Party Leadership

How do you (as DMs) deal with a refusal or inability of anyone in the party to take on a leadership role? Their decision making process is painfully slow and frequently derails momentum of a session. 

I have found giving them limited choices, frequently and often, helps. I've also found it helps sometimes to ask each member individually what they think and moving on if you don't a response and then saying ~ like so it seems the consensus is X, wait a moment ... no objections, I assume it's X and start narrating from there (if they wanted to do y instead they should have said so). 

However, it's never been a major problem for me. More an irregular occurrence & there's always been a few players who will sort of take the lead, if not all the time or always the same people. If it's particularly bad you could either talk to an individual in the group who you feel might have the qualities to lead or talk to the group as a whole and ask them their own opinions on the issue and say how you feel and come to a solution together. 

Hope this helps.

One option you can also use is to have each party member just roll a straight Intelligence check (or a fitting Intelligence based check) and provide clues accordingly. Such as clearly stating that their characters realize what their options are, hint that they're forgetting a vital clue, or that they're greatly overanalyzing their situation. This approach, of course, needs to take into account if everyone rolls a very poor Intelligence check that you think it's not worth any clues.

I think you should talk to your players outside of the game. Not in the sense of "you lot need to shape up", but instead "I've noticed you're having problems picking a course of action a lot of the time. Should we restructure the campaign to give you more explicit direction?"

There are many ways this could resolve, but starting the conversation is the important part. You may find that they pick a leader for themselves. Or maybe you will have to change your game's structure, because it sounds like it's not working well for your players.

I find that having my players vote on where they want to go usually satisfies them and keeps things moving in a direction they feel is relevant.

Quote from sarrrragh_ >>

How do you (as DMs) deal with a refusal or inability of anyone in the party to take on a leadership role? Their decision making process is painfully slow and frequently derails momentum of a session. 

 This has been an on-going problem in my groups for 30 yrs. I have not found a 'solution', and have simply had to make due. Giving limited options, just makes the problem worse - the players get dependant on the DM to provide options. Lately i've been setting time limits, and when the time is up, I force the issue - otherwise they will never reach a consensus or make a decision. I try to ask them leading questions tailored to each character to try to get them to see possible routes. It has gotten worse as time goes on. I blame video games. They've all gotten used to having games tell them where they need to go next, who they need to talk to next, and it has taken away their ability to think for themselves. Some even ask A.I. what they should do, instead of thinking for themselves (which they used to do a couple decades ago).

I've played before where "party leader" was a semi-formalized role, and to register with the adventurers guild (in the world we were playing in) you needed to declare a party name and leader. 

The leader did not have any dictatorial power over the group, but was chosen by the group and was basically given final say during disputes. That way you have this built in mechanism for group discussion where, once you think both sides have spoken their piece, you can go to the party leader and say "ok, what's it going to be?" That way, everyone gets to have their voice heard, these disputes don't become added heavy lifting for the DM to take on and instead allows the party to resolve matters themselves, and introduces leadership opportunities in a relatively risk-free way which can be a fun role to play from both sides: for the leader they can explore those, and for the rest of the party the experience of having a trusted leader to rally behind can be really additive to the game and party dynamic. 

I might do some diagnostics:

• What are your players like? Are they all deferential to each other? Is the conversation long and spirited or more "I dunno, what do you want to do?"
• Do they feel unengaged, like they don't care that much, or do they feel afraid to make a bad choice?
• When they are discussing options, do you feel like there's a clear choice that they're not taking? Or do they fail to even see the options you expected?
• Are they going in circles between good plans or are they unable to coalesce on any plan at all?
• How long has this group been together? Are they still feeling each other out for comfort level and interactions or do they know each other well?

It can be helpful to put a timer on decisions. Not necessarily a physical timer but simply to interrupt them with dire news from an NPC - no more time to talk, the building is on fire, the NPC you're trying to save is being dragged off for execution, the army that they planned to ambush is here. Train them that there's a reason to hurry.

Be thoughtful about rewarding them for quicker decisions, even if this means your plans change a little. It's really important that if they make the quick decision you want, that you don't untrain this behavior by telling them how poor the choice was. I mean.. if it was really bad, sure, and this doesn't have to be forever. But reinforcing quick decisions with a good outcome (the plan helping) two or three times will make the party more confident in making those decisions.

Reflect on what you can do to help them with those choices. Are they not clear on the situation? Can an NPC drop some useful advice? Ask them for skill checks that can allow you to drop some information that might help the discussion. "Everyone roll perception... <highest roll>, you notice... " 

And, consider talking to the players, individually or in a group. Individually, if there's someone you think could take more of a lead, consider talking to them 1:1 and giving them permission and encouragement to do so. As a group, maybe say, "I'm going to start adding time pressure to these discussions. Any of you should feel free to take more of a lead in guiding the conversation, or you can choose a leader among you. But if you don't get to a plan quickly, things may happen before you decide."

I strongly disagree that this has anything to do with someone taking the "leadership" position. That's not how any of my campaigns have ever worked, rather different players/characters make decisions at different times when the situation is one that feels important to them. E.g. the cleric of Lathander made the decisions when we were defending a temple of Lathander from an undead onslaught, but our Dragonborn Paladin made the decisions when we were trying to obtain a crucial item from a protective metallic dragon. The problem is not leadership, the problem is motivation. If none of the characters/players care about any of the available plot threads then they won't argue for doing them and no decisions will be made. 

A few tips from what I noticed caused my party to endlessly debate things:

1) Make it crystal clear the pros/cons of each option they have. If they are choosing between 5 or more options that all seem basically the same - e.g. in my group we were collecting 7 pieces of the tri-force basically and all we knew were each of their approximate locations - no one can formulate an argument for one over the other so no decision can be reached.

2) Give them a clear goal, or make sure they give their individual characters clear goals during character creation. Lots of players just kind of make a generic character from some "build" they saw on the internet as being "good" and don't give their characters much motivation to do stuff. This combined with a campaign that doesn't have clear goals to achieve is a recipe for the party not having any strong feelings about what to do next. 

3) Make your plots more relevant to the backstories of the characters. Similar to #2, players will naturally defer to one player if a plotline is clearly related to their character's backstory, no one is going to demand to execute the mother of one of the other player characters if that other player/character says no. 

4) Make plots be time-limited. If the party has 20 things they could do but one of those they will miss the ability to do if they don't do it right now, well now the decision is easy if they actually want to do all 20 things. E.g. if one of the plots is up in the mountains tell the players their characters know it will become extremely dangerous to go and do that during winter, and wouldn't you know there's only 2 weeks of fall left.

In 1e days, a party member (player, not character) used to be desire’s The Caller (I might be remembering the title wrong). It was their job to inform the DM of what the party was doing next. The idea was to solve kind of the opposite problem from what the OP is having, in that the idea was only one person would count, instead of four different people shouting five different choices at the DM. They weren’t the leader in a sense that they gave orders, just they were the one who figured out what the general consensus was.

But it might work in this case, as well. Tell them they have to pick among themselves who will tell the DM what’s going on with the party. You can even couch it like, there are always a lot of ideas going around about what to do next, I want to make sure I understand which one you all are going with.