fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4488 ]

Any advice on settling quarrels with friends without just ending the friendship? I've gotten into a disagreement with two friends of mine, one of whom I've known for well over a decade, and the other friend (first friend's fiancé) just sent me a long message that basically consists of interpreting everything I've done in the worst possible light. I'm mean, I'm awful, I'm ruining eveything on purpose - that's the general gist.
This is of course very hurtful, but I would like to make some attempt at salvaging these friendships. Any suggestions?

Kind of hard without context.

yeah, this.

Okay! This is me (I was on another computer and I can't remember my own login, go me).
This is yet another installment in the "I complain about my D&D group" saga.
So we've had three sessions with me DMing, and they've been going... not great? The first one was a bit awkward, because only three people showed up, of the seven I'd planned for, and also I've never DMed before, but I thought it went okay? The players encountered a creature, fought the creature, killed the creature, and went on their merry way.
The second session we had six players (one of the people I play with is actually in Japan at the moment, so that was the best I was gonna get), and the party traveled a bit more and had two more fights. I got some complaints that it was just fighting and no, shall we say, social roleplay? Which annoyed me, as I'd specifically told the players that they could and *should* try roleplaying off each other, and I'd given inspiration to the only players who did - but whatever. I agreed that the story bit of things would start next session.

Third session.
We're down to four players now, because one of the two who left is heavily pregnant and the other one who left is her partner, so they have other concerns than D&D. That's fine.
The party travels on, I describe the landscape a little, they get increasingly antsy, I finally get them to a point where they enter the story I made.
They promptly decide to roleplay sitting in a room for two hours, doing nothing.
No, I'm not joking - they had several hours, in game, to explore and talk to NPCs, and they chose to sit in one room and do nothing.
Blah blah blah, I forced the story along since none of the players were doing shit, the character who was created to be murdered got murdered, the player characters started threatening people with violence and arson, we had our (repeated) fight about morality (I argue that if your character threatens to burn down someone's house for not doing whatever the character tells them, your character is probably evil or at least a cock. They argue that as long as the character doesn't *think* of their actions as evil, then they're not evil). They got to looking for a secret tunnel, found one in the last five minutes, and we ended the session with them having opened it.

Was this fun for me? Fuck no it was not. Was this fun for the players? Apparently not, but what the fuck am I supposed to be doing here?

And then I got a long message from one of my players - the guy who's our usual DM, who asked me to put together a little side campaign so he could write more of the main quest. He said I was mean and rude, that I had *lied* about being ready to DM, that I railroaded the game, and also that the encounters I gave them were boring, too hard, and were out of place in the world.
That last one was a bit weird for me, as I got them from a random encounter generator and just.. put in the environment they were travelling through? I should have scaled the encounters down, to be fair, but I find it hard to do that on the fly when I find I have half as many players as I expected.
So I don't know. He said in his message that I had to apologise or I wouldn't be welcome back, which would mostly upset me because I put months into making this campaign and I'd like to finish it. I also want to tell him to stick it up his arse.
Bit conflicted.

Your group sounds like a bunch of murderhobo morons. How is burning down a house not an evil action? How do you demand RP then refuse to acknowledge that part of RP is IC consequences?

If I were you, I'd say "I'm sorry this didn't work out for anyone. Hope this in-game fiasco doesn't ruin our RL ties. See you around out of game sometime, maybe. GL with the group." and never go back.

https://i.redd.it/8clvie98x7m11.png

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https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDGreentext/

Come join us in salt.

That sounds pretty annoying and your friend was out of line messaging you like that. It sounds like it might be a toxic group for you. I would recommend reaching out the some of the other players to get a more reasonable account of whether they enjoyed your DMing and what they thought went wrong.

That said, as a player a few of your gripes stood out to me. You're looking at it from the POV that you're running a your first mini game and the playets should respect that and play your storyline the way it should be played. But they're looking at this as a fun, argely irrelevant break from their main game - kind of like when a tv show does a goofy alternate dimension episode. It's a fun diversion, but has little to no effect on the larger storyline. So they would be expecting their DM to let them have fun.

Frankly, it's the fucking worst when the DM tries to tell you that you're not role playing your own damn character right. Like, excuse me? What is the point of RPing if you can't do what you want to do? Let them justify it however they want, and let their character evolve how they want. If they wrote lawful good on their character sheet and end up RPing chaotic evil (even for just your mini campaign) it doesn't really matter to the game, at all. Rules lawyering alignments is a sure-fire way to piss off your players.

Also, murder hobo-ing is often a sign of the characters being bored of the story. Shoe-horning the story in when the characters are choosing not to look for it is also a good way to piss people off. If you gave them a bunch of super hard encounters I imagine they'd also be not that excited about continuing to explore lest they meet another mini-boss the DM was unwilling to adjust the stats for.

Plus, at the end of everything is it so bad for them to do social RP in a room for two hours if that's what they want and it's not even your campaign? Like, throw in a few bar games, a few sexy wenches/ male patrons, chuck in a barfight they can get into. Think about their character's personalities and play stuff off that. Let them do what they want to with the world you set up. And if that's having fun RPing with their friends, so be it.

Plus, if you're running a side campaign you have a responsibility to not do anything that fucks up the main storyline without the main DM's permission. Which includes not killing characters because your encounters are too hard. If they don't do a whole lot one session, that's practically a plus.

So yeah. Your main DM sounds like a bit of a POS who could have handled it way better. It's only for a few more sessions, anyway. But that doesn't mean their aren't ways you could improve your DMing in the future, either. I probably would have been annoyed and frustrated playing in your campaign. But I certainly wouldn't gave written you a crazy letter about it, and would have accepted that you're still learning.

I hope the rest of your group is less crazy than your DM.

But I just can't work out what would make them not bored? I gave them fights, they wanted to talk to people. I gave them people (fourteen named characters!), they didn't talk to them?
And I guess the encounters were hard, but no-one had to make a single death save, so I wouldn't have called them super-hard? Everyone walked away with health left, I think only one character was in any real peril and she was a druid, so her AC was shit anyway. So IDK.

"Also, murder hobo-ing is often a sign of the characters being bored of the story."

Big, fat, NOPE.

If you follow any major D&D community, stories like this about players like this are extremely commonplace. It's never because they're bored. Some players are just people that want to murderhobo and treat D&D like they would a hack'n'slash video game. Because it's a "game"! That's what they do. They're the heroes so they're automatically the good guys and if the DM tells them they're evil for threatening innocent people, they call the DM a dick for ruining their fun.

If you haven't seen them, this user has posted stories about their group before, and nothing about this group sounds like it's either a good group or a good match for them. When you set up a scenario and the players' idea of RP is to sit there and literally do nothing for hours, there's not much you can do with that. If D&D is a two way story building activity, only one side is doing the building, and the other side accuses them for railroading for it, that's not fair.

IAWTP

Your DM sounds like a dick, but it also sounds like he's not entirely wrong - you are railroading, your encounters are poorly balanced (which is both frustrating and dull from a player perspective) and it really shouldn't take the better part of three sessions to get to the start of the story. Also, you essentially told your players to entertain themselves when they were getting bored with the overly-long travel sequence, so turning around and being pissed off at them for doing just that in the next session is incredibly unfair.

If you do decide to continue DMing, stop looking at it as telling your story, and start looking at it as collaborating with your players to tell a story. Engage them by using things relevant to their characters, or relevant to their OOC interests - it's always better to lure them back in the direction of the plot with something shiny than to stick your campaign on rails because you're frustrated that they're not doing what you expected them to do. Stop relying on random encounter generators - they can be a useful tool, but only if you know how to tweak scaling and loot appropriately, and blend them into the narrative well enough to make it seem natural - and pre-plan encounters that will advance the story or a character arc instead. If you can't scale on the fly, which is perfectly understandable because it takes some practice and can be further complicated by unfortunate rolls, then make sure you draft each encounter with two or three difficulty settings, so if only three people show up you can run what you've planned without risking a party wipe on what's meant to be a group of mid-ranged minions.

I'd suggest talking to your other players, and be prepared to apologize and own up to the fact that you made some mistakes because you're new to DMing. They may not be willing to continue with the campaign, and you need to be prepared for that, but they're more likely to be if you approach it from a place of humility and willingness to improve than if you double down and insist they were wrong and unfair and ruining your plans.

Okay, I seem to have a different definition of railroading to other people? I assume that railroading is when you wall off other options than the ones you want players to take, or you punish them for going off the beaten path. Last session:
- Players could go to the house or not (I *did* tell them I'd cry if they didn't). They went to the house.
- Players could go where they liked in and around the house. All they were told was that it'd be nice if they didn't get in the way of the staff. They sat in the living room.
- Players could talk to a number of characters, and a couple went straight in and spoke to them. They shuffled through the conversations I started, and then went back to doing nothing much.
- Players were shown to their rooms for the night. One player investigated his room, found the laundry chute, and got another player to magically lock it. None of the other players thought to look for any other secret doors.
- Dinner was served. Players were invited to dinner, but they had the option to skip, ask for dinner to be brought to their rooms, go bother the staff - I didn't give them a dot pointed list of options, but I think I made them reasonably clear.
- Players went to dinner. Some of them spoke to the other people at dinner, some of them didn't.
- The guy who was made to get murdered, got murdered. The players were perfectly free to go "Wow, WTF" and go sit in their rooms for the rest of the night, eyes on the doors and weapons in hand. They decided to round up and threaten the dead man's family.
- After Zone of Truth didn't give them any answers, they went looking for a secret tunnel. They found a secret tunnel. Yaaaaaaaay.
I'm just... how the fuck am I supposed to provide a story without being accused of railroading? At this point I legitimately do not know!

Oh, and since I was obviously unclear - no, they did not roleplay amongst themselves. They "roleplayed" sitting in a room in complete silence, for two hours. A servant brought in snacks. They ate the snacks. They continued to sit in silence. Not much I can do with that.

You don't have a different definition of railroading, you said "I forced the story along since none of the players were doing shit", and we took that at face value.

As for how to deal with that sort of situation in the future, if your players aren't biting at the NPC interactions and aren't riffing off each other for a social scene and aren't looking for clues, either put the murder* earlier than you'd intended, or if the murder has to occur at a specific time, give your players one last chance to engage ("okay, anywhere else you want to explore/anyone else you want to talk to" can cover a lot of ground) and skip ahead to the action. Don't marry yourself to a specific sequence or approach - that is a form of railroading, if a much softer one than "you have no choice but to storm the castle", and will just frustrate you and your players both. Flexibility is probably the most important trait for a GM, and sometimes that means throwing half your planned encounters out the window because no one's biting and you don't want them to sit around with their thumbs up their butts for the whole session.

If you want them to have some piece of information - there are secret doors, the stars are wrong, the butler isn't breathing, whatever - contrive of a way to give it to them if they don't happen to look for the right thing. Passive perception scores are an absolute godsend, in my experience, because it means you can nudge your players into realizing something's up, which might prompt them to speak with those NPCs in more depth or explore their surroundings more thoroughly after all. Or it might not, and you'll have to skip ahead anyway. Players are weird.

(Players are also weird in the opposite direction. I've wound up inventing a new villain wholecloth before because my players have fixated on Random Flavor NPC A for reasons I could not fathom and would not be budged.)

*substitute "murder" for any other "next step in the plot" as necessary

UPDATE: Just got another message from him that he wants an answer
Can't help but think that's pretty fucking rude, given it's been less than two days since a message it took him five days to send
Increasingly tempted to tell him to stick it

I think you'd be in the right fwiw

Anyone who throws a laundry list of all the ways you suck probably isn't someone you want to be around much, generally speaking. I mean, I know it's possible you might ask "what did I do to make you so mad at me" or something, and that's what you get in return, or maybe the list itself is less about you sucking and more about cues you didn't pick up on, or things the other person wasn't expecting. But a real friend will try to not be such a dick about it, you know? (Unless, of course, being blunt and tactless is your "thing" in a friendship circle... or something)

I hope that makes sense.

You'd be right if it's really coming out of the blue, but is it? There's a chance that OP isn't aware of their own behavior or is in a bit of denial about it and their friends are at the end of their rope.

This is tricky without more detail. You don't mention what these transgressions are, or talk about how much truth there are to the accusations. You also don't mention whether or not friend #1 agrees, or what they have to say about this.

Tbh, I'm not sure it's possible to come back from this because a lot of it is out of your hands. Are you willing to offer a sincere apology? This is what I'm talking about:

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/effective-apologies-include-six-elements.html

Keep in mind that even if you do this, there's no guarantee that they'll forgive you.

[ SECRET POST #4488 ]

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