In my group all my players act on their own. They do not really communicate with each other and unless they have a direct part or a stake in it they do not really care/help/support/share with each other. I am a little tired as a DM getting the group to cooperate. In a fight they work fine together which doesnt bother me but out of battle in roleplaying they just all look after themselves. I do not want to just tell them basically work together or you all die unless I have to so I was wondering what to do.
1) Have the players work out, before the first actual game session, why their characters are together and cooperating. The DM would assist in this; there's a lot of trading back and forth, and their being together may or may not involve a major theme of the adventure/campaign. This effort may alter backstories, occasionally even character concepts. The The 1000+ Game thread is an excellent example of this. (Truth in advertising: I'm one of the four major participants in that thread.) It's a bit late for your campaign to do this though.
2) Once the game has started, the players and/or DM look over the character backstories and concepts and identify something they have in common that can be turned into the primary aim of at least several adventures if not the entire campaign. This is one reason why "end of the world" scenarios such as the one in Order of the Stick are not unusual: everyone except a complete nihilist will have some incentive somewhere to keep the world from ending.
(This actually happened in a World of Darkness game I was in once: a completely self-centered character said to such a nihilist NPC, "You want to do WHAT to the world that MY BOOKSTORE is in?")
"The world does not work the way you have been taught it does. We are not real as such; we exist within The Story. Unfortunately for you, you have inherited a condition from your mother known as Primary Protagonist Syndrome, which means The Story is interested in you. It will find you, and if you are not ready for the narrative strands it will throw at you..." - from Footloose
Yes, that's not really the DM's job to try to herd a bunch of cats into cooperating with the story after it's written, on top of all the other jobs a DM has to do.
A team of PCs in a cooperative game is not the place for a collection of lone wolves who refuse to have anything in common and cannot or will not work together! The players bear most of the responsibility of building characters and a party that work well enough to accomplish their goals.
Like warrl said, you should have had some minimal involvement in team-building before the adventure started, mostly in the form of encouraging players to speak up about the character they are developing and brainstorm together, and in the form of asking questions like "how does your character fit into my game world, what does your character do as part of the team, why is he working with the team, and how does (s)he know the party?", asked anytime the players seem like they are stuck or lost. But beyond that minimal involvement, really it should be up to the players understand that, whatever characters they create, those characters are part of a team, and they are the ones who have to explain why their lone-wolf characters are working together.
Perhaps it might be best to take some time before your next game session to tell the players what your concern is, and then explain to them that you as the DM are not going to keep pulling your punches to keep their characters' bacon out of the fire. There are real consequences in the game world for characters who cannot or will not take advantage of the best resources available to them, and those resources include first and foremost their team-mates. After that, the PCs will have to either swim or sink, and learn their lesson the hard way.
In the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin, to a bunch of would-be lone-wolves trying to look out for themselves alone in a revolution against one of the world's greatest superpowers, "We must hang together, gentlemen...else, we shall most assuredly hang separately."
Trying to solve out-of-game problems (like cheating, bad attitudes, or poor sportsmanship) with in-game solutions will almost always result in failure, and will probably make matters worse.
Gun Safety Rule #5: Never point the gun at anything you don't intend to destroy. (Never introduce a character, PC, NPC, Villain, or fate of the world into even the possibility of a deadly combat or other dangerous situation, unless you are prepared to destroy it instantly and completely forever.)
Know your group's character sheets, and check them over carefully. You don't want surprises, but, more importantly, they are a gold mine of ideas!
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's a problem if the players aren't having fun and it interferes with a DM's ability to run the game effectively; if it's not a problem, 'fixing' at best does little to help, and at worst causes problems that didn't exist before.
"Hulk Smash" characters are a bad match for open-ended exploration in crowds of civilians; get them out of civilization where they can break things and kill monsters in peace.
Success is not necessarily the same thing as killing an opponent. Failure is not necessarily the same thing as dying.
Failure is always an option. And it's a fine option, too, as long as failure is interesting, entertaining, and fun!
"Broken or not, unbalanced or not, if something seems to be preventing the game from being enjoyable, something has to give: either that thing, or other aspects of the game, or your idea of what's enjoyable." - Centauri
Perhaps they don't want a game with roleplaying (or at least very much of it). It could be that you want and what they want are not aligned. Find out by asking them.
Maybe they'd rather explore dungeons and kill creatures they come across. That's a perfectly acceptable way to game if it's fun. If they are roleplaying novices, you can instead focus on a location rather than plots. Focus your DMing lens on the history of the dungeon and how it logically/organically "works" and highlight that to the players as they kick the crap out of every living and unliving thing they find. If you do it right, they might start putting two and two together and find they actually do have an interest in the dungeon outside of killing its occupants. And that plants the seed for roleplaying in the broader campaign.
But do talk to your players directly about this issue in a non-judgmental way. There is no "right" way to play D&D.
No amount of tips, tricks, or gimmicks will ever be better than simply talking directly to your fellow players to resolve your issues. Reduce DM Prep & Increase Player Engagement:Don't Prep the Plot | Structure First, Story Last | Collaborative Roleplay | "Yes, and..." | Prep Tips Games I'm Running on Roll20: Island of the Frog | Vanguard of Dis | Star*Juice | Tesseract | The Crucible | Fimbulvetr | The Delve | Draj, City of the Moon Follow me on Twitter:@is3rith
I hadn't considered the possibility that the original poster was talking about role-playing.
I took it to mean that there was no cooperation or teamwork, in combat or out of it, so that the party was suffering as a result of it, and the DM was having to do extra work to keep bailing them out of trouble to keep them alive.
Iserith's right: it's worth pausing the game and chatting with the players to see if they are having fun. If they are enjoying themselves by playing the way they are playing, then it's not broken, and there's no need to fix it. If the players agree that lack of teamwork or lack of role-playing is bothering them, then there might be a problem to fix.
Whatever the case, it's not the DM's job to make PCs that work together, it's the players' job. If the party can't survive balanced encounters because they are working against each other, then it's not your job as the DM to keep saving them.
Trying to solve out-of-game problems (like cheating, bad attitudes, or poor sportsmanship) with in-game solutions will almost always result in failure, and will probably make matters worse.
Gun Safety Rule #5: Never point the gun at anything you don't intend to destroy. (Never introduce a character, PC, NPC, Villain, or fate of the world into even the possibility of a deadly combat or other dangerous situation, unless you are prepared to destroy it instantly and completely forever.)
Know your group's character sheets, and check them over carefully. You don't want surprises, but, more importantly, they are a gold mine of ideas!
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's a problem if the players aren't having fun and it interferes with a DM's ability to run the game effectively; if it's not a problem, 'fixing' at best does little to help, and at worst causes problems that didn't exist before.
"Hulk Smash" characters are a bad match for open-ended exploration in crowds of civilians; get them out of civilization where they can break things and kill monsters in peace.
Success is not necessarily the same thing as killing an opponent. Failure is not necessarily the same thing as dying.
Failure is always an option. And it's a fine option, too, as long as failure is interesting, entertaining, and fun!
"Broken or not, unbalanced or not, if something seems to be preventing the game from being enjoyable, something has to give: either that thing, or other aspects of the game, or your idea of what's enjoyable." - Centauri
