… and I find myself quite frustrated over it.
We have a semi-regular party and this is our fourth campaign, but they’re chaotic and make it difficult to DM for. (Sorry, rant incoming)
I put a lot of plot threads throughout the campaign. The party would find an important NPC that has been assassinated… But rather than investigating it, they opted to ‘not touch the crime scene’ and move on. They found a dwarven girl who was cursed, but decided to drop her off at a tavern. Lastly they found an unidentified plot related magic item but chose not to identify it until the last ~2 sessions, when it was largely irrelevant.
In the end, some of the players said they didn’t understand the story and wanted more narrative. They noted they were aware of some of the plot hooks but chose not to engage with them, but were also frustrated by suffering the consequences of ignoring quests/issues/NPCs.
One party member would frequently start big fights, and at one point walked up to the BBEG’S fort (noticing a massive row of archers, I made the danger very clear), he knocked on the front door and announced he wanted to fight.
The hail of arrows left two party members very injured and two on death saving throws, which led the party to be upset with me for an unbalanced encounter. (It wasn’t supposed to be an encounter)
He turned another low level encounter into a near TPK by yelling into a goblin cave as he wished to fight ‘all’ of the goblins at once.
The rogue couldn’t decide who he wanted to be and kept changing up his personality. At one point he was wearing heavy armor (without proficiency) and using a weapon he didn’t have proficiency in. He wanted to subclass into spellcasting, but also wanted to use a heavy crossbow. (He had 12 weapons he collected, and would randomly use a different one). He would often charge the enemy, and never got to use his sneak attacks bonus until 75% through the campaign.
When he very nearly died from these choices (probably around 4-5 near deaths, thanks to his party rescuing him each time), he proudly announced his next character would be the same rolled character, but with a 2 at the end of his name.
I had one player message me afterwards that it was the worst campaign so far, and wanted more roleplaying and narrative. Immediately followed by another player very excited for the next campaign.
I am at a loss.
On one hand, the party obviously enjoys the chaos but they also dislike the consequences and lack of narrative their chaos brings. What would you do?
I think its a bit of both. Some of the story beats were a little predictable (or at least seemed to be), but there are definitely times where I think (some of) the players are trying to actively prod around the rules and limits of the world.
As I kind of mentioned before, after we had finished the campaign, they were aware of some of the plot hooks but didn’t want to engage with some of them, which was a frustrating answer.
Why didn’t they want to engage with them? Seems like you need a little more group discussion about what kinds of plot hooks they’d be interested in engaging in.
They didn’t all greatly clarify on this point. One of them noted he did want to engage but didn’t want to lead the party, and another said he wanted to get to combat faster, as he was a combat only focused character. The others didn’t really say.
I did note in session 0 about what they may expect, but maybe I should talked on that point more.