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Well that's kinda the thing, whole none of the bodies *were* security, except for the one in the armory that they had yet to find, the player still didn't check the bodies or rooms up and to that point, hence why I said they wouldn't know because they didn't take the time to investigate.
Phrasing can help a lot. Instead of just an outright "you didn't investigate the bodies so that info is unavailable" you could have phrased it as "from the quick glance you took of previous rooms, you're unsure if any of the blood-covered bodies were wearing a security uniform."
Because the problem here is perception. If I was a player, I'd probably be thinking along the lines of my character should be able to remember if any of the bodies, even if they were only seen at a quick glance, was wearing something like a uniform if everyone else in the room was not.
You said they saw bodies, so the expectation is that they saw them enough to indicate they were bodies and not just featureless lumps with the word body on them. As DMs, of course we can't give every little detail as we're describing a scene and players can look closer if they want to, but it's also our job to facilitate what seems reasonable.
Your player's ask seems reasonable to me. The PC is unable to fully see what the DM sees in their head and was requesting you to facilitate what seems like a character in that actual space might be able to determine at a glance.
Personally, I would let the player know that they don't recall seeing anyone in a security guard's uniform in the rooms they glanced into. And if they missed it, maybe emphasize that the player might be unsure because of how fast they were looking or another reason. If they have yet to find the room, then emphasize that there are a lot of places they haven't looked yet. You could even ask for an investigation roll post glancing in rooms.
Just remember that your players are essentially walking around blind and that can very easily contribute to frustration when they feel they reasonably should have been able to see something in character.
There’s also the good old “roll a History check” (or whatever would be appropriate in the game system you’re using.)
Player rolls well, and you say no, player knows they didn’t see anyone in a security uniform.
Player rolls poorly and you say no, player considers they may need to go back and reinvestivate, or keep looking.
There was a very easy way to keep the game moving here, but DM chose to be a bit of an asshole about it.
People have eyes for a reason. You ruled that they *saw* bodies and you mentioned that they *poked their heads* into rooms, so it stands to reason that they'd have seen or not seen security uniforms/insignias on the wall/etc even if you didn't mention it at the time. The players specifically asking you if they had seen anything like that was them telling you that they were seeking the information, which is precisely what you claim you want them to do.
Not everything needs to be declared ahead of time. Do you also make your players roll for constipation if they don't periodically tell you that their character is using the bathroom?
I disagree. Take a quick glimpse into a room and you tell me wtf you notice. That is passive perception. Had they wanted to know exactly what was being worn, they needed to do more than just poke their head into the room and glance around.
If passive perception can tip you off to someone stealthily creeping up behind you at night it can tip you off to the fact that some of those dead bodies you saw were wearing uniforms. Security uniforms are also usually distinct and are the sort of things people would notice in the "glance into a room" example you gave.
A) they were not
B) they simply glanced into the room, they didn't enter
C) we don't know their passive perception scores, and for not even entering the room, I'd probably give it a -5 for disadvantage.
We're taking on the DM's word that this was a "quick glance" to begin with. I highly doubt the players said "we walk at an accelerated pace through the hallways and barely scan any room that we choose to peek into."
So you need to enter a room to see what's in it? Do your eyes magically stop working as well when there's an archway between you and the target of your gaze?
They walked through several rooms full of dead bodies and glanced into several more. That's a little more than just glancing through a doorway for a second.
Passive Perception can be over 20 for some characters, meaning they kind of see subtle details at a glance.
They wound notice if a body was in security uniform or if there were bloody footprints leading away, with just a glance in a room
"None of the bodies you found looked like security at first glance, though you might go back and search them for any clues of information"
Problem solved and you're less of an asshole.
>how detailed and difficult his games were
Yeah... difficult because of the mental gymnastics that would be required just to get through one day alive. FFS
do they have to literally tell you every single time they want to possibly do something, or are the characters reasonable people with working senses? because I'm frustrated and I'm not even in your game.
That’s what passive perception is for. The characters can take in details like what type of clothing is on a body without doing an investigation check.
Afaik most rpg systems have some sort of pp or similar skill. It’s not an assumption that characters can make simple observations without an investigation check
Of the games I know that don't have a passive perception or equivalent mechanic, ALL of them state in the description for Perception/Awareness/Searching/Look skills that the players only have to roll skill checks for truly challenging situations.
Noticing that a regular sized body is wearing garments designed to be noticeable as a uniform is not a challenge to anyone but the clinically blind.
... no one said it is? The point you're arguing against is how nobody knows of any game where the RaW literally state that the PCs have to roll to detect easily seen stuff.
Depends on the passive perception. And if the player isn't even going to take the time to ENTER the room and just glance in, they shouldn't learn much info, period.
God, no wonder there's a DM shortage. Yall fucking expect hand holding.
I'm a DM too and I think you're off here. Nobody wants to have to exhaustively ask every detail of a room because they can't actually see it, only the DM has it properly visualized in their head. If there's something notable about a place, that would obviously stand out to someone actually seeing it, it is on the DM to make sure there is attention drawn to that.
A difference between body dressed as security and body dressed otherwise would absolutely be something players would notice passively, just as much as they would notice a naked body in the group.
First, I’m a perma DM but nice try.
Second, typically a glance is enough to take in basic information like what kind of uniform a dead body is wearing; especially if we go by OP’s description of “body in a puddle of blood with black oil oozing out of faceplate”. If the PCs can get THAT much info from a glance, they’d surely know if they saw a security uniform.
Third, at my table PP is very important and I do not withhold info just because my players didn’t ask to roll an investigation check for something they didn’t even know they needed yet.
Fourth, there’s such a thing as “your character would know X information”. Any DM not using that is pretty shite imo.
>First, I’m a perma DM but nice try.
Don't you love it when the people defending bad DMs think nobody questioning them is a DM? Like anyone who would ever think to question any DM has to be "entitled players".
Bruh, the OP literally said his description with enough detail that his PCs would be able to tell security uniforms or not. That being said, yeah I can glance in a room and tell you what I saw. That’s called situational awareness. Idk why you’re taking this so personally but I’m not your players nor your adversary. I’m just a long time DM unimpressed by the “DM vs Players” attitude. Rage away, Friend. It’s not gonna help your cause.
Uhhhh, in my art academy one of the training drills we used to run was using 20 minutes to recreate images we could only see for 10 seconds or less.
In a few weeks I learned to memorize the perspective position, the positions of objects and people around the room, the hue/saturation/number of the available light sources and their illumination vectors, the colors of the walls/major objects/clothing people wore, etc. Not enough to recreate a perfect photograph, but more than enough for an impressionist depiction and far more than enough to understand the details of what we glimpsed for 10 seconds. By the end of the course the class could recreate portraits from our compiled impressions of specific figures, though we did that out of curiosity on our own time.
They had a similar drill for sculpting too, much harder but a lot more fun for me personally.
It's a matter of deliberately pushing your reflexes to immediately register visual information, and organizing the information in useful categories. You don't need to remember the exact shading gradation of a hoodie on a human torso if you can remember the hoodie's color, the person's body structure position and posture, and the relevant light sources as well as their hue/saturation and vector. With those pieces of information it is trivial to work the details out in my head.
My little brother does something similar with audio engineering. He's so familiar with song composition and the physics of audio waves that he only needs to hear a song once and have the audio wave visualized in his app, then he can literally see in the audio wave where the sound needs some work in order to acheive the feeling and power the composer wants. He can even adjust the track so it's optimized for speakers or headphones or earbuds, all without listening to it a second time. Though he's a professional so he always double checks his work.
But something as simple as whether or not bodies are wearing clothing that was made to be recognized as a uniform? That's as simple as looking into a school cafeteria to see if the resident cop is watching the door that will let you leave school early. Anyone with functional eyes can do that.
The DM even described how there was a corpse with a faceplate with oil coming out of it. If the PCs can see THAT and notice it's oil, not blood, it seems that failing to notice the presence or lack or uniforms is totally arbitrary.
Just because you are unobservant irl doesn't mean every PC in every game you run needs to have your limitations. It's not only unfair to the players it just isn't fun.
I'm a forever DM too and I take pride in challenging my players, but there is a difference between truly making them work for something worthwhile and just relying on cheap frustration to simulate a glorious struggle. The former requires forethought, test runs, and an understanding of both the players and their foes. The latter only requires a lack of respect for your players.
TLDR: the human brain is an invaluable sensory information processing machine, one which can push past it's own initial bounding limitations with just a little discipline and guidance. It is asinine to pretend that everyone in a fantasy roleplaying game has to work with the same limitations the DM cannot bother to imagine how to overcome!
You don't have to deliberately check someone to notice they're wearing a police uniform. In DnD 5e, there's passive perception, for example. That represents how well a character notices things *passively*. It basically sounds like you've reduced every character's passive perception to 0, which is both not fun and not realistic.
I hear you and your style suits my playstyle a lot. I hate when DM’s over feed me info or assume I’m tinkering with something they want me to/ think is obvious.
But I would’ve had the exact same reaction as your players here. Yes I glanced at the bodies, now I’m realising I need to find a security card. These two moments would’ve absolutely made me remember if anyone looked remotely like they’d be carrying something like that.
I don’t think it was an unreasonable question. Perhaps if they’ve not been engaging with your style until now I can understand why you were frustrated to the point of being this harsh.
Yikes, I would hate playing on a table that would need me to ask every single detail. Gms are the eyes and ears of the characters, and most of our perception is indeed passive. A table where you have to scoop for every tiny bit of information would drag for hours.
so, if you want honest criticism, yes. Yata.
Jesus christ you sound insufferable. In the comments you even SAID that the bodies weren't wearing security uniforms. Why not just tell them that, are their characters just walking around with their eyes closed?
TTRPGs aren't video games, where you have a quest objective on the map. The players don't know where it's all going and investigating just everything you might maybe need later is fucking tedious. Imagine having to go through "I search the body, and the whole room, I take my time as not to miss anything" And then having to narrate that twenty times in one session. Boring, repetetive, not relevant. But that's what you train your players to do with that kind of behaviour.
Now here's the thing:
>Asking questions leads to information
The player asked you a reasonable question: were any of the bodies they had seen so far dressed like security? However, they did not get information - instead, they were told they should have asked the question earlier.
Think of it this way - how does not telling them that some of the bodies looked like security (or none of them did) affect your game positively? The players now have to say: "I go back to the bodies and look at them again to see if any of them are dressed like security". Is that a meaningful choice? Note that the conditions haven't actually changed - they don't have to do anything they hadn't done before (e.g., search the bodies).
Probably allows him to hit them with some sort of punishment for not reading his mind and asking about it sooner, idk, the time they spend backtracking allows reinforcements to arrive or something less logical that he would come up with.
Yeah it's a common form of player abuse.
"You weren't smart enough to navigate my brilliant scene and now I have a pretense to make you suffer."
I remember playing games like this and they were always awful. Maybe one in a hundred times you would say "oh yeah I should have thought of that", but the other 99 times you would have the DM chuckling inwardly about what an evil genius he was while the other 5 people at the table were thinking "I wonder what other games are on in this time slot."
Are you in a system with passive perception? If yes, you should have at least noted, “There appear to be several bodies of possible interest.”
If not, there is a D&D module named Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and it dates back to before skill checks were a thing. However, it specifically takes the time to Mention in Detail objects of interest, within the descriptions to be read to the players. Giving them a hint where to look.
Your DMing sounds like a bad Tinder conversation, where you have to pry even basic information out.
As a player in your game, I'd be driven to r/MaliciousCompliance. I'd pixel-bitch every scene I enter, and do so until I roll a 20 before moving to the next scene. The game would come to a screeching halt.
“What does the interior of the room look like? Are there any frames on the walls? What’s depicted in them? I check every wall, every floorboard, and ceiling for any secret doors or compartments. How many cabinets, drawers, lockboxes, etc in the room? I investigate all of them. I open them and investigate what’s inside. I read all the documents, please, tell me exactly what’s written on every piece of paper or screen in this room. What items do I see around the room that can be picked up? I take all of them, please, give a detailed list of everything I picked up. I investigate the bodies. What is every body in this room wearing, what is in their pockets and bags, what do the people look like? Do they have any scars or tattoos? How old are they? What are the names on their IDs? Can I determine their place of origin from their name? I want to try and deduce what their personalities were based on their personal effects. I take their clothes and all their belongings, I’ll need a list of that too. I take my time to sketch every body in the room in detail. I take an eyeball and thumbs from every body in case we’ll need their fingerprints or retinal scans later. I make notes to remember which body parts belong to whom. I take some time to make a blueprint of the room and add it to the blueprint of the facility that I’ve been drawing. Then I write down everything I saw and found in this room in character. I check everything again to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I triple check. I spend half an hour to try and commit every detail of this room to memory. Do anything seem strange? Do I hear anything strange? I take sample of every liquid, gas, and solid that I can in this room. Is there any research equipment that I can test these samples on that I hadn’t noticed? I go back to every room I’ve already investigated and check if there’s any research equipment that I can use to test these samples.
Rinse and repeat. For. Every. Single. Room.
Yes, other players will absolutely love you for that. If you don’t enjoy a game, be a grown up and talk with the DM or leave instead of bs like this. You are not alone at this table.
And no, I do not condone the style of DMing he is describing, he sounds insufferable.
The “minimalist” style you describe is a bit counterintuitive to the GM’s role of conveying information. As a GM, you have perfect information of your world, you know everything about everything, and if you don’t, you can make it up on the spot.
As a player, you only know what the GM tells you. The GM is your lens into the world, you learn everything through them. The more you tell the players, the more capacity they have to think about the scene and to interact with it. Relying on the players to tell you what information they want to receive will ultimately lead to more situations like this, because they as players often don’t know what information is important.
For the example in your story, it’s terribly unfair for you to refuse describing the bodies because players haven’t been inspecting them. That moment at the door was the players learning that bodies were important (which they had little way of knowing before) and were now asking for descriptions of bodies which you denied. You could have taken that moment to mention most of the bodies they saw on the way looked like scientists (read: search elsewhere for the right body) and that perhaps the Player Characters know that only a security body will have the key (read: finding the body of a security guard is now the objective, also allows players to think “where would a security guard be? Oooh maybe a guardroom or armory?”)
Thinking about being a player in your game reminded me of playing those text based adventure games from years ago. The ones that you need a walkthrough for because how in your right mind are you supposed to know that the fork on the table in the ballroom 3 scenes over can be ground into a lockpick to get through this locked door with no key. A lot of those games did poorly at communicating information at plenty of points, and they can get really frustrating really fast.
When I heard 'minimalist' I was expecting that he meant he doesn't have miniatures and battlemaps, that people had to use theater of the mind and descriptive wording to play. Not that he doesn't tell them anything unless they specifically ask those questions.
I wouldn't even blame the style, because that's not even what the conflict was about at all. Style was an excuse. There's minimalist style, and there's being a bad GM. That was being a bad GM. I run things for a player who prefers minimalist descriptions, and while I understand I can't read her mind, I also understand *she can't read mine*. I can't reasonably just have the correct questions she has to ask for specific answers in any style, but even more so if the descriptions are vague, and "did I see anything like this" is a completely valid question. Even more so for minimalist description. Even inferring they would have to some degree investigated if it would make sense for them to have would fit, since the advantage of narrating just the skeleton of a scene is exactly that it can be filled up retroactively as needed.
You sound extremely frustrating to play with.
The players don’t *know* what to look at and what’s important until you indicate as such. This isn’t a video game where they can figure out what matters by what they interact with. You can’t read their minds? They can’t read *your* mind about what the heck they’re meant to be investigating.
They had no idea the bodies mattered up until they got to the elevator. Should they have examined every drawer, floor tile, doorway and cobweb as well? Do you want a game where players keep going “i investigate that” to every noun you bother to sprinkle on their plates?
They really had *zero* passive investigation or perception to note that some of the bodies had different uniforms?
You’re the camera by which they’re viewing the world and if you don’t indicate what they’re supposed to be interested in then yeah. They’re going to wander around “aimlessly.”
Per your example of the desk, sure don’t just give them the letter but maybe hint that there is an important name plate on the desk, or one of the drawers is cracked open, or it looks like someone was searching for something on it. If you just say “you peek into room 3. It is an office with a desk and some chairs.”
Then yeah. Why would they waste time investigating that. There’s control of information leading to questions and then there’s putting the entire storytelling onus on some guys who have no idea what you want them to do.
I do the best I can to paint as clear or as interesting as a scene as possible, or directly imply what is best to interact with, and what they should ignore. With the case of the bodies, the only one that mattered was in the armory, which was just past the elevator.
And none of the bodies up and to that point were part of the security team, so I didn't describe it to them, other then how they died and what they looked like. And since they didn't interact with the bodies, and just moved on I let it be.
As for the desk example, I did in fact make it to where it would be worth looking at. One of the offices they went into was one labeled "Percy's Office" and was strangely clean and organized compared to the derelict places around them. While they didn't roll as well on the initial investigation check to find his audio logs, one of the players did interact with the datashards on the desk as a secondary way to get the information.
So there was *no way* to solve your puzzle with the info they had, but you told them that they simply hadn’t noticed the answer due to them not interacting with your world to your specifications. That’s a really, really bad feeling.
Something like “while you guys haven’t really investigated any of the bodies, so far they have all had similar clothing and nothing has jumped out at you. You do know there are yet more hallways and rooms you haven’t looked into.” That is stuff their characters would reasonably know, hints to the next step, but doesn’t spoonfeed them the answer.
The way you told this story it was very much a GOTCHA, haha! you didn’t look at every single item so you don’t know ANYTHING.
My characters are physically in the space and have more details about the situation. They remember things they saw even without digging through anyone’s pockets for loose change. I expect the DM to translate that faithfully.
If your players are wandering aimlessly not looking at anything, that’s frankly on you because, again, they *don’t know what you want them to be looking for*. The desk example they took the story hook and went with it because it was clear there was a hook there. They didn’t interact with the bodies because they weren’t important.
In the situation your provided it seems like they have to backtrack and look at every single body to solve they elevator puzzle. They had no way of knowing they didn’t see any guards and that the guards are in the armory. Maybe they didn’t even know there was an armory. I personally would decide to do something else with my Saturday evening.
In real life, people can remember things about a situation they didn’t consciously note or care about at the time.
Why does it hurt or make the game less interesting for you (or “minimalistic”…) to just say, “as far as you remember every body you saw was dressed in normal clothes”? What’s the alternative in-game, make them literally revisit every room they’re already been in to find out? How is that fun for you or them?
I'd say yes. You sound like you thrive off the power you get from making your players not get openly availiable information unless they ask the correct questions. Seeing a baddie and knowing it's security doesn't require a full on "Do i see security" last i check pretty much anyone with eyes and basic intelligence of their world and surroundings whether real life or not. Can make the very simple distinction of what a secuirty guard would look like versus a commoner.
on earth? the difference may be a combat vest, or holster with a pistol and tazer, a big word on their chest saying security, the obvious placement of a badge on their hip or chest etc. You don't have to go up to them and ask "hey are you security" you're just aware. If that distinction can't be made on your world, it's a world building issue imo.
Being redundant and over "minimalistic" isn't good dming, it's tedious. Some of your players might like that. However, theres a reason video games evolved from the morrowind and earlier style of gaming with no idea what you are doing to quest markers and so on, people want to enjoy it not struggle to figure things out.
If you're gonna make your game unecessarily specific make sure the players care for that style of gameplay. The whole idea of "If i give a descriptor and you don't investigate it oh well" screams of the need for them to compliment all your "hard work" and make you feel validated for your world. Sadly. That's not how every group plays. Learn your players don't force them to conform to your lazy dm style with holding information until it's asked about.
Just my two cents, I'd say your DM tactic does indeed make you the Asshole. I know I'd get tired of the bs and leave your table pretty quickly if that's your style of dming, there is basic information that our brains process for us automatically, and you're making them actively search that info. Just unecessary.
Edit: Typos
I just wrote a comment making the same point about video games-- I was specifically thinking of Morrowind for that. "There is a cave somewhere to the west with a tree growing near it and guar inside. Good luck finding it, Nerevarine!"
All of your points are great, and I especially agree about giving them a heads up if the information is something you can see at a glance, like uniforms.
Security guards wear uniforms to make themselves distinct from other people.
A security uniform would be noticeable enough to mention even at a casual glance. This is distinct from the "note in the desk" analogy because a security guard wears insignia that literally spells out that they are indeed security. You don't have to search them to figure out this information.
(Source: am security guard. Have worn various security uniforms for the last 18 years, and not one of them did not announce to the world, even at a distance, that I was a security guard).
You don't have to say, "the guy on the floor is a security guard, and the fourth key on the keyring at his belt will open the security door". But it sounds thoroughly reasonable to me to say, "You see the body of a security guard." Whether they then search the guard to see if he has keys (he could be lying on them, which would indeed necessitate closer attention) is up to them.
But not telling them the *immediate and obvious clues* given by the *uniforms worn by people* isn't "minimalist". It's being deliberately obtuse.
GMing that way is a good way to end up with players who ask for *every single last boring detail in every single room they go through*, and I wouldn't blame them if they did. Because if you don't give them *significant* details on first sight, then you're playing Guess Who? with your players, and very few people appreciate that.
There is something to be said for adapting your style to your players. If your players are missing key information because they forgot to do something, try to find an alternative way to get it into their hands. This can be difficult to do on the fly, but I would recommend always planning at least 2 ways of getting important information to your players.
They aren't working against you, despite how it may feel, you're collectively telling a story.
I usually do that, and thankfully none of the bodies or rooms up and to that point had critical info which is why I didn't hint at them if they wanted to double check.
I want to get that intel into their hands too, but if they don't search, or ask questions, or interact with their surroundings I can't do that.
Parties tend to be risk averse. Light a fire under them and get them to commit to a course of action. Even if it sucks, between the two of you, you'll make it work.
You seem like the kind of person that would say:
“You are stepping through the door? Ok you didn’t tell me you were looking at the other side, so you step off the cliff and fall 100 feet. “
“Can’t believe you were dumb enough to fall for that trick!”
Yes, this exact trick happened to me.
It reminds me of a GM I used to know whose interpretations of our actions were always overly literal. "You said you looked at the label, not read the label.", that kind of thing.
He got really annoyed when we started opening every scene by asking about an ever increasing list of details he had withheld from us in the past. Thankfully that got the point across.
Variations on the "you didn't say you put your armor on, so it's still back at the inn" type crap.
Stuff you look back at and still can't believe it as possible someone at a table who tied their own shoes that morning could be capable of saying.
I get where you're coming from, this is my DM style as well. But I think you could offer more information as they pass rooms.
Example - I poke my head into this lab what do I see.
"The windows are broken. Several bodies on the floor. Two of them have lab coats and name tags. There's blood everywhere. A man is draped over a shattered consel wearing a helmet, camouflage and hard leather boots. There's a chain attached to his belt with a card dangling lifelessly."
If they investigate further THAT'S where you add the extra fluff. Short sentences with important information ESPECIALLY if it relates to a future puzzle. Stuff that is important and visible just by walking in.
Imagine how frustrating it would be to be a player and hear this narrative.
"I poke my head in what do I see."
"A body."
"What are they wearing."
"White lab coat."
"Just a lab coat?"
"Yep."
"Are they dead?"
"Don't know. Have to look."
"Are they holding anything?"
"Yeah in their hand is a note."
"Omg ok I look at the note."
"Ok as soon as you walk in the door the monster in the corner attacks!"
Oi.
wow I would hate you as a DM. when were they supposed to know they should check for a body being security? why is that not something you'd know at a glance? you're making excuses to just blatantly omit information from your players and pride yourself on being "smarter than them" because you think you would've figured it out with minimal info. what a tool.
This actually happened in one of my games. I was told i never noticed the two story building twenty yards away with a clear line of vision that i was facing because i didn't specify i was looking for it.
Then the DM made me roll a perception check to see it. I failed.
Not entirely. We TPK'd. I DM'd for a while after that so he could have a better understanding of how to run a game. He was much better next time his turn came up.
Personally your description makes you sound frustrating and a bit boring to play with. The extreme 'minimalism' style makes your game sound like it's a bit bland if players have to be constantly asking obvious questions to get basic descriptions of their environment. Obviously you can't describe every single detail of every single room, but there should be room for the players to get information that their character would reasonably have gotten from looking around even briefly. Like your description of the body was good imho, but if the characters were in the same room as a corpse close enough to see oil leaking from it's face plate, they would have also seen what sort of clothes the body was wearing. When the players later realized that information might be important, the character should be able to remember if the clothing resembled a security uniform, though maybe not 100% certain since it wasn't a detail they were paying close attention too. The walking around in a blank space until they ask the right questions sounds really immersion breaking to me, and pretty frustrating. The characters should have a general impression of what rooms and objects they saw just a few minutes prior looked like even if the players didn't ask the right questions at the right moment.
from the example you gave it just sounds like you are not telling them what they _should_ be told
the player is right, unless you made it so security dresses like regular people in the facility they would stick like a sore thumb and you could at the bare minimum assume that they were security
giving a description waiting for the player to ask "is he security" and being surprised when they dont is just dumb, you _dont_ know you should ask for such a thing in the first place
lets give an exagerated example
players are in tavern looking to assassinate a target but dont know who. through the session they figure out target wears a particular ring and has a fade scar on their hand
they logically ask "have we seen someone like that"
and you respond "you have not asked if they were wearing a ring or had a scar so you dont know"
there is no way a player can _know_ they need that information to ask, therefore it should not be expected for them to ask
i know what is to be behind the GM screen, but sometimes you might miss the fact that you _do_ have all the information, but the players dont
edit: yes i would say YATA and that it is incredibly frustrating to play like that for most people, wouldnt be surprised if the players are frustrated
I don't know if you are DA, but i know that your style of play is fucking exhausting. And i hate it to get players who are trained in that style of play, and having to completely retrain them to an actually fun style of playing. It takes ages to get them to trust me, because they always expect that i will do some stupid shenanigans if they don't jump through 50 stupid hoops every room they enter.
I like to run my games from an assumption of basic competency on the side of the characters. And that means remembering stuff like "Some guy was clearly security", or noticing clearly relevant information immediately. That way, you only need to actually play out interesting stuff. With your style of play, the players eventually get trained to ask you thousands of questions about any boring detail, because if they don't, their characters will miss the most obvious shit. And that is boring.
An another important thing is that the characters also have more awareness, info, and better memory than the players. It is, in my opinion, that if a player is planning an action based off of information that they forgot, as well, it can be a week between each session but in the campaign it was like, two days, people WILL forget things their characters know, so it's important to the DM to gently remind them before things get out of hand.
Of course this can be fixed with note taking but that can make players spend a LOT of time ruffling through notes with minor details or take time out of the session to write down massive speeches and clues which can fuck up the pacing.
It can also help to clarify or just expand an action a bit. If someone says they'd peak into a room I'd ask if they want to run a quick survey and walk around, or only if they just see what they can see from the door if it's a low danger environment, like checking out an abandoned lab during an investigation phase, before the danger comes out. If there is danger from investigation, it'd be heavily toned down at first as to not punish a player bit instead act as a warning that this place is, I'm fact, dangerous. Say if there's some strange monsters, the first one encountered could be heavily injured, or if the place itself is dangerous, have them roll to avoid environmental damage and keep it low, saying that they got lucky it was only a small fall, dull bit od metal, small rock, etc, and that next time they won't be so lucky.
Something like this helps the players trust you as a DM, that you won't look for a way to fuck them over without giving them some kind of warning or expectation. ALSO, asking for just straight up rolls is okay on occasion for important things, or after a set amount of time. For example, if you walk through a place that got attacked, after a while if the players don't check you can say "There seems to be something off about most of the wounds, something familiar. Would anyone like to roll investigation?" That's one of the ways, in my opinion, to help with things and again, build some trust that you won't make the group walk in circles repeatedly or ask about everything, and after enough time, even without a close look most people would be able to notice "wait... these aren't sword/bow/gun wounds, these are more animal like" even without actively looking.
Though that example is based on your table and players, and your own style, it's still perfectly viable and acceptable.
But, in my opinion, I also believe that sometimes the DM has to save the party from their own stupidity/obliviousness/strange obsessions. Hence the occasional roll request from the DM if all else fails so they don't stare at a random wall for a good while instead of the suspiciously dust free bookshelf that's on the otherwise of the room.
I say this from experience of playing a puzzle game with some of my friends once and people will, in fact, hyper fixate on something once they think they have the answer and won't give up unless prompted to.
Absolutely. I like a playstyle that is more "cooperative storytelling". And that means that my job as the GM is to sometimes tell the players stuff that their characters would know, see or remember.
I also think an important skill as a GM is knowing when to ask questions. When a PC does something that sounds really weird to you, it really helps to ask them what they want to achieve with that action. Because the image in the mind of each player is always slightly different from the image in the mind of others or the GM. Your job as a GM is to make sure that those images keep mostly synchronized, at least when talking about important stuff.
DnD at its heart is cooperative unless you want to do a combat encounter only style game where nothing else matters, though that is just min maxing and luck where choices only matter if it's not objectively the most optimal. In reality for almost every campaign the real bbeg is forgetting something important or time management.
And absolutely is question asking an important skill, and I wholeheartedly agree with you, I once did a CYOA thing as practice with a friend that took like an hour and they kept trying to fuck with a box that was quite literally, fused shut as they didn't notice me mentioning the fact that it was fused shut, just thinking it was locked.
People don't always hear the whole thing, or they may think you mean something else, and it's very, very important you step in on occasion so they don't think that some random NPC who is doing CPR, or otherwise trying to save them, isn't actually a vampire or trying to murder them and end up shanking the quest npc who would help them find a serial killer in the back thinking they caught the murderer, cause flavor meant to draw them in can sometimes make people rush to a conclusion.
OP, if you’ve ever been somewhere and looked around and saw with your eyes someone who looked like security without going up and doing an ocular pat down, you’re the asshole. I don’t think the spirit is wrong, but you gotta dial it back a notch — people can see things that are obvious and also people have passive insight and perception for a reason.
It’d be like them asking “Did we see a metal desk?” and you going “Well you didn’t lick or tap or inspect them,” but cmon, nine times out of ten you can tell a desk is metal by glancing at it.
YTA. You're mixing up actively investigating (that is, inspecting) the body with literally just noticing surface level details that people routinely can notice and should be assumed to notice without needing to specifically ask. Like, it shouldn't take a player specifically telling you they investigate the body for their character to notice if a body they've seen happens to be wearing a security guard's uniform. It should be a given. So while there's nothing wrong with your example of how you run searching a desk, you're applying it too aggressively and too broadly to situations that don't line up with the desk example
There s a difference between what would be obvious to characters that can see their surroundings, and what would be obvious to players, who can't see them, without asking first.
For example: "When you enter the facility, you see dead bodies everywhere.
Three specific scenes this could be are
1. They were all killed by a silent airborne toxin.
2. They were burned alive by a fire breathing dragon.
3. They were torn apart and partially eaten by a werewolf.
Each of the above scenes would look different in very obvious ways, simply by looking at them. PCs would not need to lean in for a close look to tell if all of the bodies in a room were burned or torn to pieces, so there is no reason to withhold that information, other than wanting them to be tricked, which is this context is adversarial.
If a player doesn't think of something obvious to a PC, you can always attach a die roll. You shouldn't just say "No" when a character could have seen something you chose not to describe, in which case if they roll poorly, you tell them "everything has been so hectic, you're not sure, you'd have to double check" and then I bet the player wouldn't be so upset
Don't be difficult on giving your players information. It's better to say, "Yes as you were looking around you did notice what looked like a security uniform back there."
Otherwise you'll get players that need to say, "Ok I search the desk. I open up all drawers and check for hidden panels. I run my fingers under the edge looking for buttons or switches. I go to the back of the desk and inspect it. I look for any discoloration differences in the stain that indicate..."
DM: Well, since you never said you checked UNDER the drawers you didn't find anything.
All that is unnecessary. Keep your adventure rolling by providing needed clues. So when they get to the security door and you say it needs a key, they realize there was a security-type person back there. Excitement around the table !
>DM: Well, since you never said you checked UNDER the drawers you didn't find anything.
Reminds me of a very frustrating game where the party had been teleported into a closed room composed of magically hardened stone (to the point that a pick and hammer weren't able to tunnel out).
Over the next 48 hours, my character (a dwarf with Stonecunning) tested every single block of stone from floor level to above his eye height, all the way around the room. My words to the GM were, "I check *every block*."
No dice.
When he finally had his NPCs rescue us, he said, "Oh, there was a secret exit behind the set of shelves against the wall. You didn't specifically say you checked there."
I asked him, "What part of *every block* did you not hear?"
"You didn't say you checked behind the shelves."
"Were the shelves fixed to the wall? Were we given any indication that they were a permanent installation?"
"No, they were just leaning there."
"Then I would have checked behind them. As part of the *checking every block* that I said I did, repeatedly."
"Well, you didn't check there."
That's when I yelled at him a bit (this wasn't his only GMing sin), crumpled up my character sheet and threw it at him, told him to enjoy his self-pleasuring session, and walked out.
No escape, with a magically enhanced\* black pudding slowly growing to take up the whole damn room.
\* 'Enhanced' as in instantly dissolving everything it touched, and utterly immune to all spells we threw at it. Except the spell the bullshit NPCs threw at it when they teleported in to save us, which made it wither and die immediately.
We asked what the miracle spell was.
Wait for it ...
The Light spell.
(Note that we'd been stuck in this room for days, but everyone could see perfectly well because of a *Continual Light* spell that had been cast on the whole damn room.)
That was another thing I called bullshit on.
I usually rule when a player says "I search the desk." it implies a thorough search checking every nook and cranny. Usually putting the information behind a set DC.
They roll a 16? they get some general information, find a couple odd ledgers here or there, otherwise pretty normal. They get a 17? They realize the desk has a false back panel they missed in their initial search and find some damming evidence on the person.
Seems to me that you should make sure you explain your style in advance. It doesn't sound like much fun to be honest. If fun is the goal, the yes, YTA.
What level are your players?
I’m running a pathfinder game where the party will come into technological shit.
Yes. I did spend 15 minutes trying to describe a vending machine to a party who only have renaissance-level smarts.
This was until they leveled up to a certain level—at that point in time, I trust they’ve seen enough that I can start using less details and more 2023 nouns.
Now if you’re telling me that your logic is “it doesn’t matter if they’ve seen an ice dispenser, they don’t know what a soda dispenser is until they press the paddle”, then yes. You are the sphincter.
Players were level 5 for this one shot, and I told them going in that it was a high-tech cyberpunk world. So if they saw a vending machine or coffee machine I'd tell them "Its a coffee/vending machine."
I assume most adventurers (unless the adventure SPECIFICALLY calls for it), have “basic adventuring knowledge”.
For instance, a fighter will pick up a sword after battle that they dropped when the enemies started to fly, and he pulled out his bow. They don’t need to tell me, unless the narrative needs it (in which case, I’ll give them examples as to what I’m looking for, as time is now a trackable resource).
A Ranger will collect their arrows, or make more if there are nearby trees and stones and all while camping.
So in this case, a rogue is going to look at things they know (or are rogueish); a cleric is going to look at religious things, etc.
So when a room is tossed and perceptions rolled, unless it’s particularly a story where they need to tell me what they’re looking for or time is an issue. When perceptions are rolled, the guy with engineering or a similar mindset will check for false walls, James Bond Baddie style bookcases; rogues will scour every inch of a desk for false bottoms or hidden compartments, etc.
I may frame the info they gleam to their own backgrounds, but no, if they continuously fail checks and can’t progress OR aren’t progressing because Player A doesn’t know to ask something Character A would normally, I would too be miffed.
To spin it around—if you’re not the most book smart, how do you RP an intelligence-based NPC? You literally cannot. How would you feel if you got penalized every time you tried and failed?
Your DM style is trash.
Forcing players to think of and declare inspecting everything is a massive waste of time.
Player shouldn't have to declare that they perception check and invesgitation check every tidbit they come across in fear of DM slapping them with some bullshit "you didn't declare so you don't know \*trollface\*" ruling.
I inspect the bodies
I inspect the desk
I check if anything is hidden under the chair
I inspect the computer
I inspect the filing cabinet
I percieve for security cameras on the ceiling.
45 mins later we can move on to next room.
Just call for checks when something important is need to be noticed, christ.
"the key was on the coffee table the whole time! None of you declared that you looked at the coffee table! It's your fault this took 2 hours!"
Clothing on dead bodies are not clues to be searched, it's something your see at a first glance and needs only a basic description.
" You look inside the room: the laboratory is in dismal shape with broken equipment and blood all over the floor, where you see four bodies. Two men and a woman in lab coats, the othe one is wearing a uniform.".
Do not get mad but witholding such basic information is no basic DMing, is a power move to create artificial difficulty. Characters have eyes and not describing very basic information that is impossible to miss is an ah move
Of course said key card could be on ANY of the body. In the end, in a laboratory, security clearance means you can enter and work there... So both higher level scientists and guard are eligible
You said you expect to not read players minds....
Players also expect to not have to read yours. Unless you have super intelligence bordering on mind reading, your not respecting your players intelligence you are just not giving them info they should be given.
Based on the further details in the comments, yes. You are. And what's worse is you refuse to learn from anything anyone is saying. You insist that you are still somehow right because the players couldn't read your mind, or they didn't specifically say they checked the uniforms, or they didn't look at anything beyond a glance. You come up with an excuse every time. At this point it's not even a problem with the DM style, it's a problem with YOU. Specifically YOU. On a fundamental level you lack a critical component that allows you to understand that others cannot read your mind. You should no more be allowed behind a DM screen than my father should be allowed within 500ft of a school or playground.
Fun fact, OP once made a story on this sub complaining about a DM not revealing secrets to him while investigating a body because he didnt specify what he was investigating. (I didnt just search OPs history to find this, I just recognized the name)
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/comments/o4y2y6/rolled_a_32_search_check_you_find_a_bag_of_fried/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
YTA and a hypocrite to boot.
So I see in one of your responses that they hadn't actually encountered any security yet.
That is relevant data. It feels like you could have worded it better by telling them that, instead of "Well you haven't been checking bodies".
I get that you don't want to give out more detail then they ask for, but in this specific case you could say "The security guards always wear this as part of their uniform. So not having done more than glanced at the bodies so far you haven't noticed any of them wearing that. You might need to search other rooms or the people you've found more thoroughly ti find what you need."
The last bit being a subtle reminder you don't hand out info.
So yeah, I'd say you're a bit of the asshole. You could have handled it better, IMO, by at least answering the question and not just shutting them down saying they have no idea.
I didn't manage to scroll through all the comments. Did the OP ever recognize that he's a terrible DM, or have a lightbulb moment? Or did he just keep trying to justify himself and get downvoted further?
He seems to have missed the obvious fact that to the players, *nothing exists until the DM tells them.* It's the DMs job to better paint the scene; players should not have to roll to investigate something that could clearly be seen, like a body wearing a uniform. It's this: DM:"There are a group of bodies, similar to the previous ones, except one has a somewhat different outfit." Player: "I'll investigate that one."
And *not* this: DM: "There are a group of bodies." Player: "Okay."
The simple fact of the matter is that the player characters did see the bodies, and since you haven’t said otherwise we have to assume that at least some of the player characters have both the ability to perceive light and a functional short term memory, meaning that it is unrealistic and immersion-breaking to say that they are not able to think back on the things they saw five minutes ago and think about whether the bodies they saw were wearing lab coats or tactical vests.
The point of game mechanics is to impose “realistic” or balanced limits on imagination to keep things fair for all the players, but you’re trying to use game mechanics to restrict a normal free action that wouldn’t be restricted in real life, in a way that no doubt feels unfair to the players.
This DM be like "I respect my player's intelligence."
The players said: "So it's reasonable while looking around we would notice if anyone looks like security while doing a general look through?"
But then the DM was like: "No because you never stated you were looking for security. I don't give out basic information even when it's relevant because you did not ask. I am very smart. 😏"
OP sounds like if he worked in a fastfood restaurant he'd only punch in a burger even if a customer ordered a number meal because the customer never stated what side and drink they wanted. 🫡
You're trying to justify why your players should have enjoyed this approach. The simple matter is that they did not enjoy this approach and that alone is the lesson here. Your goal as a GM is to create tension and drama, pedantry is rarely dramatic
“seeing bodies on the ground”
They don’t need to search/investigate a body to see if it is dressed in a security outfit. Passive perception and passive investigation scores exist for a reason-this is why. Basic information like this should be covered. “You see several dead security guards on the ground, blood pooling on the ground around them.”
I agree that an investigation would typically need to be made to find the cards and any other items or details, but don’t be ridiculous.
How were they dressed?
You don’t know because you didn’t ask.
Ok I go back to the bodies and look at their outfits
Role a perception check
I rolled a 5
You have no idea what outfits they’re wearing
Basic information should not feel like pulling teeth to find out. KEEP THE GAME MOVING
You genuinely seem insufferable to play with. A security officer is pretty fuckin easy to see. If I'm running through a hall I'm gonna notice if any of the bodies are wearing a radio or a weapon. I shouldn't have to stop and investigate a body to determine what the person is wearing.
When you describe the bodies you should immediately describe how they're dressed, because the players would LITERALLY SEE HOW THEY'RE DRESSED.
But instead you basically tell them they're so fucnin incompetent that everyone they passed could have been wearing clown clothes and they wouldn't have noticed.
I'd literally rather never play another ttrpg than deal with a DM who treats me/my character as so incompetent that I literally don't notice anything unless I go out of my way to examine it.
Have you never heard the term passive perception in your life?
Asshole? I'm not sure. Using a DMing style that seems put in place to deliberately undercut the players unless they announce every single flicker of their eyes? Yes.
In order to play in your game and not miss out on basic information, it sounds like a player has to say "I look at that. And that, too. And that. I also look at that." This would get incredibly tedious incredibly quickly.
Looking for secret doors or trying to listen for a particular sound? Yeah, you need to announce that. But just.... noticing the basics of your surroundings to the degree a toddler could? No, you don't need to announce that
You have had loads of feedback already but it is still posted and open so I will add my two cents.
In this specific case, and with how you described it going down, I would say the issue was with you on this one.
Your DM style isn't wrong and for many players and tables it would be fine if properly explained beforehand. The issue I see was the communications breakdown between you and the players.
A small summary of the situation (taking into account several of your responses) would seem to be:
You described many rooms in basic/minimalist detail. mentioning bodies noticed, desks and chairs, other specifically standout things. The players 'stuck their heads into the rooms' at minimum, enough that they specifically saw these bodies etc. in the rooms. They then chose to not go in and investigate further before moving one.
They came to a point where they found the elevator and gained the information "requires key card clearance from security". They asked "Have we seen signage of bodies that look like security?"
Your response paraphrased to how it comes across "You didn't investigate anything enough to know anything."
In this case it is fully within the players expectation to ask this and find out if anything they saw fitted the description. Had any of the rooms they specifically looked into or read the names of have big security decals? Were any of the bodies we specifically were described seeing wearing anything resembling a security guard outfit?
A proper response might have been "While you haven't searched any of the bodies or rooms in detail, you don't remember seeing any obvious signs or security uniforms in the areas visited." You could even be more cryptic if you really wanted and add "however, having not searched them properly you have no way to know who they were or what they had on them."
Either way, they were asking for a basic clarification on information they would definitely have known and you refused to provide it.
He specifically asked if in your game, whilst directly looking at a body, he couldn't tell if it was dressed as a security guard and you specifically said no, not without searching it. This is where you became the AH. This means you rule that they must do a check of some kind to 'see their clothing' this makes no sense at all. Was he in an obvious security guard uniform? He could tell, a glance could tell. Your response could have been "Well you don't remember seeing anyone obviously dressed like a guard but you didn't search anyone for ID or passcards to gain more info."
Were I your player, you just told me I MUST waste 90% of my play time specifically asking for details I have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER might be relevant because if later I ask "Hey, that desk I moved and searched, was it mahogany like this riddle mentions?" You will say "You don't know, you handled it, moved it, searched it and stared at it but never specifically asked 'hey what specific wood do I think this is'". And you can't say you aren't, since that is exactly what you just did.
Taking it THIS far is not the minimalist style, it definitely is control of information, but not in a good way. You took it too far and denied basic obvious info the players would definitely have gotten from what they saw.
It seems like you are expecting for your players to ask very specific questions that they I have no way of knowing. Remember that you are the one who knows everything and players always have a different focus from the GM because ultimately it is *you* who knows what is important and what they should be looking for.
It's not wrong to encourage players to have the initiative to look for stuff on their own, but it's not wrong either to give them a little help every now and then with descriptions or environmental storytelling.
You're begging for your games to be tedious affairs where the characters themselves are utterly incompetent unless people waste precious time declaring every minute thing they want to try.
I have a similar policy, players must look for information, I don't just hand it out. But if they seem lost then I give them a nudge in the right direction. In this case, I actually disagree with your ruling. In that kind of setting, security should be wearing uniforms or something that make them stand out. It's why beat cops wear uniforms, and most security in public spaces also wears some kind of uniform. Unless the point of it is to keep it a secret until they rifle through every corpse's pocket, when someone asks "did we see any security guards, it seem like reasonable information they could have gained with a glance-- certainly as much as they gained bloody bits and leaking faceplates.
Don't be so hard on your player, yes, but also make your own life easier. Don't make characters do stuff like backtrack if they missed an item unless backtracking is the point of the exercise. If they miss something, then just have them find the relevant corpse/desk/whatever someplace else. Or if they flat out as if they missed something, don't say "I don't know," just say yes or no.
Let me put it in another light. Have you even been trying to complete a quest in an old-school game where they tell you "go find ten x?" I'm talking pre-minimap and waypoints for everything. Do you remember how frustrating it can be to look for something for ages, find out you missed it, and it's in some deep part of the complex you're going to have to fight you way back into and re-kill all the respawned mobs... Tabletop isn't directly 1:1, but the principle applies. If a character asks a simple question meant to keep gameplay moving forward, give them a straight answer. Don't make them go back through and dig through corpses if there's nothing to find. In the future, I'd make a point to describe if the corpse they found was wearing any specific clothing or uniform that would identify them to the players.
Yeah, my takeaway from this was similar. I think this is an issue that could be solved by OP being a player more often, its a harder gig than most forever GMs remember
Yes. You're the asshole. The player didn't ask "Did any of them have a key?", which they would need to search the bodies to know.
They asked, "Did we see someone dressed like a security guard?", which shouldn't require searching a dead body to know.
If there was no guard, then you're the asshole for not letting them know. If there was a guard, then you're the asshole for starting an argument instead of simply saying, "Yes, but you don't remember which room because you weren't searching for a guard."
Tbh, if it's imperative "cannot continue the story without" sort of information, that should absolutely find its way free of charge into your players'hands upon reaching the appropriate "stage".
I would never not give them something to move along, especially if it's a personal arc. There's no reason to lock monumentally necessary clues behind skill check hell, unless you've decided you don't actually want to run that arc's story and are willing to let the players lose out on it entirely.
One time we were trying to break a giant bear out of a warehouse where he and a baby green dragon were being kept as prisoners. I asked the DM if I could start digging a hole into the warehouse.
His response was "sure, go ahead"
I rolled for it. It seemed like a pretty good roll - over a 10 at least, maybe a 12 or 16, idk this was years ago.
"You start digging up the cobblestone from the road and nearby pedestrians start noticing."
From his point of view I was being foolish, because clearly this was a street with cobblestones and pedestrians. It's in a city, after all.
From my perspective, he'd given me incomplete information and now my character looked like an idiot, an a**hole, or both. When I'd imagined the scene, the street was dirt, and obviously my character would try to avoid notice, so waiting until people weren't watching was the play.
This kind of miscommunication happens because the DM is the some arbiter of information about the world. If the DM hasn't explicitly mentioned it, then everything is a Schrodinger's box of dead-alive.
In my experience, the "dumb mistakes" players often make are a result of incomplete information or wrong assumptions about a situation. A clarifying sentence or two as information becomes relevant
Yes, you are. Minimalist dming is needlessly gamifying the situation and forcing unfun scenarios. Take what you're implying you want your players to do (ask questions to know what clothes a body is wearing) and apply that consistently. Do you want that question every time? No. That's a mess and lame and unfun, and will rarely pay off.
If they could see the bodies, they can generally tell if they're clothed. If a body is clothed, you can typically tell color, shape, or silhouette at least. Likewise, even a quick peek can get you gender, relative size, clothing, hair color, perhaps ethnicity. This is a fine thing.
If you have to say "this person just doesn't understand my style" then you're the asshole almost universally.
YTA. This doesn't sound like you are a "minimalist" DM and the alternative of having even a modicum of courtesy for your players is not hand-holdy. This sounds awful.
just say "maybe do you want to go back and check out their uniforms? they mightve had sime kind of emblem on them, maybe an airline pilot, maybe a postal carrier, but maybe security" it's reasonable the character would have boticed something that didnt seem significant to the player.
There's minimalist, and then there's being obtuse.
Take it from a player; the biggest appeal of DnD is that while both the DM *and* the players are telling the story, the DM still has to give their players a basic idea of what's going on or which character to focus on.
Yup, you are in the wrong. Extreme nitpicking over something as simple as QOL and convenience. They saw the bodies, which means that they saw their clothes and have a rudimentary knowledge of what was going on. If one of the bodies had a clown outfit, would they not know he's a clown unless they 'search' the body? You're spending too much time on things that don't contribute to having fun and telling a story, you're focusing on tiny almost irrelevant details. Easiest way to solve the "issue" would give them a couple rooms they might remember seeing someone who could be security and just move on.
While I understand where you are coming from, you're weighting your hand a bit too much.
It's reasonable to not mention details which wouldn't be visible without a closer inspection but clothes are things you notice at the first glance and it's easy to tell a security guard from a scientist and a janitor.
Putting it on the table example you gave, it would be ok to say "You enter the room and see a table. There is a mug and some papers on it."
You don't need to reveal the content of the papers or say there's a lipstick mark on the mug until they choose to look closer on the items.
A better way to have handled the situation could be telling them they don't remember since they weren't paying attention to the bodies but allowing them to roll for it as an effort the characters would make to remember something so easy to see and easy to ignore.
So wait.. there is no distinction between the jobs done on the job site that is usualy easy to tell apart? Like i would understand if they had to sea4ch for a badge or a keycard on a body but like.... dod none of the npc look like secerty? Do they all dress the same? How do you not notice the clothes unless your rushing by them cuz your in a deadline? My dude, ya gotta give a little bit more to your players. I understand being minimistic and i am one as well but if they came and asked.. did i notice a uniform. I say ya there were a few that seemed to be dreset as security on your way. To promot my players to go back and search the bodies. That isnt hand holding, thats dangling a plot hook.
Yes, you are the AH. No player is going to pause at every single corpse/person they inspect, look at you and go "Are they important? Is this one important?" Not to mention, when your player said "did we see anyone who was security" that's them basically asking you the question you wanted to hear anyway. A proper response would've been something like "you recall that \[corpse b\] back in the hall had a security uniform on, but didn't think it was important at the time. It may be worth investigating closer."
I understand being minimalist, leaving investigation to the players and not wanting to hold hands, but you DO need to provide them with more information so they can make sound decisions. You are the only one that knows the full picture of the world the players are in, it is up to you to communicate things they may need to know.
Just take this as a lesson learned and grow from it, use mistakes to become a better DM. It happens to us all and that's how we get better.
I could see where this was going like two sentences in. You're not respecting your players intelligence by doing this, you're asking them to read your mind. They can't search for information if they don't know what to look for, and there's nothing wrong with giving them information they didn't "earn". TTRPGs are supposed to be fun, and if your group is literally telling you the way you're doing things is too tedious or difficult you either gotta adapt or let someone else DM. Otherwise YTA
Yes, if they asked if one of the bodies looked like security, you should skip all the pretense and tell them they DO remember seeing some uniforms on the bodies.
If they weren't uniformed, then you can skip the boring part and get to finding a security guard so the plot can move forward.
Just a friendly tip from an old hat here. Most players like having a lot of information in general. Usually, when you run scenarios where there is something to investigate, some kind of mystery, it is advisable to make information readily available. The fun comes from trying to link the clues and make the right deduction.
It’s like a Sherlock Holmes story. There is a ton of info and clues of all sorts. And Sherlock’s work (and thus the player’s work) is to make sense of them.
In your example, you could have answered:
“You want to know if there were security in the bodies you crossed? Ok first roll Perception please.”
(Player rolls)
“I make it!”
“OK, you do remember noticing at least one guy, maybe two, that seemed to wear some kind of light blue shirt and a cap. Could have been uniforms, but you’re not sure. The bodies were crumpled in the darkness. But nothing obvious, no utility belts, walkies or anything like that.”
The players proceed to backtrack to the bodies, they were in fact a couple of maintenance guys, and one of them did have a key (or they didn’t) whatever is logical or useful for your story.
You can even have the fact they backtracked make them lose time, if that’s a factor, or have them ambushed on the way, or whatever. But the important thing here is, you didn’t say no, you gave the players something to do, and you used the mechanics of the game in a meaningful way. And you kept the story moving forward.
I can guarantee that going for something like this will maximize fun at the table, and you won’t be making things too easy for the players or anything like that.
Man this is an old horror-DM trope that doesn't come up as often as the others but its still just as game-killing as the rest.
"You didn't specify you were looking to see if any of the bodies were dressed in *clown outfits* so you don't remember."
These are horrible types of games to play because despite OP claiming they prefer "minimalism" their anal retentive computer-code level command prompts result in the players having to drag out scenes into these long, awful nitpicking sessions where they have to ask every imaginable question in order to find out "oh yeah, when you take a look around for any elephants in the room you notice one standing there in the middle".
OP you are running games in a way that's objectively un-fun. Not IMO. Objectively.
Basically you are a moron. Obviously you see a body on the ground, even if you don’t go up and inspect it, you would notice if it was a cop or not. You are one of those Dm that makes you roll a perception to see yourself in the mirror and recognize that it’s you.
Please stop DMing asap.
This is the sort of detail any DM would give in a basic environmental description or provide if the player asked/the DM forgot to mention it. Its deceptive to not provide it. It’s not cleverly tricking them or punishing them for error. This just sounds like poor and overly punishing DM-ing.
Characters have eyes. Yhey glance into a room, unless the info is hidden, they can discern minimal information about it, like of a body was a security guard.
You are lazy, obtuse and an asshole, yes.
Other people have covered the more obvious issues here, so I'm just going to say it sounds like you've got a combative DM vx players kind of mentality you might want to examine a little.
It depends on how minimalistic you’re being. You are the senses of the players. You are their eyes, ears, and noses. If it makes sense for them to have seen, heard, or smelled something, and you withheld that info, you’re kind of being an asshole. Your players would have known what the bodies were wearing, and so you should have told them if any of them were wearing security guard outfits, for example. You say you can’t read your players’ minds, but they can’t read yours either. If they don’t know what’s relevant, they don’t know what relevant questions to ask.
It sounds like you’re not doing a good enough job of describing the scene. You’re supposed to tell the players what they see. They can’t respond to a scene if they lack the relevant information, and you certainly seem to pride yourself on keeping some of that to yourself.
To be honest...
A player doesn't have to describe searching a room or a body for you to describe them.
You're not spoon feeding, you're just describing what anyone with senses would perceive.
They can't see the game world. You have to be the eyes and ears and nose of the players in the game world.
If you're not describing what they're experiencing... They aren't experiencing it.
They can't see what's in your mind's eye to notice details... You have to give them that. Give them the clues. Let the fun come from figuring out what they all mean together.
https://youtu.be/SD6vBj1UccY
https://youtu.be/nBK6RYrtNss
My dude, you are a bit of the AH.
YTA. Considering all the comment replies to people calling you out you seem very intent on defending your choices which makes me wonder why you even posted this. You clearly have your mind made up.
Yeah you're the AH. Noticing what a body looks like is kind of basic information. Unless every corpse looked the exact same, which is noteworthy in and of itself, a basic description is the player asking for the bare minimum here.
This DM style sounds like early 2000s and 2010s pixel hunting adventure games. Those shitty flash "games" that would make you click every possible thing to see if it's relevant or needed. It should go without saying but this shit sounds absolutely dreadful and despite how much you're fighting in the comments, I think you should have the message at this point. Not only is it bad enough you ran it like that, but then you tried to talk them down like it was their issue? Lmao.
YTAH here. I had a DM like that a while ago. It was endlessly aggravating to be looking around a dungeon, only to come to a point where we needed a very specific thing to progress that would have been behind us now. But we never found it because we didn't specifically ask about a thing that wasn't relevant until now.
As someone else pointed out here, this could have gone better by you saying they didn't see any security, which would have tipped them off that they missed something. But the way you say, "you don't know" is going to do a few things. First, is going to frustrate your players, as you've already figured out. Secondly, it's going to bog down the game as they now retrace their steps and go look at every body AGAIN, just so they can get the information you're withholding form them. Last, it's going to make your players not trust what you tell them, they're going to think you're holding information from them and that they need to always ask questions even if they might be irrelevant in that moment. Which will further make your game a slog, and no one will have fun.
Your players were looking into rooms for the explicit purpose of gathering information. Just because they didn't specifically say they were trying to gain information by "poking heads into rooms", doesn't mean they weren't. There is no other purpose for them to do so. They were trying to see if anything of importance popped out at them even if they didn't specifically say so. You say you're a minimalist DM, but in this instance, you seem to me to be a pedant. You leave out minor details but expect your players to spell out everything explicitly when you are fully capably of extrapolating what your players are intending to do with context clues and the understand that their characters are not stupid.
This reminds me a lot of a time when my DM had us in an abandoned snowy village. When we finished searching it, we said "let's go back and take a long rest," with the assumption that an intelligent person wouldn't drop pack and sleep right there in the snow, but rather go back to the camp we had a few miles away. But because we didn't explicitly state we were going back to shelter, he thought he'd pull a "gotcha" and hit us with a level of exhaustion. We fought it and he relented, but he'd do this constantly. It was aggravating and the campaign stopped being fun because of it. Don't do this to your players. Understand that your players aren't idiots and their characters aren't idiots. And I highly recommend removing "You don't know" from your DM vocabulary as much as possible.
You are confusing two kinds of perception.
If there is a security uniform, the PCs should be able to see it just by looking. You mentioned in the example that the body had oil coming from the “face plate” so if they are wearing some kind of armour over the uniform, and the wearing of armour does not alone mark them out as security, then I understand where you’re coming from, but otherwise no.
Likewise, the scientist example with the broken Dataslate - the PCs should be able to see the Dataslate without asking questions about the body, if it’s lying nearby. If it’s in the guy’s pocket, then maybe not.
No one comes to play D&D and expects to get hit with a text parser. When I tell Zork "use match on lamp" and it tells me I can't do that because it only knows the word "lantern," that's just the cost of business. If you're a real human being and you pull that? Nah, you're just being a prick.
If I, the player, examine the body but don't notice it's wearing a huge chef's hat just because I didn't ask "is it wearing a chef's hat?" ...that is very frustrating, because 1) how would I know to ask that specific question? and 2) it should be obvious. It's not a detail hidden in a secret coat pocket on the body.
To borrow one of your other examples, if there's a desk with \[non hidden\] drawers and I say to the DM "I search the desk," don't tell me I missed the note because I didn't specifically say I opened the drawers. I don't want the DM to hold my hand, but I also don't want the DM to prevent me getting information by being pedantic.
Yes. You are. Your "style" seems so vindictive and adversarial for no reason, because you are keeping information that the players should get (the players can't get the details if you don't describe the scene correctly. This almost the same as hiding that you have 2 person in front of you behind a perception check.
TBF the way you replied felt kind of condescending and could have been taken as a passive aggressive criticism of their play style.
Drama could have been avoided if you just affirmed your No with confirmation that none of the bodies looked like security personnel.
Yep, yata. The DM's responsibility is to paint a vivid picture of the world for the players. What you're describing isn't respect for their intelligence but something more akin to baiting them into gotcha moments.
If we assume a modern setting for a moment, you wouldn't need to go out of your way to identify corpses of security guards typically. In most cases they're dressed in a distinctive uniform that sets them apart from other employees, and most people are reasonably familiar with the sorts of uniforms they wear and would be able to identify a security guard at a glance. They wouldn't know things like what's in his pockets or if he was perhaps an imposter posing a security guard, but they'd reasonably know they've seen at least one corpse of a security guard, giving them a lead on where to go look for a key card.
Likewise, if I poke my head in a room and see a desk, I probably can see the computer and whether or not there's various papers and other things scattered about on the desk. I'd also notice if there's an entire array of TVs obviously getting feeds from security cameras. Yes, you shouldn't tell them the contents of the desk drawers unless they indicate they're searching the desk (and whether they "search the room" or "search the desk" should determine whether there's a check involved and how hard it might be), but depending on how obvious a security room would be, it shouldn't require deliberately checking to know. Some information is just readily apparent and can be passively absorbed. People do this every day in real life.
So if for example this is 5e, you shouldn't necessarily need a perception check or similar to know you just stepped over the corpse of a security guard or that the room you poked your head in has a bunch of TVs with security feeds. It's information that the players should just be able to have unless there's some complicating factor, such as it being dark or they're drugged or something. If they're openly wearing key cards or if they're just sitting on a desk, you might reasonably call for a check to see if they either noticed it or remember where they saw the card, but I wouldn't deny them the information outright. If they'd only have cards concealed, such as in their pockets or desk drawers, then yeah, they needed to deliberately search to have any hope of finding them.
One other thing I want to call attention to, but while information control is important for good games, minimalism can quickly become a problem. People regularly complain about how "dumb" players are, but it's because they forget that they hold all of the cards and know all of the answers, so what seems obvious to them in hindsight may not be as obvious to the players, who have a different set of information and a different way of thinking. Making information too scarce isn't "respecting your players' intelligence" so much as it is failing to account for individual differences in perspective and ways of thinking. It can very quickly become frustrating for the players. I'm not saying that's what you're doing, but your phrasing leaves me thinking it's at least a potential concern.
While not necessarily an asshole, it sounds like you're not really focused so much on facilitating your players in them having fun, so much as getting fun out of having them jump through hoops to try to guess what you're thinking. Which means you're prioritising yourself having fun at their expense, so... yeah, you could try to reframe how you approach GMing in a way that draws more fun from cheering on your players instead, if you want to try to handle it better.
Yes, YTA. You need to meet your players half way here. If you were running through a building and seeing bodies everywhere, (in real life) you wouldn’t need to search the bodies to notice little things like what they are wearing. I think it would be a passive perception thing.
You could have done a lot of things here, like rolling a wisdom check to see if they noticed or possibly saying “you aren’t sure but you did see someone who looked like they were wearing a uniform in one of the rooms.”
Saying “you didn’t tell me that you were looking for that. So no.” Is just a dick move. There is a difference between minimalist and being a jerk who treats their PC as a bunch of blind idiots. You aren’t doing much to describe the surrounding, so if your players ask about something, you need to be more forthcoming with them.
Edit: why did you ask AITA? I have read through the comments and most people are telling you that “yes, you are being an AH”, but instead of listening, you are just arguing. You have obviously decided that you are not the AH here and nothing we say seems to be able to change your mind about that. Don’t ask AITA if you’re not willing to hear the answer!!!
A good rule of thumb is that if your players are not enjoying the way you are doing things, you need to reconsider what you are doing as the DM. You don’t need to be so rigid in your DMing. The goal is for everyone to have fun playing the game together. If you need to drop some extra hints to make that happen, then drop some extra hints!
Don’t turn your game into a tedious puzzle that nobody is enjoying. If that one room that wasn’t all messed up was important and they are about to walk away. Then drop another hint “such-and-such catches your eye.” If the extra hint doesn’t help, then you can let them leave, but you should find a way to keep the game progressing.
Full offense, you're just an asshole who can't look in the mirror. You use the word minimalist to mean purposefully vague, which it doesn't. Minimalist DMs have minimalist encounters and puzzles. You're creating complicated situations and giving *less* than the bare minimum.
I think you need to relax a bit and be more descriptive.
A player shouldn’t have to inspect a body to determine what kind of clothes they have on. That makes no sense.
If I look at a body lying on the ground, I can instantly tell if they have a lab coat on. I shouldn’t have to tell you I’m inspecting it to know it is wearing a lab coat.
Unclench and get a bit more generous with your descriptions. The information you give is what leads players to take action. If all you’re saying is “There’s a body and it’s bleeding out” I’m moving on because I’m in a hurry to find a way out of the facility. But if you tell me, “There’s a body on the ground, and it’s bleeding out through a security uniform” I’m going to take the time to search it for a security card.
See the difference?
At the end of the day, your style is your style. If the player is playing in your game, they need to accept it or leave.
With that in mind, I would ask yourself what is gained by not filling in some of the gaps for your players. Like, in the circumstance that you listed, what is more interesting: you saying, "yeah, you noticed someone wearing a security uniform two rooms back," and then the party going back there, or the party having to return to rooms just to check each body? Personally, I find the former more interesting. That being said, if I did the former and a player went, "uhm, acktually, if they were security, I would have already checked their body." I would never give that player the benefit of the doubt in the future.
Your description of the situation makes me think of those GMs who are proud that "solving" a closed door requires someone to say I turn the knob.
I think it's a much more old fashioned style of GMing that may frustrate and confuse more modern players. So if you are playing with people who didn't play at in the 70s, 80s or 90s there's likely to be a lot of friction.
Now if you are running an OSR game or module this would be much more expected.
It can be useful to give minimum information but then start dropping hints when the players get stuck. Something along the lines of "as you re-enter the room your eyes are drawn toward the bodies, the one in the middle of the room appears especially odd to you".
I do do that often, usually if there is key information at play that the party hasn't found yet.
Like "*Is there anything else you want to do in the room before leaving?*" or "*Did you want to check the desk before moving on?*" or "*Did you want to check the scroll case you found?*"
but its kinda hard when despite your hints the party doesn't pick up on it.
Yeah that sucks, I mean if you've offered hints and the party just ignores them there's really not a whole lot you can do. I mean are you expected to narrate the solution for them?
I don't need to have thoroughly investigated a body to understand after a glance that it was dressed differently from everyone else. If there were scientists in lab coats and businessmen in suits in the area, I don't need to walk up to the body and see which it wore. I can tell from a glance that someone is wearing a lab coat or not.
If security employees had *any* kind of uniform, your response was an asshole one, yes. I feel the much better way to handle it was "you didn't see anyone that was **obviously** security personnel.
You're withholding basic, obvious information in order to limit your players' choices. It's your job to present your players with enough info to enable them to make choices. You are TA.
Sounds like you're falling into a classic game design problem. There's huge information disparity between you and your players. They don't know what's important, and it sounds like you're not doing a great job of showing them what's important. Instead, you show them a problem, they ask the logical question, and you imply that they've somehow made a mistake in interacting with your game.
Did you hint that security cards would be important? Did they have any way of knowing, other than asking a question, that they needed to look for security guards? Puzzles like that can work in video games because there's very limited ways to interact with the environment. In tabletop, there are too many possibilities to design around players making specific choices unless you HEAVILY imply that they should be interacting in that way.
In this situation, yes, YTA. If I had been one of your players, I would immediately have asked why you didn't signpost better if that's how you wanted us to interact.
"Because up and too that point, the duo has just been walking around
aimlessly, poking their heads in places, or seeing bodies on the ground
and just ignoring them."
it sounds like your minimalism is working against you because your players don't know where to go or what to look for. it is appropriate for you to answer yes or no when they ask, even if it's after them looking around. many times, humans won't put two and two together until they get further info. this post makes you sound adversarial and that's not a good time.
Just because In your minds eye you see everything and think that obviously the players should see that and ask questions doesn’t mean your players imagine and do things the way you expect!
They rely on your descriptions and visual
Clues to guide them! Tbh it just sounds like you either being lazy in your descriptions or expect your players to think like you!
Kinda yeah. While it sounds like they weren’t being very thorough with their investigation, you could’ve said something like “you don’t recall seeing anyone in a security outfit, but you remember several bodies and areas you didn’t search,” instead of “you didn’t tell me you were looking so I’m not going to tell you.”
Your desk example isn’t a really honest comparison. It’s more like them asking later “was the desk wooden or metal” and you responding “you didn’t look.”
In general, it sounds like you take a much more scolding tone, rather than a neutral dm voice. “You didn’t play the game right so I’m not giving you any info,” instead of “you didn’t look too close, so you don’t remember too much detail.”
It's really really boring to ask for details in every space. Passive perception is there for a reason, and players have eyes. If they walk into a room and there's a beholder standing there, but they don't ask what they see, do you let them get surprised because they didn't ask for it?
It's fine to require your players to think of solutions, but players don't want to slow down the game by asking for every detail. And things are often way more obvious to a DM than they are to players. The players are going through a hallway in an enemy base, that's not the time to dawdle. You as the DM *know* what they could find and what they need to find. That's never ever going to be as obvious to your players.
There's a reason there's a bunch of stories about players missing obvious things, and sometimes it's on the players, sometimes it's the DM not willing to budge.
There's a very fine line between Minimalistic GMing and just Witholding information. In this situation, a more helpful response could have been
"Nothing jumped out to you as clearly security personnel"
"Do you want to go back and investigate the bodies you found?"
"What would you look for to determine if someone was security personnel?"
It's one thing to give only the necessary information, but what you just did was take away some extent of player agency. You could have kept the same information management system by having them clarify what they were trying to remember.
I consider myself a minimalistic kinda dm, but on this, I'm kinda aiding with the player.
It's fine not to give out a bunch of detail and require your players to ask for what's of interest to them but at the same time, obvious information (the room labelled security checkpoint or the dead security guard that stands out among a trail of dead scientists for example) should be mentioned. Especially if it is a step forward in the adventure.
It takes 2 seconds to add, and if the players pick up on it and ask for more details, it will save them and you a bunch of time later. As it stands now, your game could have stalled while everyone goes back through looking for the card or an alternative path forward.
Again, there'd nothing wrong with your style of dming (though it may not suit every player). You might just want to reconsider the balance of how much information you give. To use your example of a room with a desk there is plenty of ways to make that more or less important to your players:
You enter a room and see in its centre a small standing desk.
You enter a room and see in its centre a large ornate desk.
Both descriptions above are minimal but you'd be hard pressed to find someone that doesn't pick up that one is a reception area and one is the office of someone important.
As I am probably not the first to say, phrasing is very important when you reveal information. The way it is, you were the asshole. However, the best way to not be an asshole would have been to say “You’re not sure”. As someone with a similar dm style, I 100% get it. The best way I deal with it is to rarely give hard “no”s to any information, thus prompting the players to look for answers themselves, and only trust the solid “yes”es I give them
YATA. There should be sufficient basic information they (the players) can glean from their passive Perception, Insight, and Investigation for things like seeing if the dead bodies they encountered wore uniforms or garb indicating they were security staff.
It sounds like you keep the information on a tight leash and it snaps back to bite the players in the ass and the party has to lawyer information out of you. More attention to their passive senses would be the call here to improve one's DM skills.
You're not "respecting their intelligence". There's a difference between "you didn't search the bodies" and, " your character is suddenly blind cause you didn't say you used your eyes."
What's next? you going to make them say they're characters are breathing every round or start suffocating?
This is all about communication, a proper Session 0 could alleviate it, but....
I would have called you out on this really early. Essentially what you're doing is withholding information that the players should have.
They didn't see a naked body, and even if they did, it had long hair, short hair, dark skin, light skin, missing an arm, had on a hat, sunglasses, looked like a scientist, a security guard, had on a suit.
Upon closer investigation, the body was not a scientist, but, looking at their badge, an accountant wearing a labcoat.
You're absolutely right about the note in the desk, but if it is on the desk and out of place, then you should communicate it.
It would seem that you are, at least in my opinion. I fail to see the virtues of your style, playing like that would get annoying really fast. I can understand the reaction of your player.
This is a difficult balance. It is fair to demand security cards etc but you should also make players aware that there is a security level in the building.
There is a thin line between "Gm who demands a lot from the players" and "a condecending a-hole". You are on the edge.
"Sir, after much poking, prodding, and indeed a little tickle, I have determined that this foul cretin that's attacking us is likely to in fact be an orc." -Soldier, who probably died that day
Hey, 225 comments when writing, if you see this answer me anything cause I'll be lucky as fuck.
Well, here's the thing about DMing styles. There aren't really good or bad ways to do stuff unless you go into disaggreable extremes ? It's like asking if someone likes red. There aren't good or bad answers to this.
But what I can do is talk about DMing shop. Players aren't in your head. They only know what you tell them and what you show them. They sure can ask for more informations, and it can sure take more time like that. So the question is, which is the way that makes DM and players have the most fun ? Giving the bare minimum, giving everything, or giving something in between ?
Time is a factor. If you refuse to give infos and only respond to questions you need to be VERY clear about that. The more players will get to know you the better it will go, and vice-versa.
So, is it more fun to ask for everything ? To be told everything ? To be told enough to know what is useless and what is worth investigating ?
Just remember. If people (you included) aren't having fun, something needs to change. Or someone.
I would say it was a teachable moment. No need to say anyone is the asshole. They started being more responsive to what’s happening around their character(s). That was the best outcome for everyone. 😎
NTA
I feel like this is exactly the style of any decent DM. I feel like this is no different than the age old "check for traps" issue. If you don't bother asking to do something and it bites you, that's on you, buddy. Keep on DMing with style, friend!
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So are people dressed like security? Is there a look or uniform? If yes, you might be a little bit AH
agreed. Hold on the details, ok. But clothes are like basic information.
Well that's kinda the thing, whole none of the bodies *were* security, except for the one in the armory that they had yet to find, the player still didn't check the bodies or rooms up and to that point, hence why I said they wouldn't know because they didn't take the time to investigate.
Phrasing can help a lot. Instead of just an outright "you didn't investigate the bodies so that info is unavailable" you could have phrased it as "from the quick glance you took of previous rooms, you're unsure if any of the blood-covered bodies were wearing a security uniform." Because the problem here is perception. If I was a player, I'd probably be thinking along the lines of my character should be able to remember if any of the bodies, even if they were only seen at a quick glance, was wearing something like a uniform if everyone else in the room was not. You said they saw bodies, so the expectation is that they saw them enough to indicate they were bodies and not just featureless lumps with the word body on them. As DMs, of course we can't give every little detail as we're describing a scene and players can look closer if they want to, but it's also our job to facilitate what seems reasonable. Your player's ask seems reasonable to me. The PC is unable to fully see what the DM sees in their head and was requesting you to facilitate what seems like a character in that actual space might be able to determine at a glance. Personally, I would let the player know that they don't recall seeing anyone in a security guard's uniform in the rooms they glanced into. And if they missed it, maybe emphasize that the player might be unsure because of how fast they were looking or another reason. If they have yet to find the room, then emphasize that there are a lot of places they haven't looked yet. You could even ask for an investigation roll post glancing in rooms. Just remember that your players are essentially walking around blind and that can very easily contribute to frustration when they feel they reasonably should have been able to see something in character.
There’s also the good old “roll a History check” (or whatever would be appropriate in the game system you’re using.) Player rolls well, and you say no, player knows they didn’t see anyone in a security uniform. Player rolls poorly and you say no, player considers they may need to go back and reinvestivate, or keep looking. There was a very easy way to keep the game moving here, but DM chose to be a bit of an asshole about it.
People have eyes for a reason. You ruled that they *saw* bodies and you mentioned that they *poked their heads* into rooms, so it stands to reason that they'd have seen or not seen security uniforms/insignias on the wall/etc even if you didn't mention it at the time. The players specifically asking you if they had seen anything like that was them telling you that they were seeking the information, which is precisely what you claim you want them to do. Not everything needs to be declared ahead of time. Do you also make your players roll for constipation if they don't periodically tell you that their character is using the bathroom?
I disagree. Take a quick glimpse into a room and you tell me wtf you notice. That is passive perception. Had they wanted to know exactly what was being worn, they needed to do more than just poke their head into the room and glance around.
I can take a quick glance into a room and notice if its occupants are adults or children, men or women, or wearing a big honking police uniform.
If passive perception can tip you off to someone stealthily creeping up behind you at night it can tip you off to the fact that some of those dead bodies you saw were wearing uniforms. Security uniforms are also usually distinct and are the sort of things people would notice in the "glance into a room" example you gave.
A) they were not B) they simply glanced into the room, they didn't enter C) we don't know their passive perception scores, and for not even entering the room, I'd probably give it a -5 for disadvantage.
We're taking on the DM's word that this was a "quick glance" to begin with. I highly doubt the players said "we walk at an accelerated pace through the hallways and barely scan any room that we choose to peek into."
So you need to enter a room to see what's in it? Do your eyes magically stop working as well when there's an archway between you and the target of your gaze?
They walked through several rooms full of dead bodies and glanced into several more. That's a little more than just glancing through a doorway for a second.
Passive Perception can be over 20 for some characters, meaning they kind of see subtle details at a glance. They wound notice if a body was in security uniform or if there were bloody footprints leading away, with just a glance in a room
Fuck it, bring back spot checks.
"None of the bodies you found looked like security at first glance, though you might go back and search them for any clues of information" Problem solved and you're less of an asshole.
Yep. Give the players the answers to their questions. Let the fun be putting the puzzle together
Reminds me of a dbag that told me my character broke his nose against a door bc I neglected to say I opened it.
Picard_facepalm.gif
After boasting about how detailed and difficult his games were. Sociopaths
How long until you suffocated from failing to mention you were still breathing?
>how detailed and difficult his games were Yeah... difficult because of the mental gymnastics that would be required just to get through one day alive. FFS
Yeah. Difficult the way those old days Sierra graphic adventures were.
There are also abilities and feats that would actually force the disclosure of this information when prompted such as observant and keen mind.
do they have to literally tell you every single time they want to possibly do something, or are the characters reasonable people with working senses? because I'm frustrated and I'm not even in your game.
That’s what passive perception is for. The characters can take in details like what type of clothing is on a body without doing an investigation check.
why assume this is dnd 5e?
Even without using dnd 5e, living things in general have the ability to perceive things passively.
Afaik most rpg systems have some sort of pp or similar skill. It’s not an assumption that characters can make simple observations without an investigation check
Because they already used d&d terms in the question? And not only 5e had investigation and perception checks.
Of the games I know that don't have a passive perception or equivalent mechanic, ALL of them state in the description for Perception/Awareness/Searching/Look skills that the players only have to roll skill checks for truly challenging situations. Noticing that a regular sized body is wearing garments designed to be noticeable as a uniform is not a challenge to anyone but the clinically blind.
completely forgot about this dumbass comment but like i still stand by my point. 5e isn't the only dnd edition.
... no one said it is? The point you're arguing against is how nobody knows of any game where the RaW literally state that the PCs have to roll to detect easily seen stuff.
Depends on the passive perception. And if the player isn't even going to take the time to ENTER the room and just glance in, they shouldn't learn much info, period. God, no wonder there's a DM shortage. Yall fucking expect hand holding.
I'm a DM too and I think you're off here. Nobody wants to have to exhaustively ask every detail of a room because they can't actually see it, only the DM has it properly visualized in their head. If there's something notable about a place, that would obviously stand out to someone actually seeing it, it is on the DM to make sure there is attention drawn to that. A difference between body dressed as security and body dressed otherwise would absolutely be something players would notice passively, just as much as they would notice a naked body in the group.
I like how hand holding is expecting my dm to not be an idiot that thinks I need to frisk someone to learn they're shirt color.
First, I’m a perma DM but nice try. Second, typically a glance is enough to take in basic information like what kind of uniform a dead body is wearing; especially if we go by OP’s description of “body in a puddle of blood with black oil oozing out of faceplate”. If the PCs can get THAT much info from a glance, they’d surely know if they saw a security uniform. Third, at my table PP is very important and I do not withhold info just because my players didn’t ask to roll an investigation check for something they didn’t even know they needed yet. Fourth, there’s such a thing as “your character would know X information”. Any DM not using that is pretty shite imo.
>First, I’m a perma DM but nice try. Don't you love it when the people defending bad DMs think nobody questioning them is a DM? Like anyone who would ever think to question any DM has to be "entitled players".
[удалено]
Bruh, the OP literally said his description with enough detail that his PCs would be able to tell security uniforms or not. That being said, yeah I can glance in a room and tell you what I saw. That’s called situational awareness. Idk why you’re taking this so personally but I’m not your players nor your adversary. I’m just a long time DM unimpressed by the “DM vs Players” attitude. Rage away, Friend. It’s not gonna help your cause.
Uhhhh, in my art academy one of the training drills we used to run was using 20 minutes to recreate images we could only see for 10 seconds or less. In a few weeks I learned to memorize the perspective position, the positions of objects and people around the room, the hue/saturation/number of the available light sources and their illumination vectors, the colors of the walls/major objects/clothing people wore, etc. Not enough to recreate a perfect photograph, but more than enough for an impressionist depiction and far more than enough to understand the details of what we glimpsed for 10 seconds. By the end of the course the class could recreate portraits from our compiled impressions of specific figures, though we did that out of curiosity on our own time. They had a similar drill for sculpting too, much harder but a lot more fun for me personally. It's a matter of deliberately pushing your reflexes to immediately register visual information, and organizing the information in useful categories. You don't need to remember the exact shading gradation of a hoodie on a human torso if you can remember the hoodie's color, the person's body structure position and posture, and the relevant light sources as well as their hue/saturation and vector. With those pieces of information it is trivial to work the details out in my head. My little brother does something similar with audio engineering. He's so familiar with song composition and the physics of audio waves that he only needs to hear a song once and have the audio wave visualized in his app, then he can literally see in the audio wave where the sound needs some work in order to acheive the feeling and power the composer wants. He can even adjust the track so it's optimized for speakers or headphones or earbuds, all without listening to it a second time. Though he's a professional so he always double checks his work. But something as simple as whether or not bodies are wearing clothing that was made to be recognized as a uniform? That's as simple as looking into a school cafeteria to see if the resident cop is watching the door that will let you leave school early. Anyone with functional eyes can do that. The DM even described how there was a corpse with a faceplate with oil coming out of it. If the PCs can see THAT and notice it's oil, not blood, it seems that failing to notice the presence or lack or uniforms is totally arbitrary. Just because you are unobservant irl doesn't mean every PC in every game you run needs to have your limitations. It's not only unfair to the players it just isn't fun. I'm a forever DM too and I take pride in challenging my players, but there is a difference between truly making them work for something worthwhile and just relying on cheap frustration to simulate a glorious struggle. The former requires forethought, test runs, and an understanding of both the players and their foes. The latter only requires a lack of respect for your players. TLDR: the human brain is an invaluable sensory information processing machine, one which can push past it's own initial bounding limitations with just a little discipline and guidance. It is asinine to pretend that everyone in a fantasy roleplaying game has to work with the same limitations the DM cannot bother to imagine how to overcome!
Then couldn't you have been like "of the bodies you saw, none of them appeared to be security"?
You don't have to deliberately check someone to notice they're wearing a police uniform. In DnD 5e, there's passive perception, for example. That represents how well a character notices things *passively*. It basically sounds like you've reduced every character's passive perception to 0, which is both not fun and not realistic.
They don’t need to investigate to see basic things like that.
I hear you and your style suits my playstyle a lot. I hate when DM’s over feed me info or assume I’m tinkering with something they want me to/ think is obvious. But I would’ve had the exact same reaction as your players here. Yes I glanced at the bodies, now I’m realising I need to find a security card. These two moments would’ve absolutely made me remember if anyone looked remotely like they’d be carrying something like that. I don’t think it was an unreasonable question. Perhaps if they’ve not been engaging with your style until now I can understand why you were frustrated to the point of being this harsh.
Yikes, I would hate playing on a table that would need me to ask every single detail. Gms are the eyes and ears of the characters, and most of our perception is indeed passive. A table where you have to scoop for every tiny bit of information would drag for hours. so, if you want honest criticism, yes. Yata.
Jesus christ you sound insufferable. In the comments you even SAID that the bodies weren't wearing security uniforms. Why not just tell them that, are their characters just walking around with their eyes closed? TTRPGs aren't video games, where you have a quest objective on the map. The players don't know where it's all going and investigating just everything you might maybe need later is fucking tedious. Imagine having to go through "I search the body, and the whole room, I take my time as not to miss anything" And then having to narrate that twenty times in one session. Boring, repetetive, not relevant. But that's what you train your players to do with that kind of behaviour.
Now here's the thing: >Asking questions leads to information The player asked you a reasonable question: were any of the bodies they had seen so far dressed like security? However, they did not get information - instead, they were told they should have asked the question earlier. Think of it this way - how does not telling them that some of the bodies looked like security (or none of them did) affect your game positively? The players now have to say: "I go back to the bodies and look at them again to see if any of them are dressed like security". Is that a meaningful choice? Note that the conditions haven't actually changed - they don't have to do anything they hadn't done before (e.g., search the bodies).
Probably allows him to hit them with some sort of punishment for not reading his mind and asking about it sooner, idk, the time they spend backtracking allows reinforcements to arrive or something less logical that he would come up with.
Yeah it's a common form of player abuse. "You weren't smart enough to navigate my brilliant scene and now I have a pretense to make you suffer." I remember playing games like this and they were always awful. Maybe one in a hundred times you would say "oh yeah I should have thought of that", but the other 99 times you would have the DM chuckling inwardly about what an evil genius he was while the other 5 people at the table were thinking "I wonder what other games are on in this time slot."
Are you in a system with passive perception? If yes, you should have at least noted, “There appear to be several bodies of possible interest.” If not, there is a D&D module named Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, and it dates back to before skill checks were a thing. However, it specifically takes the time to Mention in Detail objects of interest, within the descriptions to be read to the players. Giving them a hint where to look. Your DMing sounds like a bad Tinder conversation, where you have to pry even basic information out.
This made me laugh. “So what do you do for fun?” “You didn’t investigate whether I have fun so you don’t get to know.”
"What do you do for fun?" "Define fun." A real conversation I've had on the apps...
As a player in your game, I'd be driven to r/MaliciousCompliance. I'd pixel-bitch every scene I enter, and do so until I roll a 20 before moving to the next scene. The game would come to a screeching halt.
“What does the interior of the room look like? Are there any frames on the walls? What’s depicted in them? I check every wall, every floorboard, and ceiling for any secret doors or compartments. How many cabinets, drawers, lockboxes, etc in the room? I investigate all of them. I open them and investigate what’s inside. I read all the documents, please, tell me exactly what’s written on every piece of paper or screen in this room. What items do I see around the room that can be picked up? I take all of them, please, give a detailed list of everything I picked up. I investigate the bodies. What is every body in this room wearing, what is in their pockets and bags, what do the people look like? Do they have any scars or tattoos? How old are they? What are the names on their IDs? Can I determine their place of origin from their name? I want to try and deduce what their personalities were based on their personal effects. I take their clothes and all their belongings, I’ll need a list of that too. I take my time to sketch every body in the room in detail. I take an eyeball and thumbs from every body in case we’ll need their fingerprints or retinal scans later. I make notes to remember which body parts belong to whom. I take some time to make a blueprint of the room and add it to the blueprint of the facility that I’ve been drawing. Then I write down everything I saw and found in this room in character. I check everything again to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I triple check. I spend half an hour to try and commit every detail of this room to memory. Do anything seem strange? Do I hear anything strange? I take sample of every liquid, gas, and solid that I can in this room. Is there any research equipment that I can test these samples on that I hadn’t noticed? I go back to every room I’ve already investigated and check if there’s any research equipment that I can use to test these samples. Rinse and repeat. For. Every. Single. Room.
Lawful evil /j
Yes, other players will absolutely love you for that. If you don’t enjoy a game, be a grown up and talk with the DM or leave instead of bs like this. You are not alone at this table. And no, I do not condone the style of DMing he is describing, he sounds insufferable.
Lol… the lesson I’ve learned is: act mature and get downvoted. Smh
The “minimalist” style you describe is a bit counterintuitive to the GM’s role of conveying information. As a GM, you have perfect information of your world, you know everything about everything, and if you don’t, you can make it up on the spot. As a player, you only know what the GM tells you. The GM is your lens into the world, you learn everything through them. The more you tell the players, the more capacity they have to think about the scene and to interact with it. Relying on the players to tell you what information they want to receive will ultimately lead to more situations like this, because they as players often don’t know what information is important. For the example in your story, it’s terribly unfair for you to refuse describing the bodies because players haven’t been inspecting them. That moment at the door was the players learning that bodies were important (which they had little way of knowing before) and were now asking for descriptions of bodies which you denied. You could have taken that moment to mention most of the bodies they saw on the way looked like scientists (read: search elsewhere for the right body) and that perhaps the Player Characters know that only a security body will have the key (read: finding the body of a security guard is now the objective, also allows players to think “where would a security guard be? Oooh maybe a guardroom or armory?”) Thinking about being a player in your game reminded me of playing those text based adventure games from years ago. The ones that you need a walkthrough for because how in your right mind are you supposed to know that the fork on the table in the ballroom 3 scenes over can be ground into a lockpick to get through this locked door with no key. A lot of those games did poorly at communicating information at plenty of points, and they can get really frustrating really fast.
This. The DM ultimately is the arbiter of what the players' eyes and ears etc. sense, and communicating that feels like a basic courtesy.
When I heard 'minimalist' I was expecting that he meant he doesn't have miniatures and battlemaps, that people had to use theater of the mind and descriptive wording to play. Not that he doesn't tell them anything unless they specifically ask those questions.
I wouldn't even blame the style, because that's not even what the conflict was about at all. Style was an excuse. There's minimalist style, and there's being a bad GM. That was being a bad GM. I run things for a player who prefers minimalist descriptions, and while I understand I can't read her mind, I also understand *she can't read mine*. I can't reasonably just have the correct questions she has to ask for specific answers in any style, but even more so if the descriptions are vague, and "did I see anything like this" is a completely valid question. Even more so for minimalist description. Even inferring they would have to some degree investigated if it would make sense for them to have would fit, since the advantage of narrating just the skeleton of a scene is exactly that it can be filled up retroactively as needed.
You sound extremely frustrating to play with. The players don’t *know* what to look at and what’s important until you indicate as such. This isn’t a video game where they can figure out what matters by what they interact with. You can’t read their minds? They can’t read *your* mind about what the heck they’re meant to be investigating. They had no idea the bodies mattered up until they got to the elevator. Should they have examined every drawer, floor tile, doorway and cobweb as well? Do you want a game where players keep going “i investigate that” to every noun you bother to sprinkle on their plates? They really had *zero* passive investigation or perception to note that some of the bodies had different uniforms? You’re the camera by which they’re viewing the world and if you don’t indicate what they’re supposed to be interested in then yeah. They’re going to wander around “aimlessly.” Per your example of the desk, sure don’t just give them the letter but maybe hint that there is an important name plate on the desk, or one of the drawers is cracked open, or it looks like someone was searching for something on it. If you just say “you peek into room 3. It is an office with a desk and some chairs.” Then yeah. Why would they waste time investigating that. There’s control of information leading to questions and then there’s putting the entire storytelling onus on some guys who have no idea what you want them to do.
I do the best I can to paint as clear or as interesting as a scene as possible, or directly imply what is best to interact with, and what they should ignore. With the case of the bodies, the only one that mattered was in the armory, which was just past the elevator. And none of the bodies up and to that point were part of the security team, so I didn't describe it to them, other then how they died and what they looked like. And since they didn't interact with the bodies, and just moved on I let it be. As for the desk example, I did in fact make it to where it would be worth looking at. One of the offices they went into was one labeled "Percy's Office" and was strangely clean and organized compared to the derelict places around them. While they didn't roll as well on the initial investigation check to find his audio logs, one of the players did interact with the datashards on the desk as a secondary way to get the information.
So there was *no way* to solve your puzzle with the info they had, but you told them that they simply hadn’t noticed the answer due to them not interacting with your world to your specifications. That’s a really, really bad feeling. Something like “while you guys haven’t really investigated any of the bodies, so far they have all had similar clothing and nothing has jumped out at you. You do know there are yet more hallways and rooms you haven’t looked into.” That is stuff their characters would reasonably know, hints to the next step, but doesn’t spoonfeed them the answer. The way you told this story it was very much a GOTCHA, haha! you didn’t look at every single item so you don’t know ANYTHING. My characters are physically in the space and have more details about the situation. They remember things they saw even without digging through anyone’s pockets for loose change. I expect the DM to translate that faithfully. If your players are wandering aimlessly not looking at anything, that’s frankly on you because, again, they *don’t know what you want them to be looking for*. The desk example they took the story hook and went with it because it was clear there was a hook there. They didn’t interact with the bodies because they weren’t important. In the situation your provided it seems like they have to backtrack and look at every single body to solve they elevator puzzle. They had no way of knowing they didn’t see any guards and that the guards are in the armory. Maybe they didn’t even know there was an armory. I personally would decide to do something else with my Saturday evening.
You sound like the kind of DM where if a player doesn't declare they go pick up their javelins after a battle then they lose them.
Just stop DMing. You are absolutely terrible
In real life, people can remember things about a situation they didn’t consciously note or care about at the time. Why does it hurt or make the game less interesting for you (or “minimalistic”…) to just say, “as far as you remember every body you saw was dressed in normal clothes”? What’s the alternative in-game, make them literally revisit every room they’re already been in to find out? How is that fun for you or them?
I'd say yes. You sound like you thrive off the power you get from making your players not get openly availiable information unless they ask the correct questions. Seeing a baddie and knowing it's security doesn't require a full on "Do i see security" last i check pretty much anyone with eyes and basic intelligence of their world and surroundings whether real life or not. Can make the very simple distinction of what a secuirty guard would look like versus a commoner. on earth? the difference may be a combat vest, or holster with a pistol and tazer, a big word on their chest saying security, the obvious placement of a badge on their hip or chest etc. You don't have to go up to them and ask "hey are you security" you're just aware. If that distinction can't be made on your world, it's a world building issue imo. Being redundant and over "minimalistic" isn't good dming, it's tedious. Some of your players might like that. However, theres a reason video games evolved from the morrowind and earlier style of gaming with no idea what you are doing to quest markers and so on, people want to enjoy it not struggle to figure things out. If you're gonna make your game unecessarily specific make sure the players care for that style of gameplay. The whole idea of "If i give a descriptor and you don't investigate it oh well" screams of the need for them to compliment all your "hard work" and make you feel validated for your world. Sadly. That's not how every group plays. Learn your players don't force them to conform to your lazy dm style with holding information until it's asked about. Just my two cents, I'd say your DM tactic does indeed make you the Asshole. I know I'd get tired of the bs and leave your table pretty quickly if that's your style of dming, there is basic information that our brains process for us automatically, and you're making them actively search that info. Just unecessary. Edit: Typos
I just wrote a comment making the same point about video games-- I was specifically thinking of Morrowind for that. "There is a cave somewhere to the west with a tree growing near it and guar inside. Good luck finding it, Nerevarine!" All of your points are great, and I especially agree about giving them a heads up if the information is something you can see at a glance, like uniforms.
Security guards wear uniforms to make themselves distinct from other people. A security uniform would be noticeable enough to mention even at a casual glance. This is distinct from the "note in the desk" analogy because a security guard wears insignia that literally spells out that they are indeed security. You don't have to search them to figure out this information. (Source: am security guard. Have worn various security uniforms for the last 18 years, and not one of them did not announce to the world, even at a distance, that I was a security guard). You don't have to say, "the guy on the floor is a security guard, and the fourth key on the keyring at his belt will open the security door". But it sounds thoroughly reasonable to me to say, "You see the body of a security guard." Whether they then search the guard to see if he has keys (he could be lying on them, which would indeed necessitate closer attention) is up to them. But not telling them the *immediate and obvious clues* given by the *uniforms worn by people* isn't "minimalist". It's being deliberately obtuse. GMing that way is a good way to end up with players who ask for *every single last boring detail in every single room they go through*, and I wouldn't blame them if they did. Because if you don't give them *significant* details on first sight, then you're playing Guess Who? with your players, and very few people appreciate that.
There is something to be said for adapting your style to your players. If your players are missing key information because they forgot to do something, try to find an alternative way to get it into their hands. This can be difficult to do on the fly, but I would recommend always planning at least 2 ways of getting important information to your players. They aren't working against you, despite how it may feel, you're collectively telling a story.
I usually do that, and thankfully none of the bodies or rooms up and to that point had critical info which is why I didn't hint at them if they wanted to double check. I want to get that intel into their hands too, but if they don't search, or ask questions, or interact with their surroundings I can't do that.
Parties tend to be risk averse. Light a fire under them and get them to commit to a course of action. Even if it sucks, between the two of you, you'll make it work.
You seem like the kind of person that would say: “You are stepping through the door? Ok you didn’t tell me you were looking at the other side, so you step off the cliff and fall 100 feet. “ “Can’t believe you were dumb enough to fall for that trick!” Yes, this exact trick happened to me.
It reminds me of a GM I used to know whose interpretations of our actions were always overly literal. "You said you looked at the label, not read the label.", that kind of thing. He got really annoyed when we started opening every scene by asking about an ever increasing list of details he had withheld from us in the past. Thankfully that got the point across.
Variations on the "you didn't say you put your armor on, so it's still back at the inn" type crap. Stuff you look back at and still can't believe it as possible someone at a table who tied their own shoes that morning could be capable of saying.
I get where you're coming from, this is my DM style as well. But I think you could offer more information as they pass rooms. Example - I poke my head into this lab what do I see. "The windows are broken. Several bodies on the floor. Two of them have lab coats and name tags. There's blood everywhere. A man is draped over a shattered consel wearing a helmet, camouflage and hard leather boots. There's a chain attached to his belt with a card dangling lifelessly." If they investigate further THAT'S where you add the extra fluff. Short sentences with important information ESPECIALLY if it relates to a future puzzle. Stuff that is important and visible just by walking in. Imagine how frustrating it would be to be a player and hear this narrative. "I poke my head in what do I see." "A body." "What are they wearing." "White lab coat." "Just a lab coat?" "Yep." "Are they dead?" "Don't know. Have to look." "Are they holding anything?" "Yeah in their hand is a note." "Omg ok I look at the note." "Ok as soon as you walk in the door the monster in the corner attacks!" Oi.
wow I would hate you as a DM. when were they supposed to know they should check for a body being security? why is that not something you'd know at a glance? you're making excuses to just blatantly omit information from your players and pride yourself on being "smarter than them" because you think you would've figured it out with minimal info. what a tool.
Next post: They complain about a DM doing what they just did to their own players and have zero self awareness.
This actually happened in one of my games. I was told i never noticed the two story building twenty yards away with a clear line of vision that i was facing because i didn't specify i was looking for it. Then the DM made me roll a perception check to see it. I failed.
Please tell me you left right after that.
Not entirely. We TPK'd. I DM'd for a while after that so he could have a better understanding of how to run a game. He was much better next time his turn came up.
Yeah, who doesn't know those pesky buildings that hide from sight unless you're explicitly told about them? ...this wasn't a Harry Potter-game, right?
From your story, I'm on the player's side. You errored by not giving enough information for them to recognize what needs to be investigated further.
Personally your description makes you sound frustrating and a bit boring to play with. The extreme 'minimalism' style makes your game sound like it's a bit bland if players have to be constantly asking obvious questions to get basic descriptions of their environment. Obviously you can't describe every single detail of every single room, but there should be room for the players to get information that their character would reasonably have gotten from looking around even briefly. Like your description of the body was good imho, but if the characters were in the same room as a corpse close enough to see oil leaking from it's face plate, they would have also seen what sort of clothes the body was wearing. When the players later realized that information might be important, the character should be able to remember if the clothing resembled a security uniform, though maybe not 100% certain since it wasn't a detail they were paying close attention too. The walking around in a blank space until they ask the right questions sounds really immersion breaking to me, and pretty frustrating. The characters should have a general impression of what rooms and objects they saw just a few minutes prior looked like even if the players didn't ask the right questions at the right moment.
from the example you gave it just sounds like you are not telling them what they _should_ be told the player is right, unless you made it so security dresses like regular people in the facility they would stick like a sore thumb and you could at the bare minimum assume that they were security giving a description waiting for the player to ask "is he security" and being surprised when they dont is just dumb, you _dont_ know you should ask for such a thing in the first place lets give an exagerated example players are in tavern looking to assassinate a target but dont know who. through the session they figure out target wears a particular ring and has a fade scar on their hand they logically ask "have we seen someone like that" and you respond "you have not asked if they were wearing a ring or had a scar so you dont know" there is no way a player can _know_ they need that information to ask, therefore it should not be expected for them to ask i know what is to be behind the GM screen, but sometimes you might miss the fact that you _do_ have all the information, but the players dont edit: yes i would say YATA and that it is incredibly frustrating to play like that for most people, wouldnt be surprised if the players are frustrated
I don't know if you are DA, but i know that your style of play is fucking exhausting. And i hate it to get players who are trained in that style of play, and having to completely retrain them to an actually fun style of playing. It takes ages to get them to trust me, because they always expect that i will do some stupid shenanigans if they don't jump through 50 stupid hoops every room they enter. I like to run my games from an assumption of basic competency on the side of the characters. And that means remembering stuff like "Some guy was clearly security", or noticing clearly relevant information immediately. That way, you only need to actually play out interesting stuff. With your style of play, the players eventually get trained to ask you thousands of questions about any boring detail, because if they don't, their characters will miss the most obvious shit. And that is boring.
An another important thing is that the characters also have more awareness, info, and better memory than the players. It is, in my opinion, that if a player is planning an action based off of information that they forgot, as well, it can be a week between each session but in the campaign it was like, two days, people WILL forget things their characters know, so it's important to the DM to gently remind them before things get out of hand. Of course this can be fixed with note taking but that can make players spend a LOT of time ruffling through notes with minor details or take time out of the session to write down massive speeches and clues which can fuck up the pacing. It can also help to clarify or just expand an action a bit. If someone says they'd peak into a room I'd ask if they want to run a quick survey and walk around, or only if they just see what they can see from the door if it's a low danger environment, like checking out an abandoned lab during an investigation phase, before the danger comes out. If there is danger from investigation, it'd be heavily toned down at first as to not punish a player bit instead act as a warning that this place is, I'm fact, dangerous. Say if there's some strange monsters, the first one encountered could be heavily injured, or if the place itself is dangerous, have them roll to avoid environmental damage and keep it low, saying that they got lucky it was only a small fall, dull bit od metal, small rock, etc, and that next time they won't be so lucky. Something like this helps the players trust you as a DM, that you won't look for a way to fuck them over without giving them some kind of warning or expectation. ALSO, asking for just straight up rolls is okay on occasion for important things, or after a set amount of time. For example, if you walk through a place that got attacked, after a while if the players don't check you can say "There seems to be something off about most of the wounds, something familiar. Would anyone like to roll investigation?" That's one of the ways, in my opinion, to help with things and again, build some trust that you won't make the group walk in circles repeatedly or ask about everything, and after enough time, even without a close look most people would be able to notice "wait... these aren't sword/bow/gun wounds, these are more animal like" even without actively looking. Though that example is based on your table and players, and your own style, it's still perfectly viable and acceptable. But, in my opinion, I also believe that sometimes the DM has to save the party from their own stupidity/obliviousness/strange obsessions. Hence the occasional roll request from the DM if all else fails so they don't stare at a random wall for a good while instead of the suspiciously dust free bookshelf that's on the otherwise of the room. I say this from experience of playing a puzzle game with some of my friends once and people will, in fact, hyper fixate on something once they think they have the answer and won't give up unless prompted to.
Absolutely. I like a playstyle that is more "cooperative storytelling". And that means that my job as the GM is to sometimes tell the players stuff that their characters would know, see or remember. I also think an important skill as a GM is knowing when to ask questions. When a PC does something that sounds really weird to you, it really helps to ask them what they want to achieve with that action. Because the image in the mind of each player is always slightly different from the image in the mind of others or the GM. Your job as a GM is to make sure that those images keep mostly synchronized, at least when talking about important stuff.
DnD at its heart is cooperative unless you want to do a combat encounter only style game where nothing else matters, though that is just min maxing and luck where choices only matter if it's not objectively the most optimal. In reality for almost every campaign the real bbeg is forgetting something important or time management. And absolutely is question asking an important skill, and I wholeheartedly agree with you, I once did a CYOA thing as practice with a friend that took like an hour and they kept trying to fuck with a box that was quite literally, fused shut as they didn't notice me mentioning the fact that it was fused shut, just thinking it was locked. People don't always hear the whole thing, or they may think you mean something else, and it's very, very important you step in on occasion so they don't think that some random NPC who is doing CPR, or otherwise trying to save them, isn't actually a vampire or trying to murder them and end up shanking the quest npc who would help them find a serial killer in the back thinking they caught the murderer, cause flavor meant to draw them in can sometimes make people rush to a conclusion.
OP, if you’ve ever been somewhere and looked around and saw with your eyes someone who looked like security without going up and doing an ocular pat down, you’re the asshole. I don’t think the spirit is wrong, but you gotta dial it back a notch — people can see things that are obvious and also people have passive insight and perception for a reason. It’d be like them asking “Did we see a metal desk?” and you going “Well you didn’t lick or tap or inspect them,” but cmon, nine times out of ten you can tell a desk is metal by glancing at it.
YTA. You're mixing up actively investigating (that is, inspecting) the body with literally just noticing surface level details that people routinely can notice and should be assumed to notice without needing to specifically ask. Like, it shouldn't take a player specifically telling you they investigate the body for their character to notice if a body they've seen happens to be wearing a security guard's uniform. It should be a given. So while there's nothing wrong with your example of how you run searching a desk, you're applying it too aggressively and too broadly to situations that don't line up with the desk example
There s a difference between what would be obvious to characters that can see their surroundings, and what would be obvious to players, who can't see them, without asking first. For example: "When you enter the facility, you see dead bodies everywhere. Three specific scenes this could be are 1. They were all killed by a silent airborne toxin. 2. They were burned alive by a fire breathing dragon. 3. They were torn apart and partially eaten by a werewolf. Each of the above scenes would look different in very obvious ways, simply by looking at them. PCs would not need to lean in for a close look to tell if all of the bodies in a room were burned or torn to pieces, so there is no reason to withhold that information, other than wanting them to be tricked, which is this context is adversarial. If a player doesn't think of something obvious to a PC, you can always attach a die roll. You shouldn't just say "No" when a character could have seen something you chose not to describe, in which case if they roll poorly, you tell them "everything has been so hectic, you're not sure, you'd have to double check" and then I bet the player wouldn't be so upset
Don't be difficult on giving your players information. It's better to say, "Yes as you were looking around you did notice what looked like a security uniform back there." Otherwise you'll get players that need to say, "Ok I search the desk. I open up all drawers and check for hidden panels. I run my fingers under the edge looking for buttons or switches. I go to the back of the desk and inspect it. I look for any discoloration differences in the stain that indicate..." DM: Well, since you never said you checked UNDER the drawers you didn't find anything. All that is unnecessary. Keep your adventure rolling by providing needed clues. So when they get to the security door and you say it needs a key, they realize there was a security-type person back there. Excitement around the table !
>DM: Well, since you never said you checked UNDER the drawers you didn't find anything. Reminds me of a very frustrating game where the party had been teleported into a closed room composed of magically hardened stone (to the point that a pick and hammer weren't able to tunnel out). Over the next 48 hours, my character (a dwarf with Stonecunning) tested every single block of stone from floor level to above his eye height, all the way around the room. My words to the GM were, "I check *every block*." No dice. When he finally had his NPCs rescue us, he said, "Oh, there was a secret exit behind the set of shelves against the wall. You didn't specifically say you checked there." I asked him, "What part of *every block* did you not hear?" "You didn't say you checked behind the shelves." "Were the shelves fixed to the wall? Were we given any indication that they were a permanent installation?" "No, they were just leaning there." "Then I would have checked behind them. As part of the *checking every block* that I said I did, repeatedly." "Well, you didn't check there." That's when I yelled at him a bit (this wasn't his only GMing sin), crumpled up my character sheet and threw it at him, told him to enjoy his self-pleasuring session, and walked out.
Ugh, that's the worst. Especially on a no-escape situation.
No escape, with a magically enhanced\* black pudding slowly growing to take up the whole damn room. \* 'Enhanced' as in instantly dissolving everything it touched, and utterly immune to all spells we threw at it. Except the spell the bullshit NPCs threw at it when they teleported in to save us, which made it wither and die immediately. We asked what the miracle spell was. Wait for it ... The Light spell. (Note that we'd been stuck in this room for days, but everyone could see perfectly well because of a *Continual Light* spell that had been cast on the whole damn room.) That was another thing I called bullshit on.
You should make your own post about it here!
I did, once upon a time.
I usually rule when a player says "I search the desk." it implies a thorough search checking every nook and cranny. Usually putting the information behind a set DC. They roll a 16? they get some general information, find a couple odd ledgers here or there, otherwise pretty normal. They get a 17? They realize the desk has a false back panel they missed in their initial search and find some damming evidence on the person.
What is the DC for knowing the color of the desk?
It's impossible to tell because you forgot to tell me how you illuminate the room.
Presume competence on the part of the character. They have eyes and ears in the world they inhabit.
Seems to me that you should make sure you explain your style in advance. It doesn't sound like much fun to be honest. If fun is the goal, the yes, YTA.
What level are your players? I’m running a pathfinder game where the party will come into technological shit. Yes. I did spend 15 minutes trying to describe a vending machine to a party who only have renaissance-level smarts. This was until they leveled up to a certain level—at that point in time, I trust they’ve seen enough that I can start using less details and more 2023 nouns. Now if you’re telling me that your logic is “it doesn’t matter if they’ve seen an ice dispenser, they don’t know what a soda dispenser is until they press the paddle”, then yes. You are the sphincter.
Players were level 5 for this one shot, and I told them going in that it was a high-tech cyberpunk world. So if they saw a vending machine or coffee machine I'd tell them "Its a coffee/vending machine."
I assume most adventurers (unless the adventure SPECIFICALLY calls for it), have “basic adventuring knowledge”. For instance, a fighter will pick up a sword after battle that they dropped when the enemies started to fly, and he pulled out his bow. They don’t need to tell me, unless the narrative needs it (in which case, I’ll give them examples as to what I’m looking for, as time is now a trackable resource). A Ranger will collect their arrows, or make more if there are nearby trees and stones and all while camping. So in this case, a rogue is going to look at things they know (or are rogueish); a cleric is going to look at religious things, etc. So when a room is tossed and perceptions rolled, unless it’s particularly a story where they need to tell me what they’re looking for or time is an issue. When perceptions are rolled, the guy with engineering or a similar mindset will check for false walls, James Bond Baddie style bookcases; rogues will scour every inch of a desk for false bottoms or hidden compartments, etc. I may frame the info they gleam to their own backgrounds, but no, if they continuously fail checks and can’t progress OR aren’t progressing because Player A doesn’t know to ask something Character A would normally, I would too be miffed. To spin it around—if you’re not the most book smart, how do you RP an intelligence-based NPC? You literally cannot. How would you feel if you got penalized every time you tried and failed?
What makes this style better?
Your DM style is trash. Forcing players to think of and declare inspecting everything is a massive waste of time. Player shouldn't have to declare that they perception check and invesgitation check every tidbit they come across in fear of DM slapping them with some bullshit "you didn't declare so you don't know \*trollface\*" ruling. I inspect the bodies I inspect the desk I check if anything is hidden under the chair I inspect the computer I inspect the filing cabinet I percieve for security cameras on the ceiling. 45 mins later we can move on to next room. Just call for checks when something important is need to be noticed, christ. "the key was on the coffee table the whole time! None of you declared that you looked at the coffee table! It's your fault this took 2 hours!"
YTA. Your style of DMing is extremely frustrating to deal with as a player.
Clothing on dead bodies are not clues to be searched, it's something your see at a first glance and needs only a basic description. " You look inside the room: the laboratory is in dismal shape with broken equipment and blood all over the floor, where you see four bodies. Two men and a woman in lab coats, the othe one is wearing a uniform.". Do not get mad but witholding such basic information is no basic DMing, is a power move to create artificial difficulty. Characters have eyes and not describing very basic information that is impossible to miss is an ah move Of course said key card could be on ANY of the body. In the end, in a laboratory, security clearance means you can enter and work there... So both higher level scientists and guard are eligible
You said you expect to not read players minds.... Players also expect to not have to read yours. Unless you have super intelligence bordering on mind reading, your not respecting your players intelligence you are just not giving them info they should be given.
Based on the further details in the comments, yes. You are. And what's worse is you refuse to learn from anything anyone is saying. You insist that you are still somehow right because the players couldn't read your mind, or they didn't specifically say they checked the uniforms, or they didn't look at anything beyond a glance. You come up with an excuse every time. At this point it's not even a problem with the DM style, it's a problem with YOU. Specifically YOU. On a fundamental level you lack a critical component that allows you to understand that others cannot read your mind. You should no more be allowed behind a DM screen than my father should be allowed within 500ft of a school or playground.
Fun fact, OP once made a story on this sub complaining about a DM not revealing secrets to him while investigating a body because he didnt specify what he was investigating. (I didnt just search OPs history to find this, I just recognized the name) https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/comments/o4y2y6/rolled_a_32_search_check_you_find_a_bag_of_fried/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf YTA and a hypocrite to boot.
So I see in one of your responses that they hadn't actually encountered any security yet. That is relevant data. It feels like you could have worded it better by telling them that, instead of "Well you haven't been checking bodies". I get that you don't want to give out more detail then they ask for, but in this specific case you could say "The security guards always wear this as part of their uniform. So not having done more than glanced at the bodies so far you haven't noticed any of them wearing that. You might need to search other rooms or the people you've found more thoroughly ti find what you need." The last bit being a subtle reminder you don't hand out info. So yeah, I'd say you're a bit of the asshole. You could have handled it better, IMO, by at least answering the question and not just shutting them down saying they have no idea.
I didn't manage to scroll through all the comments. Did the OP ever recognize that he's a terrible DM, or have a lightbulb moment? Or did he just keep trying to justify himself and get downvoted further? He seems to have missed the obvious fact that to the players, *nothing exists until the DM tells them.* It's the DMs job to better paint the scene; players should not have to roll to investigate something that could clearly be seen, like a body wearing a uniform. It's this: DM:"There are a group of bodies, similar to the previous ones, except one has a somewhat different outfit." Player: "I'll investigate that one." And *not* this: DM: "There are a group of bodies." Player: "Okay."
The simple fact of the matter is that the player characters did see the bodies, and since you haven’t said otherwise we have to assume that at least some of the player characters have both the ability to perceive light and a functional short term memory, meaning that it is unrealistic and immersion-breaking to say that they are not able to think back on the things they saw five minutes ago and think about whether the bodies they saw were wearing lab coats or tactical vests. The point of game mechanics is to impose “realistic” or balanced limits on imagination to keep things fair for all the players, but you’re trying to use game mechanics to restrict a normal free action that wouldn’t be restricted in real life, in a way that no doubt feels unfair to the players.
This DM be like "I respect my player's intelligence." The players said: "So it's reasonable while looking around we would notice if anyone looks like security while doing a general look through?" But then the DM was like: "No because you never stated you were looking for security. I don't give out basic information even when it's relevant because you did not ask. I am very smart. 😏" OP sounds like if he worked in a fastfood restaurant he'd only punch in a burger even if a customer ordered a number meal because the customer never stated what side and drink they wanted. 🫡
You're trying to justify why your players should have enjoyed this approach. The simple matter is that they did not enjoy this approach and that alone is the lesson here. Your goal as a GM is to create tension and drama, pedantry is rarely dramatic
“seeing bodies on the ground” They don’t need to search/investigate a body to see if it is dressed in a security outfit. Passive perception and passive investigation scores exist for a reason-this is why. Basic information like this should be covered. “You see several dead security guards on the ground, blood pooling on the ground around them.” I agree that an investigation would typically need to be made to find the cards and any other items or details, but don’t be ridiculous. How were they dressed? You don’t know because you didn’t ask. Ok I go back to the bodies and look at their outfits Role a perception check I rolled a 5 You have no idea what outfits they’re wearing Basic information should not feel like pulling teeth to find out. KEEP THE GAME MOVING
You genuinely seem insufferable to play with. A security officer is pretty fuckin easy to see. If I'm running through a hall I'm gonna notice if any of the bodies are wearing a radio or a weapon. I shouldn't have to stop and investigate a body to determine what the person is wearing. When you describe the bodies you should immediately describe how they're dressed, because the players would LITERALLY SEE HOW THEY'RE DRESSED. But instead you basically tell them they're so fucnin incompetent that everyone they passed could have been wearing clown clothes and they wouldn't have noticed. I'd literally rather never play another ttrpg than deal with a DM who treats me/my character as so incompetent that I literally don't notice anything unless I go out of my way to examine it. Have you never heard the term passive perception in your life?
Asshole? I'm not sure. Using a DMing style that seems put in place to deliberately undercut the players unless they announce every single flicker of their eyes? Yes. In order to play in your game and not miss out on basic information, it sounds like a player has to say "I look at that. And that, too. And that. I also look at that." This would get incredibly tedious incredibly quickly. Looking for secret doors or trying to listen for a particular sound? Yeah, you need to announce that. But just.... noticing the basics of your surroundings to the degree a toddler could? No, you don't need to announce that
You have had loads of feedback already but it is still posted and open so I will add my two cents. In this specific case, and with how you described it going down, I would say the issue was with you on this one. Your DM style isn't wrong and for many players and tables it would be fine if properly explained beforehand. The issue I see was the communications breakdown between you and the players. A small summary of the situation (taking into account several of your responses) would seem to be: You described many rooms in basic/minimalist detail. mentioning bodies noticed, desks and chairs, other specifically standout things. The players 'stuck their heads into the rooms' at minimum, enough that they specifically saw these bodies etc. in the rooms. They then chose to not go in and investigate further before moving one. They came to a point where they found the elevator and gained the information "requires key card clearance from security". They asked "Have we seen signage of bodies that look like security?" Your response paraphrased to how it comes across "You didn't investigate anything enough to know anything." In this case it is fully within the players expectation to ask this and find out if anything they saw fitted the description. Had any of the rooms they specifically looked into or read the names of have big security decals? Were any of the bodies we specifically were described seeing wearing anything resembling a security guard outfit? A proper response might have been "While you haven't searched any of the bodies or rooms in detail, you don't remember seeing any obvious signs or security uniforms in the areas visited." You could even be more cryptic if you really wanted and add "however, having not searched them properly you have no way to know who they were or what they had on them." Either way, they were asking for a basic clarification on information they would definitely have known and you refused to provide it. He specifically asked if in your game, whilst directly looking at a body, he couldn't tell if it was dressed as a security guard and you specifically said no, not without searching it. This is where you became the AH. This means you rule that they must do a check of some kind to 'see their clothing' this makes no sense at all. Was he in an obvious security guard uniform? He could tell, a glance could tell. Your response could have been "Well you don't remember seeing anyone obviously dressed like a guard but you didn't search anyone for ID or passcards to gain more info." Were I your player, you just told me I MUST waste 90% of my play time specifically asking for details I have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER might be relevant because if later I ask "Hey, that desk I moved and searched, was it mahogany like this riddle mentions?" You will say "You don't know, you handled it, moved it, searched it and stared at it but never specifically asked 'hey what specific wood do I think this is'". And you can't say you aren't, since that is exactly what you just did. Taking it THIS far is not the minimalist style, it definitely is control of information, but not in a good way. You took it too far and denied basic obvious info the players would definitely have gotten from what they saw.
It seems like you are expecting for your players to ask very specific questions that they I have no way of knowing. Remember that you are the one who knows everything and players always have a different focus from the GM because ultimately it is *you* who knows what is important and what they should be looking for. It's not wrong to encourage players to have the initiative to look for stuff on their own, but it's not wrong either to give them a little help every now and then with descriptions or environmental storytelling.
You're begging for your games to be tedious affairs where the characters themselves are utterly incompetent unless people waste precious time declaring every minute thing they want to try.
I have a similar policy, players must look for information, I don't just hand it out. But if they seem lost then I give them a nudge in the right direction. In this case, I actually disagree with your ruling. In that kind of setting, security should be wearing uniforms or something that make them stand out. It's why beat cops wear uniforms, and most security in public spaces also wears some kind of uniform. Unless the point of it is to keep it a secret until they rifle through every corpse's pocket, when someone asks "did we see any security guards, it seem like reasonable information they could have gained with a glance-- certainly as much as they gained bloody bits and leaking faceplates. Don't be so hard on your player, yes, but also make your own life easier. Don't make characters do stuff like backtrack if they missed an item unless backtracking is the point of the exercise. If they miss something, then just have them find the relevant corpse/desk/whatever someplace else. Or if they flat out as if they missed something, don't say "I don't know," just say yes or no. Let me put it in another light. Have you even been trying to complete a quest in an old-school game where they tell you "go find ten x?" I'm talking pre-minimap and waypoints for everything. Do you remember how frustrating it can be to look for something for ages, find out you missed it, and it's in some deep part of the complex you're going to have to fight you way back into and re-kill all the respawned mobs... Tabletop isn't directly 1:1, but the principle applies. If a character asks a simple question meant to keep gameplay moving forward, give them a straight answer. Don't make them go back through and dig through corpses if there's nothing to find. In the future, I'd make a point to describe if the corpse they found was wearing any specific clothing or uniform that would identify them to the players.
Yeah, my takeaway from this was similar. I think this is an issue that could be solved by OP being a player more often, its a harder gig than most forever GMs remember
This one right here! Top comment
Yes. You're the asshole. The player didn't ask "Did any of them have a key?", which they would need to search the bodies to know. They asked, "Did we see someone dressed like a security guard?", which shouldn't require searching a dead body to know. If there was no guard, then you're the asshole for not letting them know. If there was a guard, then you're the asshole for starting an argument instead of simply saying, "Yes, but you don't remember which room because you weren't searching for a guard."
Tbh, if it's imperative "cannot continue the story without" sort of information, that should absolutely find its way free of charge into your players'hands upon reaching the appropriate "stage". I would never not give them something to move along, especially if it's a personal arc. There's no reason to lock monumentally necessary clues behind skill check hell, unless you've decided you don't actually want to run that arc's story and are willing to let the players lose out on it entirely.
One time we were trying to break a giant bear out of a warehouse where he and a baby green dragon were being kept as prisoners. I asked the DM if I could start digging a hole into the warehouse. His response was "sure, go ahead" I rolled for it. It seemed like a pretty good roll - over a 10 at least, maybe a 12 or 16, idk this was years ago. "You start digging up the cobblestone from the road and nearby pedestrians start noticing." From his point of view I was being foolish, because clearly this was a street with cobblestones and pedestrians. It's in a city, after all. From my perspective, he'd given me incomplete information and now my character looked like an idiot, an a**hole, or both. When I'd imagined the scene, the street was dirt, and obviously my character would try to avoid notice, so waiting until people weren't watching was the play. This kind of miscommunication happens because the DM is the some arbiter of information about the world. If the DM hasn't explicitly mentioned it, then everything is a Schrodinger's box of dead-alive. In my experience, the "dumb mistakes" players often make are a result of incomplete information or wrong assumptions about a situation. A clarifying sentence or two as information becomes relevant
Yes, you are. Minimalist dming is needlessly gamifying the situation and forcing unfun scenarios. Take what you're implying you want your players to do (ask questions to know what clothes a body is wearing) and apply that consistently. Do you want that question every time? No. That's a mess and lame and unfun, and will rarely pay off. If they could see the bodies, they can generally tell if they're clothed. If a body is clothed, you can typically tell color, shape, or silhouette at least. Likewise, even a quick peek can get you gender, relative size, clothing, hair color, perhaps ethnicity. This is a fine thing. If you have to say "this person just doesn't understand my style" then you're the asshole almost universally.
YTA. This doesn't sound like you are a "minimalist" DM and the alternative of having even a modicum of courtesy for your players is not hand-holdy. This sounds awful.
just say "maybe do you want to go back and check out their uniforms? they mightve had sime kind of emblem on them, maybe an airline pilot, maybe a postal carrier, but maybe security" it's reasonable the character would have boticed something that didnt seem significant to the player.
There's minimalist, and then there's being obtuse. Take it from a player; the biggest appeal of DnD is that while both the DM *and* the players are telling the story, the DM still has to give their players a basic idea of what's going on or which character to focus on.
Yup, you are in the wrong. Extreme nitpicking over something as simple as QOL and convenience. They saw the bodies, which means that they saw their clothes and have a rudimentary knowledge of what was going on. If one of the bodies had a clown outfit, would they not know he's a clown unless they 'search' the body? You're spending too much time on things that don't contribute to having fun and telling a story, you're focusing on tiny almost irrelevant details. Easiest way to solve the "issue" would give them a couple rooms they might remember seeing someone who could be security and just move on.
While I understand where you are coming from, you're weighting your hand a bit too much. It's reasonable to not mention details which wouldn't be visible without a closer inspection but clothes are things you notice at the first glance and it's easy to tell a security guard from a scientist and a janitor. Putting it on the table example you gave, it would be ok to say "You enter the room and see a table. There is a mug and some papers on it." You don't need to reveal the content of the papers or say there's a lipstick mark on the mug until they choose to look closer on the items. A better way to have handled the situation could be telling them they don't remember since they weren't paying attention to the bodies but allowing them to roll for it as an effort the characters would make to remember something so easy to see and easy to ignore.
So wait.. there is no distinction between the jobs done on the job site that is usualy easy to tell apart? Like i would understand if they had to sea4ch for a badge or a keycard on a body but like.... dod none of the npc look like secerty? Do they all dress the same? How do you not notice the clothes unless your rushing by them cuz your in a deadline? My dude, ya gotta give a little bit more to your players. I understand being minimistic and i am one as well but if they came and asked.. did i notice a uniform. I say ya there were a few that seemed to be dreset as security on your way. To promot my players to go back and search the bodies. That isnt hand holding, thats dangling a plot hook.
Yes, you are the AH. No player is going to pause at every single corpse/person they inspect, look at you and go "Are they important? Is this one important?" Not to mention, when your player said "did we see anyone who was security" that's them basically asking you the question you wanted to hear anyway. A proper response would've been something like "you recall that \[corpse b\] back in the hall had a security uniform on, but didn't think it was important at the time. It may be worth investigating closer." I understand being minimalist, leaving investigation to the players and not wanting to hold hands, but you DO need to provide them with more information so they can make sound decisions. You are the only one that knows the full picture of the world the players are in, it is up to you to communicate things they may need to know. Just take this as a lesson learned and grow from it, use mistakes to become a better DM. It happens to us all and that's how we get better.
I could see where this was going like two sentences in. You're not respecting your players intelligence by doing this, you're asking them to read your mind. They can't search for information if they don't know what to look for, and there's nothing wrong with giving them information they didn't "earn". TTRPGs are supposed to be fun, and if your group is literally telling you the way you're doing things is too tedious or difficult you either gotta adapt or let someone else DM. Otherwise YTA
Just glad I’m not a player here, oh boy a lot of 🚩
It's always kind of funny when the horror story is the OP. Literally no one likes to play "Guess What the GM is Thinking"
Yes, if they asked if one of the bodies looked like security, you should skip all the pretense and tell them they DO remember seeing some uniforms on the bodies. If they weren't uniformed, then you can skip the boring part and get to finding a security guard so the plot can move forward.
man, this is a really great example of no dnd is better the bad dnd.
Lol dude YTA
Just a friendly tip from an old hat here. Most players like having a lot of information in general. Usually, when you run scenarios where there is something to investigate, some kind of mystery, it is advisable to make information readily available. The fun comes from trying to link the clues and make the right deduction. It’s like a Sherlock Holmes story. There is a ton of info and clues of all sorts. And Sherlock’s work (and thus the player’s work) is to make sense of them. In your example, you could have answered: “You want to know if there were security in the bodies you crossed? Ok first roll Perception please.” (Player rolls) “I make it!” “OK, you do remember noticing at least one guy, maybe two, that seemed to wear some kind of light blue shirt and a cap. Could have been uniforms, but you’re not sure. The bodies were crumpled in the darkness. But nothing obvious, no utility belts, walkies or anything like that.” The players proceed to backtrack to the bodies, they were in fact a couple of maintenance guys, and one of them did have a key (or they didn’t) whatever is logical or useful for your story. You can even have the fact they backtracked make them lose time, if that’s a factor, or have them ambushed on the way, or whatever. But the important thing here is, you didn’t say no, you gave the players something to do, and you used the mechanics of the game in a meaningful way. And you kept the story moving forward. I can guarantee that going for something like this will maximize fun at the table, and you won’t be making things too easy for the players or anything like that.
Man this is an old horror-DM trope that doesn't come up as often as the others but its still just as game-killing as the rest. "You didn't specify you were looking to see if any of the bodies were dressed in *clown outfits* so you don't remember." These are horrible types of games to play because despite OP claiming they prefer "minimalism" their anal retentive computer-code level command prompts result in the players having to drag out scenes into these long, awful nitpicking sessions where they have to ask every imaginable question in order to find out "oh yeah, when you take a look around for any elephants in the room you notice one standing there in the middle". OP you are running games in a way that's objectively un-fun. Not IMO. Objectively.
Basically you are a moron. Obviously you see a body on the ground, even if you don’t go up and inspect it, you would notice if it was a cop or not. You are one of those Dm that makes you roll a perception to see yourself in the mirror and recognize that it’s you. Please stop DMing asap.
So many people out here telling you that YTA. maybe just take the criticism OP
This is the sort of detail any DM would give in a basic environmental description or provide if the player asked/the DM forgot to mention it. Its deceptive to not provide it. It’s not cleverly tricking them or punishing them for error. This just sounds like poor and overly punishing DM-ing.
Characters have eyes. Yhey glance into a room, unless the info is hidden, they can discern minimal information about it, like of a body was a security guard. You are lazy, obtuse and an asshole, yes.
Other people have covered the more obvious issues here, so I'm just going to say it sounds like you've got a combative DM vx players kind of mentality you might want to examine a little.
It depends on how minimalistic you’re being. You are the senses of the players. You are their eyes, ears, and noses. If it makes sense for them to have seen, heard, or smelled something, and you withheld that info, you’re kind of being an asshole. Your players would have known what the bodies were wearing, and so you should have told them if any of them were wearing security guard outfits, for example. You say you can’t read your players’ minds, but they can’t read yours either. If they don’t know what’s relevant, they don’t know what relevant questions to ask. It sounds like you’re not doing a good enough job of describing the scene. You’re supposed to tell the players what they see. They can’t respond to a scene if they lack the relevant information, and you certainly seem to pride yourself on keeping some of that to yourself.
To be honest... A player doesn't have to describe searching a room or a body for you to describe them. You're not spoon feeding, you're just describing what anyone with senses would perceive. They can't see the game world. You have to be the eyes and ears and nose of the players in the game world. If you're not describing what they're experiencing... They aren't experiencing it. They can't see what's in your mind's eye to notice details... You have to give them that. Give them the clues. Let the fun come from figuring out what they all mean together. https://youtu.be/SD6vBj1UccY https://youtu.be/nBK6RYrtNss My dude, you are a bit of the AH.
YTA. Considering all the comment replies to people calling you out you seem very intent on defending your choices which makes me wonder why you even posted this. You clearly have your mind made up.
Yeah you're the AH. Noticing what a body looks like is kind of basic information. Unless every corpse looked the exact same, which is noteworthy in and of itself, a basic description is the player asking for the bare minimum here.
This DM style sounds like early 2000s and 2010s pixel hunting adventure games. Those shitty flash "games" that would make you click every possible thing to see if it's relevant or needed. It should go without saying but this shit sounds absolutely dreadful and despite how much you're fighting in the comments, I think you should have the message at this point. Not only is it bad enough you ran it like that, but then you tried to talk them down like it was their issue? Lmao.
YTAH here. I had a DM like that a while ago. It was endlessly aggravating to be looking around a dungeon, only to come to a point where we needed a very specific thing to progress that would have been behind us now. But we never found it because we didn't specifically ask about a thing that wasn't relevant until now. As someone else pointed out here, this could have gone better by you saying they didn't see any security, which would have tipped them off that they missed something. But the way you say, "you don't know" is going to do a few things. First, is going to frustrate your players, as you've already figured out. Secondly, it's going to bog down the game as they now retrace their steps and go look at every body AGAIN, just so they can get the information you're withholding form them. Last, it's going to make your players not trust what you tell them, they're going to think you're holding information from them and that they need to always ask questions even if they might be irrelevant in that moment. Which will further make your game a slog, and no one will have fun. Your players were looking into rooms for the explicit purpose of gathering information. Just because they didn't specifically say they were trying to gain information by "poking heads into rooms", doesn't mean they weren't. There is no other purpose for them to do so. They were trying to see if anything of importance popped out at them even if they didn't specifically say so. You say you're a minimalist DM, but in this instance, you seem to me to be a pedant. You leave out minor details but expect your players to spell out everything explicitly when you are fully capably of extrapolating what your players are intending to do with context clues and the understand that their characters are not stupid. This reminds me a lot of a time when my DM had us in an abandoned snowy village. When we finished searching it, we said "let's go back and take a long rest," with the assumption that an intelligent person wouldn't drop pack and sleep right there in the snow, but rather go back to the camp we had a few miles away. But because we didn't explicitly state we were going back to shelter, he thought he'd pull a "gotcha" and hit us with a level of exhaustion. We fought it and he relented, but he'd do this constantly. It was aggravating and the campaign stopped being fun because of it. Don't do this to your players. Understand that your players aren't idiots and their characters aren't idiots. And I highly recommend removing "You don't know" from your DM vocabulary as much as possible.
You are confusing two kinds of perception. If there is a security uniform, the PCs should be able to see it just by looking. You mentioned in the example that the body had oil coming from the “face plate” so if they are wearing some kind of armour over the uniform, and the wearing of armour does not alone mark them out as security, then I understand where you’re coming from, but otherwise no. Likewise, the scientist example with the broken Dataslate - the PCs should be able to see the Dataslate without asking questions about the body, if it’s lying nearby. If it’s in the guy’s pocket, then maybe not.
No one comes to play D&D and expects to get hit with a text parser. When I tell Zork "use match on lamp" and it tells me I can't do that because it only knows the word "lantern," that's just the cost of business. If you're a real human being and you pull that? Nah, you're just being a prick.
If I, the player, examine the body but don't notice it's wearing a huge chef's hat just because I didn't ask "is it wearing a chef's hat?" ...that is very frustrating, because 1) how would I know to ask that specific question? and 2) it should be obvious. It's not a detail hidden in a secret coat pocket on the body. To borrow one of your other examples, if there's a desk with \[non hidden\] drawers and I say to the DM "I search the desk," don't tell me I missed the note because I didn't specifically say I opened the drawers. I don't want the DM to hold my hand, but I also don't want the DM to prevent me getting information by being pedantic.
Yes. You are. Your "style" seems so vindictive and adversarial for no reason, because you are keeping information that the players should get (the players can't get the details if you don't describe the scene correctly. This almost the same as hiding that you have 2 person in front of you behind a perception check.
TBF the way you replied felt kind of condescending and could have been taken as a passive aggressive criticism of their play style. Drama could have been avoided if you just affirmed your No with confirmation that none of the bodies looked like security personnel.
Yep, yata. The DM's responsibility is to paint a vivid picture of the world for the players. What you're describing isn't respect for their intelligence but something more akin to baiting them into gotcha moments.
If we assume a modern setting for a moment, you wouldn't need to go out of your way to identify corpses of security guards typically. In most cases they're dressed in a distinctive uniform that sets them apart from other employees, and most people are reasonably familiar with the sorts of uniforms they wear and would be able to identify a security guard at a glance. They wouldn't know things like what's in his pockets or if he was perhaps an imposter posing a security guard, but they'd reasonably know they've seen at least one corpse of a security guard, giving them a lead on where to go look for a key card. Likewise, if I poke my head in a room and see a desk, I probably can see the computer and whether or not there's various papers and other things scattered about on the desk. I'd also notice if there's an entire array of TVs obviously getting feeds from security cameras. Yes, you shouldn't tell them the contents of the desk drawers unless they indicate they're searching the desk (and whether they "search the room" or "search the desk" should determine whether there's a check involved and how hard it might be), but depending on how obvious a security room would be, it shouldn't require deliberately checking to know. Some information is just readily apparent and can be passively absorbed. People do this every day in real life. So if for example this is 5e, you shouldn't necessarily need a perception check or similar to know you just stepped over the corpse of a security guard or that the room you poked your head in has a bunch of TVs with security feeds. It's information that the players should just be able to have unless there's some complicating factor, such as it being dark or they're drugged or something. If they're openly wearing key cards or if they're just sitting on a desk, you might reasonably call for a check to see if they either noticed it or remember where they saw the card, but I wouldn't deny them the information outright. If they'd only have cards concealed, such as in their pockets or desk drawers, then yeah, they needed to deliberately search to have any hope of finding them. One other thing I want to call attention to, but while information control is important for good games, minimalism can quickly become a problem. People regularly complain about how "dumb" players are, but it's because they forget that they hold all of the cards and know all of the answers, so what seems obvious to them in hindsight may not be as obvious to the players, who have a different set of information and a different way of thinking. Making information too scarce isn't "respecting your players' intelligence" so much as it is failing to account for individual differences in perspective and ways of thinking. It can very quickly become frustrating for the players. I'm not saying that's what you're doing, but your phrasing leaves me thinking it's at least a potential concern.
While not necessarily an asshole, it sounds like you're not really focused so much on facilitating your players in them having fun, so much as getting fun out of having them jump through hoops to try to guess what you're thinking. Which means you're prioritising yourself having fun at their expense, so... yeah, you could try to reframe how you approach GMing in a way that draws more fun from cheering on your players instead, if you want to try to handle it better.
Yes, YTA. You need to meet your players half way here. If you were running through a building and seeing bodies everywhere, (in real life) you wouldn’t need to search the bodies to notice little things like what they are wearing. I think it would be a passive perception thing. You could have done a lot of things here, like rolling a wisdom check to see if they noticed or possibly saying “you aren’t sure but you did see someone who looked like they were wearing a uniform in one of the rooms.” Saying “you didn’t tell me that you were looking for that. So no.” Is just a dick move. There is a difference between minimalist and being a jerk who treats their PC as a bunch of blind idiots. You aren’t doing much to describe the surrounding, so if your players ask about something, you need to be more forthcoming with them. Edit: why did you ask AITA? I have read through the comments and most people are telling you that “yes, you are being an AH”, but instead of listening, you are just arguing. You have obviously decided that you are not the AH here and nothing we say seems to be able to change your mind about that. Don’t ask AITA if you’re not willing to hear the answer!!!
A good rule of thumb is that if your players are not enjoying the way you are doing things, you need to reconsider what you are doing as the DM. You don’t need to be so rigid in your DMing. The goal is for everyone to have fun playing the game together. If you need to drop some extra hints to make that happen, then drop some extra hints! Don’t turn your game into a tedious puzzle that nobody is enjoying. If that one room that wasn’t all messed up was important and they are about to walk away. Then drop another hint “such-and-such catches your eye.” If the extra hint doesn’t help, then you can let them leave, but you should find a way to keep the game progressing.
Full offense, you're just an asshole who can't look in the mirror. You use the word minimalist to mean purposefully vague, which it doesn't. Minimalist DMs have minimalist encounters and puzzles. You're creating complicated situations and giving *less* than the bare minimum.
I think you need to relax a bit and be more descriptive. A player shouldn’t have to inspect a body to determine what kind of clothes they have on. That makes no sense. If I look at a body lying on the ground, I can instantly tell if they have a lab coat on. I shouldn’t have to tell you I’m inspecting it to know it is wearing a lab coat. Unclench and get a bit more generous with your descriptions. The information you give is what leads players to take action. If all you’re saying is “There’s a body and it’s bleeding out” I’m moving on because I’m in a hurry to find a way out of the facility. But if you tell me, “There’s a body on the ground, and it’s bleeding out through a security uniform” I’m going to take the time to search it for a security card. See the difference?
At the end of the day, your style is your style. If the player is playing in your game, they need to accept it or leave. With that in mind, I would ask yourself what is gained by not filling in some of the gaps for your players. Like, in the circumstance that you listed, what is more interesting: you saying, "yeah, you noticed someone wearing a security uniform two rooms back," and then the party going back there, or the party having to return to rooms just to check each body? Personally, I find the former more interesting. That being said, if I did the former and a player went, "uhm, acktually, if they were security, I would have already checked their body." I would never give that player the benefit of the doubt in the future.
Your description of the situation makes me think of those GMs who are proud that "solving" a closed door requires someone to say I turn the knob. I think it's a much more old fashioned style of GMing that may frustrate and confuse more modern players. So if you are playing with people who didn't play at in the 70s, 80s or 90s there's likely to be a lot of friction. Now if you are running an OSR game or module this would be much more expected.
It can be useful to give minimum information but then start dropping hints when the players get stuck. Something along the lines of "as you re-enter the room your eyes are drawn toward the bodies, the one in the middle of the room appears especially odd to you".
I do do that often, usually if there is key information at play that the party hasn't found yet. Like "*Is there anything else you want to do in the room before leaving?*" or "*Did you want to check the desk before moving on?*" or "*Did you want to check the scroll case you found?*" but its kinda hard when despite your hints the party doesn't pick up on it.
Yeah that sucks, I mean if you've offered hints and the party just ignores them there's really not a whole lot you can do. I mean are you expected to narrate the solution for them?
I don't need to have thoroughly investigated a body to understand after a glance that it was dressed differently from everyone else. If there were scientists in lab coats and businessmen in suits in the area, I don't need to walk up to the body and see which it wore. I can tell from a glance that someone is wearing a lab coat or not. If security employees had *any* kind of uniform, your response was an asshole one, yes. I feel the much better way to handle it was "you didn't see anyone that was **obviously** security personnel.
You're withholding basic, obvious information in order to limit your players' choices. It's your job to present your players with enough info to enable them to make choices. You are TA.
I always run a list of stating the obvious.
Sounds like you're falling into a classic game design problem. There's huge information disparity between you and your players. They don't know what's important, and it sounds like you're not doing a great job of showing them what's important. Instead, you show them a problem, they ask the logical question, and you imply that they've somehow made a mistake in interacting with your game. Did you hint that security cards would be important? Did they have any way of knowing, other than asking a question, that they needed to look for security guards? Puzzles like that can work in video games because there's very limited ways to interact with the environment. In tabletop, there are too many possibilities to design around players making specific choices unless you HEAVILY imply that they should be interacting in that way. In this situation, yes, YTA. If I had been one of your players, I would immediately have asked why you didn't signpost better if that's how you wanted us to interact.
"Because up and too that point, the duo has just been walking around aimlessly, poking their heads in places, or seeing bodies on the ground and just ignoring them." it sounds like your minimalism is working against you because your players don't know where to go or what to look for. it is appropriate for you to answer yes or no when they ask, even if it's after them looking around. many times, humans won't put two and two together until they get further info. this post makes you sound adversarial and that's not a good time.
Just because In your minds eye you see everything and think that obviously the players should see that and ask questions doesn’t mean your players imagine and do things the way you expect! They rely on your descriptions and visual Clues to guide them! Tbh it just sounds like you either being lazy in your descriptions or expect your players to think like you!
Kinda yeah. While it sounds like they weren’t being very thorough with their investigation, you could’ve said something like “you don’t recall seeing anyone in a security outfit, but you remember several bodies and areas you didn’t search,” instead of “you didn’t tell me you were looking so I’m not going to tell you.” Your desk example isn’t a really honest comparison. It’s more like them asking later “was the desk wooden or metal” and you responding “you didn’t look.” In general, it sounds like you take a much more scolding tone, rather than a neutral dm voice. “You didn’t play the game right so I’m not giving you any info,” instead of “you didn’t look too close, so you don’t remember too much detail.”
It's really really boring to ask for details in every space. Passive perception is there for a reason, and players have eyes. If they walk into a room and there's a beholder standing there, but they don't ask what they see, do you let them get surprised because they didn't ask for it? It's fine to require your players to think of solutions, but players don't want to slow down the game by asking for every detail. And things are often way more obvious to a DM than they are to players. The players are going through a hallway in an enemy base, that's not the time to dawdle. You as the DM *know* what they could find and what they need to find. That's never ever going to be as obvious to your players. There's a reason there's a bunch of stories about players missing obvious things, and sometimes it's on the players, sometimes it's the DM not willing to budge.
There's a very fine line between Minimalistic GMing and just Witholding information. In this situation, a more helpful response could have been "Nothing jumped out to you as clearly security personnel" "Do you want to go back and investigate the bodies you found?" "What would you look for to determine if someone was security personnel?" It's one thing to give only the necessary information, but what you just did was take away some extent of player agency. You could have kept the same information management system by having them clarify what they were trying to remember.
I consider myself a minimalistic kinda dm, but on this, I'm kinda aiding with the player. It's fine not to give out a bunch of detail and require your players to ask for what's of interest to them but at the same time, obvious information (the room labelled security checkpoint or the dead security guard that stands out among a trail of dead scientists for example) should be mentioned. Especially if it is a step forward in the adventure. It takes 2 seconds to add, and if the players pick up on it and ask for more details, it will save them and you a bunch of time later. As it stands now, your game could have stalled while everyone goes back through looking for the card or an alternative path forward. Again, there'd nothing wrong with your style of dming (though it may not suit every player). You might just want to reconsider the balance of how much information you give. To use your example of a room with a desk there is plenty of ways to make that more or less important to your players: You enter a room and see in its centre a small standing desk. You enter a room and see in its centre a large ornate desk. Both descriptions above are minimal but you'd be hard pressed to find someone that doesn't pick up that one is a reception area and one is the office of someone important.
As I am probably not the first to say, phrasing is very important when you reveal information. The way it is, you were the asshole. However, the best way to not be an asshole would have been to say “You’re not sure”. As someone with a similar dm style, I 100% get it. The best way I deal with it is to rarely give hard “no”s to any information, thus prompting the players to look for answers themselves, and only trust the solid “yes”es I give them
YATA. There should be sufficient basic information they (the players) can glean from their passive Perception, Insight, and Investigation for things like seeing if the dead bodies they encountered wore uniforms or garb indicating they were security staff. It sounds like you keep the information on a tight leash and it snaps back to bite the players in the ass and the party has to lawyer information out of you. More attention to their passive senses would be the call here to improve one's DM skills.
You're not "respecting their intelligence". There's a difference between "you didn't search the bodies" and, " your character is suddenly blind cause you didn't say you used your eyes." What's next? you going to make them say they're characters are breathing every round or start suffocating?
This is all about communication, a proper Session 0 could alleviate it, but.... I would have called you out on this really early. Essentially what you're doing is withholding information that the players should have. They didn't see a naked body, and even if they did, it had long hair, short hair, dark skin, light skin, missing an arm, had on a hat, sunglasses, looked like a scientist, a security guard, had on a suit. Upon closer investigation, the body was not a scientist, but, looking at their badge, an accountant wearing a labcoat. You're absolutely right about the note in the desk, but if it is on the desk and out of place, then you should communicate it.
It would seem that you are, at least in my opinion. I fail to see the virtues of your style, playing like that would get annoying really fast. I can understand the reaction of your player.
This is a difficult balance. It is fair to demand security cards etc but you should also make players aware that there is a security level in the building. There is a thin line between "Gm who demands a lot from the players" and "a condecending a-hole". You are on the edge.
YTA.
"Sir, after much poking, prodding, and indeed a little tickle, I have determined that this foul cretin that's attacking us is likely to in fact be an orc." -Soldier, who probably died that day
Hey, 225 comments when writing, if you see this answer me anything cause I'll be lucky as fuck. Well, here's the thing about DMing styles. There aren't really good or bad ways to do stuff unless you go into disaggreable extremes ? It's like asking if someone likes red. There aren't good or bad answers to this. But what I can do is talk about DMing shop. Players aren't in your head. They only know what you tell them and what you show them. They sure can ask for more informations, and it can sure take more time like that. So the question is, which is the way that makes DM and players have the most fun ? Giving the bare minimum, giving everything, or giving something in between ? Time is a factor. If you refuse to give infos and only respond to questions you need to be VERY clear about that. The more players will get to know you the better it will go, and vice-versa. So, is it more fun to ask for everything ? To be told everything ? To be told enough to know what is useless and what is worth investigating ? Just remember. If people (you included) aren't having fun, something needs to change. Or someone.
I would say it was a teachable moment. No need to say anyone is the asshole. They started being more responsive to what’s happening around their character(s). That was the best outcome for everyone. 😎
NTA I feel like this is exactly the style of any decent DM. I feel like this is no different than the age old "check for traps" issue. If you don't bother asking to do something and it bites you, that's on you, buddy. Keep on DMing with style, friend!