What do you do when there’s a disconnect between what the player thinks they can do and what the GM knows they can do?
A few weeks ago, I talked about how GMs can help find the ‘Essence of Awesome’ for their players. This subject is similar, but it comes from a far more basic place. Usually this only happens with people that aren’t used to playing together much, if at all. While it can make for an uncomfortable introduction to a new group, it’s a fairly common  problem in convention games. When the players and the GM are on different pages about what’s expected in a game, it can make for a very frustrating experience on both sides of the table. It may not happen often, but it’s a good issue for GMs to be aware of so they know how to adapt and adjust to get everyone on the same page.
In the opening example, the player hadn’t played D&D in quite some time and was coming at his choices from a very old-school perspective. The last time he had played regularly, if something wasn’t explicitly stated in the rules, you simply couldn’t do it. He assumed that he couldn’t jump up onto the wall because it was something he couldn’t do in one of his previous games. The GM, on the other hand, was aiming for a fun action adventure with the PCs performing epic acts of heroism. Or at least something close to that. When faced with this situation, she just plainly pointed out to the player that he was playing an epic hero capable of great things and that it was an easy roll for him to get up on the wall. Once he understood that, he stopped being so hesitant and got up on the wall to start taking out the enemies on the other side of the gate.
Of course, the opposite can happen too.
Several years ago, I was in a fantasy game at Origins where the GM took great care in setting up the scenario. The game opened with the PCs returning to their employer with an artifact they had been hired to retrieve. Before they could get their payment, a much more experienced and accomplished party was allowed to jump line and go in ahead of them. Behind closed doors, but obvious to a PC that was spying on the other room with clairvoyance, those experienced adventurers were slaughtered with the wave of a hand, leaving the artifact they had brought back to be picked up from their disposable corpses without a single gold piece being spent.
The entire adventure was supposed to be the PCs fleeing from their employer and trying to foil his nefarious plans. The idea of retreating was absolutely foreign to this group of players, though. Despite the GM consistently rewarding bennies/plot points to the one player who was saying ‘Let’s get out of here!’ the other PCs insisted on busting into the bad guy’s office and trying to fight him right then and there. The GM honestly did his best to get the PCs to run without explicitly stating it. In the end, the entire party was wiped out, creating a forty minute TPK that wasn’t fun for anyone at the table. Â (As a note, the GM immediately offered to run a different game for anyone who wanted to stick around since they had paid for a four hour game. The two most stubborn players left, but everyone else stayed for what turned out to be a really good game.)
So what’s a GM to do? If the players are expecting the game to be one thing but the GM intended something else, how do you get everyone playing the same game?
Encourage Them To Just Do It — Like the first example, sometimes just pointing out how easy a task is will be enough to get the player to start treating the game like an adventure story instead of a logic puzzle. There’s a place for logic puzzles in gaming, but if you’re looking for action and adventure, you might need to nudge your players in the right direction. If they’re used to playing games with a slightly more adversarial role for the GM, it may take a little extra work, but it’ll be worth the effort.
Are You Sure You Want To Do That? — On the opposite end of the spectrum, if the players are doing crazy, stupid actions that are going to get them killed, a simple and skeptical question is often enough to make most players hesitate. “Are you sure?” is a tool many of the GMs I admire employ very well. You don’t need to give away the plot of the game, but sometimes the players may not pick up on more subtle clues that would have told them they’re biting off more than they can chew.
Be Clear and Up Front About It — Worse comes to worse, have an out of game conversation to set expectations. Whether you’re switching to another system that requires a slightly different style of play or you want to change up the tone of your game, it is sometimes necessary to just let the players know what you’re going for with the game.
Give Them What They Want — Of course, it’s also good to keep an open mind. If you realize the game the players think they’re going to play sounds like fun, there’s nothing wrong with setting aside the game you thought you were going to run for the one the game turns into.
Have you ever sat down to a table and realized that two different games were being played, even if only momentarily? I’d be curious to hear how it was dealt with and how the game turned out.
To my mind, the TPK you describe at Origins is a massive failure on the part of the GM. Yes, the players may have been behaving in a fantastically stupid manner. But the GM’s job is to spin a fun adventure for the players. Being able to think on your feet and deal with the players doing something wildly unexpected is an important part of that.
So the players just walked into the room with massively powered and hostile people in it. Okay, clearly the players are going to lose this encounter. But how can they lose it in a way which is fun and interesting and keeps the game going? (This is when I like to take a bathroom break as a GM — strategic out of the room time to plan what happens next, and maybe give the players a chance to think about what they are doing.)
The first answer that pops into my head is the players are all effortlessly captured and coerced into doing some of their employer’s dirty work. So the GM’s job is to figure out why this adventuring group and not the prior one, which may help point to what they will be asked to do. At that point, you don’t know if the players will try to turn the tables on their employer or go along with the new plan. You’d better be ready for them to both…
Edited to add: Just remember one of my very favorite examples of this. Chris Bickford was running a con game where the players (including me) kind of accidentally destroyed the multiverse about halfway through. No problem for Chris. The game just shifted to us trying to build a new multiverse…
BTW, I kept thinking this over while I drove to the doctor’s office this morning. I think my favorite idea for how to rescue the scenario is basically Groundhog Day. The players are butchered by their employers, then wake up five minutes before the fight started. This is the power of the artifact, which is why their employers will do just about anything to get their hands on it. And now that the players get do-overs, you don’t have to hold back…
It was hard to fit all the details into the article, but I honestly don’t blame the GM at all. First, he was running a scenario for a game company, so he had limits on how much he could tweak the adventure. Second, one of the problem players KNEW he was being obnoxious in goading the rest of the players into staying the course of fighting the over powered boss.
The GM truly did do everything in his power to get the players to leave. It was a combination of one player deliberately and devilishly trying to mess things up and one really dense player who happened to have the leader character.
Could he have probably done things differently? Yeah, but it would have altered the adventure completely from what he was ‘hired’ to run and wouldn’t have solved the issue of dense/obnoxious players at the table.
In the end, he ran a completely different game for us and it turned out to be my favorite game of the con. I’d only accidentally signed up for the fantasy game anyway. I tend to stick with other genres at cons since it’s so easy to get fantasy at home. 🙂
Angela, nice article. I’ve had this disconnect in Con games I’ve run, though without TPK. For my next Con game, I am going to encourage folks to take risks, use all their spells, etc…
I had one DM in a Con game who said first thing: “I won’t kill you unless your character is doing something REALLY stupid.” He laid it on the table, have a good time. You’ll be playing for the full four hours. I appreciated that and hve played with him at other Cons as well.
Ah, yes, the one I don’t have a good answer for is what do you do when just one player has the disconnect? I don’t have a good feel for how to reliably accommodate that person without messing with the players who are getting what they want.
That’s a case where I might call for a break and pull that one player aside and just plainly try and clarify for them. If their disconnect is starting to negatively impact the game for the other players, you have to do something to try and fix it.
We still tell tales of the day that our heroes turned back because of some riffle fire. The game was Spirit of the Century, where big damned heroes are the norm. For some reason, the PCs decided to retreat this day, instead of charging ahead blazing away with sixguns.
The session wasn’t a total loss, but the delay and redirect were too clearly patched in; it’s the one Spirit session we shake our head about.
Heh. Yeah, I run into that with my regular group on occasion. They’re very smart, but they’re also very cautious. When I was running my first supers campaign for them, I often had to readjust as they backed away from encounters I thought were super easy for them.
I figure there are three types of situations where players fail to take an assertive action the GM expects them to. How I help the players varies a bit depending on which case it is.
1. The players don’t know it’s allowed. Maybe they’re not aware of a rule that describes their chance of scaling the stone wall guarding the keep. I’ll suggest the idea to them as a meta-game discussion. “You know, as you consider ways to bash down the wall, one other idea would be to climb it. Take a look at rule XYZ. Characters A has the best climbing skill and can estimate the risks.”
2. The players believe it will fail because the facts are wrong. Maybe they think the wall is 50′ tall when it’s only 20′, or they assumed “stone wall” meant one super-smooth block instead of something with loose stones offering hand- and footholds. I’ll offer this additional detail as insight that an appropriate character would have. “Character A, you have experience climbing walls, and you can tell this one is within your capability because you see that it’s only 20′ high and has rough footholds.” I may couch the information in the form of a successful perception check.
3. The players are just too timid. Occasionally the players know all the mechanics, they have all the facts that are reasonable to know, and they simply think it’s too dangerous. I remember this happening with my LT group years ago when they first encountered a dragon. I expected them to rise up and fight it to end its reign of terror on villages in the countryside, but instead they basically joined the villagers in hiding from it and calling for other heroes to intervene. 🙁 I addressed the situation in the voice of NPCs. The villager leaders pled the party for help, pointing out the urgency of immediate action. Meanwhile, an NPC ally who was already committed to another challenge offered the group a pep talk, telling them he thought it was within their capability. And, of course, that they should do it before the dragon murdered everyone in the entire area. The group took the hints and hunted down the dragon.
Really like this article. As a DM/GM/Storyteller/Whatever-you-want-to-call-it, I frequently encourage my players to try things. It took some doing to get them to expand their ideas of what they can and cannot try. This became especially noticeable when we went from 3.5 to the latest edition of D&D.
With the changes to the way skills are done, this was especially a problem. For a little while. They had gotten used to having all the skills they could and couldn’t use right in front of them, now they have to think a bit more broadly about them. But, I think we, as a group, have now gotten it down to where their experimenting with creative uses of their skills & abilities. Which, I find makes the experience at the table more enjoyable for all.