After last night's session, my players and I had a long after-action discussion in which they expressed frustration at how their own in-game decision making has led them to circumstances that they find frustrating and un-fun.
I try to run the game in a way that is objective-based, but still fairly open – the players will have a goal, but may not know all of the details of what or how to accomplish it; they have to explore and make decisions, sometimes with imperfect information.
When planning the adventures (everything is 100% homebrew), I try to plan for a few decisions that the players are likely to make. One or two of them could be considered "optimal" – they give the players a quick path towards their goal. Other choices could be considered "sub-optimal" – they may force the players to take a more circuitous route to their goal, but they will always have a way to "fail forward".
Based on the conversation, my players feel frustrated for two reasons:
- They feel like they ended up in a frustrating and un-fun situation
- They feel like the decision that landed them there was really the only viable decision to make (what I thought to be the "optimal" decision was dismissed early on)
From my perspective: I do try to give hints at better options, but sometimes those go unnoticed. There are also times where if the party were to just push ahead a little further, everything would work out for them, but they change directions (of course, the players have no way of knowing this).
In summary, my question really comes down to two things:
- How to increase player satisfaction with in-game decision-making, given that they have to work with imperfect information?
- How to keep players happy while they deal with the consequences of making sub-optimal choices?
The party recently arrived in a city in which adventurers are not allowed to operate without the lord's permission.
They are presented with 3 options:
- Be conscripted into the army
- Pay a hefty "conscientious objector's" tax
- Face arrest
There are two additional options that I thought of, but didn't explicitly present, to allow for lateral thinking:
- Skip town
- Go into hiding
The players deemed options #1 and #3 unacceptable. #4 was likewise not an option because the quest that brought them to town was time sensitive and unskippable for broader campaign reasons. I gave them a hint that the area of town that they needed to go to for their quest wasn't frequently patrolled by the guards, hinting that Option #5 may be viable, but they instead choose for option #2 and pay out a large sum of gold.
(Had they pushed further down their main quest in the city, they would have found opportunities and allies that would have made Options #5 and even #4 more viable, but they had no way of knowing that at the point they made their decision.)
The party goes to the castle to pay the lord's minister who is disdainful of them for choosing to pay rather than be conscripted.
Almost immediately after leaving the castle, the party is attacked by a group of thugs sent after them by a businessman that they ran afoul of earlier. The players chose to attack the thugs lethally and kill them (even after I explicitly asked at least twice if they were dealing lethal or non-lethal damage) and then chose to wait for the city guard with the bodies after the fighting had ceased. (This is due to a personality trait of one of the PCs to implicitly trust authority.)
This winds them once again in front of the minister they had angered earlier, who charges them with "disturbing the peace" and gives them the choice of arrest or immediate exile.
At this point, the session was drawing to a close, and I could tell that the players were unhappy, so I gave them the opportunity to adjudicate it with the lord of the city in our next session.
So based on all this, it's not a single decision that has the players upset. It's a culmination of decisions that has put them in a tough spot.
Best Answer
It seems like your definition of an "optimal" solution is very different from your players' definition, and that's creating issues.
Other answers have focused on how you might have given your players more information, and designed a more flexible adventure, and I do think that's valuable. I want to focus on your play group's second complaint, though:
In the scenario you described, your optimal solution is one that preserves the players' autonomy and costs them the fewest resources (breaking the law to avoid doing what the magistrate wants). On the other hand, your players chose an option which cost them significant resources but minimized the amount of time they would have to spend distracted from their main quest ("screw it, we'll just pay the fee so we can get on with our lives").
In other words, your players prioritized their main quest over something that they saw as a distraction from that quest. It's highly likely that your players are frustrated because they came to town with a very clear goal in mind, and everything they've had to deal with since they arrived has been an unwanted distraction from that goal. If I roll into town looking for Big Guns the Bandit Lord, only to have the City Watch demand I go to the king's house and fill out tax paperwork, I am understandably going to be annoyed. It probably irked them even more when, after burning resources not to have to deal with this unwanted problem, a combat encounter literally right outside the building forced them to deal with it all over again.
The problem isn't your players' decision-making process. The problem is that you gave your party five options for dealing with a problem they were not interested in dealing with.
Carrots are better than sticks
If you want to run the sort of game where players proactively discover solutions to the problems you lay out, you need to give their characters compelling reasons to want to solve those problems, rather than simply avoiding them. You can't just put an unrelated obstacle between them and the fun thing they were looking forward to, and expect them to engage. Players are far more motivated by rewards -- whether in the form of loot, character advancement, or story progression -- than they are by fear of consequences -- character death, imprisonment, or financial hardship. Sure, players don't like losing stuff, so they'll go along with stuff when they're threatened. They just won't have a lot of fun doing it, as you've discovered.
An example from my current campaign
A couple months ago, I had a situation vaguely similar to yours. The party's main quest involves chasing a villain from town to town, undoing the damage he's caused. When the party arrived in the next town, though, they weren't immediately sure where the villain was. I took the opportunity to introduce a side quest, but I didn't just have an authority figure demand that they do something. Instead, I offered the group an opportunity to make some money. The fighter was looking to get full plate armor, and the other party members needed new clothes and adventuring gear, so when an old friend came to them offering to pay them for some private detective work, they jumped at the chance. In short, I used an NPC they already had a connection with (roleplaying reward) to deliver a challenge, and completing that challenge meant making a large sum of money (material reward). The party was happy to pause their search for the BBEG while they played detective for a few sessions, knowing that I'd make it worth their while.
Once I had the player's buy-in, I was free to throw all kinds of obstacles in their path, because they knew that overcoming those obstacles would directly improve their chances of getting the reward they craved. But I didn't start making their lives difficult until after I got their buy-in for the quest.
How to turn sticks into carrots
In your campaign, you could achieve a similar effect simply by changing the order in which you presented your challenges. Let the party make their way into the city first, make some progress on their main quest, connect with some useful NPCs, and only then have the guards start interfering. But honestly, if the lord and the guards aren't somehow related to the quest the party is doing, and are just an extra bit of busy work for the party to deal with, it's probably best to just leave them out and save more time for the stuff your players are really interested in. You'll be amazed how much more industrious your players are when they're working towards something they actually want, rather than trying to avoid something they don't want.