My players are learning!

In last night's game, we were short a few people, so the party recruited a big pile of henchmen from the ex-mindslaves of the wizard they just killed. "I'm so thrilled with our weird army," said one. Then they went into a dungeon.  There was a split path between a giant spider lair and a meadow full of flowers and giant bees. The party started down the spider path, considered it, and then reversed, reasoning that walking into a spiderweb had a high fight chance and low odds of being full of treasure. Confronted with the bee room, they initially began thinking of a plan to smoke them out, but ultimately chose to follow the existing path, reasoning that if others passed through here often enough to make a path, the bees must not be excessively aggressive, and there's no reason to get into a fistfight with fifty bees if they can avoid it. 

 

I'm very pleased with their newfound ability to read warnings and make risk/reward judgements. 

That's awesome!

Mine... aren't, so much.  My most veteran player is pretty smart and perceptive, but he's also played a lot of 3.5 and Pathfinder and, I get the impression, has seen a lot of railroads.  So there's some stuff he looks at and seems to think "well, that's where the adventure must be, so here we go."  My words not his, but it's a trend.

Isn’t it a trope, though, for a spider’s lair to have the desiccated corpse of a thief with a gem worth an absurd sum hidden in a boot?

[quote="Dave"]

That's awesome!

Mine... aren't, so much.  My most veteran player is pretty smart and perceptive, but he's also played a lot of 3.5 and Pathfinder and, I get the impression, has seen a lot of railroads.  So there's some stuff he looks at and seems to think "well, that's where the adventure must be, so here we go."  My words not his, but it's a trend.

[/quote]

 

Yeah, I'm still having trouble training them to be more proactive and we're working on building a shared language of player-verbs beyond "Follow questlines" but I'm sort of hoping that choosing priorities and making judgement calls on a room-by-room level will eventually yield a dungeon-by-dungeon level and then we can just keep expanding outward. 

I'm pretty sure our year playing ACKS totally educated my players in terms of thinking things through and not racing into combat. To be honest, I was quite surprised at just how much they changed, and are now carrying that through to other games. That said, they've just about gone too far the other way now, spending so much time planning that the current GM that's giving me a break has started to implement countdowns to something happening in order to get them moving! (But let it not be said they ever enter a situation unprepared!)