Howdy all,
My current group is much more RP focused than most of my previous groups. We had one session which was somewhat of a typical dungeon delve. I received feedback from the players that they wanted more role-playing opportunities.
So the PCs spent the second session completely in town speaking with various NPCs and each other. There were 0 combat encounters in the second session. After that session, the players stated that it was a lot of fun.
As such, I'm trying to include more opportunities for the players to interact with one another and NPCs.
I'm looking for any suggestions people may have to keep the RP fresh and exciting.
Thanks in advance.
Greetings Tormsskull,
So I frequent these forums for opinions, but have never posted before. Just a heads up.
One thing that I love to do is to give players opportunities to Role play during combat. Allow them to describe their attacks, describe the enemies attacks for them, and make use of the "Talking is a free action" rule.
Let the enemies taunt the players, allow the players to attempt non violent, creative solutions to things. I believe that your players will appreciate how fresh and fun combat can feel when it is not just *Roll dice* You hit, deal damage.
If you already do this, Great!
Perhaps make it a primarily urban campaign? The close proximity to people should let them talk to NPCs and scratch their itch for RP. It sounds like your players love to interact with the world.
Tower of the Last Baron could be entirely RP'ed.
To keep it fresh, npc's need goals. Yes, stat blocks are nice, but you need to go further. What is that NPC trying to accomplish? That will give you a handle on what they will say, what resources they will share, and what trades they can make.
I also find the Diplomacy skill sub par as written. Rich Burlew's rewrite is stronger at Giant in the Playground, and the Alexandrian rewrote that, so either one is an upgrade.
I haven't really tried the Social combat deck, but it looks cool.
Finally, check for more specific advice at Gnome Stew, there's a lot there to help.
My general advice is to use "villain-based plotting." Basically, there is A Villain, who may or may not be known to the party initially, and he has A Goal he wishes to achieve.
To that end, he takes Actions using his Resources and Capacities. The party's job is, basically, to stop him.
This naturally lends itself to an open-ended sandbox on the players' part, where they can do as much or as little roleplaying as they like. For example, if the Villain wants to corner the world's supply of yo-you polish, they could deal with that without any role-playing at all by simply kicking in the door of where he is stockpiling the stuff and killing everything that moves, or they could run a long, RP-intensive con on him (or on some of his minions) that results in an interruption of supply, so that he has to take the fight to them, or maybe they just want to ninja around, gathering evidence, and then persuade the cops to raid the place.
The advantage of this approach is that they get to decide for themselves if they want to roleplay and what they hope to get out of it.
I also find the Diplomacy skill sub par as written. Rich Burlew's rewrite is stronger at Giant in the Playground, and the Alexandrian rewrote that, so either one is an upgrade.
Personally I have a strong distaste for Diplomacy rolls. I feel they are often used (intentionally or not) to bypass role play sessions. I suggest minimizing social rolls and actually playing out the conversation that happens.
If your players need to convince a king to send money to a struggling village then let them come up with reasons for why doing so would benefit the king. If the king is particularly stubborn or a player is having trouble being articulate where their character would excel, then the players can roll in addition to the role playing (Which is how I feel it should be done).
But if the players have a very convincing argument, or the king is kind-hearted, then there is really no reason to have to roll for diplomacy.
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Urban adventures is one good way of building in more RP. Or give them a quest that involves travelling far and wide on land and sea so that they can experience new environments and new peoples as they try to find what they seek.
Giving each PC a mentor, friend or organisation to introduce adventure hooks, that may sometimes conflict with each other but provide layers of villains and neutrals.
Just a couple of ideas.
Cheers
Perhaps a subterfuge and espionage focused campaign? I know that style is my personal favorite. There are struggles and obstacles to overcome, but they come in the form of roleplaying and subterfuge rather than combat (although combat is still to be had, mostly if/when they mess up).
When you do dungeon crawls, remember to include monsters that fit into the local area and can be negotiated with.
Nothing is quite as fun as talking your way out of a fight because the beastie just wants to be left alone, or even turning an enemy into a friend.
The key for me is the strength of the characters - they should have motivations (as has already been suggested) but also quirks, traits, opinions, and recognizable attributes. My advice is to steal ideas liberally from TV / film / books / computer games - whether you think a character stands out. You don't need to copy the whole character, just the traits.
Secondly give the players choices. Never present one door when you could present two. Make the dungeon decor relevant and interesting and ideally interactive. Present moral dilemma's - prisoners, goblin children, the survivor who knows the way down but won't tell. If your group is anything like mine they will happily role play off each other for 20 mins given a sufficiently interesting idea.
Whether you decide to make your campaign take place in an urban setting or not, there can be multiple opportunities for roleplaying available.
And one of the most crucial skills for a good DM is what I call "pacing": carefully dosing out combat, roleplaying, exploring and book-keeping components of the game. If a session is exclusively combat (or more likely, combat + exploration + book-keeping) then players can feel a little frustrated, especially if they came intending to play a "roleplaying game".
I'm looking for any suggestions people may have to keep the RP fresh and exciting.
NPCs can be found nearly anywhere: in a city, in the countryside, in the middle of the wilderness or even in a dark and spooky dungeon. The key element in "keeping things fresh and exciting" is giving them an agenda. If most NPCs have a goal, a personality, a few quirks and speech mannerisms, then players will get into RPing with them, especially if they are on the path to whatever the PCs are wanting to do.
Some NPCs should have clues, rumors or tidbits of information that the PCs need. Some will "know a guy who knows a guy". A few will actually have items the PCs need, be it healing potions, a map or even the special key that is reputed to open the McGuffin family vault.
But when you talk about a session with *only* RPing, I can't help thinking that there's something wrong with this picture too. Good pacing means balancing combat opps and roleplaying opps. Sure, your players may have said they had a good time, in contrast to the previous session which was all combat, but I bet they would have had a better time if you had managed to sprinkle a little combat in between the roleplaying sequences.
I find it odd that people associate roleplay-heavy sessions with urban adventures. Wilderness adventures can be just as chock-full of roleplaying opportunities as a big city. Admitedly, meeting loads of people to RP with in a dusty web-choked dungeon is a bit of a stretch. But that's when exploration and book-keeping sequences will take some of the load off the pure combat opps, and hold folks over until they are back in somewhat more civilized environs.
I could write whole chapters on the topic of pacing, and I'm sure you could find a few in various DM guides for various games. It's a tricky skill and one I don't always live up to myself. Sometimes things get away from you, and those golden roleplaying opps you meant to include don't pan out. Or the roleplaying ends up crowding combat out of your available time slot. But the best RPG sessions are carefully balanced between the four elements I mentioned above, and that remains something I strive for.
I've always found the best way to structure this sort of game (which I've run a lot, I once had a game of 3rd edition that, no joke, had 6 combats in 7 months of play) is to structure it as more of a setting that the players interact with than a story in which they need to intervene. So start with the game in a reasonably populated area, and figure out who the major factions and figures within those factions are, what they want, and what they're going to do about it. Make sure these agendas conflict at various points so there is some sort of conflict (else there really isn't a story.)
Then all you need to do is introduce the characters naturally to the various persons of interest in the setting, get across generally what it is that they want and what they plan to do about it (avoid "here is my evil plan in full" soliloquies), give the party some comparatively simple tasks to bring them up to the point that they realize that person X's goals are seemingly in conflict with person Y's goals, so they have to pick who they want to back or figure out a way they can both be happy (which need not always be possible, but let the PCs surprise you if they come up with something clever.) At this point the game largely runs itself provided you're on the ball about who all of the NPCs are and what they're planning to do.
One of my favorite ways to set this up is just to have the PCs asked to deliver some sealed letters to various persons of import at a local festival (so everybody's plausibly out and about), with the instructions that they are to hand-deliver the letter to the important person, but they ought not be seen doing so, and they absolutely under no condition should ever read any of these letters (in some groups, this will ensure that they do). Delivering the mail may seem beneath experienced adventurers, but their experience likely translates into "so-and-so knows you're reliable."
One thing you'll need to do with this sort of approach is to drop the way the game tabulates XP and either award the players levels for accomplishing a certain number of meaningful goals (however they accomplish them), or just give them levels every so often. Some parties are going to do everything they can do in order to avoid fighting, and those groups can be dissatisfied with how "by the book" advancement treats them.
But in a reasonably sized fantasy city you can assume that you can find, for example- an in-power political party, an opposition political party, a law enforcement institution, several different temples, an organized crime syndicate, possibly a disorganized crime syndicate, several seemingly legitimate guilds, a dissatisfied underclass, some folks who would like to elevate that underclass and may not be choosy about their methods, a place people go to learn various mystic arts, several advocacy groups for concentrations of people who don't fall into the majority group for the city, and more. So just consider who's important inside all the various organizations, what they're like, and what they want.
I've been experimenting with a more sandbox storyline in my game. The party have been sent to deal with a baron who hasn't been paying his taxes, only it's because the tax collectors have been repeatedly robbed by bandits. I've established personalities for the baron and his family, their idiotic guards, their secret underground area with an imprisoned troll, a torture chamber with an imprisoned psychopath, and the crocodile pit where the baron drops his enemies. The baron suggests the PCs pose as tax collectors to lure the bandits into a trap.
Meanwhile, the bandits have their own plans. They are living a Merry Men lifestyle in the forest. The local villagers have been bribed or threatened into silence.
Some of the characters are villains who deserve punishment, but it's not obvious who.
Also, there's a vampire in the area who might be any of the characters they've already met, and who can mind control people.
The party has freedom to investigate this as they wish. Do they want to explore the forest at random? I have encounters prepared for that. Do they want to team up with the bandits to rob the baron? I have a plan for that.
What they've actually done so far: find the bandits and befriend them, snuck into the castle basement, discovered the existence of the vampire's coffin, and rescued the troll and the psychopath. This was nothing I planned for, but it amuses me, and because I worked out the area in detail in advance, I can handle this kind of thing.
Personally I have a strong distaste for Diplomacy rolls. I feel they are often used (intentionally or not) to bypass role play sessions.
And this is WHY they were rewritten, Gamefire, so that it's not role-play or skill check, the way it is now, but role-play AND skill check, the way it is when a player tries to bravely leap across a pit and attack a foe.
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Personally I have a strong distaste for Diplomacy rolls. I feel they are often used (intentionally or not) to bypass role play sessions. I suggest minimizing social rolls and actually playing out the conversation that happens.
If your players need to convince a king to send money to a struggling village then let them come up with reasons for why doing so would benefit the king. If the king is particularly stubborn or a player is having trouble being articulate where their character would excel, then the players can roll in addition to the role playing (Which is how I feel it should be done).
But if the players have a very convincing argument, or the king is kind-hearted, then there is really no reason to have to roll for diplomacy.
There's more to it than that though, some players simply aren't able to articulate well, or at all, their ideas and some may simply be unable to come up with good ideas on the spur of the moment. For people like this not using skill rolls is essentially denying them the opportunity to play characters who are charming and diplomatic.
There's also the opposite side of it too, if there is no mechanical need to invest in Charisma, Diplomacy, etc then you're allowing players who are able to think quickly, spin a good story, persuade people, etc the same ability for free for their characters, which is unfair to everyone else.
A good balance is key imo, if people can roleplay the situation great, take it into consideration and perhaps give them a bonus on the roll, but to allow those unable to eloquently convey a characters feelings to be effective as these sorts of characters you have to be willing to let them use skill rolls in an area they are not personally good at.
The best way to balance "roll for diplomacy" and "roleplaying", IMO, is simply to give people "stunt" bonuses when the player gives speeches that are some combination of convincing, well-considered, and good roleplaying. That way you're encouraging people where they might need encouragement, but you're not punishing people for not being able to come up with something on the spot.
Feel free to give just ridiculous bonuses if what the player comes up with is really good.
Thank you to everyone that posted advice. All of it has been helpful. I'm going to try to incorporate some of it in my next session. Particularly the idea of the PCs being invited to a party, and describing the weather and sights/sounds/etc better.
I've been introducing a lot of NPCs and trying to make them original with their own quirks. I feel like that is going well, but I don't want to get into NPC overload. Maybe I'll try to have the party use a lot of the NPCs I've already introduced.
Thanks again. If anyone has any additional advice, please continue to post. It is appreciated.
Personally I have a strong distaste for Diplomacy rolls. I feel they are often used (intentionally or not) to bypass role play sessions.And this is WHY they were rewritten, Gamefire, so that it's not role-play or skill check, the way it is now, but role-play AND skill check, the way it is when a player tries to bravely leap across a pit and attack a foe.
I did check out Rich Burlew's rewrite and I do not think I fully understood it. It seemed to me to make diplomacy something like CMD, which could be interesting I guess, but still does not seem to address encouraging players to role play.
A good balance is key imo, if people can roleplay the situation great, take it into consideration and perhaps give them a bonus on the roll, but to allow those unable to eloquently convey a characters feelings to be effective as these sorts of characters you have to be willing to let them use skill rolls in an area they are not personally good at.
I may have not stressed it enough, but while I have a strong distaste for diplomacy and other social checks I do not eliminate them entirely. If a player is not particularly articulate, I just want them to give the gist of what they want to say. I try to facilitate role play as much as I can, so even if a non-articulate player still has an excellent argument that I can see no reason that the NPC would disagree with, then I see no need to roll.
The best way to balance "roll for diplomacy" and "roleplaying", IMO, is simply to give people "stunt" bonuses when the player gives speeches that are some combination of convincing, well-considered, and good roleplaying. That way you're encouraging people where they might need encouragement, but you're not punishing people for not being able to come up with something on the spot.
Feel free to give just ridiculous bonuses if what the player comes up with is really good.
I actually kinda like this idea, I think I might consider something like this when I feel a roll is necessary. Something similar to giving a PC a bonus to damage when they jump down from a higher place.
Another fun way to spice up social situations is using Paizo's "social combat" deck. I don't use it in the way intended, instead...
1) each PC gets to draw 1 card + 1 per point of CHA bonus (minimum 1 card). Each card has two options which may well inspire the PC into trying some new tack, and these options may be based on diplomacy, intimidate, bluff, sense motive or some knowledge check.
2) If they play a card, they get to redraw one. If they don't like their cards, at any time they can describe their own approach, pitch, action or attempt. Hence the cards are always *suggestions*, rather than imposed strategies.
3) If they dump the cards and propose their own thing, success DC and choice of appropriate skill depends entirely on the description they make of what they are trying to do. Sometimes this means players are actually making their character's pitch, more often it means the players are simply describing how their character is going about things, what he's offering and what he's trying to achieve.
Rich Burlew's system (and somebody, can't recall who, actually cleaned it up and streamlined it a bit) is a good way to get plausible DC values for various actions. Or the DM can just eyeball it, and guide social interactions in the direction that will make for a fun story and encourage player creativity and agency.
I found Rich Burlew's rules helpful, because they clarify what I can accomplish as a player. If my skills are high or low, I have a sense of what I can do. Do I ask for a discount of the horses we need to purchase, or do I ask the royal guard to leave the king and come with us?
I can estimate what's possible, which is what players do in combat all the time. They charge the ogre, or turn and run, based on their estimate of it's strength.
Try this: take a regular monster, and drastically change it's apperance. Leave the stats the same, but describe the ogre as a blue trapezoid, floating in mid air, that hums quietly.
They'll act completely differently because they don't know what it is, I'll bet.
And when you think about it, that's how many players act with non-combat encounters. They never learned how to adjust their behavior because there was no reason to, the GM gave out the information no matter what happened.