The fridge test

Hey, Veeky Forums, this is mostly venting, but with your experience and ideas maybe we can get something out of it.

I was GMing yesterday, it went for nearly eight hours, not counting a lunch break. I'm new at this, so of course there were points where I got lost and wasn't satisfied with whatever I came up with on the fly.

But I had fun. I had a lot of fun GMing, and the players seemed to be having it also. And they're not my friends, but strangers at a con, so it's not like they have any reason to pretend.

But today I'm looking back on it and thinking that session sucked.

I couldn't create a feeling of urgency with the adventure. The point of it was survival; the characters were supposed to have limited time and resources, but I didn't manage that well at all. So two crucial elements I was excited about, the resource management and race against time, went out the window because I wasn't able to make them work.

I couldn't describe the scenes in an evocative way. The players were never excited about the environments they were journeying through, which was something else I was aiming for.

Among the players, there was one whose response to every situation was casting a spell. "I cast False Friendship"; "I cast False Vision". Everything they interacted with, he wanted to solve by casting an illusion. It didn't always work, in fact it didn't work at all at some important points, but it didn't make him ever have a different idea.

One other player just wanted to fight everything. There were plenty of creatures that were way stronger than the characters, dangers I expected them to try to avoid, but that one guy's answer to everything was attacking. Not even trying different tactics or responding differently to situations. Whatever was in front of him was a Final Fantasy combat encounter.

Then there was this other player that barely did anything. He went along with the other player's ideas, but never came up with anything on his own.

I had fun, te players apparently had fun, it was a good game session while it lasted; but now I'm thinking I'm a horrible GM and that was a horrible session. I didn't accomplish the goals I had set for myself with the adventure and I wasn't able to deal with player's behavior that I thought was undermining the game.

So, GMs, I'd like to know your opinions and ideas on that, please; and you're welcome to vent if you feel like it. Do you experience the fridge test with your games? Do you have any ways to prevent that from happening? I mean both in game, realizing what is going wrong and fixing it, and afterwards, not beating yourselves up about what went wrong.

>have you tried not playing D&D?
I wasn't. It was fantasy, but not D&D.

>So two crucial elements I was excited about, the resource management and race against time, went out the window because I wasn't able to make them work.
Resource management is only a cunt's hair from accountancy 101, good luck making that fun. Urgency is likewise a bugger and a half, since role playing games don't go in real time, and trying to force them to kinda do that easily becomes just a pain in the ass, and drastically restricting in-game time makes it all an optimisation puzzle for the players to ponder very carefully, making things feel even less urgent.

It sounds like you are trying to do something your players dont really care about. Im going to guess you have two decent roleplayers, a THAT GUY and a waste of a seat, which is a common enough problem.

As for the specifics of what you tried to do, resource management is always boring. Always. Unless you are rationing very small numbers of very impactful resources, it never comes across as compelling. The difference between 11 and 9 of a thing is not impactful, no matter what the thing is.

Second, time sensitivity only works if you force the players to think fast. Establish that when you put an hourglass on the table, they have until it runs out to each take an action, with the caveat that they can try to pass some kind of mental roll to MAYBE get a little extra time.

>it went for nearly eight hours
Have shorter sessions. No one can stay on point for 8 hours. Playing 4 hour sessions gives you more time to think what's likely to happen next.

And yeah, one-shots are hard.

>Whatever was in front of him was a Final Fantasy combat encounter.
Some people can't be helped. But you can try giving a heads-up before the session "btw, some things are way too strong for you to fight, and remember that running away is also an option", because many people are used to a style of game where every creature is killable. Then, if something kicks their ass hard enough they have to flee (or die because they're too dumb to run), then they can't complain.

8 hour sessions are fine if there's breaks

Well, fuck; maybe I'm not such a bad GM after all.
I really want to find a way make it work, though. To make them think on their feet and give importance to how much time and food and rope and oil they're spending. There's gotta be a way to do it without the session grinding to a halt. Hopefully.


>you are trying to do something your players dont really care about
I guess, but it's part of the GM's job to make the players care about stuff, right? To present the elements of an adventure in way that gets players interested.

>Unless you are rationing very small numbers of very impactful resources, it never comes across as compelling
What do you mean by very impactful resources, exactly?

And I do need to get an hourglass. Not just for the players, but also to force me to keep the pacing.


>Have shorter sessions.
Yes, absolutely; those eight hours were not by design. That's one of my flaws, I can't keep things concise.

>you can try giving a heads-up before the session "btw, some things are way too strong for you to fight, and remember that running away is also an option"
I never do this because I worry about how the players will react to me just saying it upfront; I worry that it'll make me sound like I'm playing against them. I wanted them to come to this conclusion through gameplay, and some of them got the message. But I'll try establishing it beforehand next time, maybe it'll go better.

>I really want to find a way make it work, though. To make them think on their feet and give importance to how much time and food and rope and oil they're spending. There's gotta be a way to do it without the session grinding to a halt.
This is hardly system-agnostic advice, but one system I'm trying out lately (Unity) abstracts equipment into Necessities (camping supplies and rations) and Gear (adventuring equipment you're likely to pull out of your backpack in a pinch). Perhaps you could similarly abstract whatever resources you want your players to manage by focusing on the amount of stuff they have and how/where to find more, instead of writing down specifics and keeping track of several different quantities.

>I never do this because I worry about how the players will react to me just saying it upfront; I worry that it'll make me sound like I'm playing against them.
>sound like I'm playing against them
By giving them advance notice that some challenges in the session will be too hard to overcome and that the key to success is to avoid them?

My players have traditionally been the type to consider everything in the game something they might want to kill and should be able to, so when necessary I pointed out to them that some upcoming enemies were out of their league. At that point it's up to them to decide if they want to risk a TPK. I know that as a player I like to take on unfavorable odds when there's prep time.

If your prerogative is survival, you need to teach your players that they are the trout in a sea of sharks. Have danger be around every corner but give them just enough breathing room to have agency over their own actions.

Sometimes, you can in fact take on the shit that's outside your weight class especially if your game isn't a number cruncher simulator like D&D, post TSR and sometimes you can get some great loot from taking a chance and employing smart tactics. However, the price of failure should be equally as high, especially if we're talking about creatures that are not only stronger than the party but also operating on their home turf.

Sometimes, you can safely avoid a creature before it actually notices you, sometimes a creature will immediately attack you on sight, other times it'll ambush you because it doesn't want to risk its own life trying to take yours.

Then once resources become low and the threats keep on coming...

>Necessities (camping supplies and rations) and Gear (adventuring equipment you're likely to pull out of your backpack in a pinch). >abstract whatever resources you want your players to manage by focusing on the amount of stuff they have and how/where to find more
That sounds good, actually, I'll give it a read. In the session I was trying to use a similar system, but I fucked up and neither time nor resources depleted at a high enough rate as to be a problem.

>giving them advance notice that some challenges in the session will be too hard to overcome and that the key to success is to avoid them
Well that's how it sounds to a GM. To a player, it just as easily sounds like "I'm the big bad GM! You puny players can never beat my powerful minions! HAHAHAHA!". And it might be ridiculous, but that's what I'm afraid of sounding like when giving them advance notice. Maybe I'm being paranoid. I'll just put that on the table next time, before the session starts.

>not only stronger than the party but also operating on their home turf
That's something else I've had trouble with in the session. I put them in some pretty hostile environments, but I couldn't really use that to their disadvantage.

I can't see survival working well in a one shot. Hard to impart that sense of a hard slog in such a short time

>To a player, it just as easily sounds like "I'm the big bad GM! You puny players can never beat my powerful minions! HAHAHAHA!"
I don't know, I guess it depends on how you say it and whether you explain where you're coming from. My experience went something like "By the way, there will be encounters coming up that you're not meant to be fighting head-on but are there because it makes sense for them to be there. Don't forget that you don't have to fight everything you come across, and maybe you'll be able to take them on later."

You know, a side effect of designing adventures for players and fine-tuning series of challenges that are exciting but always more likely to be won than lost is that when realism or cause-and-effect calls for insurmountable obstacles to appear, the players can assume and trust that you have planned a way for them to overcome them like everything else. If you don't run a type of game where they always have to be very careful and discerning about what they engage, it doesn't hurt to raise a flag when their expectations don't apply in a specific situation.

>That's something else I've had trouble with in the session. I put them in some pretty hostile environments, but I couldn't really use that to their disadvantage.
First off, consider the area that you want the players to be in and then consider the type of creatures that could survive in this environment and how they'd use the environment to cover their weaknesses.

An example I came up with involved a swamp and a troll. Trolls became aware that fire/acid was dangerous for them after surviving several low level adventuring parties, so rather than lumbering around like morons, trolls began covering themselves in muck and waiting for unsuspecting creatures to travel too close to them in the swamp, whether they be crocodiles, snakes, or people.

The muck gave it resistance to fire/acid attacks but only to the first fire/acid attack and only if it dipped back into the muck by the end of the round, so they used Hold Person on it and sprayed it with fire/acid until it died.

>What do you mean by very impactful resources, exactly?

Lets say your party is in a region filled with giant monsters, and the locals have made flares to distract the monsters out of necessity. The party only has two. They are critical to survival. And they only have two. Thats impactful resource management.

I... I hadn't thought of that.

You aren't ever going to do those things you set out to do to the extent you want. The players can like the envionment, but they will never be excited by environment descriptions. You won't create a sense of urgency through resource management, since that's something you have to think hard about efficiency about.
Your wizard wanting to solve everything through mind control/illusions is due to your player, not you. You can't make him a better player, you can only refuse to indulge him too much to try to stave off repetitiveness. Same with fightdude, and dude who barely participates. You can't create your players.

Thanks, anons, I'll keep all that in mind.

>The players can like the envionment, but they will never be excited by environment descriptions.
I don't know, man. Maybe If I do it right, y'know, give them a sense of wonder.

>You won't create a sense of urgency through resource management
You guys are really convincing me that this stuff doesn't work.

>You can't create your players.
Not create, but curate. If the guy has no initiative, how do I encourage him to think of solutions and speak out more? If the guy responds to everything with a spell, and even with spells not working his attitude doesn't change, how do I get him to try something different?
But maybe a oneshot is not the right place to think of that. I guess in a regular group those questions would make sense.

>Well that's how it sounds to a GM. To a player, it just as easily sounds like "I'm the big bad GM! You puny players can never beat my powerful minions! HAHAHAHA!". And it might be ridiculous, but that's what I'm afraid of sounding like when giving them advance notice. Maybe I'm being paranoid. I'll just put that on the table next time, before the session starts.
Rather than telling the players that your encounters are too cool and badass for them to beat, tell them that the point of the game is to survive and accomplish long term goals, which means they'll have to know when to sneak, cheat, deceive, placate, and otherwise tip the odds in their favor, as well as having a good handle on a head on encounter when it comes down to it.

Those are NPCs, get some actual players.

That sounds to be about the case. Unfortunately, OP was at the mercy of a con. They come across as /v/gamers who were just curious about tg and this was an opportunity to try it out, especially since nobody wants to GM right off the bat.

>your encounters are too cool and badass for them to beat
Look, I'd never say that. But for players who are used to solving everything with head to head combat, I think it might sound like that.

Then they deserve to be TPK'd every encounter.

You've commited the classic GMing mistake: blaming yourself for everything that happens at the table.

If you have fun, and your players have fun (for the most part), it's OK.

The players had fun.

You had fun at the time.

You've stated up front that one player really enjoyed fighting everything, one wanted to do crazy things with spells and the other just wanted to contribute a little to an adventuring party. You took a group of random fucking strangers and facilitated them having fun while having fun yourself. That's good GMing.

You also stated that for you, the "point of the game" was to have the players working actively against limited time and resources. You also wanted to excite the players with the environments. Trouble is, none of your players gave a shit about limited time and resources or about exploration. Those weren't their goals, and you're never going to change someone's mind at a con.

If you want to run a game about survival and exploring new shit, find players who would be interested in playing such a game. Online or in person. Then you can have your dream game and have a shot at being a "good GM" by your own standards. As it stands, you did well with what you had.

>If the guy has no initiative, how do I encourage him to think of solutions and speak out more?
Talk to him about it. Everyone is coming to the table to play the game, but everyone's going to have different reasons for doing it, and different things they want out of it. Some players are going to be more quiet and reserved than others, content to sort of follow along with the group, and enjoy that. If they're not thinking of solutions and speaking up and they're unhappy about it, chances are good that talking to them will reveal the reason why that's the case, and you can address that.

If you try and force a player who isn't comfortable thinking of solutions and speaking up, but is otherwise enjoying the game, to come up with a solution and starting speaking up because you think they should be more pro-active, you're likely going to have a grumpy player on your hand.