Need some GM diplomacy advice (Pathfinder)

[Kitsune413]

Actually, it is "War is politics by other means."

The modern definition of strategy is all actions that are used to Obtain a end result. War and diplomacy are both means towards a nations goals.

Also #1. Perception is a skill you should roll to see if they notice something. They can all look and ak questions. But most ofthe things he is using perception for are probably from another skill. Like tracking. Anyways roll perception forrhem and dont tell them if they pass or fail. Just tell them things tthey may have missed based on the margin of failure or success. Dont let them meta game on you. Bad environment for a gm.

#2 some players are naturally passive. Try to engineer situations where they specifically have to make decisions.theywill either begin to like it or stay passive. Its your job to make sure they have fun and you have fun.

#3 its your job to make sure they had fun. But some players are going to want different things from a game. Occasionally you will have a player that doesnt like the pace the others do. Leadership is easy. Find out where they want to go and take them there.

But my advice for you specifically is this. You sound like a nice guy trying to avoid confrontations. Most gm suggestions you see are for the leadery in charge type. But you should step away from that.
After the game have a conversation with them about what they liked and didnt like. Dont be afraid to talk about the challenges of gming with them. Be open. Have fun at the end of the day an rpg is a collaborative story you tell with friends.

[Bedwyr]

But my advice for you specifically is this. You sound like a nice guy trying to avoid confrontations. Most gm suggestions you see are for the leadery in charge type. But you should step away from that.
After the game have a conversation with them about what they liked and didnt like. Dont be afraid to talk about the challenges of gming with them. Be open. Have fun at the end of the day an rpg is a collaborative story you tell with friends.

Thanks for the advice. I am inclined, as you say, to use a different conflict resolution method for this. Most of this is feeling out where I think my boundaries ought to be and how far to extend my authority in the name of having fun with the group.

[StCptMara]

Thanks for the advice. I am inclined, as you say, to use a different conflict resolution method for this. Most of this is feeling out where I think my boundaries ought to be and how far to extend my authority in the name of having fun with the group.

Frankly, being a GM is the hardest work you can do while having fun, even with the best groups of players. You have a group like
you have described, and it can be downright frustrating.  It really is something you should explain if none of your players have GMed
before.

Also, I am curious on something: You say they don't decide to do anything...what *ARE* they doing rather then taking decisive
action? Are they going exploring the city/world, are they looking for information about things, or are they just sitting around doing
lots of purely social RP that doesn't push your plot along? Or are they doing a lot of OOC kibitzing?

[Bedwyr]

It's a combination I think. There's some OOC stuff, but I don't think causes a huge amount of delay, except for the powergamer. We just tell him to focus every so often and not worry about the silly hypothetical Tarrasque fight.

Mostly I think it's in-character trepidation about doing the Wrong Thing. or Not Knowing What To Do, inching forward, no one taking the lead and suggesting something. I think I leave things too open-ended for this crew. They seem to need to be told very clearly what needs to happen and my guess is that both sides are using different analogs. The players are using either the "acting out a novel" model or "fight the bad guys like in Rogue" model where I'm using the Black Isle style "choose what you want to do, the world is your oyster" model. So I may be allowing so much room that they're just flailing.

[William J. Pennington]

Mostly I think it's in-character trepidation about doing the Wrong Thing. or Not Knowing What To Do, inching forward, no one taking the lead and suggesting something. I think I leave things too open-ended for this crew. They seem to need to be told very clearly what needs to happen and my guess is that both sides are using different analogs. The players are using either the "acting out a novel" model or "fight the bad guys like in Rogue" model where I'm using the Black Isle style "choose what you want to do, the world is your oyster" model. So I may be allowing so much room that they're just flailing.

Work them into it. Right now, it sounds like you need a Big Bad Guy, who wants to kill the Good Guys.

Part one of campaign. Players try to stay alive. This should not be a hard decision process.  Ease into choices.  After first conficts (preferably with low level minions of big bad guy You can slowly work in choices.  Spoonfeed them pretty clear choices, but still choices.

These choices can be choosing allies, all with procs and cons. (you can balance them out, but heck, let the players feel like they choose the right one if they simply do a good in character decision process)

Later on, allow some other choices--as the conflict escalate, give them a few, sluightly wider options, such as seeking out why the Big Bad Guy wants to kill them.

Finally, after time and group cohesion builds, you can see if they are ready to plan how to stop the Big Bad Guy. And if not..well, there is nothing wrong with creating a direct path to campaign resolution. You have to adjust to the groups style, then develop it slowly.  Sometimes a campaign just doesnt go where and how you planned.    And right now, a new group, with still passive players developing cohesion, this does not look to be the place for an open world choices.

Yu don't need to be fancy, or metaphysical, sometimes the good old reliable plot devices are the best.

If they dont react and get involved with a BBG trying to kill them, and try to find out why, and how to stop him, they just passively defend and keep going on flailing aimlessly,  its time to stop, and talk to folks, and ask them what are they wanting to really do.  Maybe even be honest and tell them that you think you arent giving them what they want.  Because if the BBG solution doest work, then what you just said here to us really probably needs to be said directly to them.

[BirdofPrey]

1) How can I reign in Perception-itis? The players seem to want to use it every few steps or in every new situation. It's not bogging down length of play but it is becoming irritating and redundant. I'm having to tell them several times to look around first before doing P. checks.

Well first you should make them be specific in what they are looking for.  If they just look around, they either shouldn't be rolling or should be rolling at a penalty to spot anything, if indeed something is amiss.  Rather they should have a goal, looking for footprints, listening for excessive rustling in the bushes, etc.

An alternative is to humor them rolling every 5 minutes by telling them they hear birds or see some rabbits running around, or what, not.  Then you can give clues that something is out there through a LACK of something happening.  You enter a town in the evening and don't smell anything (the thing to notice a lack of is the smell of dinner cooking), you're in the woods and don't hear anything but the wind (no birds chirping, no bugs, etc.)  If they missed the clue, that's their fault.

[Klingon]

Best thing I can think of to break him of the "must have a river gnome" bit is first, tell him what we've outlined above, then have a stock human barbarian in the party as well, and let him see how much the stock character makes him Mister Irrelevant, and have the barb make IC comments such as "Mister, you're sure hard to hit, but unless you've got another trick, you're not much of a team player. The whole idea of a team or party is each of us contributes something to the whole, and you really don't..."

[StCptMara]

Best thing I can think of to break him of the "must have a river gnome" bit is first, tell him what we've outlined above, then have a stock human barbarian in the party as well, and let him see how much the stock character makes him Mister Irrelevant, and have the barb make IC comments such as "Mister, you're sure hard to hit, but unless you've got another trick, you're not much of a team player. The whole idea of a team or party is each of us contributes something to the whole, and you really don't..."

Yeah..if he can't be hit, why have people target him? Can he hit them any better then they can hit them? If he can't hit..then he is a lower priority....except for the enemy mages dropping AoE spells and Magic Missile at him.

[idea weenie]

Yeah..if he can't be hit, why have people target him? Can he hit them any better then they can hit them? If he can't hit..then he is a lower priority....except for the enemy mages dropping AoE spells and Magic Missile at him.

That would be a nice stunt, the enemy just ignores him in combat.  When the other players notice it, explain that he has been noticed as someone that doesn't do enough damage to be worth their attention.  Best is if the GM keeps a record of damage delivered per character, and when he is shown to be doing barely any damage, ask him what his character brings to the rest of the group.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

I actually had a standing house rule when I was GMing for that- an intelligent monster (needed to have Int of at least 6 and Wis of at least 10) could actively decide to ignore an opponent it was engaged in combat with if the opponent had demonstrated that it was unable to either hit or inflict damage if it did hit: at that point the declared target gets a +4 to hit against it but can't provide flanking with allies or attempt to use Bluff, Intimidate, or Diplomacy against whoever was ignoring it.  Players couldn't actively attempt to get monsters to think of them like this, they had to actually be putting out their best effort against the monster and still showing that they simply weren't actually capable of posing a threat.

[monbvol]

That can be problematic in it's own right.

If the player is just having bad rolls(there have been entire campaigns where I've had trouble rolling double digits on my attack rolls) or what the character is built for doesn't pan out the way the player thought it would I'm disinclined to punish them for it.

[William J. Pennington]

Don't put in characters to teach a lesson. Just go with direct communication player to player.  Now, if the character simply is not the maximum of combat effectiveness, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Its an RPG, not a wargame.  As long as the player feels his character is relevant, and not powerless, that is what is important. The GM can scale the challenge level.  Now if the character is so poorly made that the game cant be balanced (the character is so weak that challenges that bore the other players kill him, or he's so defensively tough that the only things that can vaguely threaten him slaughter the other players) then you have adjustments to make.

This case is a heavy tank armed with a popgun apparently. If he fits within the defensive parameters, then the lack of offense isn't as much of a problem balance wise, but eventually the player might feel a bit of frustration. If he doesn't feel the frustration, and is satisfied, then the opinions of others of his combat efficiency are not an issue.

As for  Perception-itis, simply say you roll all perception checks, or even better, have a large number of pre-rolled dice results you use for perception results (that way you don't even tip players off by dice rolling).  You can strictly enforce any action or time use rules as well, so if they want to keep wasting time doing detailed perception checks, find a way to make that have consequences. Otherwise, simply use the pre-rolled results (or fake it) and move on quickly.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

That can be problematic in it's own right.

If the player is just having bad rolls(there have been entire campaigns where I've had trouble rolling double digits on my attack rolls) or what the character is built for doesn't pan out the way the player thought it would I'm disinclined to punish them for it.

I've only actually used it on one character, and in that instance the character was poorly built in general and extremely underpowered in particular for the campaign, which I flat out told the player when he proposed the character to me.  It was a 3.5 game where the main villains were Tanar'ri demons (and therefore mostly had DR Good) while he was playing a Monk that lacked any way to overcome their DR or hit hard enough to damage them through it.  I gave him several options on how he could modify the character to rectify the problem, including alternate Monk builds from supplemental books, but even after a fight where despite landing easily a dozen hits he managed to inflict a mere 3 points of damage total he refused to take any rebuild options.  Considering that at that point I'd actually offered to let him completely rebuild his character at no penalty and he still refused, I said to hell with it.  I wasn't going to force him to build the character in a way he didn't want to, but I also wasn't going to rework my entire campaign just to accommodate a player who was so dead set on playing something that flat out wasn't working.

[monbvol]

I've only actually used it on one character, and in that instance the character was poorly built in general and extremely underpowered in particular for the campaign, which I flat out told the player when he proposed the character to me.  It was a 3.5 game where the main villains were Tanar'ri demons (and therefore mostly had DR Good) while he was playing a Monk that lacked any way to overcome their DR or hit hard enough to damage them through it.  I gave him several options on how he could modify the character to rectify the problem, including alternate Monk builds from supplemental books, but even after a fight where despite landing easily a dozen hits he managed to inflict a mere 3 points of damage total he refused to take any rebuild options.  Considering that at that point I'd actually offered to let him completely rebuild his character at no penalty and he still refused, I said to hell with it.  I wasn't going to force him to build the character in a way he didn't want to, but I also wasn't going to rework my entire campaign just to accommodate a player who was so dead set on playing something that flat out wasn't working.

Sounds like the Monk in question was just trying to be a deliberate problem then.

The River Gnome Barbarian isn't as hopeless from the sounds of it as the character was adjusted a few times.

[Bedwyr]

Yup. He's not a big problem no more. There's been enough new characters to balance the group out reasonably well.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Sounds like the Monk in question was just trying to be a deliberate problem then.

No, I think he was just overly fixated on playing a particular character and didn't get that it just wasn't going to work.  He was a friend of one of the other players, not part of the usual group, and I got the impression that he wasn't exactly the sharpest arrow in the quiver.

[monbvol]

I guess it is a difference of groups really.  I've managed to game with someone who in an edition of D&D where every class in the Player's Handbook required a minimum attribute score and rolled up a character who couldn't meet even Fighter.  His character was still a sufficient force to be reckoned with that we still tell his story now and again in our group.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

If he couldn't even meet the minimum ability score prerequisites for the fighter class, how in the world did he count as a force to be reckoned with?

[monbvol]

Good roleplaying.

The player understood how to take actions for desired results that did not require a single attribute linked roll unless absolutely neccessary and knew how to minimize the risk to himself.  Liam's Ghost probably remembers the particulars a lot better than I do these days but when you had the kind of DM we had for that campaign you learned how to squeze every last advantage you could without having to always rely on attribute linked rolls or supernatural powers.