mabon5127 wrote:

Blackadder23 wrote:

There aren't any shortcuts.  Long-term RPG campaigning was invented by a specific group of people (middle-aged wargamers) and this form of play is tailored for people with similar interests and attention spans.  If your players don't have the patience for campaign play, then they won't be able to enjoy the advantages of it.  Players have to be willing to put in their time.  A campaign grows through a slow accumulation of interesting and exciting events, and there's no way to achieve that short of sitting down and doing it.

For example, you can tell your players as part of their backstory, "You hate the mayor of Highmark because he once humiliated you in public".  But it would be a hundred times more meaningful to them if this actually happened as part of ongoing play, and they actually spent some time dreaming of revenge.  This is an advantage of campaign play that can't be imitated by assigning the PCs a bunch of "contacts", "rivals", "enemies", or whatever.  There simply aren't any shortcuts to actually sitting down and playing out a campaign - including the "boring" bits.

 
Indeed. It's not 100% your responsibility to make the game interesting. The players need to step up. It's one thing to be a newbie and sit tight while others take the spot light because you on your learning curve, but for the player to intentionally act stupid and ruin the campaign is another. If it's not fun don't do it. Never settle, coach or replace players as needed.

All true.

Of course, if your players are drunks, you *do* need to remind them sometimes that *that* guy is the one who embarrassed them in public. *Then* they're ready to roll. Maybe no one else has this ... not problem ... facet? Anyway, just gentle reminders and more Yuengling.

My main advice would be to always offer plenty of things for PCs to do that are independent of their class abilities - for example, solving puzzles and talking to NPCs.  Don't let them fight or use spells to get out of every situation.  That forces them to put on their thinking caps and engage the game, and it lets you worry less about spell counts and FA.

The other thing I would say is that some people just prefer to sit back and let others take the lead.  It doesn't necessarily mean they're not enjoying the game.  I would make sure there really is a problem before I worried about it too much.

Yora, I agree with Blackadder and MarbleToad that you have to make the situation rich enough that the players are compelled to interact with it to a great degree apart from their characters' special abilities. I started playing D&D when I was 12, and no one complained that the magic-user only got a single spell casting at first level, because we the players had plenty to do in interacting with the game world. (One of my current players is so good at dealing with NPCs and searching for traps with verbal back and forth with me that the character classes he plays are often inconsequential.) I think some of the better older modules are great at demonstrating this sort of thing.

That said, spellcasters in more traditional D&D games are in some ways the "delayed gratification classes" when it comes to special abilities. (I refer to them as marshmallows after the Standford Marshmallow Experiement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment). If you haven't played D&D to the point where they start getting their third level spells and higher, you haven't experienced that shift in power and perspective (or seen your players experience it with wide-eyed wonder). The casters will start paying back those fighters who saved their butts so many times at lower levels by turning around no win situations, and they will start to understand that the cost of great power is danger and sacrifice. Very sword and sorcery and a good life lesson in my opinion, and it's not something that's obvious unless you have a longer term committment from your players.

This is a great discussion all. 

Last edited by Kirowan (7/03/2014 11:22 am)