is simple. Say something like, "Given your paranoid unwillingness to share information with changelings, trying to get them to ally with you is probably futile." It's not GM meta-gaming because no part of it hinges on being the GM. This is an observation you could make as another player or as someone who wandered by a game that was taking place in a semi-public environment and watched for five minutes. If your "don't cheat" means "don't say anything at all out of character," well, then you have a problem.

This is what I did say, eventually, when it became clear that they weren't going to volunteer any additional information.

The players then got frustrated and went on a rant about how I was wasting their team with impossible goals and unreasonable NPCs.

At which point I was like "Guys, its not "impossible", you just had to tell them what the werewolves were planning, which the "unreasonable" NPCs directly asked you multiple times."


Although I have absolutely been accused of railroading in the past for making suggestions that any random person off the street could come up with like "If the monster is too strong for you to fight, why don't you try talking to it or sneaking past it instead?" Heck, I remember my Dad rage quitting the very first RPG I ever tried to run because he got stuck in a room in Heroquest and I suggested that he try searching for secret doors. (For those who don't know, Heroquest was a Milton Bradley board game that is basically baby's first dungeon crawler, and only has like five possible actions characters can take, one of which is search for secret doors).

Well now wait.

Is that what they decided to do, or is it what you decided they need to do?

That is, do you have any plans for future gaming sessions that don't hinge on "the PCs beat the Black Spiral Dancers in combat"?

If it's your plot outline, well. Anything that your plot needs them to do needs to be both obvious and effectively a gimme. It is, for whatever reason, not obvious to them that they need to actually treat at least some changelings as allies: if this is about them following plot rails then you need to up the level of information you're giving them about where those rails are, however baffling you find the need. (And in this case I can't wait to hear about what happens when they reach the part that actually sounds quite counterintuitive to me, where a group of near-helpless supernaturals are supposed to voluntarily approach a group of hunters.)

Another way to beat them popped into my head while I was reading the insistence that there was only one way. I'm sure others could think of other methods as well. But if the GM only allows One True Path, well...

As I said... players (especially those online) are hyper vigilant for the slightest hint of perceived railroading, as the "rail-road GM" is one of gaming's biggest boogey men.


For clarification, the Black Spiral Dancers and their Fomorian minions are by far the strongest faction of those who are currently "on the board". None of the others have a realistic chance of beating them alone in a straight fight, although if several of them work together, defeating them in a straight fight is a definite possibility.

I am absolutely open to the a resolution which does not end with the BSDs being defeated in combat, or someone coming up with an out of the blue plan / insane luck that allows them to be defeated without involving the other factions who are currently involved.

[Quertus]

Again, blaming computer games seems like a red herring. Star Control 2 was (significantly) more complex than Quertus's stereotype of a computer roleplaying game, and it was published in 1992. Now, have all games since then been as good at this particular aspect? No. Not even close. But maybe, rather than blame the medium, take a look at why game designers failed to make their games as good. Because a lot of what computer game designers have to do are the same things what game masters have to do. It's unlikely computer games pioneered railroading players through a strict or badly thought plot, as opposed to copying bad practices from tabletop games.

I mean, I did say things like "randomly" and "without any real evidence" - you could turn that whole text blue, and it wouldn't change the meaning significantly. This was just a solid example of a different style of play that people have already suggested is what Talakeal's players actually want. Speaking of red herrings,

Haha. I can tell you, kids are among the most likely groups of people to threaten horrible atrocities to your face, with the only thing holding them back often being lack of vocabulary. The difference between real world and a game is that real kids rarely have the capacity to actually follow through. In the real world, a kid threatening to kill you and your dog is, typically, mildly distressing and not at all threatening. In a game, kids will do just what they promised and dance on your grave too. Kids are mean.

Yeah, I didn't want to say anything, but I completely agree, real kids really do come up with things like that. Doubly so when they're players in an RPG, IME.

You frame this as "the PCs being cagey" but I don't think it is. I think they just don't know why the info is relevant, and they're not going to just infodump on the NPCs. To you it looks like they're being cagey because you know a particular piece of info would sway the NPC into action, but I don't think they know that. If you presume they know what you do, it does look cagey - but if you presume they don't, it looks just like a normal interaction.

Yeah, I thought it was a given that the PCs don't know that that information is important in this context.

I want to communicate. But I want to do it without meta-gaming.

To me, what you are saying is the equivalent of saying someone is being unreasonable for wanting to win a game but not being willing to cheat to do so.without any real evidence

Talakeal, that's the point of OOC conversations, to facilitate communication. It isn't metagaming, it isn't cheating, it's using the tool as intended, for what it's designed to do.

Also, all the Fey asking the same question (or variants thereon) was much more metagamey and immersion-breaking than asking an OOC question ever could be.

My players absolutely do not come up with plans as a group. They each act as individuals, with no cohesive teamwork or strategy, regardless of whether they are engaging in combat, exploration, or a social scene.

So it's all of them? That's really odd. I wouldn't expect... oh, wait:

There is also a healthy dose of meta-gaming going on. The PC changeling is a master of contract magic, and constantly binds NPCs to oaths against their will. Though the rest of the party has no IC knowledge of this, the players are absolutely terrified of finding themselves in the same situation and makes sure to never make a definitive statement.

OK, you've got your answer. /thread?

Also, no need for you to be surprised about it, when it's this obvious that anything where a direct answer is required just isn't going to happen in this game. /game?

[Unoriginal]

This is what I did say, eventually, when it became clear that they weren't going to volunteer any additional information.

The players then got frustrated and went on a rant about how I was wasting their team with impossible goals and unreasonable NPCs.

At which point I was like "Guys, its not "impossible", you just had to tell them what the werewolves were planning, which the "unreasonable" NPCs directly asked you multiple times."

What did the players say in response to that?

Although I have absolutely been accused of railroading in the past for making suggestions that any random person off the street could come up with like "If the monster is too strong for you to fight, why don't you try talking to it or sneaking past it instead?" Heck, I remember my Dad rage quitting the very first RPG I ever tried to run because he got stuck in a room in Heroquest and I suggested that he try searching for secret doors. (For those who don't know, Heroquest was a Milton Bradley board game that is basically baby's first dungeon crawler, and only has like five possible actions characters can take, one of which is search for secret doors).







As I said... players (especially those online) are hyper vigilant for the slightest hint of perceived railroading, as the "rail-road GM" is one of gaming's biggest boogey men.

Those are out-of-table issues, they can't be dealt via in-character interactions.

Addressing the root of the issue out-of-table is the only way you can deal with it. Even if it may mean"stop playing with those people because you're just not compatible".

Talakeal, that's the point of OOC conversations, to facilitate communication. It isn't metagaming, it isn't cheating, it's using the tool as intended, for what it's designed to do.

I 100% agree.

This is really important, Talakeal.

What you call meta-gaming is what is needed to make any TTRPG work.

Also, all the Fey asking the same question (or variants thereon) was much more metagamey and immersion-breaking than asking an OOC question ever could be.

This isn't really true. People with similar goals and similar ressources will often have similar questions when asked to use those ressources.

Like if my PC was going around town asking merchants to invest in a project, I would expect several variations on "how much would it cost us and how much are we getting in return?". If my PC was talking to lawyers about defending a teammate who got framed for a crime in a superhero game, I would expect several variations on "how are you proposing to prove he was framed?". Etc.

[Duff]

Why not just ask the players, bluntly, what they are trying to accomplish by not giving the NPCs the info?

Furthermore, I'm not familiar with Werewolf/Changeling, but there are probably a stat or skill or trait that indicates how good a PC is at reading others, right?

If that's the case, as a DM it's worth to look to the PCs who are the best at doing it and state "you can sense that [insert NPC name] won't help unless you give them something concrete to react to" or the like.

And some NPC would just ask them point blank "tell me what's happening if you want my help" of course.

Now if it's a question of the players not remembering what actually went on in enough details, then you can just ask "do you tell them everything or leave something out?" then timeskip over the "PCs explain the situation" part of the conversation.

In a general sense - This
Plus have a diversity of approaches. In this case, once you realise how the players are playing it, throw in an NPC who's intrigued by the mystery. They don't ask "Why?" they ask "What do you want me to do?" "Where should we meet?"

Another consideration. After the first 2 interactions, you realise they're going no where. Ask them to roll social skills. If it's a fail tell them "Your approach is unsuccessful, unless you want to try something significantly different, we'll close the scene there"
They still don't have the help you wanted them to, but with only a couple of conversations and a roll, there's less game time invested in something which might look like a waste of time.

Though how much of this you can apply to your game is hard for me to know

[Telok]

There is also a healthy dose of meta-gaming going on. The PC changeling is a master of contract magic, and constantly binds NPCs to oaths against their will. Though the rest of the party has no IC knowledge of this, the players are absolutely terrified of finding themselves in the same situation and makes sure to never make a definitive statement.

Danger! Will Robinson! DANGER! Red alert! Warning warning warning!

So um... I think this is a big one. The players are doing stuff to NPCs and are terrified of it happening to them. Probably they've worked themselves up to the point where they're expecting a bunch of karma for this to hit them as soon as they blink. Being at a sufficient remove I can fully believe that they'll be so busy staring at their boogeyman of fey oaths/mind control that they'll walk backwards into something worse.

You said they're cutting deals with unseelie goblins now?

I've come to think that a lot of the D&D-type TTRPG & CRPG scene instills a sort of... I'd call it "transactional violence interaction equality" between PCs and NPCs. That is: PCs and real opponent NPCs (not mooks & chaff) are given abilities to annihilate each other and are expected to use them as often as possible. As time/xp/levels increase these abilities increase on both sides at about the same rate. The players are thus conditioned to expect that any "named NPC", equating a name with importance as reinforced by lots and lots of mow-through-nameless-mooks media, is capable of utterly crushing them in order to be an "on level" or "cr appropriate" opponent. It follows the "NPCs must be X dangerous to fight the PCs and be interesting" paradigm followed by strongly scaling rpg combat systems. Players (often including GMs) then extend this assumption to everything else. If your players have a master of contract magic PC among them they may be assuming that "named NPCs" will also have that level of screwjob power and are going to use it as much as the PC does if given any chance to do so.

First, the biggest correlate with this kind of behaviour is being a kid, and kids these days are too young to have played games with a word parser. Second, those old games actually required reading skills and being able to give specific info: if...
...Anyways, backs to kids... people below a certain level of development have trouble comprehending real people as independently existing things that aren't there just for their benefit...
.... I can tell you, kids are among the most likely groups of people to threaten horrible atrocities to your face, with the only thing holding them back often being lack of vocabulary. The difference between real world and a game is that real kids rarely have the capacity to actually follow through. In the real world, a kid threatening to kill you and your dog is, typically, mildly distressing and not at all threatening. In a game, kids will do just what they promised and dance on your grave too. Kids are mean.

You know some ****ed up kids then. I used to believe like that when I was single. Extended interaction with kids cured me of that. The very large majority are nice kids who feel bad when they hear about people or animals getting hurt even on accident. They perfectly well understand that other people are actual people with homes and families like theirs. You're also coming across as trying to imply that other folks players & GMs have the emotional development of three year olds who pull wings off flies for fun.

And the games these days absolutely have the same game logic as the old word parsers. That logic is often hidden behind a "talk choices" menu, but its the exact same logic. Pick the right input, get the good output. Pick the wrong input, get a bad output. Didn't talk to the right NPC or inspect the right doodad and you don't have the right keyword/menu option. Same logic, different facade.

[Vahnavoi]

You know some ****ed up kids then.

Yes, including some requiring special intervention by social services or law enforcement. That's not what this is about, though. Pay attention to specific arguments made: you being likeliest to meet a behaviour in a group, isn't the same as majority of a group engaging in it at any given moment. Even with a phase every person goes through, it won't occur in everyone at the same time nor be relevant for all of their lives. It still stands that if somebody's babbling about how they'll kill everybody over a minor slight, that's more likely to be (say) a 7-year-old having a fit who hasn't yet learned to emotionally regulate, versus a functional adult. (Etc.) And it isn't rare. Especially not in context of games.

You're also coming across as trying to imply that other folks players & GMs have the emotional development of three year olds who pull wings off flies for fun.

Implying it? I'm outright stating it. Statistically it has to hold true for some fraction of players. Some of those three-year-olds grow up to fifteen-year-olds and then forty-year-olds who still pull wings off flies for fun. Some of those people end up playing tabletop roleplaying games. The same train of thought applies to every atypical neurology, psychological disorder and social issue you'd care to name, save for those that render a person entirely unable to play these games. That's just a fact of life.

It's not even a particular interesting fact. It would be more interesting if you know a player well and they only behave oddly in a game. Even better if it's just in one game and not all games they play. That kind of knowledge allows us to get to what it is about the game and its rules causing it, rather than just the people playing them.

And the games these days absolutely have the same game logic as the old word parsers. That logic is often hidden behind a "talk choices" menu, but its the exact same logic. Pick the right input, get the good output. Pick the wrong input, get a bad output. Didn't talk to the right NPC or inspect the right doodad and you don't have the right keyword/menu option. Same logic, different facade.

Being reductive about how games work isn't helpful. There is an actual difference between having to type a whole word versus checking boxes in a multiple choice, even if both technically work by "pick right input, get right output". This can be shown mathematically: if you have to input a four letter word in English, you have 27^4 input choices. If you are clicking a dialogue box, you only have as many input choices as a programmer thought to include. One of these formats is much easier to navigate by pure trial-and-error and thus requires and fosters different skills in the player.

[Vyke]

The structure of my argument here is that even in an adversarial, competitive game sometimes you have protocols that call on you to help the other player. So for a cooperative game, it should be even less like 'cheating' to do so or expect someone to do so! E.g. the adversarial nature of chess vs a tabletop RPG makes the fact that you do it in chess a stronger example, unless you hold the position that its less natural to help out the other players in a cooperative game than it is an adversarial game.



The thing is, what I'm suggesting at least is to do this explicitly *as a diagnostic*, not just as a permanent forever new style of GM-ing. Its to avoid OOC cageyness. You frame a hypothesis like 'the players don't actually remember the detail that the Seelie need to hear' and then you test that hypothesis by actually reminding them and seeing if their behavior changes. Or the hypothesis that 'the players are afraid of contract magic'. Or the hypothesis that 'the players see NPCs as objects and want to roll social rather than actually have to talk'. Or any of these explanations people have raised.

So rather than just saying 'aha, I believe I understand, now I feel smart' and continuing to do the same thing, you actually try to elicit the information you're missing. And while I agree that 'asking the players explicitly' is the absolute first thing to do as you wrote, Talakeal did say they did that and got a non-answer. So to really figure out what's going on, you need to act differently and see if anything changes.

That necessarily means acting differently than your passive preferences of how to run game. But perhaps not forever - you're doing it to find out what you don't know, so when you know it you can re-assess at that point. Of course, if there is a systematic misalignment between the sorts of games Talakeal would like to run and the types of games the players would like to play, then yeah there will either be forever problems or forever changes.

If in that situation everyone is clear on why things are going wrong but no one wants to change and no one wants to stop, well, then basically nothing anyone says can possibly help anyhow.

Got it, I agree.

[Vyke]

It's a matter of degree, but this will be present since the DM / GM has to role play the adversaries.

I still don't agree. GMs and players aren't adversaries. Their positions aren't opposed. A GM is presenting and adjudicating the conflict required for the game to be a game. The players aren't trying to beat the GM, they're trying to resolve the conflict. The GM is not trying to beat the players.*

Y'know.... hopefully.

*Because the GM just wins in that case.

[kyoryu]

I still don't agree. GMs and players aren't adversaries. Their positions aren't opposed. A GM is presenting and adjudicating the conflict required for the game to be a game. The players aren't trying to beat the GM, they're trying to resolve the conflict. The GM is not trying to beat the players.*

Y'know.... hopefully.

*Because the GM just wins in that case.

I think the GM wears many hats. At one level, they're fans of the players. At another level, they're neutral arbiters of the rules. And at a third level, they're adversaries.

Like, in combat? The combat is there because the "fan of the players" GM (or the "neutral arbiter") set it up to be an interesting and engaging encounter. They want the players to have fun.

However, in a lot of cases, the best fun is had in those situations when the adversarial GM tries their best to play hard, but constrained by what the "fan" GM gave them.

[Unoriginal]

The GM is not trying to beat the players.*

Y'know.... hopefully.

*Because the GM just wins in that case.

As an aside, I always feel both amusement and sadness, as well as frustration and pity (to be 100% honest), when there are people claiming their obviously-not-that-good builds are the best because they did X or Y at their table that confirms their white room theorycrafting... and cry that it's unfair when the build is put to the test against something that wasn't made by their usual GMs to make their PC look good.

[Vahnavoi]

I still don't agree. GMs and players aren't adversaries. Their positions aren't opposed. A GM is presenting and adjudicating the conflict required for the game to be a game. The players aren't trying to beat the GM, they're trying to resolve the conflict. The GM is not trying to beat the players.*

Y'know.... hopefully.

*Because the GM just wins in that case.

The position of a game master stems from a wargaming paradigm where opposing players both describe their moves to a referee, and the referee then processes them. The common roleplaying game paradigm only folds the opposing player's role into the role of the referee, it doesn't remove it. It is pointless convolution of language to insist the game master isn't an adversary when they're playing adversarial roles.

If you want a game master who genuinely isn't adversarial, don't have the game master play those roles.

As for the point of a game master "just winning", that's a fallacious thought. Just declaring one's victory by fiat doesn't provide any gameplay. Because he is an opposing player, a game master, too, benefits from semblance of parity. It's what provides them with a challenge and something to do. For contrast, we could talk about setting up a chessboard instead. A player can set up a board blatantly in their own favor, the only limit to that is finding a second willing player. But most of those solutions are trivial, they can't sustain long-term play. Beating people up in rigged matches isn't infinitely entertaining.