“I pick up the knife” is now a mini-meme among my party and obviously it just means “I did something impulsive and now it’s going to take two sessions to solve.”
“I pick up the knife” saga continues because listen we can sit around failing investigation checks all day or we could play d&d
Something a lot of newbie GMs get tripped up by is that player “stupidity” is often a power move on the part of a disruptive player. Basically, they’ll deliberately do something that ought to get them killed off five minutes into the session, and as a GM you’re faced with two bad choices: if you back off and contrive an excuse to let them survive, you’ve demonstrated that you can be pushed around, while if you stick to your guns, you look like the bad guy.
The trick is, you don’t actually have to solve it in-character. The real solution is to do an end-run around the manufactured dilemma by addressing the player directly and telling them to stop being a dick.
(And as always, “I was just playing my character“ is never an excuse. Even if your character legitimately is the sort of gormless dipshit who wouldn’t last five minutes on an adventure without constant GM babysitting, you chose to define them that way in the first place. Still a dick move!)
“okay here i’m gonna use a glitch where i threaten to spill mountain dew all over the dm’s lord of the rings lego playset unless he lets me find the amulet early”
I apologize for lashing out. One of my players threw themselves in acid after they were fully aware it was in fact acid. I did not and still do not know how to deal with that.
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