I think you really need to read the rogues post. Because there is some underlying issues that needs to be addressed. If not it can end in lots of hurt feelings. My two cents
This is a great topic. It's taken so many twists with accusations and blames and people bringing up things from their own past that it's really going to be tough to make a response that's both focused and useful. Maybe the Gygax be with me.
Your original question was: How do I stop a PC from killing an NPC without hurting his feelings or seeming unfair. That's a fair question. It doesn't matter why you want the NPC alive. It's your game, you can want her alive for any reason you like. I paid $37.00 for Rise of the Rune Lords; if a player decides to murder Aldern Foxglove in the middle of the town square in chapter one and get themselves run out of town, I'm gonna make sure that doesn't happen. Opinions of people on the Internet notwithstanding.
To answer your question you really have to know why he wants to kill the NPC. He's being a dick, yes, but why is he being a dick? It's clear to me, even without revealing anything from his post, that he thinks you way overplayed the clone card. You have screwed them repeatedly with the clones, culminating with stealing all their stuff. Power gamers get very attached to their stuff. Like dwarves. If you had shaved off his beard, painted his ass blue, and used him in a game of dwarf toss, he would have been less irritated. At least the game would have ended. The clones haven't gone away. They can steal their stuff again. And screw them again. And there isn't a damn thing he can do about it… Except kill your NPC and punish you in the process. To be honest, I can empathize with him. It's like an audit from the IRS; you just want it to be over.
That's the crux: you have to give him a way to get rid of the clones without killing the NPC. If you don't, your game is at a standstill. My advice would be to have the NPC be an important part of that. Consider that if someone was making clones of me I'd be pretty upset about it. I would want to do something about it. I would gather up whatever wealth I had and head down to local temple to ask the gods what I can do about it. Make a big production of it.
Visualize. The players are all waiting outside the church. After 48 hours of prayer, sacrifice, and spells, Khiana comes out.
Khiana: The gods have shown me the way to sever the link that creates the clones, but it is a dangerous path. I must prepare, and I must have help.
Tamarack: Of course I will go-
Khiana: No. (points a Taylor) Only he may accompany me. (To Taylor) The the goddess has revealed that my life and my death rests in your hands. And I must not die.
Khiana: (To the rest of the party) The clone link is a link of the heart. If I die, it does not sever: it passes to the one I love. And then to the one she loves, and so on. That was his plan all along.
Do you see the true insidious evil of his plan? The clones would sow fear and distrust until they grew greater than their love and they killed. Then their love would destroy them.
To sever the link she and Taylor have to find one of the clones. Taylor will have to keep the clone busy without killing it while Khiana casts a special dispel magic to sever its link with the master. Then she has to cast a blessing spell from a scroll to protect it. Then Khiana has to die. Most likely by taylor's hand. When she dies, her soul will move into the clone as per the normal spell description. Since you can't have a clone link to a clone the connection can't reestablish, but she also isn't dead, so it can't move onto the next person. The link is over. No more clones.
And Taylor even got to kill her.
Sure except in this care Marta is not dying. She is being put into a coma or knocked out, technically. She will be allowed to "wake up" after the danger has passed. :)
Only that this plan impinges upon the enjoyment of at least another player, as someone else in the group is having an in-game relationship with said NPC. If the NPC is violently removed from the campaign until its end, the player of the Rogue is taking away a part of the campaign the other player actively enjoys. And, reading that other thread, trying to cover it up with some heavy-duty rollplaying, stacking temporary bonuses for a gigantic Bluff check.
We're going to know what you decide in the end -- and we hope you do the right thing.
Illidyth is totally right -- this is NOT a book. And as a GM of decades also I'll tell you -- I've had my endings inexorably altered too -- and it's a challenge a good GM must rise to meet, otherwise we should be writing stories and not running campaigns.
You're completely s@@!-canning your credibility as a GM if you do this. I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than you're letting on, and you have to balance concerns that are OOC as well... most notably establishing somebody dear to you (for whom you may not or cannot {easily or at all} be truly objective towards) having a strong story connection to the NPC that ALSO your story seems to pivot on... so alongside your attachment to the NPC, you have to crap where you eat in relation to the storyline of somebody else at the table you'll have to deal with even after the session and campaign are called.
My bet is that you'll roll and tie your players hands, and for that you should be ashamed. I'll be ECSTATIC to find out now or down the line if you do otherwise though.
Where the hell do you get off insulting this guy over things which he hasn't even done yet?
If the npc is essential, you're going very close to the line to DMPC territory. Do not fall into this trap. Let the dice fall where they may.Close? The fact that this thing spilled out of a game and has spawned two message board threads on it, has shown that it went over that line long ago. When a DM gets as protective over an NPC on the scale that players do with their PC's, it's DMPC territory.
It's an important NPC alright, but Maugan already indicated that the plot can and will continue without her, only with consequences.
However he also has to take into account that allowing the Rogue to go forward with his intended action will probably impinge upon the enjoyment of the campaign on at the very least the other player whose character is in a relationship with the NPC in question.
People who are all up in arms about the poor widdle Rogues players feelings being hurt should also take into account that the other players have rights and feelings, too.
What the Rogues player is about to do has strong potential to lead to hurt feelings IRL.
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My main concern is whether the player of the rogue is accurate when he talks about campaign events or is simply paranoid and jumping to conclusions. If he is wrong, allowing him to take out the NPC is a bad thing for the other players and the campaign as a whole. If he is right, there are other methods to block the sort of liability he is seeing. I think he needs to look at a less disruptive approach.
Why should it? IF it's a justified ROLEPLAYING decision, then the other players should appreciate good drama, even if their characters are put out of joint. I've always gone by the guiding rule... "Actions Have Consequences" and do my best to stay out of it's way.Heck one of the best ways to motivate players is to get them attached to NPC's... and then brutally kill them. It's not something that should be overdone, otherwise the players don't attach to anything but it's a good once in a campaign maneuver. If the players generate their own drama, it's a plus.
Because it's a giant douchebag move to do stuff like that and has serious potential to cause real life stress between the group members. That's why. I can't of course speak for the player who is going to be negatively affected, but if another player would kill of my characters love interest because of his own rampant paranoia, then try to rollplay any suspicions away with some stacked Bluff modifiers, I'd be damned furious. Some players deal better with douchebaggery like this, but at least I would not be happy. At all.
It's also a douchebag move if said player is oblivious of the potential to hurt another feelings to the point of not caring. From what I've seen in the other thread, the player in question is doing exactly that.
This is a great topic. It's taken so many twists with accusations and blames and people bringing up things from their own past that it's really going to be tough to make a response that's both focused and useful. Maybe the Gygax be with me.
Your original question was: How do I stop a PC from killing an NPC without hurting his feelings or seeming unfair. That's a fair question. It doesn't matter why you want the NPC alive. It's your game, you can want her alive for any reason you like. I paid $37.00 for Rise of the Rune Lords; if a player decides to murder Aldern Foxglove in the middle of the town square in chapter one and get themselves run out of town, I'm gonna make sure that doesn't happen. Opinions of people on the Internet notwithstanding.
To answer your question you really have to know why he wants to kill the NPC. He's being a dick, yes, but why is he being a dick? It's clear to me, even without revealing anything from his post, that he thinks you way overplayed the clone card. You have screwed them repeatedly with the clones, culminating with stealing all their stuff. Power gamers get very attached to their stuff. Like dwarves. If you had shaved off his beard, painted his ass blue, and used him in a game of dwarf toss, he would have been less irritated. At least the game would have ended. The clones haven't gone away. They can steal their stuff again. And screw them again. And there isn't a damn thing he can do about it… Except kill your NPC and punish you in the process. To be honest, I can empathize with him. It's like an audit from the IRS; you just want it to be over.
That's the crux: you have to give him a way to get rid of the clones without killing the NPC. If you don't, your game is at a standstill. My advice would be to have the NPC be an important part of that. Consider that if someone was making clones of me I'd be pretty upset about it. I would want to do something about it. I would gather up whatever wealth I had and head down to local temple to ask the gods...
I like this idea. In fact, if the spouse was the first one to joke about 'maybe she's the big bad' perhaps something like this is what she's looking for.
So many RP options: save my love/destroy the world, save the world/destroy my love, save the world/redeem my love, or even join my love to rule/ruin the world.
Why are these less valid than the rogue's options?
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At this point, both of these threads have gotten VERY VERY convoluted.
First off to the DM OP in this thread: You have my sincere admiration. This campaign, from the small level of detail I've read here, seems to be as convoluted in thought, planning and execution, as any $20 hardcover I've ever read from a major publishing house. Regardless of how these threads pan out, you should feel proud of yourself for a campaign well written and well done. Anyone who's called you an idiot in this thread obviously hasn't read any of your very well written posts.
There's two topics I want to comment on here, and I'm stepping back from any detail because at this point I'm CERTAIN I do not have enough history or knowledge either of the details of THIS campaign or any past history of previous campaigns to give you any useful SPECIFIC advice. I'm going to try to take EVERYTHING you posted here at face value.
First, this campaign is COMPLEX. At least from what I've read here, it seems to be VERY VERY complex. This is awesome. However, complexity in a campaign creates branches in a story line path that can be very unforeseen. It looks to me like you've reached one of these branches. Best laid plans of mice and men, you've encountered a situation where (right or wrong) your PC has jumped to a conclusion you didn't intend for him to come to.
It's my opinion, just from what I've read, that you made this bed for yourself. Even now you've refused in this thread to identify the NPC as safe (and I get why, please don't) so I have to concur with your Rogue player that his interpretation of the events are AN interpretation that could be read. The person talking about Jade Regent and disallowing the PC to kill the main NPC in Act 1 is quite off from where we're at here. In this situation, you (the DM) have spent an inordinate amount of time convoluting the story and throwing curve balls at your players (a good tactic by any good DM).
The problem is when you have players who have only half the information, they are going to come to conclusions on half the information. Sometimes those conclusions draw actions that the DM can obviously say are wrong, but that the players may not be able to. In your post above about the way the party vs. rogue see things I say that both sides have valid opinions...She could be above reproach and she could be the BBEG himself (herself?). There's just not enough information in the campaign to know. This makes BOTH party opinions correct and thus makes the rogue's "Kill her now" action JUST as valid story wise as the rest of the parties.
I also appreciate your opinion that a decision/event as large as this should be handled by the PARTY of players and not a single player. Unfortunately that's not how this has panned out. That's not the reality of your story right now. The reality is that you have a single character looking to go Cowboy on information he's got only half right...
Maybe? I keep coming back to this point because it IS convoluted. The only way I can see agreeing with a heavy handed approach here is if your NPC was ABOVE REPROACH. And she's not...not according to the information posted here and in the other thread anyway. She has the possibility of being linked to the BBEG or even of BEING the BBEG. The rogue may be jumping to the wrong conclusion, but he's not doing so based upon the information he has.
Actions have Consequences is probably the best advice anyone on this thread can give you right now. You have two options as I see it at this point:
1) DE-complicate the story right now. Release some of your plot details, lay out some of your plot hooks, and show a bit more of your hand to your rogue player. Your player has to make a better choice than the one he's discussed with you...he's made his choice based upon the information you've provided him, so now, if this is really that important, you need to provide more info to allow him to make a better choice.
2) Follow "Actions have Consequences" and allow the action to happen. No one here can say definitively, based off of the actions we have, that the Rogue ISN'T doing better for the campaign (I'm not talking for the players of the campaign, I'm talking about for the imaginary story they're living out) by soul locking your NPC and tossing it in a dark hole somewhere. YOU may know that's not the case, your other players may BELIEVE that's not the case, but one player believes that IS the case, and he's got every right to act on it.
Any other option is contrived by you, the DM, to counter an action by your player. The original question in this thread is: How can I save my NPC? The answer is: You can't.
Not without accepting that you have crossed the line from story teller to omniscient player character. All of the ideas on this thread pre-suppose one very important fact: That someone already has knowledge of this Rogue's attempt to remove this NPC from the campaign. The fact you are asking for ideas means that you are about to actively attempt to counter the idea of a PC with knowledge that PC has given you out of character.
This ENTIRE thread means one thing: You, the DM are guilty of metagaming. This is a bad spot because the story cannot continue without the DM knowing all the details, but the players can no longer give you all the details for fear of you using those details against them.
Be cautious, you're quickly stepping into "Me vs. Them" territory. Your reasons may be the best in the world (and it sounds like they are, trying to prevent RL Heartache from the outcome of a game is always a noble cause), but your credibility as a DM to your players (not us "anonymous faces on the internet") is quickly going to come into question. It may be this one campaign for this one player, but what happens next time when another of your players finds himself in a similar situation? They look back at this campaign and see how you handled this event and realize that they can't trust you.
You save the NPC in this case by providing better motivation and better information to your player at an appropriate time (like when he's about to commit the act) that convinces him not to follow through on the act...if you can't do that, as a DM, you must sit back and let the actions have the intended consequences.
The second point I wanted to touch on was the motivation of the rogue player. It sounds like part of his interest is to surprise the rest of the party at the end with his wondrously devious actions for some big reaction at the end.
I cautioned him in the other thread about his motivations...making sure that what he's looking to do is better for the story and not for his personal ego. If this is an ego issue, where he wants this big ending so that he looks cool, or some such, then I'll present you a third option for how to save your NPC.
Just say no.
Don't metagame the information, don't RP the solution, don't try to rules lawyer or spell combine or otherwise give in to finding an IN CHARACTER reason to stop his actions. If you truly believe that this action is harmful, not just to your storyline but to your players and their enjoyment of the game, then you as the DM have not only the right, but the responsibility to tell the player that you will not condone such an action.
If he wants to argue with you tell him there's an over arcing rule that he may or may not find in the various handbooks but which has existed in D&D Since it's original printing back in the 1970's.
Have fun.
If his action is sure to cause conflict and pain and suffering to the other players, if it's going to cause drama and hard feelings among your gaming group, simply tell him no. Quit looking for IC solutions to OOC problems...deal with Out of Character issues out of character, deal with IC problems with IC solutions.
From everything I've read, IC the character is within his full rights to do exactly what he's trying to do. The IC solution is to let it happen or provide him better information to help him make a different choice.
OOC the character may be harming the group as a whole...that's a decision you have to make as the DM. If that is how you feel, stop the action. Period. You don't have to justify your actions as the DM to stop an OOC issue from occuring...here's where "It's my campaign, and I don't feel that action will have good consequences on this gaming group" is appropriate.
--Illydth
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I've read about half of this thread and everything from the other thread.
I'll make sure to avoid information crossover from the other thread so.
The player believes he has a justified reason for doing this. You have to ask him what his reason is, and if it is incorrect you should provide information IN GAME to him shows to him that he is wrong.
If his interpretation of the situation is correct, however, then we have a problem.
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As a DM, your primary responsibility is to make sure that all players are enjoying the game. From what I understand from both threads:
1) The rogue wants to ensure that the NPC is not a threat.
2) The other players want to protect the NPC.
If the NPC is not a threat, you can easily shut down this problem by making this clear to the rogue's player by a combination of OOC assurance or explanation and IC information that allows the rogue to trust the NPC. The rogue will then not be motivated to act against the NPC. Problem solved.
If the NPC is a threat, you can satisfy both parties by providing a way to eliminate this threat without causing undue hardship to the NPC. De-villainizing her through some quest cutting her connection with the Big Bad would work very well. Alternatively, you could isolate her from the action. The latter is what the rogue is actually trying to do, but his feeling he is acting alone leads him to take extreme measures. If you can find a more compassionate method for the group as a whole to send the NPC on vacation (Plane Shift to a friendly demiplane?) then that might satisfy the rogue that she's not a liability and also satisfy the players that she's not dead or cruelly imprisoned. The solution should also take the clones into account - you don't want confusion between hostile clones and the friendly NPC causing the rogue to want to kill them all to be sure.
Whatever the means, if the rogue feels she's not a threat and the other players are satisfied she's not threatened, your players will be happy. It's up to you to determine the means to attain this that fits best with your campaign, but you will probably need to sacrifice some storyline to keep the players happy. If you're not OK with that, try writing a novel instead.
This of course assumes that all players want to avoid interpersonal drama. If you think that some parties would actually enjoy more drama (and I'm not talking about the rogue tolerating it as a side effect of his plan) then there's another conversation to be had.
So, Op- what happened?
Looking at the 'common knowledge' from both of these threads, it looks like your enemies have a lot of options of interfering with this plan without it becoming metagamming. This Kianna has been with this party for a long time, and she is extremely familiar with their abilities, resources, and tactics, which is now all know to the enemy. And since the soul trapping tactic has been done before, it would not be much of a stretch for them to guess that has happened and act upon it after a while.
With this, it would not be hard to justify something tiny sized, with a lot of stealth and sleight of hand. It sounds like they want this NPC, and it much easier to steal a gem than to carry a whole person. Having one of your PCs aid in setting this up makes it all the easier.
This tactic might also work great with the fact you have clones. While I am not saying make the rogue go after a clone, I think it might be interesting for him to have to explain himself about why he knows the clone is not the original. With the soul gem gone, that makes his situation all the worse. But you are obviously not vindictive, but you can still play around with one or two of these ideas.
Without getting in too much detail here, I want to again point out that there are two possible alternatives here.
1: Either the rogue player is correct, and the NPC is a danger to the group.
2: Or she is not a danger to the group.
If 2, then you have to show this. If 1, then you have to provide some argument as to why this NPC should not be eliminated.
I'm playing an extremely cautious elf wizard in a Kingmaker campaign at the moment, and if he joined your group of players, he would not want to have regular dealings with any NPC whose goals are contrary to the group he is working with. It is, in fact, extremely likely that he would either help the rogue to eliminate this NPC or actually leave the group.
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I as a gm understand that this can be devastating to the game but as the dm u need to be fair to all and unbiased to all. U create the initial guide lines of the story the players right the rest. As a dm i have always strongly believed in the saying "let the dice fall as they may." Dont actively act against them but dont act in favor of them. If they do some thing that can get them killed then let them fall on there own sword.
1: Let the Rogue do his thing. If the Sorceress is an essential part of your story line, roll percentile for determining whether or not he killed the sorceress or just another clone. (Close to a cheat)
2: Let the rogue do his thing, and let the party deal with the rogue as they see fit.
3: Let the rogue do his thing, and let the town deal with the rogue as they see fit (I am assuming the NPC has helped the town now and then on her journey to level 16).
Once the rogue has done his thing:
1: Remind the players of their characters and how the characters would feel about/deal with this event, and the manner in which the event happened to unfold.
2: Ask the players if they want a break to figure out where to head next
3: Prepare for a TPK event and PvP combat scenarios.
Alright.... 5 months later they finally made their move.
What the Rogue has done.
After much consideration the rogue individually approached each of the party members in the group save for the NPCs PC love interest. One by one he sold them on his plan to trap the soul of the NPC. They have given the player of the other PC the option to either:
Know what all the plotting is about out of game
or be in the dark so as to not risk metagaming on information her character doesn't have available.
She has opted not to be put in the loop in the interest of more faithfully playing her character.
The plot at this point is flawless, unless the party's barbarian opts to seek out the advice of a third party diviner after the 2 day duration of the mind-blank has concluded there is no conceivable way that all her compatriots kidnapped her love interest.
What I've done:
In the second act of their penultimate adventure the party is going to come upon fragments of an ancient prophecy that hints that the NPCs involvement is crucial to their victory over the mage-bred monstrosities. If they had the other fragments they would learn that the prophecy is actually directed at another member of the Party.
I'm pretty happy with the present state of affairs, I think it'll create some excellent opportunities inter-party drama/conflict for the campaign climax.
Also, I'm never running a 1-20 campaign again, it takes eons to write adventures that need to factor in the ability of party members to cast wish and so forth >.<
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Be thankful that the Wish spell has been debuffed since 3.0. I will say this though 1-20 games imo are very fun if u write up every thing about the game being seasons, politics, civilized areas, pantheon, creatures native to home world, ext. Ive been running a game 2x a month for the last 24 years going on the 5th group now. I have no prob with players effecting the area and just letting the dice fall as they may and because of that there are some very fun things about the game that have been set in the games history. A great example was a player in my 2nd group that caused all the dwarfs to go to war with the elves, giants, humans, and orks. Earlier in the game one of the character found 1 of the 10 artifacts on the world being The Horn of Summon Undead and using Legend Lore and Scrying to find a location were past battles occurred and helped the other player set up the war on said location. Needless to say once the war started the character in possession of the Horn used it and called forth 10 Legions of undead. In a matter of moments all races allied and went after the undead. The entire world's main forces unified with that war thanks to the players. Another example was when a few of my players from group 4 came together and conquered an entire nation by simultaneously casting Spheres of Force dissected with Wall of Force with an open gate to the Positive Plane in one side and Negative Plane in the other to simulate the equivalent destructive force of a dam Nuke when the force spells dissipated.