Teach Your PCs Well
A while ago, I described methods I used to encourage my players to be more proactive. At the time, they seemed to be working. Basically, the idea was to reward activity lavishly, conditioning players by Pavlovian methods to be active, and to make answers less cryptic than one might at first think appropriate for a campaign of mystery, thus giving players a direction to act. Sadly, I must report that the operation was a success, but that the patient died.
For a while, the players were doing well. They started out tentatively with their magic, which was appropriate for teens just discovering wondrous powers, then began to really open up when it became clear that I’d allow them to cast very powerful spells. Players got more aggressive about talking with NPCs for information once they learned that simply asking could get them answers. Unfortunately, they now persist in looking for more NPCs to give them answers even though it is now clear that there is no one left to help.
The climax to the campaign in which I’ve employed these methods is a confrontation at Warehouse 23, where security measures have broken down and a powerful artifact has taken over the Sinner net. (Warehouse 23 is a GURPS setting inspired by the final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a warehouse full of all the amazing, terrifying stuff the mysterious THEY don’t want you to have.)
My players know full well that’s where the action is. Every lead they’ve ever followed has either reached a quick dead end, or led back to the warehouse. The PCs have found two crates labeled “SRO 715,” for which they can find no record, but suspicious holes in the records link it to a spot in north-central Nebraska. There’s a blacktop road unmarked in any map leading right to the place. Scrying the Air Force base in that location gives views of an odd-looking reception area, and powerful magic static beyond that. Scrying for missing people or items produces a signal coming from the warehouse. The umbra, the magical plane lying alongside our own material world, is full of signs. Great root systems of wires and cables stretching over the umbral neighborhood are breaking into the umbral reflections of banks, courthouses, power plants, etc., and all lead back to the warehouse. The artifact wants to employ the PCs (among others) as warehouse staff, so it hasn’t been subtle about its presence: magical beams have visibly struck the junkyard the PCs call their sanctum, fired from somewhere near SRO 715. One PC teleported into a holding tank on a botched teleport roll; though she soon got out, the PCs had time to get a fix on her location first: north central Nebraska. Telepathy attempts have actually let the artifact talk to the PCs. It said, “Come.” About all I’ve left out is a giant neon sign blinking “PCs go this way!”
Nor is there anything else going on to distract them, no side plots other than those the PCs generate themselves, usually by screwing up in some dramatic fashion, and even there I’m implausibly forgiving. Like I said, everything else hits a quick dead end. I haven’t even written any adventure material for two months, for fear of side-tracking them. Two months. Nothing is happening anywhere but the warehouse.
Nonetheless, the players persist in taking every possible excuse, no matter how flimsy, not to investigate the warehouse because it’s too dangerous, even if they have to make the excuses up themselves. Typically, the PCs persist in chasing obviously unproductive leads, hoping against all evidence that someone knows more than they do. They keep at it, refusing to take “I don’t know nothing” for an answer until the situation gets ugly, and someone sustains another small wound, which justifies a refusal to go to the warehouse now, while someone is wounded. Maybe they can get some more information from someone else. Repeat the cycle. So desperate are the players to do anything but go to the warehouse that last session they chased down the Mother of Spiders, who they’d never met, and who they only learned of as a stray thought of a minor PC whose mind they were reading. That happened eight months ago. But rather than explore the warehouse directly, the players talked themselves into thinking that the Mother of Spiders, who knows none of them by name, and lives in another state, and is quite mad, will provide them with a foolproof plan for storming this warehouse of which she’s never heard.
Part of the problem is that we’re using the Mage system, where botches for spell rolls are painfully common. Mostly, though, the problem is that the players persist in using tactics so tentative that they get nothing if they succeed, forcing them to keep trying until someone botches, then taking another session to lick their wounds.
Scyers who decide to risk the mystic connection necessary to spy on the warehouse don’t send their point of view inside the warehouse, but rather from what they consider a safe distance, hundreds of yards onside it. Yep, there’s a mysterious air force base there. Diviners who ask questions about the warehouse don’t ask “What do the root-like tendrils growing out of the umbral fortress do?” but rather “Is something in the warehouse causing these root-like tendrils to grow out of it?” Surprise, surprise, the answer is “yes.” Was that helpful? Did it tell you anything you didn’t already know, or give you a handle on the problem? I swear, one player decided to rig a force field onto his technomagical umbral vehicle, capable of deflecting any physical attacks short of a cannonball—after discovering the warehouse’s umbral reflection was a fortress with cannons on the walls.
It’s like they’re dealing with a lion escaped from the zoo. They’ve got a small team of people with nets and dart guns and a cage, but insist on creeping up on the lion and prodding it with a stick, just to be sure it’s really a lion, or maybe hoping to discover that it’s already dead, or that this isn’t the right lion, but a tame one belonging to Mr. Dieterle down the block. When the lion doesn’t respond, they prod it a little harder, until the lion is at last provoked into a peevish swipe at the stick. Then the players act all wet themselves and run off to regroup, convinced the lion is too dangerous to approach. When they run out of other ideas, they reluctantly creep up to a safe distance from the lion and pelt it with gravel to see what happens and make sure it hasn’t ceased to be a lion in the meantime, then run away again when the lion snarls in irritation.
I’m out of ideas on how to get the players to get off their cowardly butts and do something. I’ve painted myself into something of a corner, unwilling to let the final, climactic threat not be a threat. There’s nobody left to tell the PCs they need to go in—it being a point of understanding that mages are rare in this world, and busy with their own agenda, in any case—nor anybody the PCs would believe, anyway. With the warehouse staff dead, the PCs are the world’s foremost experts on the warehouse. There’s literally nothing happening that isn’t coming directly from the warehouse now: no distractions, no excuses. And what’s coming directly out of the warehouse is bad: power outages at the nuclear plant, government computer files garbled or stolen, tornadoes, small children disappearing from their homes. I’ve lost patience with the players. From this point, they can go to the warehouse or sit on their hands at home while the world collapses around them. I wish I could say with confidence which they’ll go with.