Ask the GMs: What we have here is A Failure To Cooperate
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Mike’s Answer:
Thanks for the kind words, Izzy. I’ve never come across a group so unwilling to work together except in one case where the players had conspired together because the GM was always foisting plot trains on them and never listened to their input, so I’ve never been in your exact situation. As a result, my advice will be fairly generic, I’m afraid, and at the moment is limited to a couple of thoughts:
1. They don’t seem to be feeling threatened by events personally, so they have no stake in mutual cooperation. Have bad things happen to all of them as a result of the problem that they are not confronting. The banker gets accused of misappropriating funds, the theatre critic gets fired from his job, the MI5 agent gets accused of being in the employ of a foreign power (and the socialite of being his contact) out to destabalise the currency, and so on. If they aren’t working to stop it, then they can easily be misperceived as part of the problem – so have some NPCs jump to conclusions about the ‘perty’ members.
2. They are obviously weaker as individuals than they would be as a group. Take advantage of this. Have them all arrested as accomplices to the murder, for example. Interrogate them individually, let the police suggest that another of them is cooperating and has given evidence against the rest – then let them compare notes in the cells (where they CAN’T go their separate ways). They can be released eventually, pending a hearing, if one of them puts up the bail for all. That gives one of them a vested interest in holding the group together as a party, but make it clear to the characters that they must all stick together or they will all be hung separately!
3. Have their Gods weigh in on the subject of cooperation, in their own styles of course. Remember the scene in Ghost with the singing of “I’m Henry The Eight I Am” 24 hours a day until the psychic gives in?
4. Let the bad things happen, then let the characters go hunting for a 13th-hour solution to the problem. Players and PCs should never be protected from their own stupidity. It may be metagaming, but they should have been looking for reasons to team up and coorperate in the first place.
5. Rework the scenario so that they can solve the problem piecemeal at first, each handling their own little piece of the puzzle.
Johnn’s Answer:
Mike has provided some awesome in-game suggestions, so I’ll focus on the meta game angle with my reply.
6. Ask them out of character to cooperate. I’ve done this for my last 4 campaigns. When the players made their characters, one of the initial PC creation requirements was that the PCs all had a desire to work together.
This fends off typical alignment clashes, player grudges from previous campaigns, and gives players a parameter to get creative with. In my new campaign, for example, some PCs knew each other beforehand, some had common quests, but they decided the unifying element would be an inn they all owned.
It’s not too late for you to have a chat with your players and ask them directly that they give their PCs a reason to cooperate and join forces. Let your group decide what that is and whether it needs to be gamed out, or if it’s a background element that has just now come to the surface.
7. A divided party costs spotlight time. Make the cost of being split up known to your players. If everybody is always in their own exclusive scenes, then players will need to wait up to 5x as long (fill in your own number here where it equals # of players -1; 4 players = 3x, 5 players = 4x).
This is because each player will go their turn to do their actions, but no one is sharing the scene, so no one else can participate or even feel present. So it’s complete isolation.
8. Ask your players why they are not cooperating. The answer might surprsie you. Perhaps they are waiting for you to produce a heavy-handed plot-driven unifying moment. Or perhaps the players have created characters who do not cooperate, and they feel like they’re roleplaying their PCs perfectly. Could be your players think this is what the game is supposed to be like – the old board game mentality.
You won’t know until you ask. Do not superimpose your own thoughts while listening to their answers. This is difficult, but try to hear their answers objectively. You need to understand their viewpoints so you can get to the bottom of things. Making assumptions and leaping to conclusions, as we are all wont to do, will end up leaving the root of the problem undiscovered.
9. As Mike has suggested, change the structure of your game. Let everyone do their own thing as seperate citizens, but plan sessions to have big encounters that result in everyone rallying together. This is a Hollywood style campaign where the audience is treated to just the big moments in a couple hours.
10. Similar to point #6, ask players never to do anything alone in the game, if possible. This is a directive I’ve given in my current campaign. I want players to share scenes as much as possible.
In my game world though, it would be unusual, and sometimes tactically undersirable, to walk around as a large group. That’s just asking for trouble in Riddleport. So the PCs often pair off or go in groups of three, except for key actions where the entire group’s resources are needed.
In-game, this makes sense because the PCs are weak and will likely get assaulted or worse if caught out in the dangerous pirate city alone. My players are fine with this and try to comply wherever possible.
I hope all these suggestions help, Izzy. Please let us know how your campaign progresses.
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August 19th, 2010 at 11:26 am
Good advice all around, but I’ll especially second Johnn’s take on things. What you have is meta-game logistics problem, and should be treated as such. I’ve seen way too many role-playing experiences sabotaged by a group’s refusal to deal with some disonance between “artistic purity” and real-world issues.
Watching TV taught me early in life that the best way to set up a comedy of errors is to contrive a reason for people to refuse to communicate, and that’s exactly what you get when a GM can’t or won’t be up front with his players about his needs and expectations. Just as it’s a GM’s perogative to choose the rules and setting he’s willing to run, it’s his perogative to choose the amount of party cohesion he’s willing to accept. There’s not a blessed thing wrong with saying, “Look, guys, we’ve had some fun with this, but keeping up with all the different directions your characters take as they scatter to the wind is exhausting for me. Concoct whatever reasons you like, but I need your characters to actually coalesce into a team if I’m going to keep running this for you.”
August 19th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Actually, this reminds me of a gaming group I played with, who got together for various means, and this was the type of characters they liked to play.
So first and foremost, check out why they want to play loners, rather than forcing them to come together. Such groups tend to prefer games like Vampire and Shadowrun, rather than the overly heroic tones of D&D, and if this is what you are used to, trying to force a group of people that prefer to play individual characters can break a GM and their plans.
I asked one of the regular GMs at this gaming group why they put up with this style, and they said they enjoyed it. They would have a loose plot, and let the PCs improvise the action. They would arange encounters and elements in their head so things could be run independently or together, as the action dictated, and allowed the PCs time to go off and pursue their own goals and cause trouble. He often has a twisted way of making the actions of one PC on his own affect another, and eventually draw them in together for the big climax when they were ready.
Sure, it can be exhasuting, and the PCs get smaller amounts of time in the limelight. This si the sacrifice they make for being alone. This alone will often force the PCs to start working together, just so that they get more screen time – if everyone is getting 10 minutes for a scene or so, then those who are sharing a scene would get 10 minutes each, or a 20 minute scene – this can be rewarded by allowing them more time if they deserve it.
Your role as GM is to make the game fun for everyone involved, including the players, and this means compromising what you find fun with what they find fun. There is no right or wrong way to GM, because every group will have a different definition of fun.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Born to be Wyld
August 19th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Also, Izzy, I noticed two specific flaws which you could easily fix to bring your current game back on track and help get the party working together.
The first is that you’ve basically given the party a mission briefing and a dossier file to work from, al a classic espionage setting. This normally works because characters are already a party with a chain of command through some form of Agency. You mention an NPC told them to stick together – this would be a breach of such command structures, and see the PCs “burned” or disavowed by their agency – there would most definately be some form of recrimination from their handler and higher-ups for this attitude.
If you don’t have such an agency in place, and it sounds like you don’t unless you want their gods to get in on the act (I think Mike wrote an article of limiting divine power, but this is probably one of those times when unlimited divine power works wonders) – you should probably readjust your adventure set up, so that there isn’t just one “file of clues” the whole party has access to, but rather each member of the party has access to a different clue and therefore they need to work together to find out what’s going on. Even such a breifing session where they discuss their clues could bring the party together, especially if the clues are personalized to each PC’s background.
The other flaw is that you are setting the adventure in a city, and in many cases, unless you make the city dangerous – it is normally a place where the PCs can split up into smaller groups to achieve their individual goals. One way to do this is to provide an encounter or other situation which shows them that city is dangerous, and the adventure is here, and not in the wilderness or some other dungeon, or elsewhere they might be used to. If there are adversaries in the plot, have them attack the PCs while they are together in the café to make them realise that there is safety in numbers.
You could even consider having the PCs framed for the incident, and hunted down by the police, giving the PCs a vital survival incentive to stick togther, if only to clear their name. It’s not a good idea to railroad the PCs into set actions, but you can steer them by shaping the world around them, so that their only real choice is to work together.
Whatever you decide, stick to your guns, and make sure you get feedback from your players. You’re supposed to be making the game fun for them, so while it may be very tempting to suspend their character’s priveleges (the Lord loses political immunity, the banker loses his money, the MI5 agent get’s burnt, and the socialite is ostracised by high society, for example) this may simply ruin the game for them. However, if you do it right, and give them the ability to regain these features, and use them, while restructure some of your ideas of how to run a game to meet what they want to do, this can work really well and provide your campaign and the party with the start it needs to unify them for future adventures, and prove that you are not such a green GM after all.
Da’ Vane recently posted..Born to be Wyld
September 18th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
All of the above sounds like it could work (especially if everyone in the party sees reward posters with ALL of their names and pictures on them), however perhaps the problem is actually with how the campaign started. There is a podcast called FeartheBoot (I hope I’m not stepping on any toes here…) and they suggest that you start each campaign with a party template. Essentially, it outlines why the party exists in the first place. It can have a lot of player input, or it can be carefully crafted by the gamemaster. It sounds like you already sort of tried to do that (‘someone who would live/be in London’), but maybe you need to go a little further. For example, you could have as part of the template: the party must consist of a number of people who would live/be in London for the purpose of unraveling an epic mystery that concerns each member. That might be giving more away than you wanted, but you could probably come up with alternative wording to keep the surprises intact but still guide your players in the right direction. I know that gamemasters hesitate to give out information beforehand, but little bits can sometimes help. If your players don’t quite know what is expected of them, they can’t help you fashion your plot… and once the damage is done and the bad habits set in, it can be hard to salvage the campaign.
It’s not hopeless though, I have only seen a few games that were unsalvageable (and I’ve been gaming for almost 24 years)! Keep at it, even if your current group is not cooperating, try different things, and don’t be afraid to stop and take a break (sometimes that really helps). If all else fails, it’s okay to scrap it all (really, you don’t have to scrap everything, only what you’ve revealed, keep the rest for another time) and start over. If your group complains, just remind them that you’re supposed to be having fun too and then sit down and figure out how everyone can have fun.
If everyone has incompatible expectations, maybe it’s time to start a different group. But make sure everyone’s expectations are known first.
Good luck, I’ll be praying for you!
September 18th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Actually, Norbule, I think the GM in question did a reasonable job, but has fallen foul of an assumption: that the PCs would automatically cooperate with each other, just because they are PCs. Nevertheless, your advice is good for avoiding the problem in future games – but it won’t help with our Enquiring GM’s current game.
Mike recently posted..Jolting The Status Quo