Hi guys, new DM here 4 months into my first full campaign and I’ve come seeking wisdom from the more experienced.
A few nights ago I had my players in a dungeon that in the previous session, they had already pretty well farmed...in the sense they found what they came for. But they are definitely “let’s make sure we check out every single possible dark corner JUST IN CASE” players, so I’ve had to learn to have monsters ready on the fly because I don’t feel like the answer to that is to have them find nilch as a punishment for curiosity. I mean, it’s a system of caves. There’s probably something else there. I made the mistake of deciding to throw a big monster they couldn’t possibly beat at their level at them to drive them out, trusting 1-2 of the characters to be level-headed enough to know when the party is beat and call for a retreat, as they have before. Retreat they did.
So finally, they were on their way out of the dungeon - by this time it was after midnight and I could tell one of my players was especially getting burnt out by the others’ rampant enthusiasm for killing anything that might have 2 coppers in its pockets. When. They hatched a really clever scheme to essentially trick a bunch of cultists they had been infiltrating undercover into helping them fight this monster. Again, I wasn’t going to tell them no for being creative, but the ROLLS. I felt like I had no choice but to let it play out. So now it’s 5 hours into the session, I have one players who’s being continually overridden and dragged into this stuff, I’m exhausted, and suddenly I have 30 cultists and essentially a battle to run. I probably should have made it a cliff-hanger and used the time to buy myself a solution. Instead, more out of desperation than anything, I basically boiled it down into a montage. I had the players make a few rolls to determine and steer the course of the battle and did the same for my mass of cultists and the monster and then told it like an epic ballad. The players seemed to enjoy it but as a DM, after the fact, I felt like I’d really cheated. But even as it stands...I’m really glad our next session isn’t going to start out STILL in that forsaken dungeon (which was never intended to be such a long endeavor).
I would love to hear what you guys would have done (probably left the monster out and not gotten yourself into trouble in the first place, but let’s pretend). And in regards to when a dungeon or scenario drags and it feels like half the party is enjoying it but the other half are twiddling their thumbs...how do you usher stuff along without railroading? Because apparently trying to herd a bunch of unruly chaotic neutrals with a monster is a terrible idea.
One is the out-of-character thing, that it was too long. Just feel free to end the session at whatever moment you or people are tired of it...
Second is that you expected players to actually leave a challenge alone because it's too hard. That basically never happens, I think. Players often assume that because they're given a challenge it must be solvable, which leads to either them suicidally fighting a doomed battle... or going back and tediously trrying to solve this bit that you meant to be unsolvable, and sometimes succeeding. In the future, remember that "there's nothing else here" is a much more powerful way to get the players to avoid a place instead of "there's something there, but it's just a bit too hard for you right now."
Herd players with goals, not with obstacles. The players should have wanted to leave that cave system and go somewhere else because they achieved their goal in that cave system, and their next goal would take them somewhere else.
The key to a good campaign is leave them wanting more. Sometimes that means leaving at a cliff hanger or the start of a combat. As for exploring every nook and cranny things like a little green slime can encourage prudence and less focus on finding the last copper if that's not important.
It seems like you learned through experience but I’ll give my 2 coppers. I try not to put a monster or battle encounter in front of them they can’t beat, just in case, though there is a time and place. And if I want a really tough battle I’ll try to use my best judgement to make it right on the absolute edge of their max difficulty, a fight that could go either way might cause them to retreat if the monster(s) get some nice luck early and if not then it ends up being an epic battle. After, when they try to rest throw some easy monsters at them to disrupt it and they should get out of there lol. The opposite might have worked too, a super easy boring fight might send the message there’s not much else down there. But I agree with what ftl said, nothing wrong with there not being anything else down there.
, nothin wrong with there not being anything else down there.
I would have told them they look through the empty dungeon and are unable to find anything else of note. In these situations, I use the old "taking 20" method from an older edition. (With enough time and checks, it is assumed a PC will get a 20 as a result.) My players know this, and are comfortable with the knowledge that their characters found nothing with 20's on their checks. No need to drag it on and roll in each room for investigation or perception.
As a side note on the monster, did your players know that the XP for the monster is split 30+ ways because of the cultist help? If they were trying to farm XP with a bunch of NPCs it never works. No one wants long battles for very little reward.
You have the solution: call the session. As soon as you realized you had a tired player who wanted to stop, you should have stopped. Blame yourself, not the player -- say you're tired, and you have work or whatever tomorrow, and we need to stop. Call the session and use the intervening time to regroup -- come up with a clever way to run the encounter, etc. Give the tired player time to rest. And the like.
As for the larger dungeon, well... I tend to put something in every room or the room generally doesn't exist. So I get where you are coming from there. And I do agree that players should get to find the occasional thing when looking around rooms. But not every room needs a monster. They could find an old journal entry that leads them to the next dungeon. Or they could find the remains of a camp-site and then further on the bodies of a former band of adventurers who came in here months or years ago. These things are still "something to find" but don't necessarily lead to combat or monsters.
It also sounds like you and the players may need to talk OOC, since it seems like 1 or more of them (and you) are not really into the murder hobo'ing, and the rest of the group seems to be. These could potentially be incompatible play styles depending on how flexible everyone is.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Thanks everyone, that’s all super helpful. I guess - because I do DM a group of treasure-crazy murder-hobos with the exception of my one poor female Druid - that I feel guilty not giving them something when they insist on going further and further in. And part of me feels like, because we’re currently playing on Roll20 and they can see that parts of the map are still blacked out, it’s completionism too. I think if I were on the other side of the table I’d feel similarly, where if we were theatre-of-the-mind-ing it, they might not necessarily feel or know the need to keep pushing.
And I don’t think the determination to fight the monsters was XP-based so much as what ftl said about assuming I wouldn’t have given it to them if there wasn’t some way to beat it. And. They do just really, really like killing stuff (and I think two of them also relish the idea of dying trying?).
I’m definitely frustrated I didn’t just call the session, but now hopefully I’ll know better next time.
I do DM a group of treasure-crazy murder-hobos with the exception of my one poor female Druid - that I feel guilty not giving them something when they insist on going further and further in.
Again, I think there needs to be an OOC conversation. Maybe you should start with the female druid's player, as about that player's impression of things and if this is all making for an unpleasant experience. Then use that to guide a conversation with the table. People need to understand that different folks want different things out of the game and as friends, you should all be willing to make some sacrifices. The druid player needs to understand that if she is only 1/5th of the table, and 4/5ths wants to murder hobo, then there's going to be a lot of that type of play. But the hobos need to understand that at least some of the time, the druid player needs to be able to have fun too. If everyone is OK with that you can proceed, and just make sure that 20% of the time or so, there is a non-combat, non-dungeon-crawly aspect... and the other 80% or so they can just hobo it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
1) If it is getting late, you've passed the time you usually stop the session, you are getting tired or some of your players are obviously tired and aren't into anymore ... then call the session. If everyone has been having a good time then they will be back next week anyway. It is usually best to avoid a situation that will likely turn into a big combat at the end of a session but if you do then it is better to stop and start the next session with the combat rather than keep on playing for too long.
2) Try for a bit of realism in your world building :) ... not every cave system has monsters or treasure. If the players decide to stay in a dungeon turning over every last rock, and you don't want them to bother, don't make up something for them to find. You have lots of fun and exciting content for them elsewhere ... you don't have to expand the dungeon on the fly to give them something to do. That said, there is nothing wrong with adding content if you want to, or if it fits your story, or if you want them to spend some more time somewhere ... just don't add content just because the players decide to further search a dungeon they have already been through.
On the other hand, if the characters decide to head in a direction different from that which you expected, feel free to add or modify content to fit what the players do. The players may not know exactly where they are going or what they are looking for so often it is possible to just move your content to a new location in the character's path. Alternatively, make something up on the fly ... but the difference here is that the content is narrative related, not just throwing in a monster to give them something to do while they waste more time in a dungeon that was basically completed.
3) The way you handled this situation was fine given that you wanted to wrap up the session reasonably quickly and didn't want to run a huge combat that might take hours. Narrating the battle between the players+cultists and the monster is a perfectly acceptable solution. The die rolls give the players a bit of a feeling of control over the action. If you weren't going to end the session before the combat then the way you handled it was probably the best choice given that some folks were already tired.
4) You might want to have a bit of an OOC chat with the party about the playstyle. Is everyone ok with being murder hobos? Society (even in D&D) often has a very negative reactions to a group of psychopaths that go around slaughtering folks so if they are extreme murder hobos you really should let them know that there will likely be consequences depending on what actions they take.
I would’ve done exactly what you did. Run the battle as a montage. Your players loved it and that’s what mattered. You totally did the right thing.
Though if your one player seemed exhausted and not really into it I might have insisted on ending the game early and letting everyone get some rest. But if I had gone ahead and run the battle I think an epic montage was a great way to do it.
There's been a lot of advice on how you could've/should've handled this scenario, so I'd like to take a slightly different tack with mine: review it, and don't beat yourself up.
As a new DM, there's a lot of pressure to perform and it's easy to obsess over everything you think you did wrong. Wanting to be a better DM is great, and making notes about how you can improve is great, too. Just remember to be kind to yourself as you do it. You're still growing as a storyteller, and it's normal to make mistakes along the way. Heck, the veterans do it all the time. Plus, we DMs are often far harder on ourselves than we need to be - and it frequently turns out our players had a blast and we stressed out for nothing.
I'm sensing that you feel an obligation to please your players - again, perfectly normal. Just recall that it's your story world and they're the ones walking around in it. If you don't want the dungeon to have anything else interesting, it doesn't have to. Will your players be disappointed? Maybe, but that's the game, sometimes. By including more things to fight all the time, you're only going to condition them to expect it in the future, and you're going to burn yourself out. A burned out DM has a tough time pleasing anybody.
I do understand the tension of wanting to reward players for their curiosity, so perhaps as a happy medium is to introduce some non-murderhobo-y things for them to discover. What if instead of finding a monster, they discover a bioluminescent garden? Or a vein of iridescent metal? Or a cavern that has been eroded to the point that any wind passing by makes it sing? Adding details like this rewards their curiosity, adds color to your backdrop, and allows opportunities for the druid to shine.
All in all, you're a good DM for wanting to do right by your players. Nothing but support from me! :-)
I think one of the most common sensations I have had while DMing ( aside from it being a ton of fun!) is the "aw man, what I should have done was..."
My group has also moved to Roll20 to play, and have a new problem of the players sometimes wanting to get out of challenges/combats through bargaining and role play, and then apologizing later or feeling like they wasted my time because I laid out a combat map or came up with a riddle that they circumvented. So now they kind of trudge into certain situations feeling like combat is unavoidable and it can be a challenge to encourage them to use any tool at their disposal without worrying about letting me down somehow. It sounds like you came up with a pretty elegant solution for the reverse, an unplanned combat where a grid of 30 cultists moving around would have been a real pain.
Ideas for some of the other aspects:
• Show that there are some powers/abilities that they could access by doing missions in a non murder-y way. Maybe a local priest will bless them if they can negotiate with the overwhelming force of some local elves or a tricky fey spirit. Perhaps show off some local NPCs who have a kind of favor or access to the upper echelons of society that a bunch of murderers for hire won't be able to get until their reputation improves
• Encourage out of game feedback from players, even if it's "hey I'm getting pretty beat, do you think we can find a place to stop in the next 30 minutes?". That or just have a set time window you plan to wrap up the game at. I think it also helps to actively solicit stuff like "what was your favorite part of the session" or "do you feel like your character is growing" to encourage players to think about what direction they want the story to take.
• It's ok for the players to "guess wrong" about stuff, and I think if you can add some in-game hints that there time would be spent elsewhere, they shouldn't get too upset about it. If they can always 'farm' the same places over and over, they might not get to all the other cool stuff you have planned for them!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Hi guys, new DM here 4 months into my first full campaign and I’ve come seeking wisdom from the more experienced.
A few nights ago I had my players in a dungeon that in the previous session, they had already pretty well farmed...in the sense they found what they came for. But they are definitely “let’s make sure we check out every single possible dark corner JUST IN CASE” players, so I’ve had to learn to have monsters ready on the fly because I don’t feel like the answer to that is to have them find nilch as a punishment for curiosity. I mean, it’s a system of caves. There’s probably something else there. I made the mistake of deciding to throw a big monster they couldn’t possibly beat at their level at them to drive them out, trusting 1-2 of the characters to be level-headed enough to know when the party is beat and call for a retreat, as they have before. Retreat they did.
So finally, they were on their way out of the dungeon - by this time it was after midnight and I could tell one of my players was especially getting burnt out by the others’ rampant enthusiasm for killing anything that might have 2 coppers in its pockets. When. They hatched a really clever scheme to essentially trick a bunch of cultists they had been infiltrating undercover into helping them fight this monster. Again, I wasn’t going to tell them no for being creative, but the ROLLS. I felt like I had no choice but to let it play out. So now it’s 5 hours into the session, I have one players who’s being continually overridden and dragged into this stuff, I’m exhausted, and suddenly I have 30 cultists and essentially a battle to run. I probably should have made it a cliff-hanger and used the time to buy myself a solution. Instead, more out of desperation than anything, I basically boiled it down into a montage. I had the players make a few rolls to determine and steer the course of the battle and did the same for my mass of cultists and the monster and then told it like an epic ballad. The players seemed to enjoy it but as a DM, after the fact, I felt like I’d really cheated. But even as it stands...I’m really glad our next session isn’t going to start out STILL in that forsaken dungeon (which was never intended to be such a long endeavor).
I would love to hear what you guys would have done (probably left the monster out and not gotten yourself into trouble in the first place, but let’s pretend). And in regards to when a dungeon or scenario drags and it feels like half the party is enjoying it but the other half are twiddling their thumbs...how do you usher stuff along without railroading? Because apparently trying to herd a bunch of unruly chaotic neutrals with a monster is a terrible idea.
Could be a few things.
One is the out-of-character thing, that it was too long. Just feel free to end the session at whatever moment you or people are tired of it...
Second is that you expected players to actually leave a challenge alone because it's too hard. That basically never happens, I think. Players often assume that because they're given a challenge it must be solvable, which leads to either them suicidally fighting a doomed battle... or going back and tediously trrying to solve this bit that you meant to be unsolvable, and sometimes succeeding. In the future, remember that "there's nothing else here" is a much more powerful way to get the players to avoid a place instead of "there's something there, but it's just a bit too hard for you right now."
Herd players with goals, not with obstacles. The players should have wanted to leave that cave system and go somewhere else because they achieved their goal in that cave system, and their next goal would take them somewhere else.
The key to a good campaign is leave them wanting more. Sometimes that means leaving at a cliff hanger or the start of a combat. As for exploring every nook and cranny things like a little green slime can encourage prudence and less focus on finding the last copper if that's not important.
It seems like you learned through experience but I’ll give my 2 coppers. I try not to put a monster or battle encounter in front of them they can’t beat, just in case, though there is a time and place. And if I want a really tough battle I’ll try to use my best judgement to make it right on the absolute edge of their max difficulty, a fight that could go either way might cause them to retreat if the monster(s) get some nice luck early and if not then it ends up being an epic battle. After, when they try to rest throw some easy monsters at them to disrupt it and they should get out of there lol. The opposite might have worked too, a super easy boring fight might send the message there’s not much else down there. But I agree with what ftl said, nothing wrong with there not being anything else down there.
, nothin wrong with there not being anything else down there.
I would have told them they look through the empty dungeon and are unable to find anything else of note. In these situations, I use the old "taking 20" method from an older edition. (With enough time and checks, it is assumed a PC will get a 20 as a result.) My players know this, and are comfortable with the knowledge that their characters found nothing with 20's on their checks. No need to drag it on and roll in each room for investigation or perception.
As a side note on the monster, did your players know that the XP for the monster is split 30+ ways because of the cultist help? If they were trying to farm XP with a bunch of NPCs it never works. No one wants long battles for very little reward.
You have the solution: call the session. As soon as you realized you had a tired player who wanted to stop, you should have stopped. Blame yourself, not the player -- say you're tired, and you have work or whatever tomorrow, and we need to stop. Call the session and use the intervening time to regroup -- come up with a clever way to run the encounter, etc. Give the tired player time to rest. And the like.
As for the larger dungeon, well... I tend to put something in every room or the room generally doesn't exist. So I get where you are coming from there. And I do agree that players should get to find the occasional thing when looking around rooms. But not every room needs a monster. They could find an old journal entry that leads them to the next dungeon. Or they could find the remains of a camp-site and then further on the bodies of a former band of adventurers who came in here months or years ago. These things are still "something to find" but don't necessarily lead to combat or monsters.
It also sounds like you and the players may need to talk OOC, since it seems like 1 or more of them (and you) are not really into the murder hobo'ing, and the rest of the group seems to be. These could potentially be incompatible play styles depending on how flexible everyone is.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Thanks everyone, that’s all super helpful. I guess - because I do DM a group of treasure-crazy murder-hobos with the exception of my one poor female Druid - that I feel guilty not giving them something when they insist on going further and further in. And part of me feels like, because we’re currently playing on Roll20 and they can see that parts of the map are still blacked out, it’s completionism too. I think if I were on the other side of the table I’d feel similarly, where if we were theatre-of-the-mind-ing it, they might not necessarily feel or know the need to keep pushing.
And I don’t think the determination to fight the monsters was XP-based so much as what ftl said about assuming I wouldn’t have given it to them if there wasn’t some way to beat it. And. They do just really, really like killing stuff (and I think two of them also relish the idea of dying trying?).
I’m definitely frustrated I didn’t just call the session, but now hopefully I’ll know better next time.
Again, I think there needs to be an OOC conversation. Maybe you should start with the female druid's player, as about that player's impression of things and if this is all making for an unpleasant experience. Then use that to guide a conversation with the table. People need to understand that different folks want different things out of the game and as friends, you should all be willing to make some sacrifices. The druid player needs to understand that if she is only 1/5th of the table, and 4/5ths wants to murder hobo, then there's going to be a lot of that type of play. But the hobos need to understand that at least some of the time, the druid player needs to be able to have fun too. If everyone is OK with that you can proceed, and just make sure that 20% of the time or so, there is a non-combat, non-dungeon-crawly aspect... and the other 80% or so they can just hobo it.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Just a couple of comments ...
1) If it is getting late, you've passed the time you usually stop the session, you are getting tired or some of your players are obviously tired and aren't into anymore ... then call the session. If everyone has been having a good time then they will be back next week anyway. It is usually best to avoid a situation that will likely turn into a big combat at the end of a session but if you do then it is better to stop and start the next session with the combat rather than keep on playing for too long.
2) Try for a bit of realism in your world building :) ... not every cave system has monsters or treasure. If the players decide to stay in a dungeon turning over every last rock, and you don't want them to bother, don't make up something for them to find. You have lots of fun and exciting content for them elsewhere ... you don't have to expand the dungeon on the fly to give them something to do. That said, there is nothing wrong with adding content if you want to, or if it fits your story, or if you want them to spend some more time somewhere ... just don't add content just because the players decide to further search a dungeon they have already been through.
On the other hand, if the characters decide to head in a direction different from that which you expected, feel free to add or modify content to fit what the players do. The players may not know exactly where they are going or what they are looking for so often it is possible to just move your content to a new location in the character's path. Alternatively, make something up on the fly ... but the difference here is that the content is narrative related, not just throwing in a monster to give them something to do while they waste more time in a dungeon that was basically completed.
3) The way you handled this situation was fine given that you wanted to wrap up the session reasonably quickly and didn't want to run a huge combat that might take hours. Narrating the battle between the players+cultists and the monster is a perfectly acceptable solution. The die rolls give the players a bit of a feeling of control over the action. If you weren't going to end the session before the combat then the way you handled it was probably the best choice given that some folks were already tired.
4) You might want to have a bit of an OOC chat with the party about the playstyle. Is everyone ok with being murder hobos? Society (even in D&D) often has a very negative reactions to a group of psychopaths that go around slaughtering folks so if they are extreme murder hobos you really should let them know that there will likely be consequences depending on what actions they take.
I would’ve done exactly what you did. Run the battle as a montage. Your players loved it and that’s what mattered. You totally did the right thing.
Though if your one player seemed exhausted and not really into it I might have insisted on ending the game early and letting everyone get some rest. But if I had gone ahead and run the battle I think an epic montage was a great way to do it.
There's been a lot of advice on how you could've/should've handled this scenario, so I'd like to take a slightly different tack with mine: review it, and don't beat yourself up.
As a new DM, there's a lot of pressure to perform and it's easy to obsess over everything you think you did wrong. Wanting to be a better DM is great, and making notes about how you can improve is great, too. Just remember to be kind to yourself as you do it. You're still growing as a storyteller, and it's normal to make mistakes along the way. Heck, the veterans do it all the time. Plus, we DMs are often far harder on ourselves than we need to be - and it frequently turns out our players had a blast and we stressed out for nothing.
I'm sensing that you feel an obligation to please your players - again, perfectly normal. Just recall that it's your story world and they're the ones walking around in it. If you don't want the dungeon to have anything else interesting, it doesn't have to. Will your players be disappointed? Maybe, but that's the game, sometimes. By including more things to fight all the time, you're only going to condition them to expect it in the future, and you're going to burn yourself out. A burned out DM has a tough time pleasing anybody.
I do understand the tension of wanting to reward players for their curiosity, so perhaps as a happy medium is to introduce some non-murderhobo-y things for them to discover. What if instead of finding a monster, they discover a bioluminescent garden? Or a vein of iridescent metal? Or a cavern that has been eroded to the point that any wind passing by makes it sing? Adding details like this rewards their curiosity, adds color to your backdrop, and allows opportunities for the druid to shine.
All in all, you're a good DM for wanting to do right by your players. Nothing but support from me! :-)
I think one of the most common sensations I have had while DMing ( aside from it being a ton of fun!) is the "aw man, what I should have done was..."
My group has also moved to Roll20 to play, and have a new problem of the players sometimes wanting to get out of challenges/combats through bargaining and role play, and then apologizing later or feeling like they wasted my time because I laid out a combat map or came up with a riddle that they circumvented. So now they kind of trudge into certain situations feeling like combat is unavoidable and it can be a challenge to encourage them to use any tool at their disposal without worrying about letting me down somehow. It sounds like you came up with a pretty elegant solution for the reverse, an unplanned combat where a grid of 30 cultists moving around would have been a real pain.
Ideas for some of the other aspects:
• Show that there are some powers/abilities that they could access by doing missions in a non murder-y way. Maybe a local priest will bless them if they can negotiate with the overwhelming force of some local elves or a tricky fey spirit. Perhaps show off some local NPCs who have a kind of favor or access to the upper echelons of society that a bunch of murderers for hire won't be able to get until their reputation improves
• Encourage out of game feedback from players, even if it's "hey I'm getting pretty beat, do you think we can find a place to stop in the next 30 minutes?". That or just have a set time window you plan to wrap up the game at. I think it also helps to actively solicit stuff like "what was your favorite part of the session" or "do you feel like your character is growing" to encourage players to think about what direction they want the story to take.
• It's ok for the players to "guess wrong" about stuff, and I think if you can add some in-game hints that there time would be spent elsewhere, they shouldn't get too upset about it. If they can always 'farm' the same places over and over, they might not get to all the other cool stuff you have planned for them!