… and I find myself quite frustrated over it.

We have a semi-regular party and this is our fourth campaign, but they’re chaotic and make it difficult to DM for. (Sorry, rant incoming)

I put a lot of plot threads throughout the campaign. The party would find an important NPC that has been assassinated… But rather than investigating it, they opted to ‘not touch the crime scene’ and move on. They found a dwarven girl who was cursed, but decided to drop her off at a tavern. Lastly they found an unidentified plot related magic item but chose not to identify it until the last ~2 sessions, when it was largely irrelevant.

In the end, some of the players said they didn’t understand the story and wanted more narrative. They noted they were aware of some of the plot hooks but chose not to engage with them, but were also frustrated by suffering the consequences of ignoring quests/issues/NPCs.

One party member would frequently start big fights, and at one point walked up to the BBEG’S fort (noticing a massive row of archers, I made the danger very clear), he knocked on the front door and announced he wanted to fight.

The hail of arrows left two party members very injured and two on death saving throws, which led the party to be upset with me for an unbalanced encounter. (It wasn’t supposed to be an encounter)

He turned another low level encounter into a near TPK by yelling into a goblin cave as he wished to fight ‘all’ of the goblins at once.

The rogue couldn’t decide who he wanted to be and kept changing up his personality. At one point he was wearing heavy armor (without proficiency) and using a weapon he didn’t have proficiency in. He wanted to subclass into spellcasting, but also wanted to use a heavy crossbow. (He had 12 weapons he collected, and would randomly use a different one). He would often charge the enemy, and never got to use his sneak attacks bonus until 75% through the campaign.

When he very nearly died from these choices (probably around 4-5 near deaths, thanks to his party rescuing him each time), he proudly announced his next character would be the same rolled character, but with a 2 at the end of his name.

I had one player message me afterwards that it was the worst campaign so far, and wanted more roleplaying and narrative. Immediately followed by another player very excited for the next campaign.

I am at a loss.

On one hand, the party obviously enjoys the chaos but they also dislike the consequences and lack of narrative their chaos brings. What would you do?

  • Redsven@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 year ago

    It’s difficult to say with only a brief summary, but it sounds like you and your party all want different things from the game. I’m going to guess that you play with people who you were friends with before d&d, and not play d&d with people you have become friends with.

    You clearly seem to have a murder hobo. You also have a player who sounds like he’s more interested in hanging out with the group than he is playing d&d. There’s a lot of advice on forums about how to deal with these types of players, and your threshold for what you’ll put up with is entirely up to you.

    I encourage and tolerate a lot of silly shit, but if one of my players handed the same character sheet of their character that had just died with a 2 after it, I would direct them to the nearest LFG post and be on my merry way. That’s a dealbreaker for me.

    The others don’t necessarily sound like a problem, but i think they want a little more railroad and guidance, while you want them to take initiative and make decisions. Neither of these are wrong, but they aren’t always compatible.

    From our perspective as DMs, its easy to set the scene and say “what do you want to do”, then react because we know the whole tavern, encounter, story, world, everything and when we don’t, we’ll make it up. For a lot of players though, leaving things open ended like that feels very limiting. They don’t know what you are or aren’t prepared for and don’t want to be that guy. They like you, and if this murder is going to be important later they don’t want to fuck up the crime scene until they have permission.

    As a side note, when I wanted my party to participate in solving a murder, I framed one of them for it. Also, the Gumshoe advice is great for running mysteries. They get the clue that tells them what’s next automatically and have to search for more information to gain context so the game doesn’t stall on one bad roll.

    Ultimately, if you’re dissatisfied with the game, you should have a conversation with your players before preparing anything further. I would say something like this:

    “Hey muderhobo, I know you like fighting tons of shit, so I promise I will give you challenging combat in the campaign, but I need you to exercise some common sense and let me bring it to you instead going off to find it on your own. You other guy, are you sure you want to play? You dont seem to be interested and we can just hang out sometimes without playing if you want to skip the sessions. The rest of you, I can be more direct in giving you options and plot hooks, what kinds of encounters would interest you most? I’m going to start preparing a new campaign, I’m thinking about (themes and flavor of next story) as being important, can you start preparing characters that would have a reason to engage with a story like that? While I begin preparing, would anyone like to run any one shots in between?”