Stupid player plans

What do you do when the PCs come up with a plan that not only won't work, but it doesn't even make sense, yet they insist that it's brilliant and can't be dissuaded from it?

My current iteration has the players hired to investigate what keeps happening to one very rich merchant's caravans, of whom a bit more than half get attacked; inevitably wiping out the entire group, which is usually large and well armed.

Scattering some clues around town, including that the merchant's 12 year old daughter has seen some suspicious figures skulking around the house, has led them to the rather illogical conclusion that the point of the attacks is to lure the old man out of the house so they can abduct his daughter, for sinister reasons unknown.

The PC plan is to abduct the daughter themselves, and leave enough of a trail that these conspirators will come after them in search of their prize, at which point the PCs can kill them all.


I'm at a loss. I've tried reminding them of several of the flaws in the plan, and they aren't listening. I don't want to railroad. I don't want to expose them to the likely effects of this, since that will almost certainly be a TPK or imprisoning them for most of the rest of their natural lives.

What do you do with thick players?

Guardsmen/other adventurers come to save abducted daughter. Congratulations you are the criminals.

House also gets robbed or whatever. Everyone loses.

I kill them in the most humiliating and degrading way, possibly with description of their torture and execution. In other words, they get a Bad End.

>I don't want to expose them to the likely effects of this, since that will almost certainly be a TPK or imprisoning them for most of the rest of their natural lives.
This is where you fail.

Just drop the hammer, nigga. Get it over with.

Ok, say I do that. They get the Bad End, and their boss gets in worse straits.

Chances are, they'll probably roll up new characters, I'll spit out a new adventure, and they'll do something equally retarded next time around.

Then what? I've tried the punishment method before, and I've had very bad results in using it to get players to actually stop and think about the consequences of their actions.

Missed you guys, but it's the same thing. I've never found "dropping the hammer" to actually work at curing player stupidity. They just either blithely make new characters and are still stupid, or they complain about how mean I am as a GM and are still stupid.

You look for a new players? Seriously, that's the point of playing with bunch of retards? And even if they aren't retards, they are clearly don't know to deal with something named "consequences of their actions".

Roll with the punches?
how about making the story with some absurd details to make plans maybe not work like they want but not end in utter failure?
it sounds like they are making an effort to understand the story and play along with it,,,even if they miss the point, you shouldn't punish someone for trying to have fun, especially in table top.

Answer me this: How many cycles am I likely to go through before I find decent players? Because this last batch looked pretty good from the pre-game discussion.

In my experience, two or three cycles will suffice, because in most games you have a least one decent player, which you can bring into another game with you, if he wills it. My problem is more that you can't tell stupid players from not-so-stupid on a first game.

>I've had very bad results in using it to get players to actually stop and think about the consequences of their actions.
are you sure that they actually don't know the consequences? I frequently at my table, both as a player and GM, witness "we know this is a bad idea and probably a lot of terrible shit will happen, but it might be a fun ride, so fuck it."

guard gets lippy? stab him in the neck. Sure, we have a corpse to hide and no doubt a bunch of other problems, but we just don't care. We know there are consequences, but part of RPGs is that as much as they matter in game, the consequences don't matter in real life.

And if that's your problem, you're going about this all wrong.

Even good players will do stupid shit from time to time. I once threw my sword into an escaping craft's engine to slow it down long enough to be able to board it. Ended up knife-fighting a thousand sons sorceror on top of a rhino.

I won

That's not a stupid shit. That's shit that makes game funny and entertaining. Stupid shit would be try to preach Imperial Credo to this sorcerer while he dismembers you.

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Hail Mary? The benefactor is a rich dude with lots of mercenaries, insert pic related and have him tell your PCs to hard stop ogling the underage girl. That's about as close to a "dead end" sign as you can get without shutting them down with the voice of God.

Have their next characters tasked with unfucking the situation their previous ones fucked up.

>Maybe one of the real culprits actually really like this kid for some reason and are furious at the abduction.

or

>When the party goes to abduct the kid they run into one of the skulking figures the kid saw

or

>The kid is a naturally really powerful mage that no one knows about. When she wakes up during the abduction, terrified out of her wits, she Mass Teleports everyone into the nearby lake, foiling their plan.

or perhaps

>The villains think the PARTY is there to abduct the kid and are staking the place out. The culprit is actually the girl's mother, who is trying to ruin her husband so he can't sell his daughter into a loveless political marriage, like what happened to her.

Basically, be flexible. Rather than getting mad, pretend your party is actually perfectly roleplaying a bunch of complete morons and let them bumble around to your amusement.

>Maybe the merchant is actually hiring bandits to rob his own caravans for insurance fraud. Rather than report the party to the guards, he assumes they've been hired by his insurer and tries to buy them off

>The merchant is innocent and reports the player to the guards, who are secretly super-corrupt and responsible for the attacks. They see an opportunity to kill the party and hold the girl for ransom, which the party discovers when they kill the first bunch of guards.

>The girl is actually a doppelganger or some shit and is manipulating the old man, trying to abduct her reveals the plot

>The girl has been mind-controlled to reveal critical details concerning her fathers' caravans, which the abduction reveals (so the party can play it off like "Yeah we were just testing a theory pops"). Maybe she scrawls something on a piece of paper, puts in a bottle and tries to leave it in a dead drop every night at a certain time

I can keep going, should I? This is kinda fun.

>The kid is very devout and under the protection of a local goddess, who chews out the party for being dumb and points them in the right direction out of sheer frustration (this would work better if you hadn't already chewed them out for being dumb).

>She's not actually his daughter, she was mind-controlled into believing she was, and the party has just unwittingly blown the lid off of something far darker than they'd imagined. A slaving ring, demonic cult, whatever. A few bandits are just chump change compared to this.

>The kid was lying about skulking figures to cover for the real culprits: a bunch of harmless trickster fairies who are also her only friends in the whole world.

>The party goes to do the abduction and finds father dead and the kid gone. Either they were right and the bandits beat them to the punch, or something else is going on. Maybe the kid is special after all.

Do the players at least plan to inform the merchant of this to mitigate the legal issues?

>Rather than getting mad, pretend your party is actually perfectly roleplaying a bunch of complete morons
Basically this. Treat it like a buddy cop movie where they should by all rights end up locked up for kidnapping & murdering officers in the course of their duty, but coincidence leads them to just so happen to discover the real culprits. You don't have to always railroad them back on track either - where it won't completely ruin the game you can let their plans fall through & humiliate/punish them

And if they turn out to be so stupid that they're no fun to play with then you can just let them screw themselves over & end it there

Or why not both?
>kidnap girl
>first wave of guards coming to save her takes the party completely by surprise through a trap door/blowing up the wall
>team gets arrested for kidnapping
>on the way to the jail they pass a caravan being attacked by the real culprits
>redemption ensues

This user got the right idea.

PCs are forcing their magical realm on you

If they start raping her the GM still has plenty of time to decide that she's actually an eldritch horror.

vagnindenta

> Find me a bard.
> I've got this, family.

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c'mon bro, they are obviously trolling you.

What do you think your pc's are going to do when they get alone with his daughter?

Seriously thou To OP

I have a three strike rule when I come across dumb plans / PCs

The first time I see some stupid shit. I let it go and work it into the story like (and do continue I enjoy the comedy narrative)

The second time I see, then I kind of make it a more narrative consequence. like a complication. and then I give them an in game 'hey that was kind of really dumb, and you could have died'

The third time I see it and especially if it's the same damn shit. You let the rocks fall as they may, because at that point they're just not respecting the game as a whole. and if they're not going to put in any work. I just don't care

I was running a Shadowrun 3rd ed game back in the day. Players had to kidnap a starlet and hide her away for a few days so she couldn't make an important appearance.
The plan they came up with to grab her from her penthouse was this:
Two of them dressed up like paramedics
The party face pretended to be a wounded and bandaged person in a wheelchair.
They were going to go in with the wounded person, get to the penthouse, knock out the target, disguise her in all the bandages and just waltz out.
The paramedics wheeled the "paitent" up to the security officers at the front desk and demanded to be allowed into the penthouse.
When questioned as to why they were bringing a sick/injured person TO a condo, they replied with "It's an emergency!"
They were laughed out of the building as my head began to hurt.

do your friends do drugs?

This actually could have worked. It's a bait and switch. But with no in into the build proper it was doomed to fail.

Better if they had actually paid for a condo under wheelchair guy's name. Wheeled him into his place. Broken into starlet's condo. switched bandages with starlet and THAT would have worked great. ideally with bandages sneaking out after wards

Konosuba has a great example of this.

>Accept a quest to purify a lake.
>This will be easy, we've got a water goddess in our party
>She has to make physical contact with the lake to purify the water
>Purifying the water pisses off the monster crocodiles who are way stronger than us
>What do?

>Solution:
>Buy a gigantic steel cage
>Put the water goddess in the cage
>Throw the cage into the lake
>Operation Goddess Teabag is GO

Let them get caught and then have the bad guy bail them out so they work for him now, after all every good villein needs some stupid lackeys to cover his tracks, the more they mess up like this the more they will progress his plans.

See, that uses logic which, in the 30 seconds they spent planning, did not apply.

Thats not the same as a non nonsensical plan, as OP described. And then folding that into the story.

That's a simple job, into complication, into cagey work around

>cagey workaround

I like the cut of your jib, user.

>Player characters have to rescue a nobleman, imprisoned in a foreign palace
>I give them suggestions like posing as diplomats, disguising as servants, sneaking in...
>they decide to literally scream and punch the guards at the gate like madmen so they get arrested and imprisoned with the other guy
>literally the fail state for any of the other options

Their stupidity still baffles me to this day.

I didn't want to post the whole thing but it was definitely stupid:

She needed to make contact with the water for 6 hours to purify the lake.

After 6 hours of enraged crocodiles trying to eat her, she was so traumatized she wouldn't come out.

So they dragged her back to town. Still in the cage. Which started its own shit.

On the other hand, maybe they're considered such laughable idiots that the guards don't take as many precautions as they would have if they'd just caught a bunch of skilled infiltrators.

The difference in treatment between a guy who runs naked onto the white house lawn vs. a guy clearly working for the KGB.

It was bullying, but it wasn't retarded shit.

OP, the other takeaway is that your players are clearly interested in a plot involving this kid than whatever it was you had planned. Consciously or unconsciously, players will head towards things they're interested in and shy away from stuff that seems boring.

Maybe they don't really care about this plot. Maybe they care, but see manually hunting down the culprits as too tedious and are looking for a shortcut. Maybe they feel railroaded and want to try something crazy to shake shit up. Maybe they just really like little girls.

Now, if they're constantly doing this, they might have brain problems. But I think every party will do this at some point.