So I DMed for the first time yesterday with a group of first-timers that never played P&P before

So I DMed for the first time yesterday with a group of first-timers that never played P&P before.

I've set up an adventure with several locations, NPCs and quests and expected them to be done with it in 8 hours max.

What happened was that they've spent 5 hours at the introductory starting location that was supposed to be a small contained area that was set up in a way to teach them how the game even works. They weren't even done with 10% of the adventure after 12 hours.

Now my question is, is this something the DM is accountable for? If you notice that the players are very slow what do you do? As I said, it was my first time DMing and their first time playing so it's probably a combination of both. I just want to know how you guys handle situations like this.

Go away frogposter.

Nudge them along, but if they don't like being rushed, just accept they enjoy a slower pace and tailor future legs of the journey to that sort of playstyle.

What did they have trouble with?

First timers are always slow, especially if they're in a group that's all first timers.

As long as they're enjoying things it doesn't matter. You can always compactify your plotlines. Frankly if you've already laid out enough in advance that you can say "they weren't even done with 10%" then you've probably overplanned anyway.

Not enough information. What did they spend time on? What was the location?
Maybe it's you, who should go away.

Sounds like you are still learning how much material provides what length of playing time. You'll learn how much prep work you need to do for your players in time.

Then, when you get another group, you'll find that the prep time : play time ratio is different.


The fact that you produced too much content is a good thing. It means that you don't have to do as much prep work for next week.

>If you notice that the players are very slow what do you do?
If everyone, including myself, are enjoying ourselves at this slow pace I don't change anything.

>Maybe it's you, who should go away.
It's not. Go away, frogposter.

2 of them managed to get injured before they even met their first enemy, the first fight against a single opponent was a disaster with 2 of them being incapacitated, one of them cutting open his own entire rib-cage on broken glass and the other guy lying on the ground the head straight in the dirt. There could have been deaths right then and there.

It was like a fucking Monty Python sketch. I've planned encounters WAY harder than that. This was basically just to introduce them to the concept of how to play the game.

Go away frogposter.

>hurr durr we're so kewl for not liking something popular xD

You're both poser faggots. Kill yourselves. Now.

>one of them cutting open his own entire rib-cage on broken glass and the other guy lying on the ground the head straight in the dirt
This sounds like a story of impressive PC stupidity and/or you being a bit to harsh on your PCs. Tell us more.

If the players like playing slowly, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Also, give them some time, they'll get used to shit in the setting after a while and things'll speed up

...

they broke a lamp on a critical miss a couple of minutes earlier and forgot to remove it from the floor. They were fighting an enemy in enclosed space and one of them tried to hop over a table during combat with a critical miss on acrobatics. The glass was still there so he slipped off the table and fell into it. The other two guys tried to back into his direction and fell over his body because they didn't see him, tripped right into the touble, one of them hit their head and went unconscious.

You are a shitty gm. Remove yourself from the hobby

he's a good DM. Immediately taught those fuckers that the DM is not going to go easy on them for their own stupidity.

YOU fucking carebears should remove yourself from the hobby.

why? he did nothing wrong, players sound like a bunch news with shitty luck

That's not so bad.
My friends are also very slow but that's only because they can't leave the first town without checking 10+ expansion manuals, look at the future prestige classes and magical items and build a whole character around which setup has the best numbers

That's why we just play video games together now

On a side note, yes I've tried to restrict it to the Player's manual for the first quests, but they complain that it's too boring.
And I've never seen them try to solve a conflict through other means than combat. Usually they pull out their weapons as soon as an NPC appears outside a town

I would love to hear the full tale. Green-blooded P&P players often have cringeworthy exploits.

it was extremely hilarious. As soon as they figured out that I as the DM can technically not stop them from backstabbing each other they intentionally started omitting information from each other. It was backstabbing, critical misses, bad plans and chaos wherever they went.

What system, because I feel like is right.

>Not having things go comically wrong at every opportunity is being a carebear
Bitch, please.

the DM is not responsible for a critical miss of a player character.

New players need to get into roleplaying mindset first, especially if they come from video games. They need to start using their minds to come up with choices of their own and not drive you to the brink that you basically tell them what their options are just to keep them moving. It takes time.

Tell me more about this PoV
Are you saying the players should narrate all their own 'critical misses'? What determines if what they say is permitted and actually allowed to happen? How far can they go? What if their bad thing is only sorta kinda bad and you as a DM think they're wimping out on it?

what the fuck was he supposed to do if there is glass on the ground and a guy fails his acrobatics check with a critical miss? Tell him he did it?

Are critical misses/failures part of the game system or are they a houserule you are using? Is it considered a critical miss if they roll a natural 1 or if their roll plus modifiers misses the target number to succeed by a lot?

If they are a houserule, drop them. Especially if it requires a natural 1. Or ease up on what the consequences are.

That wasn't what I was saying. If the DM punishes you for a critical miss and you eat shit then that's not the fault of the DM, that's the fault of the dice.

You've gotta figure that each character makes about 10 rolls during a fight. If there are 4 characters, that's 40 rolls, and statistically speaking, 2 of them will be critical misses. If you have something go drastically wrong when you roll a 1, that leads to ludicrous results. But wait... what about the enemies? Include them and we're up to 4 different people accidentally chopping their dicks off or face-planting into a brazier in the average fight.

I'd like to see a full-scale battle according to these rules. You get 400 lancers charging and that's 20 critical misses the first time they all roll the dice. No need to worry about knights charging at you; with 20 of those fuckers biting it hard, at least a couple of them are bound to careen into others and cause a massive pileup. They'll be lucky if nobody ends up with a lance shoved up his ass.

I am saying that if the player is in a situation where a critical miss naturally leads to a bad outcome then the DM is not at fault. The OP already said that there was glass on the floor and he fucked up the acrobatic check. Falling to the ground is the least that will happen, the glass is something that the players could have prevented themselves.

Oh, yeah, I follow you now. My bad.
A crit miss's actual effects can vary depending on a lot though, and generally the GM decides what exactly it entails regardless.
So the GM isn't absolved of all responsibility for what happens.

My words here aren't specific to this OP, just generically.

yes, some GMs just think a critical miss means that shit blows up. It depends on the situation. If a critical miss naturally leads to something horrible because it makes sense then it's justified to fuck the player over. Like dodging traps for example. A critical miss in a low-stakes situation should usually never lead to disaster.

It's the two guys falling over the guy on the floor and one of them knocking himself unconscious that's the icing on the cake.

The glass on the floor also resulted from a critical miss. Yes, the players forgot to remove. But the critical miss and cutting open your rib-cage sound more like the DM's decision than the rules of the system.

One of my problems with critical misses as they are is that a similar outcome happens if an untrained moron or a trained and highly experienced professional roll a natural 1.

That depends on the system though. If the system has a fumble table and stuff like that, fine. But if the GM is running D&D or similar and decides without player knowledge that a nat 1 is not just "you miss" but "you accidentally kill yourself", then yeah, it's all the GM's fault.

what was he supposed to do? Give both players the power of foresight to spot the body behind them while they were backing away from the enemy?

Lemme guess, you dropped the players in some stupid town and expected them to wander around until they hit some action?

Yeah, that's fucking stupid, but unfortunately it's also how 90% of games out there condition people.

The best way to start a game is always to begin with an action scene, straight out and away. "You're all on a ship, when suddenly pirates attack!" Once they fight off the pirates, ask them why they were on the ship in the first place. Then ask what they had that was so valuable that it made them ripe for piracy. Then work out a story from the details your players give you.

I have to note that the glass on the floor was from a critical miss earlier, before the fight ever happened. They were in the room for a while and knew that there was an enemy behind the door because they heard a strange noise. They could have prepared themselves, cleared the room and made sure that they had enough space to fight adequately so nothing was in the way. Instead they just opened it and decided to fight on the broken glass while one of them was still located behind the table. They had more than enough time to do anything in their power to completely prevent that situation in the first place. In fact with enough preparation a real fight wouldn't have happened, they had opportunities to place a trap, open the door and then leave the room while the enemy was following them.

The situation was basically just there to teach them the advantage they can have over an enemy if they know he's coming.

So, what system were you running? Seems that a lot of the discussion requires this bit of information.

Lemme guess, you dropped the players in some stupid town and expected them to wander around until they hit some action?

No I didn't. I placed them in a fairly secluded small location that had a very clear area of exploration. It also had one enemy inside that was located behind a door, it kept announcing itself with grunting and rustling noises. If they wanted the loot inside their job was basically to just find objects in the room that would help them create the optimal situation to prevent the enemy from ever becoming dangerous to them. I wanted to teach them that their stats are not as important as they think, the dice is just an extension of the roleplaying experience.

>what was he supposed to do?
Not turn the whole thing into a farce?

Look, he's a first time DM, so if this is the worst thing that happened, he probably didn't do too badly, but let's not pretend that this was an exemplary way of handling things.

Shadowrun

The broken glass from a lamp will hardly make a bad cut if it's already on the floor. There is no way a person will open his ribcage open from the broken glass of a lamp for falling in it.

>running Shadowrun with first timers

I exaggerated a bit, he didn't "cut open his entire rib-cage", his rib-cage was littered in glass splinters.

that explains a lot

WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO THEM

holy shit
what kind of garbageass rolls were they doing if glitches (or even crit glitches) are happening with any frequency

I am telling you, they were so fucking unlucky. I had no choice.

what is maybe 1 hp of damage

>Look, he's a first time DM, so if this is the worst thing that happened, he probably didn't do too badly, but let's not pretend that this was an exemplary way of handling things.
This.

A common rookie GM mistake is thinking in terms of "I have to do 'x' because it's in the rules/game/module."

OP, if your game is not moving along at a good pace, it is because of time being wasted.
Doing things that add no fun for anyone, whether it's "hilariously" bad critfails, slogging through the consequences of the whole party trying to backstab each other, or shopping for 3 hours, adds unfun filler to the game.
Cut it out.

Get on the same page as your players and decide what your group's goals are as PLAYERS.
If you want slapstick, go for it.
If you want sensible consequences to events, go for that.

>inb4 negative consequences are no fun, so you're suggesting a babysafe hugbox.
The *risk* of negative consequences is fun.
A parade of them is unnecessary drudgery.

Yes? Most games (pretty sure even shadowrun does this) have it that characters know of everything going on around them in combat. If it's in a place they could turn their head to see, they see it. This is so turns don't get slowed down with players constantly having to specify that they look behind them every turn. It's a bit of minutia that would be fucking annoying to have to deal with constantly and that the GM would forget about for the enemies all the time. What rules were you even using to determine that they trip and what was the reasoning for "one falls and gets knocked out."

And what said. In Shadowrun (4e for this), even a character with 1 body would take 9 damage before going down, there isn't a blade in the game that deals near that much damage without someone strong swinging it. You'd have to start getting into bigger guns to deal that much damage with a single shot.

...

Well, glass shards poked into ribs are not much of an injury, but ribs don't cover 100% of your chest and getting even just one longer shard slide between the ribs can give you punctuated lung.

I can tell you from personal experience that things will proceed much more smoothly if you start them off in a dungeon immediately instead of making them walk to it.

Getting hit by a sword or getting shot by a gun would instantaneously incapacitated and/or kill a person.
But it is a game and it only does 1d6 damage.
I would rather do a 10 bellyflops in broken shards, then get a hit by one sword.

The tripping was fine, but he could have easily not specified that one of them hits their head and goes unconcious. Just having 2 players prone on the ground with all the disadvantages that come with it would be enough of a penalty. And if he really wanted to warn players about how bad things can go if they don't pay attention to their surroundings, he could have mentioned how their heads whizzed by the edge of the table on the way down, so close that the wood rustled their hair.

In Shadowrun, you don't roll for damage, and knives only do like 2 damage base. That's not even enough to inflict a penalty for damage. The glass would have had to roll extremely well on its blades check to do significant damage.

>The tripping was fine
*Two* people tripped over him? And after he busted his ass and nearly killed himself in glass? And we're not just talking about a stumble here; one of them was knocked unconscious.

Give the PCs the benefit of the doubt and let them have some situational awareness. The players shouldn't have to carefully parse everything, especially not if they're new players. Otherwise you're a bit like a GM who knocks PCs unconscious for walking through a door... without specify that they open it first.

Yes. It's called a "passive notice check," assuming he's playing 5E.

Bare minimum, you'd expect him to mention that there was someone gasping in pain behind them, given that a character just had his ribs cut open by a fucking lamp.

Seriously, this "lel you didn't ask" bullshit is dumber than frogposting. As GM, YOU are responsible for creating the world. YOU are responsible for letting them know what they see. If you omit vital details like "hey, you're pretty sure a guy who bit it on the lamp is behind you, then you have failed at your job.

Except it was shadowrun if you read yhe thread.

Ok? Shadowrun also has rolls to see if you notice things. It's called "Perception," and the book recommends the GM roll it when the players might or might not notice something.