What To Do When Your Players Get Stuck in D&D - The Role of the Ref 

Inspired by a few threads on Twitter about “fail forward” mechanics, I thought it would be

fun to go over some of the options other than FF mechanics. Not that you shouldn’t use

them, by all means go for it! But if you want other options, here are a few ideas.

What I gather from many of the discussions I’ve seen is that the purpose of fail forward mechanics is to keep the game from getting stuck. Sometimes your players hit a situation they can’t solve because of a failed roll, and the value of fail forward mechanics is that a failed roll still pushes you forward. 

That’s elegant design, and I appreciate it for what it is. 

But I played for years without it, and found there are a lot of other options for the ref to keep things moving that don’t involve coming up with fail-forward conditions for the roll. Also, sometimes the players are stuck and trying to figure out what to do and they don’t even have a roll to make, a fail forward mechanic won’t help with that! 

Here are a few things that have worked for me.

1. Ask what they would do

Not as characters, but as people. I know this sounds odd, but I find asking them, “OK, but what would YOU DO if you had to cross a chasm” is sometimes useful. It gets them out of the perspective of their character’s skills and limitations and gets them to look at the problem on its own for a moment. When the players were stuck at a chasm in a recent session (the party had arrived at a chasm in a cave complex and none of them had fly or teleport or anything) I asked them this question. Eventually one replied, “well if the bandits came this way (they were trying to find the hideout of a large group of bandits and the trail had led here) they probably didn’t have the magic to get them all across, maybe there is another way across”. That led to some searching the area, and they found a cache of ropes and grappling hooks behind some rocks. 

2. Ask why they are here

Sometimes reminding the group of their goals can allow them to realize that maybe they don’t need to do something. Right now my Friday group is going through Barrier Peaks, exploring a crashed spaceship. There are a LOT of rooms in that ship, and most are empty of anything useful. So they don’t have to search EVERY room, and the cards to get into some of those rooms are located elsewhere, so they might find them later. They were stuck on a door they couldn’t open, and were determined to get in. I asked them, “why are you here right now” when they were getting frustrated. Their task was to find out why monsters had been appearing in the valley near the crashed ship. This was just one door of hundreds in the ship. Suddenly the penny dropped, they didn’t have to go into this particular room right now. So they left. 

3. Review the environment

Players are always at an information deficit compared to their PCs, they don't have anywhere near as much information as their PCs would. So reviewing the environmental features can sometimes get the players to an epiphany. In my Tuesday group one of the party members has eyes of the eagle, and while on a road travelling spotted a group of flying creatures coming from a distance. So they had warning, but they couldn’t decide what to do. They were freaking out, as the flying creatures were perytons, and a decent sized group as well. They got stuck. 

So I said, “Where are you right now”

“Travelling to Gorsham”

“No, where specifically are you at the moment”

“On the road”

“What’s around the road”

“Ummm, I don’t know”

“When you started out this morning I showed you the map, what was on the map” 

Silence...  wait for it… 

“THE ROAD FOLLOWS THE EDGE OF THE FOREST, WE COULD HIDE IN THE TREES”

Bingo.

4. Review their character sheets

As an OSR guy I’m big on the idea that the answer isn’t always on your character sheet. BUT SOMETIMES IT IS. Players forget what’s on their sheet, forget what their spells can do, forget their abilities and items, ALL THE TIME. Sometimes we pull out the sheets and go over them together and see if there is anything useful. And that can lead to fun stuff. My Thursday group once wanted to make a big signal fire but were worried about causing a forest fire as they were in a dense section of the forest. We reviewed sheets and discovered that the warlock had affect normal fires, and affect normal fires grows the fire but doesn’t add to the heat. 

5. Draw parallels with past situations they may have forgotten

The players sometimes forget when they did things in the past that were similar to what they are facing now. You can’t assume they will remember everything from past sessions, or what worked before. I think it’s fair to remind them of past actions when this happens. In a recent game the PCs needed to draw their opponents away from a spot and get to that spot while they were away. They were stuck on how to do that. So after some time I reminded them of the last time they used levitate on an opponent. The spell lasts for 40 minutes at their level, and when it ends the object comes plummeting down to earth at a terrific speed. They put two and two together and found a large rock (400 lbs is the limit), gave it a push when it started levitating up so it was over a pile of rocks, and let it rise for the full 40 minutes. Meanwhile they got close to the spot they were looking to get into. Then the spell expired, and the 400 pound rock came crashing down from 400’ in the air, that made some noise. The noise drew out their opponents and gave them an opening. 

6. See if anyone has a relevant skill or background that would give them a clue

Even in OSR games PCs have skills outside of their class, and sometimes these are relevant to the task at hand. I had a group stuck on crossing a fast moving river, they were worried about monsters in the river so they didn’t want to swim. They also didn’t want to try and find another way around. So I told them to check their skills. One of them had “carpenter” as a skill, and they asked if they could build some sort of raft. Of course, you don’t have to be a carpenter to build a raft, but once they were reminded of the skill, it occurred to them to do so.

7. Take 5

For real. Tell them to take a break. Players can get like a dog with a bone sometimes, but the stress of it makes it hard to think. Get up, walk away from the table, take a smoke break, grab a snack, take a bathroom break. Whatever. Just walk away from the task and refocus. The heat of the moment can make it more difficult than it needs to be.

8. Have something happen that pushes them forward

This is the closest I come to “fail forward”, the environment they are in is not static, there are other things around. If they are standing around a door trying to decide if they should go through it maybe something COMES THROUGH THE DOOR. Also, I don’t stop rolling for random encounters or wandering monsters when the PCs are stuck on a task. THINGS HAPPEN WHILE YOU TRY AND FIGURE IT OUT. 

9. Don’t create environments where the PCs get bottlenecked

If you create a bottleneck in the game you have to be prepared for the fact they might not get past it. That means that there should be multiple ways to achieve your goals. They don’t have to be obvious or easy, but in most cases there should be more than one option to solve the problem.

10. Give them permission to leave or do something else

This is a big one. I have a group going through White Plume Mountain right now and they made it past the gynosphinx and the pit, the hall of copper plates and the frictionless room. They arrived at the inverted Ziggurat with the scorpions, manticores, etc. and just hit a wall. They spent a while discussing strategy and just couldn’t decide what to do. One of them turned to the others and said, “OK, lets go explore the rest of the dungeon, maybe we will find something to help us there.”

Winner, winner chicken dinner.

I think they got to the point of being able to do this as I’ve pointed it out to them a ton of times, just because they are trying to do something they don’t HAVE TO KEEP DOING IT if it isn’t working at the moment. It’s a big game world, get out and explore it!

11. Give them hints

This is a last resort, but I have used it a few times. Given the information gap between PCs and players, I think it’s fair sometimes to just drop a hint. Don’t give away the game, don’t make it too obvious, but sometimes even a small clue will get them moving in the right direction. They still have to figure it out, they are still being challenged, but it will lower the frustration level to have some progress.

The point of all of these suggestions is that you aren’t telling them exactly what to do, or giving them the answer, you are giving them prompts so that THEY can figure out the answer, or at least a course of action that moves the game forward. Just moving them on to the next situation to avoid “failure” robs them of their agency to some degree, giving them prompts still requires them to make decisions, be observant and achieve goals, but it doesn’t bog down the game or make their decisions for them.  

I have started off 7 groups over the last two years, and every one of them has had an observable learning curve with respect to this issue. At first they want to do everything, beat every challenge, solve every problem. But over time they learn to pick their battles, and to be OK with walking away or trying unconventional things. I think many players fear that if they don’t complete task X then the ref won’t have anything for them to do. After playing with me for a while they see that THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING ELSE TO DO, so they don’t feel the need to solve every problem or solve it right away.