Comment on “Bad Advice We Don't See”

Alexis,

I want to say thank you very much for doing this particular post's worth of deconstruction (and for its follow-up, too.) I can see in it some of the failures that I experienced earlier this year while running my game. To be specific, instead of taking opportunities to hand my players the information they were clearly looking for, and put them in positions to act (or not) on that info, instead I drip-fed it to them at a rate which was too slow to maintain their interest. That was my fault.

I would not say that I forced the players into a passive role, so I avoided the embarassingly stupid and contrived kinds of scenarios written by Mercer at the beginning of this post. But I gave them a space of options that was too wide-open, with not enough feedback or context to know when they ought to make decisions, and not enough mounting pressure to force them to act. So, it is not enough, at first, to just to say to the players "do whatever you want!": the specific scenario (e.g. the bakers' guild example you gave) is what is needed to get things going at the beginning of the campaign. If they accept it, then fallout from their decisions becomes the seed for the next round of offers from the DM, and away you go! If they reject it, try a different tack and quickly -- hell, ASK THEM what they want and propose things they might do to get it until they decide one of those sounds good.