GM rant, Veeky Forums. You can tell me if I'm being a dick or not

In all fairness, this was really open-ended.
He was also a bit of a dick saying "Do something"
But you really could have provided a bit more. It seems like the missing piece is a final end goal with character motivations. especially motivations.
Once a player's character has motivations, they usually push the story themselves to fulfill such motivations.

In this case the character was a traveling entertainer. A hobo bard, if you will. The motivation was supposed to be, "hey, my employer has kinda high expectations and I don't want to wind up sleeping in mud."

Actually, I say "supposed" but it was in fact directly stated during the game.

And now you know why sandbox games don't actually work.

There's a chance you could have been too vague about the player's options, maybe you did screw up. I've had my fair share of situations where something was perfectly clear in my head but was completely lost on the players, everyone has. But the way the player handled it was bratty and childish. They may or may not have been in the wrong about not knowing what to do, but they were absolutely in the wrong with the way they reacted.

>Could go anywhere and talk to anyone they pleased.
But if they don't know anyone, they don't know anyone.

Also, there really was no motivation there that I could gather from all that? Like, what's the point of everything you've meme arrowed there? I'd be pretty confused myself.

>Also, there really was no motivation there that I could gather from all that?

Doing the job?

By "hired to be entertainment" you meant literally walking up to random people and doing funny tricks? I don't really know what you were expecting.

No, the character had been established as a stage entertainer. There was going to be a performance.

So why did you make a lull for player input before the performance?

Just kicked a dude out of my custom made campaign because he fucking lied to me.

>starting campaign
>friend of a friend asks to join
>help him make a character
>asks to skip background story for the time being
>tell him ok, but he must make a paragraph backstory with your own choice of names and locations
>day 1 comes
>no backstory
>"I'm just a loner outcast, I am looking for a way home"
>running an hour late so just begin
>he makes no attempt to describe his character, his characters actions, or role play
>forced to ask him what his character would do in this situation on every occasion
>occurs for another 4 sessions
>make a campaign to test him
>Bard college tryouts
>allow role play or dice rolling and description to determine audition success
>other party members have fun and play along
>his time comes, ask him "does your character do anything?"
>"No..."
>He remains quiet as I finish the night, and don't even address him or his character
>tell him to make a backstory and begin participating by next session or he is out
>4 days pass and I ask him if he made any progress
>"uhh yeah, I worked on it a bit"
>"okay, what did you come up with"
>"well you know, my character is a loner outcast, looking for a way back into his home"
>"that's just the shit we talked about 6 weeks ago"
>"yeah I'm gonna make names and stuff, you said I could just make that stuff up"
>nearly break shit telling him to fuck off back to the land of lying faggots

Where's the lying?

Player sounds like he didn't really know what to expect and just joined because his friend is into it.

Which is annoying, but you seem like a giant sperg.

I guess I thought with how much emphasis the player had put on the desire for a more story-centric game and their interest in exploring they would have been more inclined to explore the story. I had placed information and items that could have helped them during the performance and the events after here and there.

Give this guy a break. It's his first roleplay campaign.

Spot the people who have never GMed.

Don't expect people to just figure out what to search for in a void, dude. It never works out. If they decided to go about it in a way you didn't care for, you'd still be salty about it.

You need to always be able to properly and unambiguously present all the options available in a scene and make them seem worthwhile, that's the most important part of being a GM. If you don't learn to do this, your players will keep feeling lost and uninvested. Unfortunately, the best way to do this is by playng with good GMs that can in fact do this.

I feel bad for you if all the players you find have been babied by video games to the extent that you have to emulate one to get them to play.

"Just make something up" isn't helpful at all, and after all that time he was clearly struggling instead of helping him all you did was say "why aren't you doing it".

There was no stake in anything you presented. You need something that threatens the player, and it doesn't need to be combat:

Priced possessions, ego, reputation, family name, race, culture, religion, loved ones, love interest, etc.

That being said, combat is by far the easiest tool to use for putting something at stake.

Next, what is his character motivation? If he doesn't have any, then there's no point. You can try to give him one, but that's not how it works. The player needs give his character a goal that is interesting to himself, that's the only way to get anything resembling open world (or "sandbox") to work. Same goes for your NPCs.

>If they decided to go about it in a way you didn't care for

But that was impossible. If the player just upped and decided "yeah I'm not actually gonna do the show, I'm just gonna start looting and jump over the garden wall" I would have said great. I guess you're right, in this case the way I didn't care for was no way at all.

I mean, I thought I had highlighted the most present options available right before the inaction. The noble had instructed the character to practice. I noted a NPC that literally said "come find me if you need anything." I noted another NPC that had expressed interest in getting to know the character better. I noted the presence of other servants nearby that could be interacted with. Survival was a big thing with this player, and the character had not eaten. The character was informed of the exact location of the kitchen.

>You need something that threatens the player,

Survival was a big factor the player liked, and they were homeless and looking for lodgings. This wasn't even the first or second or third option presented to obtain them, they had turned down others to go for this one. The interactions with the noble showed her to be very demanding and unfeeling. The stakes of their success and the consequences of their failure had been pretty well outlined during the game, I thought.

>pick one of these literally whos to talk to
Sounds boring as fuck, fampai.

Did he have a backstory well prepared? If so, could you post it?

yeah dang i guess i should have written more than just those two things huh

Born to a tribe of nomadic people, taught a little magic after a mage joined up, set off to see the world and make their way once coming of age. That's pretty much it.

I run a 9 floor B/X megadungeon for a rotating pool of ~15 players faggot, you don't have anything on me, my players have the best play bitch, they impress me every night in my basement.

...

>yeah dang i guess i should have written more than just those two things huh
Are you being sarcastic?

I sort of get that feeling sometimes.
>If you railroad your players, they complain
>If you don't railroad your players, they get stuck and don't know what to do
Fuck me. One of these days I should just drop the pretense and write a novel so I can get all of my shit fantasy ideas out of my system.

OK give him a checklist of quest objectives he needs to get done in order to prepare.

Write like 2-3 baseline and then leave more "secret bonus" ones. Do not in fact predefine the secret ones, they are anything useful he comes up with.

FFFFFFF
While my players are better than this, they actually talk to NPCs and have fun, they take so goddamn long to take any proactive actions. They dither and they say "yeah, we should do that thing that everyone's nominally agreed to do" and then no-one actually says they go towards doing that.

I have to, EVERY TIME, ask "do you approach the objective" or "do you go to the party" or "are you actually going to leave the inn to do the thing".

It really really frustrates me. Can't you just confirm that they go off or not? How hard is it to confirm that you're done in that area and are actually leaving?

Give them a loose choice with two shitty options and hint at alternatives being possible. They will desperately try to come up with a third.

>using "they" when you know the gender of the person

>>/lgbt/ is that way

It's an online game, user doesn't know.