Drac's thoughts on GM'ing: Stupid Player Actions and how to

[Dracos]

Today I'll be sharing my thoughts about how to deal with those odd stupid things players do, how to cut back on  them, and how to successfully manipulate your gamers.

My experience tells me that, over time, a GM gets exactly what he encourages.  Odds are if your players regularly do dumb stuff, it's not them, it's you.  I've played in campaigns where the entire player group just stopped planing any battle period.  Why?  Because it became blatantly clear  that there was no point to doing so.  A skillfully plotted ambush with traps would have no more benefit in battle than sitting in a prison cell and stabbing at enemies as they came.   That group actually did  that once, and sickenly enough, wiped out an entire tribe of giants by doing such.  This needless to say, is a clear example of a gm encouraging the wrong stuff.

It's important to have a good idea from the beginning of your campaign of what kind of playing you want to encourage in your players.   This goes along with my earlier article on picking your genre.  The most important thing is to stay consistant.  An unconsistant GM usually results in righteously angry players.

Comedy campaigns: this generally is carry along for the ride stuff.  You want to encourage players to be silly and not tragic.  Heroic charges aren't  the mainstream and should be discouraged, whereas pies to the face may indeed be.  I'd go more into this but I never run these kinds of campaigns.

Special Ability/Strategy Use: These kinds of things are why I generally abhor dice based systems.  In most of my campaigns I try to encourage players to be both cautious and considering of their abilities.  If a GM encourages a player to be thoughtful and to use them, the players will generally get into the good habit of strategy based on what they can do.  The problem with dice is it can often accidentally result in disencouraging the behavior you want.  Why would someone do the incredibly challenging and strategic  flying attack from above off a building using a rope to catch the villains by surprise when their odds of success are higher just walking up to them and punching them in the face.

This of course all depends on the GM, but I generally find it worthwhile to encourage creative actions, strategy, etc, in my campaign.

Stupid actions:

A player decides he is going to do a frontal charge, by himself, into  the enemy fortress, in broad daylight, with polished armor and a neon sign saying "I make your mother suck eggs".  He proceeds to kick in the door and kill every enemy by his lonesome self.

This is an extreme example, but one that highlights simultaniously a lot of the dangers of letting players get away with being obnoxiously stupid or silly.  Whenever a player succeeds at a stunt thats flat out stupid, it accomplishes two things:
A)The player himself notes that  he succeeded and will continue the same types of actions in the future.
B)The other players note he succeeded and realize that the GM will let them get away with similar actions.

This quickly will kill any level of seriousness or fun in your campaign if it gets out of control.  Some may be asking now "how do I prevent this from happening without angering my players?"

First off, never let it start.  As I noted above as soon as you become inconsistant with your ruling styles you get angry players.
Next, have bad stuff happen to people being stupid.  Chances are they are often providing the most reasonable targets to get hurt badly.  It's suggested around this point that outside of the game you give the player a brief talking to in order to try and help him  figure out 'why the GM always targets me' (Some players don't get this without pictures, so it's important to give it an attempt).
What if casual negative effects fail to stem a player's tide of stupidity?  Well, in that case there is always the crossbow bolt to the face.  Yes, the most important part of encouraging good behaviour and discouraging bad behaviour is not  being afraid to kill the character who is being stupid.   Odds are they will give you a lot of chances to do it if they are really being consistently idiotic.

Another tool  is the NPC.  Nothing quite gets the point across sometimes like cannon fodder NPCs that accent the stupid actions or demonstrate the good ones.  It's usually best to use these in early campaigns to teach players the ropes.

Bottom line is, as Shade said earlier, Reward Creativity and kill stupidity.  Soon, following the above pattern you will be left with only intelligent and creative players in your game.  Everything else would get weeded out through the process of discouragement.

Dracos the dark Heretic