My solution would be to suggest a break from 4e (not abandoning it totally) to experiment with other systems that are built to support "faster combat where the players get a say in the NPC actions."
Being the GM doesn't mean you have to be the one shouldering the burden and making the decisions--the group is healthier if the GM's role does not extend beyond the table into social choices.
@Corion So make it explicit and tell them that you want to continue but something has to change in order for that to happen.
I once played in a 3.5 game with round-robin GMs: the main GM set up the story and took over for major events, but most nights someone else was running it. We took turns, and the current GM always had free reign to steer the story how he saw fit.
But really, I think that a couple weeks in other systems that are designed to create the experience everyone wants will help reset assumptions and train new habits, so you can all return to 4e refreshed and with new skills.
yeah. I think one of them wants Diablo, one of them wants Skyrim, one of them wants Overlord, one of them wants Fable, and I want D&D like the game I fell in love with
where people improvise and create characters they're interested in, not trying to "PERFECT!" every combat like there's a sequence of moves to maximize damage and avoid ever being attacked
@Corion It is true that the more experienced a GM is, the more tools and tricks he has to satisfy widely divergent experience goals within the same game. But sometimes it can't be done.
@Corion Yeeeah.
That's why I suggest a game like Fate Accelerated, where the mechanics reward "fun failure" and show that it makes for better stories.
Just a single session of fun, dramatic failure can change a group's attitude.
it was literally the most fun I have ever had in a game, that first day after I played D&D (4e) for the first time. I was so happy the entire day and couldnt wait to play again, it was the COOLEST THING. thinking outside the box. improvising! interacting! And this game is like the polar opposite. It's like the players are trying to cram me into a box that doesnt exist
I remember my own turning point, a few years ago, when I realized that my goals and my character's goals are not identical, and I can enjoy and actually promote actions and events that mycharacter will consider bad.
Because it makes for a better story that I enjoy being a part of.
Step A: Think of what your character would do. Step B: Find an appropriate skill to roll. Instead the players tried B then A. "I have really high arcana. what can I use arcana for?"
even though the situation had literally no applicability to that skill
But of course, not everyone is into that sort of gaming. Some see their character accomplishments as their accomplishment in the game. That's also fine, and I'm not even sure it's entirely impossible to have those different gaming style coexist. Just difficult.
@lisardggY Yes. that's exactly what happened. He tried like 4 times in a row to make up random things to do with Arcana and none of them made any sense in context or for his character. He just wanted to do an arcana roll because he was afraid of accruing a single failure in a challenge
Strangely enough, I played with many of those accomplishment-oriented players over the years. Many of them also read extensively, and a lot of fantasy novels, and these influenced their characters and choice of setting.
But while they liked - and were inspired by - good fictional characters that had flaws and weaknesses and didn't always succeed, they somehow never took that aspect over to the game.
@lisardggY I'm not necessarily saying I want them to embrace failure, but they wont even embrace embracing the concept of embracing the concept of embracing a single step towards what could be a minor failure in a small edge case
I always try to make sure my players understand that I am interested in helping them tell awesome stories, and that in order for a character to have an awesome success, he needs to be overcoming something.
That is, I will trash your character and make him despair, because then his triumph will be all the sweeter.
With my one 4e character - a warforged paladin optimized for CON and Endurance - I would always look for a good way to use Endurance for skill challenges. But when I couldn't find a way with enough coolness factor, I would bow out and let other characters handle it.
The Fate system has a rule for the GM: never call for a roll unless you think both success and failure will be interesting. If that's not true, just work with the players to narrate it happening the interesting way.
but it's going to take like 6+ encounters to get there and sitting through that just horrifies me now that they want to cut our sessions to 3 hours tops
Fate doesn't sound like it would work then, they seem even more bored by the narration bits
I'm honestly wondering if maybe I should just program a video game that they can play on thursday nights instead of having me automate their guaranteed success
I mean, I guess this is a legitimate way to play D&D. maybe they just need another DM who can just go through the motions without getting bored
It doesn't sound like you're happy, so this is a wrong way for you to play D&D. Find out if it's wrong for them, too.
If you're all unhappy, change things.
If you're the odd duck, see if they're willing to find a mutually happy-making alternative way to play.
If they aren't willing to try it, or there isn't a method that makes you all content, then yeah. Time for you to move on before you make them miserable too.
Don't be afraid of sitting down one of those Thursday nights and having a "are we all on the same page" talk. They're important tools to make sure everyone is having fun.
@lisardggY Yup! I encourage doing it during a time other than the regular game time, though. "I could be playing instead of having this talk" breeds discontent.
It definitely sounds like a Big Group Chat is needed, and you need to make it clear that you can't go on with the status quo.
Frame it in terms of helping the group, not being about you, though.
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It really sounds like you are worried that your discontent will reduce their enjoyment.
That warms the cockles of my heart and tells me you're a great GM. You want to work for the good of the group, and you know that you can't do that properly if you're sacrificing your happiness for theirs.
@BESW That's definitely good advice. I'm here for them. I don't feel like I'm sacrificing for them, but if I step back and look at my situation, it's clear that the person who is DM'ing their campaign isn't going to be able to keep doing it under these circumstances, and I don't want that to happen to my friends
The big hurdle seems to be that you're trying to read their minds to find out what they want or need, and they kind of expect you to be able to do that.
GMs are not magical creatures who can divine the players' unspoken mood, nor are they the Fun Police with the authority to tell you whether your feelings on a subject are right or wrong.
Some groups play D&D to beat up goblins and take their stuff, to vent frustration at their real-life situations or to exercise perfect control over a model world because they feel out of control in the real one.
I used to live up in Dallas and work with most of them and saw them regularly. I DM'd in person and bought a ton of maps and tokens and books and things for us to use. then after a few months I had to move to Houston. We've been using roll20 ever since. to some degree it's helped because it's streamlined a lot of the math that was even more tedious. but now they dont really interact with me as a friend the way they used to when I was in the room. at least they get together in person there though
so now I guess I must seem like this guy on the other end of teamspeak who takes a long time to debate with about what enemies would do
but another part of the problem is the campaign was designed for 5 people. we have 4 players, 1 of which is almost never there and connects remotely - when he does connect he's like 95% distracted
so 1 of the players is controlling my old character that I left behind as well as his brother's (the one who connects remotely)
they're hoping that everything will get magically better by picking up two new players, who are in a third city and know nothing about D&D
so I think we have some personal connectivity issues outside of even the table
This isn't something that being a better or more experienced GM can fix. It's a group dynamics problem that needs buy-in from all the players on a solution.
This is not a simple challenge you face. Any GM would be daunted by it, and many of the RPG.SE citizens would, if you told them about this, unequivocally tell you to run as fast and far as you can.
Heh. They are my friends. I want them to be happy. I was hoping I could help facilitate that by being there, but I think I can better facilitate it by not being there.
Long-distance games are challenging. Balancing conflicting game experience goals is challenging. Bringing unknown players into a group is so challenging that many groups forbid it!
The DMG talks about how to do this, but I've found that it needs some tweaking to be really effective.
What level should an encounter be?
DMG 56 says:
An easy encounter is one or two levels lower than the party’s level.
A standard encounter is of the party’s level, or one level higher....
I wish I could download mods for these campaigns like you can for say ... Skyrim. that game is a fraction of what the mods showed us it could be. I have a feeling WoTC's D&D rules and supplements are similar
either that or when the group agreed to play a game where the players 'won', they didn't necessarily agree on what 'winning' meant, and for them it means that they are effectively superheroes who should never take damage
It sounds like a control issue: they think the system is an immutable set of rules, so if something happens they don't think follows those rules, the GM must have altered them.
@BESW I would argue that its more when something happens that they deem to be 'unfair' to their character, and their definition of unfair is what the problem is
He says they want to have a say in interpreting the rules for every action, and as if they think NPC choices should follow predictable rules, as well as the mechanics for how to enact those choices.
IE, they want a system whose every nuance they understand and thus they can predict with perfect accuracy what the results of their actions on the world will be.
I've had problems in the past with players who have a fixed idea of what the narrative for their players should be, and whenever I as GM make a decision that strays from that they call foul
@BESW I don't actually think that's the problem - see my previous comment
but I could be letting my previous experiences colour my opinion too much :o)
If I were feeling brutal, there are some tools I'd pull out to showcase that 4e doesn't give a flying ferret what your defenses are: if it wants to damage you, it will make you weep.
"Start your turn within five squares of this guy? 10 psychic damage."
"Okay, he missed. That means you get to choose to take the damage or the crippling debuff, instead of taking both!"
But as I said earlier, in-game solutions to out-of-game problems don't solve anything.
Although I have had a couple cases where I had to prove that I held all the cards before a player learned to trust I was making good decisions.
"Look, I have total control here and I could be crushing you into a fine red mist without batting an eyelash or breaking a rule. If your character feels challenged instead of dead, I'm doing it on purpose."
I don't like being that GM, but sometimes I needed to prove I could be in order to get players to trust my non-that-GM choices.
A new guy walks into an SE room asks a question that is clearly a bad fit for it. You try to explain why it's a bad fit, quote the FAQ and urge to try in chat. Meanwhile, the guy gets an upvote, two favorites, and an answer. Mixed signals much?
I left a detailed comment (and VtCed) but with the question garnering answers and upvotes and favorites, it's all like "people like this question, why take it away from them?"
There's been a question by high-rep member of the GD site which is clearly an attracting opinion based answers: Do you give back? The way the question is formulated ("Do you give back?", " Do you donate? How?" "if there's a way to donate design services to large caregiving organizations") clearly...
I don't mind opinion based questions as such. I think that a strict definition of "answer" as something based on citations and data isn't a good fit for many SE sites, including RPG and SciFi.
Opinion-based doesn't have to mean "open to discussion". A lot of interpretations of texts can be considered "opinions".
However, when a question is both Opinion-Based, Asking for a List and Too Broad, I think that's a sign of a bad question.
Three warnings directly from the mouth of a deity, and two rolls of the dice after one of you ignored those warnings.
One of the reasons I moved away from 4e is that I didn't want a system where such things were so reasonably inevitable, but in the system we'd chosen at the time...
(And I would've tried harder to avoid it if I hadn't already planted a planned "out" for deaths in that session.)
I wish I had some faster, reliable way around this stupid block, but my work has put far more into this blocker than they do anything that will actually help us do our jobs.
Can someone suggest a RPG system to be used in a video game that might be way more mathematically complex (as opposed to DnD) to give more "fun" experience?
The DMG talks about how to do this, but I've found that it needs some tweaking to be really effective.
What level should an encounter be?
DMG 56 says:
An easy encounter is one or two levels lower than the party’s level.
A standard encounter is of the party’s level, or one level higher....
Can someone suggest a RPG system to be used in a video game that might be way more mathematically complex (as opposed to DnD) to give more "fun" experience?
