Your players decide to turn your carefully crafted world, story...

>not being flexible

Literally the first rule of being a GM. They can't see what's coming ahead. Tie your crafted stuff back into it. It isn't THAT hard, you autismo.

don't carefully craft plots and worlds from the getgo
amature DM mistake

Ah, the age-old philosophical quandary...

If a GM makes a setting and no-body plays it... Does anyone give a fuck it was ever made?

It wasn't that carefully crafted, be honest.

First, make it clear to your players before they sign up that this isn't another murderhobo adventure, as that is the default mindset of players everywhere.

Second, make sure you're playing with people who are down to play a story-driven campaign.

>murderhobos
if you still have them, you're a shit GM

Shut up Aqua, your campaign isn't as clever as you think.

...

>not giving them the John Wick treatment for being total assholes
You deserved it, dude.

Don't worry. I am already putting them into prison cells the next session. And it's going to be 10 sessions of them needing to suck my clit until I let them free.

>Players want to kill things and take their stuff.
>Dead things drop just enough stuff to keep the players interested, but plot hooks hint that the best stuff comes from completing long, overarching quests that lead players all across my campaign setting and require them to interact with myriad NPC's.
>They go explore the world and talk to everybody.

>Players can never remember NPC's and story stuff from one session to the next.
>Make an MMO-style quest journal for them and update it after every session with plot hooks, a dramatis personae, world info they've learned, etc.
>Players are unsure what to do with a particular scenario.
>"Maybe you should check your quest journal. Might be something useful in there."
>Players read it and are reminded of a seemingly innocuous thing that happened months ago.
>Players call me a sly devil and slap themselves for not seeing this new development coming a mile away.

Want players to climb a mountain? Tell them there's a magic sword at the top.

Want players to explore an island? Tell them there's buried pirate treasure.

Want players to talk to a particular NPC? Give them a reason to.

tl;dr: Put a big enough carrot on a stick, and the players will do whatever you want. Player Characters are inherantly greedy. Even the Lawfulest, Goodest, Paladinest character in the game will chomp at the bit for a bigger, more fiery sword.

And always operate on the assumption that players will kill everyone they meet, burn down every building they see, and hell, they'll dry up the ocean if they think they have the tools for it. Every NPC is replaceable, every town is expendable. Unused plot hooks can always be relocated.

>The entire party commits suicide and rolls new characters

their hands are tied and they can't move. Impossible to kill themselves.

Prison is also equipped with a soul shackle spell so their dead characters get just transformed into ghosts that are bound to the prison cell.

If your players are turning to murder-hoboing instead of following the plot hooks for your ~epic narrative~, it's probably because your narrative is boring, tedious, over-wrought dogshit, and you're too in love with it to notice.

>players are perfect
>GMs are always to blame if anything isn't perfect

I don't GM at all. As a player I find about half of other players are retarded and/or shallow. Bad GMs have been about 1 in 5 for me.

yes, because clearly players can never be plebs and are always right. Just as there can never be people who have shit taste in music, movies or videogames? It's pretty fucking rich to assume that players are murder hobos only because they think the story is boring. There can't be an interesting story in the first place if the player characters just decide to kill everyone. How the fuck is the DM supposed to tell stories without NPCs? Creating an interesting story is a collaborative experience, even the best DM can't salvage a great story if the players constantly kill everyone and everything.

>Players cant physically do anything.
...why are they playing again? At that point i'd just play something else.
I mean its just a cutscene of "ha im mad at you now suffer". Walk the fuck out.

Players are always right about what they care about.

Although sometimes even when I like a setting and a plot I give them GM shit for no reason other than to see how he deals with it. I'm just like that sometimes.

>Players are always right about what they care about.

Take your trendy relativism and stick it up your ass, you empty-headed blowhard. :^)

>carefully crafted world, story, quest-design and clever foreshadowing for things to come

That was your problem to begin with.
Craft a setting and a timeline of events, everything else is secondary detail work.
Bait the players into your quests but let them do what they want and just have your event timeline progress without them and have the world change according to it.
If some cult was planning on summoning an evil deity but rather than follow the clues the players decided to murder goblins, so be it.
One month into the timeline those fuckers better be ready for demons out the ass and hordes of cultists because they didn't want to even check where the huge fucking breadcrumbs led.

Go write a book and cry more faggot.

>Players are always right about what they care about.

no they aren't. What fucking retarded statement is that? There isn't anything "right" here. A good GM can create interesting scenarios and his players can still rely on their murderhobo tactics and just don't give a fuck about the bigger picture. There are many great movies out there that can be utterly boring to a specific type of people. You can't change what people care about but you can still tell if they have shit taste. And if your group of players is only interested in murdering shit that no amount of intricate wordl building and story telling will ever get them to stop. You can sit them with hundreds of different GMs, from newbies to experienced story tellers, they will still have the same issue because a GM can not stop people from attacking shit unless he literally disallows them from ever doing that which kind of defeats the point of tabletop RPGs.

>Bait the players into your quests but let them do what they want and just have your event timeline progress without them and have the world change according to it.

I let them do whatever they want. But if "whatever they want" means "murder everyone in every campaign" then you don't even get surprised by your players anymore. They are clearly more interested in looting and leveling so no amount of freedom of choice is going to change the fact that they will default back to killing people.

Not him, but at that point I would just ditch the group in favor of one whose expectations of a campaign are more in line with my own. You're not going to convince them that their fun is badwrong, and there's no sense in trying; you'll have more fun with a different group and they'll have more fun with a different DM.

They swallow their own tongues.

>The only real fun is my fun

This is literally the easiest way to spot that guy.

It sounds like you designed the entire thing without other people in mind and then you're surprised that it didn't play out the way you wanted it to when inviting other people to take it for a spin.

To save some of that wasted effort; consider asking the players what they had in mind next time.

Clearly your players don't want to play the same game you want to play. Maybe you should consider playing the kind of game they want to play or having a straightforward talk with them instead of trying to find ways to force them back on the railroad tracks. This isn't only your game, it's their game as well.
>tl;dr You're both wrong.

>You lose interest in your own fucking campaign 5 sessions in
Why am I like this?

You even bore yourself?

You then simplify the world, and the story.
The gray choices become black and white.
The foreshadowing becomes very obvious.
The whole game looks like a Saturday morning Diablo now, and this could be ok.

ADD?

This is why most videogame stories today are like this.

I don't know how I do it, it's only with DnD
Not that I know of

GM was out to get me from day one for not rolling the same race as everyone else so now his perfectly planned campaign is being derailed hard.

Have you tried not playing D&D?

You're either a troll or a moron if you think that'll fly for ten sessions. Even the most rock-stupid player will leave halfway into the first.

Then don't play DnD.

I've never seen a good GM have murder hobos for longer than a few sessions, once the players see their actions have consequences they'll actually start playing the game as intended

They don't have a 'questions that don't deserve their own thread' up, so how hackneyed is it to have a character who's been foreshadowed a bunch to have ulterior motives for aiding the party turn out to be related to someone the party is trying to protect?
Just a bit, or completely?
I'm running a cliche-o-thon and I want to figure out where this one weighs in.

>You actually have to make one of your players leave the room when combat stops because he kills every friendly NPC he meets. Plz let this campaign end fast.

The obvious thing to do is kill him.

>carefully crafted world and story
Heh. I'm running a module, so I didn't have to craft that much, really.

>another murder hobo adventure
As long as they can keep that shit to the wilderness and dungeons, I'm happy. If they get caught stealing in town, I'll roll on the "getting caught" table and hope for a gruesome torture or amputation punishment.

Wanna know how I know this didn't happen?
He listens to your request that he leave for a bit.
The player or the character?

The character is just a symptom of the real problem.

Tell your players that you are sick of their shit, and from now on only quest-appopriate monsters drop loot and exp. Any other NPC they kill is just going to be a drain on their resources and gives them nothing, no exp and their stuff just vanishes into thin air. It's a heavy handed approach, but it's what they're asking for.

I've pondered doing this for my PCs. Make a list of NPCs spoken with, locations visited maybe a small recap section.
It feels like this is something the players should be doing themselves. How far is too far? What pushes it from helping to gm wankery?

It's not a request. I already decided to kick him out of the group, but let him finish the last session under this condition. He's a dumb cunt, but he knows he doesn't have any other friends so he'll listen to me.

From what I've seen, even the murdery-est of hobos has something that will bait them into caring about the plot.

As an example of something I saw recently... Take the first episode on Rollplay: West Marches when Gassymexican made his first appearance. Everyone in the group was hungover and most seemed to be there just to be dumb trolls for the lulz. The first half hour or so was so bad, I paused to read the comments to be sure I wasn't about to miss out on the next several hours actually ending up good.

The GM humored the trollness for a bit and gave them slack in the reins and eventually introduced something that made a couple of them interested enough to bite. Then he hit them up with some really epic lore and sucked them in deep.

Granted, the GM has a ton of experience, GMing for dozens, if not hundreds of different players and was not only running a game designed to roll with whatever his players threw at him, but was apparently used to people fucking around - but nothing saying you can't take some pages from his book.

(This, by the way, is sort of why I'm leery of taking up the GM roll. I'm more of a plotter and while I can roll with things as a player fairly easily, I haven't got the hang of rolling as a GM yet.)

>This act started the Hero-Hobo Conflict that lead to the formation of Hobopolis

i use something called adjustable difficulty, if they want to murderhobo, they have explicitly agreed to be murderhobo'd in turn, they can use whatever 3rd party splat shit to overrun whatever the fuck, they can be mary sue, queen of the furry fuck planet and things will respond in kind, if they want to be evil little that guy shits they will get evil that guy shitted on in turn, and they tend to like it that way, don't throw your plot out for the sake of the players, incorporate their murderhobo tendencies in kind into the setting and play accordingly. they want to fight shit and kill the king, now they get to fight hilariously overpowered guards, extremely high level court wizards and an entire kingdom that wants their heads. they have the potential to be god kings of mankind, but they have to earn it and fight the entire universe hating them in the process, i want them to know i hate them but i am fair about it as i plot to destroy them as they inevitably plot to destroy my campaign, or we can luck out and get people who actually want to not be shits, and want to play a subterfuge campaign or kingmaker or whatever the fuck.

My group decided to audio-record every session we have. One of my players is in charge of uploading the files to our onedrive, so if the players have enough interest in the story, they can simply replay the recording.

That makes them easier to control. Easier to keep them on-plot.

Not the best possibility. But one I planned for.

Before each session, our DM has the players go through and say "Last time on Dragon Ball Z..." and give a small recap. Each player gets 30 or so seconds to say what they recall. Let's everyone remember little things and retell what they though was nifty.

Also we do a "Next time on Dragon Ball Z..." where we say what we think would fit, or be funny, for next session.

I wish. They're far too reasonable to do anything crazy like that, and yet I love nothing more than to improvise all the crazy consquences of them doing something entirely bizarre.

Your DM does that because he has shit memory and needs you to remind him of what happened last time. The last DM I played with pulled the same thing and it was really transparent at least to me because he had shit memory all the time.

That actually sounds like fun.

But user, GMs would *never* hand one of the most important tone setting, scene starting tools they have over to the players unless they had a good reason, r-right?

Muh player investment! They're surely more invested because I made them try to remember all the important stuff that happened last session, r-right?

>suck my clit until I let them free
I'm pretty sure if I or them were givin the option we would suck your clit for hours for free.

Some players may feel more invested, but the purpose for such an exercise is purely for the benefit of the GM. It means that he doesn't have to remember exactly what went down each session as the players tell him exactly how they remembered it happening and are likely also emphathising the parts they were really fond of, so now the GM can more or less improvise the entire session around that input. I on the other hand only felt like I should put in false information to see if the GM would run with it or not. Considering that he couldn't even remember his own rulings from twenty minutes earlier in the session I wouldn't have been surprised if he did.

If the player is invested then they surely remember. If neither player or GM remembers then they can just make up stuff since it doesn't matter. You can rewrite history if no-one cares.

>it's only with DnD
Because DnD is one of those systems that you don't play for a really long time and then you start having this idea for a massive dungeon crawl and you think 'oh hey, DnD is gonna be perfect for this' and you start planning it out, mapping out levels of an enormous dungeon, gather your players, start playing, and slowly realise why it took you so long to play DnD in the first place.

Not even when you do what the system was designed for is it engaging.

>Also we do a "Next time on Dragon Ball Z..." where we say what we think would fit, or be funny, for next session.
I was already doing the first thing, but I think I might steal this one.

This fits all my DM/GMs to a T.

>tfw your players being murderhobos is actually furthering the plot, and you know the big reveal is going to cause serious bullet sweating from at least one of them.

If murderhoboing is what they want, then I shall provide. Easier than creating a plausible story from scratch, which is what I have been doing since they wanted to start a campaign in a modern setting instead of my medieval-fantasy-with-some-advanced-technology.

Damn, if robbing banks and deforesting mountains is what they wanna do, then I am in. I'll be happy to assist in the destruction of the world that I hate so much.