If I found that a campaign bored me, then I would just stop showing up. It would have to be really boring though. Now on the other hand I did once play in a 3.5e campaign that was balanced for combat monsters. I played a rogue. After the second session of laying around unconscious I packed my bags and informed the DM that I was unsuited for his game and went home, drank beer and played video games.

Of course Gumshoe still does nothing to address the problem of players who are dumber than the PCs and can't manage to piece the clues together and solve the riddle, or maybe it has another mechanic for this. I generally suck at writing investigation adventures so I tend not to run them. Thus I haven't looked at Gumshoe.

In general I find games that require X to happen but leave an actual possibility of failure for X to happen to suck. If X must happen then have X happen and make the adventure be about how and why X happens, or how the PCs deal with X happening.

As for reading big blocks of prepared text to players there is a whole school of module design that does it like this. Even if your GM is a trained voice actor it gets old.

It sounds to me like there is something of a bait and switch taking place here. The OP was expecting a game about the war with the Orcs, instead he is getting the mystery of the cattle mutilations. Best I have to offer is to have a conversation about what the GM wants out of the game and what the players want out of the game. I have one set of players who just want to play murderhoboes, so when I run for them that is what I run. I have a nother group who really like imersive role playing, so I run that style.  I also at the end of every session ask my players "is there anything you especially want to see next session?"  They don't always get what they want, but it helps me to know if I am in the right ballpark.

Quote from: DavetheLost;926673I also at the end of every session ask my players "is there anything you especially want to see next session?"  They don't always get what they want, but it helps me to know if I am in the right ballpark.

That's weaksauce Dave. If you can't read their minds with GM telepathy, what's the point? Your lame ass solution of talking to your players and engaging them in conversation to enhance your game sessions is only going to end badly. Eventually. For sure.

If you were a real GM, you would just wonder about it silently, or post about it on a forum where your players don't visit.

:mad:

You are right. I have strayed from the One True Way. I will go burn some dice and character sheets in atonement.

Quote from: DavetheLost;926673The OP was expecting a game about the war with the Orcs, and instead he is getting the mystery of the cattle mutilations.

Kind of seems more like he was expecting a campaign about fighting the orcs, and only fighting the orcs and instead is getting the mystery of what is behind the orcs, ie. the real threat, but again, hard to tell.

For example, the OP asks why the defending soldiers would sortie out to face the orcs instead of fighting defensively?  Instead of wondering about the possible reasons (like maybe they discovered their food stores were poisoned/plagued and so fighting even at a disadvantage is preferable to dying of poison/plague/starvation), he instead calls bullshit on the GM.  Instead of wondering about the coincidence of poisoned food sources behind the front lines happening at the same time as an orc invasion with rumors of an evil druid, the OP just assumes investigating cattle is boring and calls bullshit on the GM.  Seeing a pattern here...?

That's why even if the GM is running in Railroad Mode, there's still two people who get The Bucket.

Oh, yeah, I see the pattern. Only cure is the bucket. That or a discusion of expectations. What do the players (plural is important) want and expect out of the game? What does the GM want and expect out of the game?

It may well be the case that the other players are happy to go down the side path of investigating the situation with the cattle to see where it leads. Likewise they might find the GM's text blocks to be enthralling prose. It may also be the case that the other players all hate the new direction the campaign seems to be taking so much that no one shows up for the next session.

I understand the frustration of being in a game where you just don't like the GM's style, or the direction of the adventure, or what have you. It sucks. I've been there myself. You can have the expectations chat, and probably should, but be prepared to make a choice between leaving the game or having it continue the same way. If the GM can't or won't change, and you can't or won't stand to continue, it might be best to sit out until this arc wraps. At least that way people remain friends at the end.

It does sound like there are in character threads that you might be more interested in following up on than the cattle sickness. Who brought the news of the battle? Why did the garrison sortie against the orcs? Even who or what attacked the boy? Or head back to the besieged city and fight orcs. Presumaby you have delivered your request for reinforcements. If you haven't make that happen. Or just suck it up and investigate the damned cattle plague.

Quote from: DavetheLost;926693Oh, yeah, I see the pattern. Only cure is the bucket. That or a discusion of expectations. What do the players (plural is important) want and expect out of the game? What does the GM want and expect out of the game?

Well, I did say they should have the Expectation Talk...they just need The Bucket first.

Quote from: DavetheLost;926693It may well be the case that the other players are happy to go down the side path of investigating the situation with the cattle to see where it leads. Likewise they might find the GM's text blocks to be enthralling prose. It may also be the case that the other players all hate the new direction the campaign seems to be taking so much that no one shows up for the next session.

True, no way to tell yet.

Quote from: DavetheLost;926693I understand the frustration of being in a game where you just don't like the GM's style, or the direction of the adventure, or what have you. It sucks. I've been there myself.

Yeah, I think we all have.  I'm a firm believer in No Gaming is better than Bad Gaming, but to me Bad Gaming isn't "anything that isn't 100% perfectly wired in to what I want to do".  There are other players.  Some are always going to be more on board with an agreed action than others, you're never going to have 100% agreement and 100% engagement with any premise, whether Player-chosen or GM-chosen.  If you find the other players are always moving the campaign in ways you don't especially get excited by, or the GM just runs the one style of adventure and that just isn't you, then obviously you have to speak up and/or sit that one out.  I'm not seeing this terrible pattern of GM railroad abuse, I'm seeing an OP who wanted to fight orcs bitching because he got sent away from the front and claiming everything the GM does is shit.  Yes, maybe it is, but experience tells me maybe, just maybe, there's another side to the story here and it's not just a living embodiment of GM stereotypes.

Quote from: Headless;926325Ahh yes, here it comes.  The rpg site specially, blaming the player who comes looking for advice for sucking.

Quote from: CRKrueger;926685For example, the OP asks why the defending soldiers would sortie out to face the orcs instead of fighting defensively?  Instead of wondering about the possible reasons (like maybe they discovered their food stores were poisoned/plagued and so fighting even at a disadvantage is preferable to dying of poison/plague/starvation), he instead calls bullshit on the GM.  Instead of wondering about the coincidence of poisoned food sources behind the front lines happening at the same time as an orc invasion with rumors of an evil druid, the OP just assumes investigating cattle is boring and calls bullshit on the GM.  Seeing a pattern here...?

That's why even if the GM is running in Railroad Mode, there's still two people who get The Bucket.

Exactly.

Players whining about how something DOESN'T MAKE SENSE! are often (1) stupid, (2) lazy, (3) stupid and lazy, or (4) missing the fact that something which doesn't make 'sense' is a GIANT FUCKING CLUE that there's more to what's going on than they realize.

It may be that the referee doesn't know the first rule of running an investigation scenario . . . something I don't think that asshat Robin Laws knows either . . . is that the investigation should be the most interesting part of a mystery. It also may be that the player is a fuckwit. Most likely it's some combination of the two. Bucket liberally - it's the only way to be sure.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;926663Gotcha.  I see how it's a reaction to shitty GMing.  Wearying, sometimes, but an understandable reaction to Sturgeon's Second Law.  ("90% of everything is crap.")

Essentially another case of "We suck as players, but its really the GMs fault! So we'll FIX the game so we, er... the GM! wont suck anymore."

Laws version

QuoteWhy This Game Exists
Investigative scenarios have been done wrong since the early days of roleplaying games.
As a consequence, they’re hard to run and prone to grind to a halt. GUMSHOE is here to fix all that.
What’s wrong about the traditional way of doing investigative games? They’re based on a faulty premise. Story-based roleplaying, of which investigative games were an early if not the earliest example, evolved from dungeon-bashing campaigns. They treat clues the same way that dungeon games treat treasure. You have to search for the clue that takes you on to the next scene. If you roll well, you get the clue. If not, you don’t—and the story grinds to a halt.
However, treasure gathering isn’t the main event in a dungeon game. There, the central activity is killing the monsters and enemies who live in the dungeon. The treasurefinding phase comes afterwards, as a mere reward. If you don’t get all the treasure in a room, you lose out a bit, but the story keeps going, as you tromp down the hallway to the next monster-filled chamber.
Imagine a dungeon game where you always had to roll well to find another room to plunder, or sit around feeling frustrated and bored.
In a fictional procedural, whether it’s a mystery novel or an episode of a cop show, the emphasis isn’t on finding the clues in the first place. When it really matters, you may get a paragraph telling you how difficult the search was, or a montage of a CSI team tossing an apartment. But the action really starts after the clues are gathered.
INVESTIGATIVE SCENARIOS ARE NOT ABOUT FINDING CLUES,
THEY’RE ABOUT INTERPRETING THE CLUES YOU DO FIND.
GUMSHOE, therefore, makes the finding of clues all but automatic, as long as you get to the right place in the story and have the right ability. That’s when the fun part begins, when the players try to put the components of the puzzle together.
That’s hard enough for a group of armchair detectives, without withholding half the pieces from them.

Hite version

QuoteWe designed GUMSHOE to make that easier, clearer, and more direct. GUMSHOE exists to solve a problem that many people found with running Call of Cthulhu – one bad die roll can derail an adventure. You didn’t find the diary, so you didn’t get the spell, so either Arkham is destroyed or the Keeper has to scuttle ‘round and plant the diary somewhere else. In Trail of Cthulhu, the GUMSHOE rules guarantee that you will find that diary.

Boy, does Laws have a fucked up idea of what a dungeon crawl is all about.

If a lot of people share it, though, much becomes clear.

I know a lot of players who would agree with Laws. So many in fact that I left off dungeon crawling. An endless cycle of kicking the door, kill the monster, loot the treasure, with the occasional spice of a trick or trap does very little for me. But I have seen D&D played that way since the '70s. Several editions even encourage it in their DM notes on stocking a dungeon.

I am referring in particular to "treasure-gathering is not the main event."  The treasure is the whole damn reason you went down there.  That's why XP comes from gold.

The fact that so many people never understood why that was done does not make it a bad rule.

True. The primary in character motivation to brave those nasty monsters and traps is the chance at all that LOOT! Not to mention the EXP for gold, which it helps to think of as "EXP for everything you did in the dungeon that wasn't killing monsters", but "EXP for gold" is a lot more concise.

Out of character getting lots and lots of treasure was a pretty good motivation for us too. At least we could pretend to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;926877That's why XP comes from gold.

For most editions of D&D, it doesn't.

Quote from: yosemitemike;927004For most editions of D&D, it doesn't.

Was still a thing in AD&D. It didnt stop till 2e. So no. Thats not "most editions"...