What to Do When Your Players Ignore the Story

When I started writing Over the DM's Shoulder five years ago, I wasn't sure what would come of my efforts. Now, five years and a long break later, this is the fiftieth post on this site. I thought that I would use this special post to answer a classic GM question that is near and dear to my heart: what to do when your players ignore your story. I've addressed this idea in the session notes for my mystery campaign; when I handled it there, I described how I reacted when my players decided to spend time on band practice rather than investigating a murder. Every experienced GM has a similar experience--sometimes the players are simply motivated by other things than following the path of a story from start to finish. If you've read the linked session notes, you already know how I feel about this kind of experience, but what about if it's happening to you? What can you do? 

I argue that your best path depends on the situation you're dealing with as a GM. Generally, you will fall into one of three categories: the players don't understand how to stick with the story, they are not motivated to advance the story, or the players are interested in other things. These issues can be difficult to diagnose; all of them express as your players not following your story, but they are caused by very different things. Within each of these categories are a few ways for players to express their disconnection with your story, and I can suggest solutions for each one. Let's start with the first category: players who don't understand how to stick with the story. 

Generally speaking, players who don't know how to follow the story are not going to express it because they think they do understand what's going on. You can recognize this issue by seeing players confidently make story choices that don't reflect the information you have tried to give them. For instance, let's say you've presented your players with a BBEG who you wanted to be a little ambiguous at first to increase the drama of the players discovering their evil intentions. But because of your subtlety, your players think of the BBEG as a fairly neutral or even helpful entity. Now you have players who aren't poking around the BBEG like you want them to, and even an in-game prodding strikes the players as unremarkable information. What to you do to course-correct? 

For this example, I recommend that you try to solve the problem with a matter of degrees. Over the course of a session or two, insert increasingly suspicious information about the BBEG. Don't force your players to view them as the problem; just guide them into moments that show that the BBEG has an agenda that would adversely affect them. Your players may grasp this at your first gentle prodding, and they may still be unsure after your most obvious prodding. But so long as you can get the players to realize that the story you're telling them is specifically about something, you'll be on the path to a happy game again. 

Generally speaking, though, your players will understand the big picture without too much work on your part. The more common issue with understanding the plot is that players either don't understand what the limits of your story are or that the players think they're walking a path designated by you when they really aren't. Both of these issues arise more during storytelling/roleplaying games where detailed information can be mistaken. Let's consider how to deal with each one. 

Your players might not understand the limits of the story if you're telling a story that is wide-ranging rather than narrowly focused. My mystery campaign is an ideal example. I'm trying to tell a story about a mysterious set of events that seem to grow broader and broader in scope as the mystery progresses. This leaves my game wide open to speculation on what is and is not part of the players' responsibilities. To wit, in a recent session for the mystery campaign, the players discussed what they believed was their goal: solve the initial murder, and ignore the web of murky details surrounding it. I as GM have been developing this campaign as a story that takes them from the murder to something much larger. But my committed roleplayers have portrayed their characters as weary of the investigation and reticent to get further involved. This is a limits problem: where does the edge of the story reside? 

The solution for this particular problem can be reached with some gentle herding. The party in my mystery campaign wants to find the person who murdered the initial victim; they have a good description of the murderer, but no way to find them. So to assert that the web of details is connected to the murder, I am bringing the murderer back into the investigation. Previously, they were a spectre the party could only hopelessly chase, but as of our next session, they will be once again at the heart of the mystery. This will show the players that the murder and the web of details are related enough to pursue both, solving our limits problem. 

Your players may think that they are pursuing the story when they are actually off in the weeds doing something else. This is an issue that can exist on a small scale, as when players get hung up on a detail you didn't mean to be significant, or on a larger scale, as when players begin to push in a completely unplanned direction. The issue here is not a miscalculation of the story's limits, but an entire misperception about what content is in the story and what isn't. Let's look at an example that includes both minor and major misunderstandings:

Let's say that you're running a campaign and the main story you've planned for involves a primal magical force that is clawing its way into this dimension. Your players are trying to figure out what is causing this rift, and they learn from an Arcana check that the magical force is mostly evocation magic. The players take this information and run with it (but in the wrong direction given your plans). They head to a library and pore over spellbooks to learn about evocation spells and how to counter them. But you as GM had planned that they would take another hint about where the magic rift appeared, and now you and your party are disconnected. To make things worse, that small misinterpretation leads to a bigger one; now your players are talking about how to use evocation spells to fight against the magical force, which will only make the force more powerful. How do you get out of this bind? 

Whereas the solution to the limits problem is to maintain the structure you've planned for (when your planning cannot be altered without radically changing everything) and just reorient the players, you have choices with players on the wrong track. If it's a minor misunderstanding, such as the evocation magic investigation mentioned above, you can adjust your plans and allow the players to be on the right track in your revised adventure--in the new version, evocation magic hides secrets which will help the players succeed. You might do this because investigating the type of magic is actually a pretty good idea and you want to reward your players; you might also go this route because it's generally a good idea to let the players decide the direction of your story and work with them. 

But for bigger issues, like the decision to fight the magical force with evocation spells, you have to make a harder judgment call. Can you afford to rewrite a bit? Maybe it's ultimately best to allow your players to succeed with their plan. I generally believe that players should be rewarded for good ideas even if it breaks my prepared notes, but you should find the balance that works for you. If you can't adjust your planning, allow the players to try their strategy and let them fail, but without punishing the party. No player character deaths should occur unless your players are being reckless and obstinate. They've tried a route that seemed appropriate and found out it didn't work; this is a natural party of a story. (It's called the middle--most every story's middle is about failing at something until you eventually get it right.) So provide them a scene that proves they were on the wrong path, drop a suggestion of what path to start on instead (and don't be afraid to be a little direct here; if your players were just confused, give them something clear to compensate), and move back to the story you're trying to tell. 

This covers what to do when your players are confused about the story. But it's just as likely that your players are simply not motivated to progress the story. This might be because your story is not motivating them or possibly because the characters themselves are not motivated by the story. In either case, you can diagnose this issue when your player characters are getting invested in details rather than the big picture. Pay close attention to what your players say to each other when they discuss your story. If they describe it in basic terms without the details you have provided but discuss side details with relish, you probably have players who aren't motivated. 

Let's say you're running a campaign about a dungeon from which emerges monstrous creatures bent on destroying humanoid settlements across the countryside. Your players have tended casually to this quest, but they are spending more time talking to tavernkeepers and townsfolk than worrying about the monsters. You're likely struggling to impress upon them the importance of the quest. Now you need to determine if it's the players or the characters who aren't motivated. Listening to the players talk is again your best tool. If your players discuss their interests out-of-game, you're dealing with player issues; if they speak in-character about their motivations, you're dealing with character issues. Both have simple solutions. 

You're running your story about the monster-spawning dungeon and your players care more about townsfolk than your quest. The players themselves are the ones who don't connect with the quest; now what do you do? I recommend isolating the thing that your players care about and recalibrating your adventure to tend to those interests. In this example, where the players are invested in the townsfolk, put the townsfolk in harm's way by making them the target of the monsters. Now your players are serving your story in order to connect with the thing that matters to them. 

Similarly, you can address character disinterest by focusing on what the characters care about. Let's say that in the monster-spawning dungeon example, your players' characters are really interested in becoming powerful enough to take on a minor NPC who has antagonized them. So you again align the two goals; the reward for dealing with the monsters is increased power (not just via experience, but via magic items and stat boosts). Now your players and their characters have a stake in following your story. All it takes is some creative moving of the goalposts, which is bad in a debate but vital in TRPGs. 

Some characters, however, are tough nuts to crack. Especially with characters designed for roleplay, you will occasionally encounter a character who doesn't align with quests very often. My strategy for dealing with a disconnected player character is to add a detail to the quest that directly involves that character. Let's say a player is controlling a character who is a halfling rogue, someone who doesn't get excited about combat so much as conversational tactics, and they don't care much about the monsters at all. Add a detail: that character has a magical aura about them that attracts the monsters. How and why they attained this aura is up to you, but it will make that character unable to ignore the story, as it will follow them wherever they go. Now your player may be invested in ending the aura's effect for roleplaying reasons, and that's enough to move them to progress the story. 

The last category of disconnection from the story is that players are interested in specific things outside of your story. Again, this is mostly a problem for storytelling/roleplaying campaigns, but it can easily derail a campaign if you're not careful. There are generally two reasons a player might be interested more in something else besides your story: they are more invested in a side quest than the main quest, or they are looking for opportunities to roleplay, which they have an easier time doing with a non-story moment than during investigation of the main quest. The solution to these problems has less to do with rewriting your plans like the above examples and more to do with creating new content for your players to engage with. 

I started this article by addressing how in the mystery campaign, my players have strayed from the main path to get invested in details. As mentioned, they leaned on band practice as a plan rather than investigating a murder; they have also interrogated someone I meant to be a footnote at most and pulled a five-footer. This doesn't mean that they're a bad party. In fact, none of the issues in this article mean that players are failing; it just means they're responding to things other than what you intended them to. But especially with this category--players interested in non-story elements--what we're dealing with is not a communication breakdown, but rather an indication that the story isn't working as we're intending. So solving the problem means, as I mentioned above, creating more content to bridge the players into the story. 

Let's address side quests becoming a central focus first. Remember that we're not necessarily trying to push the players into the story; we're trying to meet them halfway. I'll use an example from the mystery campaign since it has lent itself so much to roleplaying trumping the story. The players intended to speak to high roller Clover Loom about the reports that she had offered to pay someone to steal from and/or kill the inventor Lyssbetonk Cogswagon. But the plan the players and their characters devised was to convince Loom to start a business with them. They pitched a unique business using false identities, and they ended up spending considerably more time discussing their business plan (a decoy) than investigating Loom herself. I found myself wondering how effective this strategy would be. As it turned out, the player characters allow Loom to go unquestioned for the most part, opting instead to infiltrate the high roller circle in town. This is not a failure, however; they did get the information they needed, and they allowed themselves entry to a closed society that would benefit them later. Why penalize the players for taking a different strategy than I would? They were leaning into roleplaying, and so I responded by adjusting my plans. I started considering the ways that different people in the high roller circle would respond to the unconventional and upstart party, and although this choice by the players also means playing the long game (which I hadn't considered), I think it's a great digression for the story. Remember that you as GM are not just trying to tell a story. You are trying to help tell a story. Let the players make choices like this. They're not so much ignoring the story as inspecting all their options and being creative. This is ultimately what I want from my players. So I move to meet their new goals, and the story shifts to suit what is coming. 

And then there's the drive to roleplay. This could only be an issue in the most specific scenarios--I would argue that it's only a problem when it negatively affects the other players' experiences. That's the kind of problem you can deal with via my guide to building a cohesive party before it becomes a problem. But by and large, when your player characters are driven to roleplay rather than progress the story, you've effectively diagnosed what they care about. Now you can do two things to give your players what they want: give them more opportunities to roleplay in new ways, and get their favorite characters involved in the story. This is less of an either/or situation; you should really do both to make your game ideal for your players. 

Let's start with how to give roleplaying opportunities. You can do this in a myriad of ways. The easiest is to let up on the GM reins and just let the players spend some time doing as they wish. This is also a great way to check in and see what your players really want; they'll be doing it, so recognizing it is easy. Be ready to be in-character for whatever NPCs they encounter--feel free to use my NPC database with its detailed descriptions of characters you can drop into your campaigns. Roleplaying also grows out of small, less consequential quests. Perhaps a street urchin asks for help dealing with a corrupt guard, or a widow needs someone to carry the coffin of her late spouse. These micro-quests are less about success and failure; they should require very little rolling of the dice. Rather, they should be situations with rich possibilities for roleplaying. Add as much emotion to these scenes as possible, as that is the fuel roleplaying often relies on. These small touches are simple and will pull your players into the possibilities of their roleplaying. 

So now you've allowed your players the space to express themselves in the freedom of not sticking to the story. It takes a certain level of comfort as a GM to manage this; you need to be willing and able to improvise as you go, and you have to trust that your players can have fun without the direction of a story they're dutifully following. But once you're there, and your players are in the zone, you'll find the rewards are quite limitless. Players and their characters will both be more engaged in whatever happens, and that is really chief among my goals as a GM. But you don't have to abandon your story! In fact, you can use your players' desires to roleplay to get the story back at the center of their experiences. It just takes some creative writing like we used with the monster-spawning dungeon above. 

Let's say that, hypothetically, my mystery campaign players decided ultimately that they are having more fun masquerading as rich folks than they are solving a crime. It allows them to roleplay more effectively and they're portraying their characters as being fed up with being investigators. (This is not that far from the case currently.) How do I get them to get invested in the crime again? In fact, I have quite a few options. I could allow my murder mystery to recede into the background for a while and let the players experience the game as they're trying to; perhaps the story will orient in a new direction, or perhaps the murder mystery will return to the players' interests. I could push the murder mystery back into focus by having high rollers start turning up dead with links back to the original murder; this might convince the players that the murder mystery still matters. I could allow the players a campaign that goes much longer than I anticipated, giving time to truly build their business and infiltrate the upper echelons of society; perhaps the city guard, who are forcing the player characters to complete the investigation, grows tired of their traipsing with the rich and begins trying to sabotage their new business. I could even use story agitator Dirk St. Patrick to put more pressure on the party; perhaps Dirk has no scruples about blackmailing the party over their secrets and their roles in the high roller circle. All of these represent attempts not to correct the players, but to meet them halfway. 

That's really the bottom line with all issues when your players are ignoring your story. It's more likely to indicate that your story is broken than that the party is broken. So diagnose the issue and push yourself to give the players what they want. If you're pushing them back to your story, try something new to hook them. An out-of-game "I need you all to follow the story" is an awful tactic--it removes the simulation of free will in the game, it places your story on rails, and it denies you the potential to solve these issues with your players. Instead, create more content to satisfy your players and give them incentives to return to your planned content. It's a simple strategy, but it works very well if you're sensitive to your players. 

These guidelines should help to both get your story back on track and give the players what they want. It's a "best of both worlds" scenario--everybody's happy when the GM and the players are all working together. Coming soon: my accents resource, how to balance your game, and how to help players find their fun. Until then, happy gaming!

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