DM improvement

Thinking Drew Carey wouldn't be an amazing DM

I have these kinds of players.
How do I fix?
Just railroad them?

Yeah, I'd say it's more "Thou shalt not GM for thy own gratification alone."

Do they just not have any external motivation to make their own adventure? Don't misunderstand, you still need hooks to get them interested and provide options, just don't force them into anything or predetermine outcomes.

thinking their the star of the show.

writing plot and not encounters.

allowing for only one outcome.

Ask them to give their characters a goal.
Usually players do this themselves in one way or another, but in this case explicitate it. Give them a side quest for one of these characters to reach that goal. If at least one player gets some sense of initiative, the rest will follow or start a discussion.

>Thinking the rules don't matter.
Thinking the rules are absolute.
You must bring balance in the rules usage, user!

Let's update this bitch and see

Thou shalt not think the rules don't matter
Thou shalt not GM for thy own gratification alone
Thou shalt not think their the star of the show.

Thou shalt not write plot and not encounters.

Thou shalt not allowed for only one outcome.

And one suggestion
Thou shalt not skip session Zero

Here's an example from a few weeks ago, shortened for brevity
>Some guy runs in out of breath, says that 'at least a dozen' beastmen are coming to attack this farming village, which has a rickety defensive wall.
>that guy going through rehab is keeping quiet like I asked him to, trying to let the others make choices
>since they stand around doing fuck all I just look at him like "Alright, go ahead"
>party TPKs when they walk out to fight the beastmen
>the village fights off the rest of the beastmen with massive losses

favoritism
pushing political ideology
unwanted sexual content
negating PC strengths permanently
not talking about the campaign type beforehand
having only one hint for the mystery

Nah. I mean, you CAN decide rules are fluid... but it's not up to the GM, but to the group.

Wait, you came to the PCs with the threat of an invasion, and when they attempted to fight off the invasion they all died? I'm not sure what you expected them to do given that information. If there was some secret "correct" option to defeat the beastmen then it sure as hell wasn't obvious.

>Alright, there's four of us.
>There's at least 12 of them.
>Sweet, let's walk out into a field and fight them.
They admitted it was dumb.

I mean wouldn't you have the town inhabitants follow behind them as soon as they saw a brave group of adventurers taking up the mantle?

If they had bothered to ask them, sure, why not? But they went outside the defensive wall, without telling anybody, and fought the beastmen and died after taking out like 3. Then the beastmen went onto the town, where the town defended itself with heavy casualties since the only person going around warning everyone was the initial one dude. But they heard the news and basically walked out to where the beastmen were supposed to be and got slaughtered.

>do [x] badly
Nearly anything that comes to mind like DMPCs, railroad, whatever, can be okay if the DM does it well, or at least well enough to lull his players into ignoring the sin.

DM Rule 1 of 1:
Don't Suck.

Yeah, you just sound like a dick DM. You could have had someone look over the wall and say
"Hey! these guys might need some help!"
Don't blame the players for that. You had one good solution in mind and they didn't pick it. Too bad, so sad, it's your job to adjust. At worst, give them hints when seeing the enemy that they might be outmatched or something.

>you are bad dm cause you don't baby players
k

Essentially, yes.

If there's one thing that i learned is that, unless you are running Cthulhu or something along those lines, where the players know they aren't supposed to engage in combat and must run, if you put a challenge in front of them they will fight it or die trying. They want to be heroes, not cowards, and usually this game is where they can try to be like a shonen protagonist and fight against the hordes.
I f they're suppose to come with a different plan or to run away you have to be VERY FUCKING CLEAR.

>Gives no leads
>No hints
>Railroads in his head
>"muh players are babies"

>Thou shalt not skip session zero

Commandment 1 (or 0 if we're being cheeky.) right here. 90% of problems can be addressed with communication alone.

I'm playing WFRP2e, not DnD
Usually unless you're decked out in heavy armor melee combat is a no-go
I warned them about this before the session started, but oh well
>there's a defensive wall and about 30 villagers able to fight (albeit poorly)
>there's 12 of them, 4 people in the party
Geeeeeeeeeeee, wonder what you could possibly do?
Walk out into a field and get rid of all tactical advantage, including numbers? Sure, why not?
Fuck off

>>there's a defensive wall and about 30 villagers able to fight (albeit poorly)
Maybe they thought they were heroic characters saving the villagers. I wonder where they could have gotten that idea from?

They definitely didn't since it's WFRP2e.
The only reason they did anything was because the dwarf was promised a house.
Since he was a hobo it was a very attractive offer.

No

Gygax really went out of his way to establish this Andy Kaufman-like theatricality about D&D.
That's how you have people thinking OD&D and the flavors of Basic are simply character death carousels, and yet we have the broad history of the earliest settings which have a laundry list of player characters making history in those campaigns to such a degree that they're still referenced in the core rules today. He wanted players to be a little afraid of the rules, and he wanted experienced DMs to make it run more or less as it is now without shattering that illusion of horrible and capricious chance.

Adding houserules to 5ed despite never running a campaign prior.

Ignoring player feedback that said rules are ruining the fun.

This isn't a problem in and of itself, though. It only becomes a problem if you refuse to adapt the plot to the PCs' actions.

>Do they just not have any external motivation to make their own adventure?
This, I think, is the crux of dealing with these kinds of players. Your players need to have some kind of coherent motivation, otherwise they're just going to stall out. You can make the most perfect lure in the world, and you won't catch anything if the fish aren't hungry or aren't the kind of fish who eat whatever it resembles.

>Adding houserules to X despite never running a campaign prior.
Why would anyone do this?
I've seen a rule and said to myself, "Oh that's stupid, I'll probably have to do Y instead."
But then I play it first to see if I'm right.

>Ignoring player feedback that X are ruining the fun.
Oh, yeah. If you're an arrogant, self absorbed dickhead, sure. That makes sense now.

Yeah, it was a stupid mistake.
I can see how players might make it, but it doesn't change it from being stupid or the players from being stupid.
The only reason to take that action would be if they had significant reason to believe that each of them could kill 3 beatstmen at once, safely.
Which it sounds like they were told the opposite.

When players have no sense of their own characters and what motivates them, they are usually drifting, driveless lumps that go in whichever direction they think they are "supposed to".
They need to understand their characters as people with motivations, goals, and limits, and then play them as if they were people with those desires.

"I want booze, sex, and gold to get booze and sex and I'm willing to risk danger to get it, unless I think I could die." is infinitely better than a human fighter that likes to kill things.

I think it's an unhealthy habit to have things written out that way, though. Especially for newer GMs, there's a temptation to stick to it too strongly, subconsciously or otherwise.

I think the issue is that sometimes DMs would like to write a book, but they're not good enough writers to write a book and be successful, so instead they start DMing, but they're not trying to DM, they're trying to tell a story.

Every time the players try to deviate from that story, this "DM" will feel like they're ruining his vision, and that's not allowed.

Having a plot and accidentally sticking to it looks more like a rookie's mistake than something evil. Newbies make mistakes, it's unavoidable, and it's even important to allow them to go through these mistakes to improve. Plot is a crutch to them.

Not everyone has someone standing next to them telling them what they did wrong, though. "Allowing them to go through with these mistakes" is bad advice unless they are corrected afterward, and I think it's easier to warn them off that path in the first place.

Give them some better crutches. I always encourage having a timeline, which is kind of like a plot that all the NPCs follow for as long as the players don't intervene. When they do, they react as appropriate, otherwise they carry on with their routines.

I dislike this insistant idea that the "Game" part in TTRPG is 90% of it while the "Roleplay" part is 10% or even less.

That's... really cool, IMO.
Too young for AD&D and I bought into the rusty dagger shanktown death circus legends about it, to the point that it effects me as what combat should be like for my players in games, with theatricality and the feeling that they /could/ die, even if there is realistically a very very small chance of that happening.
Apparently that makes me a pretty good DM from my friends point of view, so that works/

>thou shalt not write plot
I wonder what's it like to play a shit game that has no advancement whatsoever and no underlying plot.

I hope that you fa/tg/uys are just taking the piss out of for this board's future.

Allowing couples in your game, or runing a longstanding game where your partner plays. It is going to end up bad.

I can see that, but getting over that temptation is an important DMing lesson. You also lose so much without having some idea of a plot - namely, the ability to create any kind of satisfying narrative structure. Roleplaying is fundamentally about telling stories together, and nobody wants to tell the story of some people who randomly did shit until everyone got bored.

Don't kill the players, no matter how stupid they are.

>Write a "plot" for their campaign.
You should do this. You just should have no attachment to it and be ready to let go of it at a moment's notice.
>Or insert their waifu or similar as an NPC.
I did this once. The players captured her and mutilated her so she was paralyzed. Agree on this one, it's a bad idea.
Except the rules don't matter when there's dumb shit like drowning someone to heal them, or if the rules are badly written and make something unrealistic (for the setting).
The GM should tend not to be the star of the show, yes, because he does not exist in the game world. As for "writing encounters," if you still think of RPGs in terms of chunks of encounters I think that is very simplistic but hey what do I know.

>anything that violates my safe space is wrong

>no leads
>No hints
Maybe you should come up with your own, genius. Try actually thinking.

See this man? This man is a terrible GM. Don't take any advice from him.

What the fuck kind of groups do you guys play with?