D&D 5E [5E] [DM HELP!] Player Reliance on NPCs, Poor Spell Management, Poor Life Decisions

[Trudy]

Hi there!

I'm going to be running my first D&D game in a few weeks, and there's a couple of problems I've noticed while playing with some of the players as a player myself that I've got some Serious Concerns about when I start DMing. I'd really appreciate your advice / suggestions when dealing with these particular issues, because I've noticed them as a player, and I'm concerned they're going to continue to be an issue when I DM.

• Relying heavily on NPCs for answers, instead of trying to find these answers themselves.

A good example of this was in a game that we all played in last night; we captured a bearded devil, and those party members most interested in interrogating them began their interrogation. They went through a litany of questions: who are you, what are you doing here, where can we find X person, when did you last see X person, what is your name, how do we know you're telling us the truth about your name, etc. They were a half-second away from asking the man his entire life story.

It was clear to me in the first minute or two that we were getting nowhere with this, and that the DM wasn't going to give us the information we needed; this DM is not a master of subtlety, either, especially when she realizes she's not getting through to the players (though she's a damn good DM!).

However, these players are persistent. They won't stop. And while it encourages their DMs to forge fully-fledged and 3 dimensional NPCs because this group demands it, it also means that a good chunk of the game is spent roleplaying 'I'm not going to tell you anything' with them ad nauseam, or them asking a million questions of someone who really doesn't know the answers to the questions they're asking (or already supplied the few answers they knew). Logically, I know that if this is what they want to do, as DM I should simply roll with it -- but this is time I'd rather them spend productively roleplaying with one another rather than an NPC, or actually trying to find the answers themselves.

Has anyone dealt with something like this before? How did you handle this?

• Poor spell management.

Some spellcasters are not very good at spell conservation; they use their spells very liberally, and without consideration for what they may encounter next. Routinely, I've seen these players expend a 4th-level spell slot on 1- or 2-hit group encounters, and then as soon as they've depleted spell slots, demand a long rest at the expense of the players who were trying their best to use spells intelligently and save the big guns for more lethal / more challenging encounters.

This doesn't seem fair to those players who are careful about using their spells, and I'm not sure what to do about it; one person suggested making it impossible for them to take a long rest before certain encounters (but this isn't always possible). Another said that I should be better enforce the one long rest per 24 hours rule (which I'm not sure has been as rigorously enforced as it could be).

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what to do here? Should this be an out-of-game conversation, and if so, should it happen before I start running, or after we run into this problem the first time in-game?

• Making poor life decisions because they don't fear reprecussions.

My characters have made poor life decisions before, and they've dealt with repercussions; however, some DMs that have run for us before (particularly fledgling DMs) have struggled with this. A few weeks ago, for instance, another character decided to pickpocket a thief the Town Guard were dragging away, as the Town Guard dragged him away. He rolled poorly, and the Guard noticed. They were Not Happy, but let them off with a warning. This is likely to never come up again.

I would have run this encounter differently, but I know that improvising can be difficult, and this is a difficult line to walk to begin with. You don't want to ruin the players' fun, but at the same time, I feel that there needs to be a balance. If you make good life choices / make risky decisions and succeed and are rewarded, you should be penalized for making poor life choices / make risky decisions and fail.

Am I overthinking this? I don't want to ruin anyone's fun, but if players who make risky decisions are continually rewarded when they succeed, but face no penalty when they fail, they have no reason to carefully consider a litany of plans presented by other characters.

--

Thanks again for any advice that you can provide! I'm sure that I'm overthinking things, but I'm the sort of person who likes to be overprepared for every scenario, and this is definitely one of those situations where I want to know how to handle the problems I'm likely to encounter as a DM that I already see as a player.

 

[jasper]

Ok I think your problems are these.
1. Spending too long on NPC. As Dm tell them the NPC has not more information for you.
2. Long rest on demand. The party can rest but the monsters don't have too. Either they attack the party, are alerted to the party, or the plan moves on. Gee Trudy the Terrible, you arrive two days after the full moon. The were chickens have flown the coop. Colonel Sanders body has been deep fried. You find only one leg and thigh. Some tender strips are scattered over the site.
Trudy, " What you said we had 4 days."
DM, " You demanded 8 long rests".
3. I fear nothing! Kill their pc, Kill their pc! Or they get a rep.

 

[Trudy]

Long rest on demand. The party can rest but the monsters don't have too. Either they attack the party, are alerted to the party, or the plan moves on. Gee Trudy the Terrible, you arrive two days after the full moon. The were chickens have flown the coop. Colonel Sanders body has been deep fried. You find only one leg and thigh. Some tender strips are scattered over the site.
Trudy, " What you said we had 4 days."
DM, " You demanded 8 long rests".

I literally chortled at this. Thank you for a morning laugh.

 

[iserith]

Hi there!

I'm going to be running my first D&D game in a few weeks, and there's a couple of problems I've noticed while playing with some of the players as a player myself that I've got some Serious Concerns about when I start DMing. I'd really appreciate your advice / suggestions when dealing with these particular issues, because I've noticed them as a player, and I'm concerned they're going to continue to be an issue when I DM.

• Relying heavily on NPCs for answers, instead of trying to find these answers themselves.

A good example of this was in a game that we all played in last night; we captured a bearded devil, and those party members most interested in interrogating them began their interrogation. They went through a litany of questions: who are you, what are you doing here, where can we find X person, when did you last see X person, what is your name, how do we know you're telling us the truth about your name, etc. They were a half-second away from asking the man his entire life story.

It was clear to me in the first minute or two that we were getting nowhere with this, and that the DM wasn't going to give us the information we needed; this DM is not a master of subtlety, either, especially when she realizes she's not getting through to the players (though she's a damn good DM!).

However, these players are persistent. They won't stop. And while it encourages their DMs to forge fully-fledged and 3 dimensional NPCs because this group demands it, it also means that a good chunk of the game is spent roleplaying 'I'm not going to tell you anything' with them ad nauseam, or them asking a million questions of someone who really doesn't know the answers to the questions they're asking (or already supplied the few answers they knew). Logically, I know that if this is what they want to do, as DM I should simply roll with it -- but this is time I'd rather them spend productively roleplaying with one another rather than an NPC, or actually trying to find the answers themselves.

Has anyone dealt with something like this before? How did you handle this?

When I hear about games where there are a lot of interrogation scenes, that tells me the DM could probably stand to be more forthcoming with information. Monsters and NPCs can give out information during battles via banter, tipping of the PCs as to their plans. Intelligence found on the corpses after the fight can also work. I personally hate interviewing cagey, quirky NPCs as a player. We're the one leading lives of adventure - they should be interviewing us! As a DM, I give away a lot of information so we don't need to have interrogation scenes. So if you're not stingy with the 411, you shouldn't really have an issue.

Further, just get these PCs away from places where NPCs are hanging out by putting the adventure locations far away from towns or wherever NPCs cluster.

• Poor spell management.

Some spellcasters are not very good at spell conservation; they use their spells very liberally, and without consideration for what they may encounter next. Routinely, I've seen these players expend a 4th-level spell slot on 1- or 2-hit group encounters, and then as soon as they've depleted spell slots, demand a long rest at the expense of the players who were trying their best to use spells intelligently and save the big guns for more lethal / more challenging encounters.

This doesn't seem fair to those players who are careful about using their spells, and I'm not sure what to do about it; one person suggested making it impossible for them to take a long rest before certain encounters (but this isn't always possible). Another said that I should be better enforce the one long rest per 24 hours rule (which I'm not sure has been as rigorously enforced as it could be).

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what to do here? Should this be an out-of-game conversation, and if so, should it happen before I start running, or after we run into this problem the first time in-game?

Time pressure. They have X days to accomplish the mission and/or every time they rest, there is a risk of a random encounter. It should work itself out. It's not really on the DM to deal with poor resource management. That's a player skill - if they want to succeed more often, they need to plan better. Once they start failing time pressure scenarios or find that taking too long to accomplish a quest is causing future quests to be harder, they'll sort themselves out in my experience. If there is legitimate conflict between players over the matter, that's when I'd try to foster a conversation between the players to work something out. If not, then time pressure is the way to go and there are many ways to build that into adventure scenarios.

• Making poor life decisions because they don't fear reprecussions.

My characters have made poor life decisions before, and they've dealt with repercussions; however, some DMs that have run for us before (particularly fledgling DMs) have struggled with this. A few weeks ago, for instance, another character decided to pickpocket a thief the Town Guard were dragging away, as the Town Guard dragged him away. He rolled poorly, and the Guard noticed. They were Not Happy, but let them off with a warning. This is likely to never come up again.

I would have run this encounter differently, but I know that improvising can be difficult, and this is a difficult line to walk to begin with. You don't want to ruin the players' fun, but at the same time, I feel that there needs to be a balance. If you make good life choices / make risky decisions and succeed and are rewarded, you should be penalized for making poor life choices / make risky decisions and fail.

Am I overthinking this? I don't want to ruin anyone's fun, but if players who make risky decisions are continually rewarded when they succeed, but face no penalty when they fail, they have no reason to carefully consider a litany of plans presented by other characters.

--

Thanks again for any advice that you can provide! I'm sure that I'm overthinking things, but I'm the sort of person who likes to be overprepared for every scenario, and this is definitely one of those situations where I want to know how to handle the problems I'm likely to encounter as a DM that I already see as a player.

Since the goals of play are everyone having fun and creating an exciting, memorable story in the doing, even failure should be fun in my view - for the player, at least, even if it's bad for the character. There's a careful balance there and you'll need to judge that based on the people around your table.

But again, here we go with scenarios where they're doing "stupid" stuff in what sounds like a town. Why are so many adventures going on in town? Get them away from places of civilization and you'll find a lot of these shenanigans go away. Doing silly things can also be a symptom that they are bored and looking to create dramatic conflict. So if you've been spending a lot of session time interviewing NPCs to drag exposition out of them or otherwise not having them boldly confronting deadly perils, for example, it's really no wonder that they're going to act out. Get to the adventure already!

As for issues about planning, I recommend getting players to buy into the "yes, and..." method of decision-making. This is basically just nonjudgmental ideation wherein everyone offers good faith ideas in a way that doesn't shut out the ideas of others. So one player will suggest a course of action, the next player then accepts that idea ("yes, and...") and adds onto it with his or her own idea (in a way that doesn't negate the original idea), the next player does the same and so on until a plan is cobbled together. Not only does this encourage players to be open to ideas and thus encourages everyone to participate, it makes play smoother and faster by getting to the execution of the plan a lot faster.

 

[Nagol]

Relying heavily on NPCs for answers, instead of trying to find these answers themselves.

After a couple of minutes of first-person discussion, jump to third person and then ask what information they are trying to get, ask for rolls, if any are applicable, and give the group a synopsis of the information they were able to extract... and what they weren't.

Poor spell management.

Not your problem. The player group will adapt to the situation. Either those playing it safer will loosen up or those playing fast and loose will tighten up, Design adventures with a variety of natural constraints. Some should have time limits and/or reactive foes that get reinforced over time. Some areas aren't safe to camp. Let the situations play out naturally and make the players aware of the constraints through in-game events and consequences.

Making poor life decisions because they don't fear reprecussions.

Have consequence. Have the environment react plausibly and consistently to actions the PCs pursue. Be willing to follow through and disadvantage/remove PCs from play and you'll find the players will adapt (though in some cases it'll mean they find other looser games -- that's OK too).

 

[Trudy]

When I hear about games where there are a lot of interrogation scenes, that tells me the DM could probably stand to be more forthcoming with information. Monsters and NPCs can give out information during battles via banter, tipping of the PCs as to their plans. Intelligence found on the corpses after the fight can also work. I personally hate interviewing cagey, quirky NPCs as a player. We're the one leading lives of adventure - they should be interviewing us! As a DM, I give away a lot of information so we don't need to have interrogation scenes. So if you're not stingy with the 411, you shouldn't really have an issue.

Further, just get these PCs away from places where NPCs are hanging out by putting the adventure locations far away from towns or wherever NPCs cluster.



Time pressure. They have X days to accomplish the mission and/or every time they rest, there is a risk of a random encounter. It should work itself out. It's not really on the DM to deal with poor resource management. That's a player skill - if they want to succeed more often, they need to plan better. Once they start failing time pressure scenarios or find that taking too long to accomplish a quest is causing future quests to be harder, they'll sort themselves out in my experience. If there is legitimate conflict between players over the matter, that's when I'd try to foster a conversation between the players to work something out. If not, then time pressure is the way to go and there are many ways to build that into adventure scenarios.



Since the goals of play are everyone having fun and creating an exciting, memorable story in the doing, even failure should be fun in my view - for the player, at least, even if it's bad for the character. There's a careful balance there and you'll need to judge that based on the people around your table.

But again, here we go with scenarios where they're doing "stupid" stuff in what sounds like a town. Why are so many adventures going on in town? Get them away from places of civilization and you'll find a lot of these shenanigans go away. Doing silly things can also be a symptom that they are bored and looking to create dramatic conflict. So if you've been spending a lot of session time interviewing NPCs to drag exposition out of them or otherwise not having them boldly confronting deadly perils, for example, it's really no wonder that they're going to act out. Get to the adventure already!

As for issues about planning, I recommend getting players to buy into the "yes, and..." method of decision-making. This is basically just nonjudgmental ideation wherein everyone offers good faith ideas in a way that doesn't shut out the ideas of others. So one player will suggest a course of action, the next player then accepts that idea ("yes, and...") and adds onto it with his or her own idea (in a way that doesn't negate the original idea), the next player does the same and so on until a plan is cobbled together. Not only does this encourage players to be open to ideas and thus encourages everyone to participate, it makes play smoother and faster by getting to the execution of the plan a lot faster.

Thanks so much for the super-thoughtful response!

With regards to interrogation sequences... they only happen because the players make it happen. One time, we saw an NPC buried up into the neck in the dirt with "Oathbreaker" written on his forehead. Instead of having a conversation, it became a whole thing where they immediately bust out the Zone of Truth spell because they were convinced that the few answers he was willing to give weren't truthful (because he didn't know the party / the party didn't establish trust with him and he was afraid of being coup d'etated if he said the wrong thing).

I'm totally going to take your advice into account. I don't have any problems with giving the PCs the information they need to know (or where they need to go to get it), but there seems to be an extreme lack of trust between the PCs and NPCs in many of the games I play in, and I don't really know how to handle that.

Time pressure in particular is part of why I'm really hype to be running Tomb of Annihilation (I'm running that after this -- this is a practice Adventure so I can get my bearings before I go full campaign). I'm going to have to think creatively about how I can change things based on how much time goes by. I'll start doing that today as I finish up my Part One notes.

We actually don't spend all that much time in a town (surprisingly!), but most of the stupid things do tend to happen in towns. The Bearded Devil thing actually happened in a dungeon. Obviously, this is going to be really great because the first adventure I'm running is a highly-modified, 5e-converted version of Speaker in Dreams, which takes place almost entirely in a town. I'm hoping that by keeping things fast-paced, or moving people along, I might be able to avoid this. I think you definitely have a point there!

The "yes, and" method of roleplay is something I use routinely in text-based roleplay, so it makes sense that it'd work in tabletop too. Another thing I'll be implementing. Thanks for the advice!

 

[Trudy]

After a couple of minutes of first-person discussion, jump to third person and then ask what information they are trying to get, ask for rolls, if any are applicable, and give the group a synopsis of the information they were able to extract... and what they weren't.



Not your problem. The player group will adapt to the situation. Either those playing it safer will loosen up or those playing fast and loose will tighten up, Design adventures with a variety of natural constraints. Some should have time limits and/or reactive foes that get reinforced over time. Some areas aren't safe to camp. Let the situations play out naturally and make the players aware of the constraints through in-game events and consequences.



Have consequence. Have the environment react plausibly and consistently to actions the PCs pursue. Be willing to follow through and disadvantage/remove PCs from play and you'll find the players will adapt (though in some cases it'll mean they find other looser games -- that's OK too).

Thanks for the advice; a lot of this is incredibly practical (that's a good thing!), and I feel like my anxiety over being a first-time DM and wanting to be the sort of DM people want to play with is crippling my confidence when attempting to address these issues hard-on.

Obviously, something I need to work on. I'm hoping to make some tweaks to this adventure that do have time-based repercussions that will hopefully indirectly drive players to be better at time management. Letting them know directly out-of-game they're not getting anything more might help to move things around quickly, too; I like RP to be organic, but there comes a time where you just have to put your foot down and go "that's all your going to get" because they're just not getting the clue through RP.

Thanks again!

 

[Warmaster Horus]

You're the DM and control the NPCs. Run with that however you want in a way that is fun for you and the players. You can always truncate it with a, "And that's all you get from them." if you want.

Spell conservation is a learned behavior. Hit them with a time limit or several closely-spaced encounters they have no control over. It's fun to unleash your big spells because hitting a bad guy with a cantrip for 18pts isn't much fun when the fighter is hitting them for 50. But there's a time and a place.

Poor life decisions = poor game decisions in an RPG. Depending on the theme of your game you may offer some leniency on this aspect as you think is appropriate. An RPG is an opportunity for people to engage in fantasy behavior that would normally have severe consequences IRL. Let them have some fun getting away with the occasional misdeed if that's what they're looking for. But if you want to have brighter boundaries be sure to emphasize them and put in a couple of warnings before lowering the boom.

Good luck running your game!

 

[Trudy]

You're the DM and control the NPCs. Run with that however you want in a way that is fun for you and the players. You can always truncate it with a, "And that's all you get from them." if you want.

Spell conservation is a learned behavior. Hit them with a time limit or several closely-spaced encounters they have no control over. It's fun to unleash your big spells because hitting a bad guy with a cantrip for 18pts isn't much fun when the fighter is hitting them for 50. But there's a time and a place.

Poor life decisions = poor game decisions in an RPG. Depending on the theme of your game you may offer some leniency on this aspect as you think is appropriate. An RPG is an opportunity for people to engage in fantasy behavior that would normally have severe consequences IRL. Let them have some fun getting away with the occasional misdeed if that's what they're looking for. But if you want to have brighter boundaries be sure to emphasize them and put in a couple of warnings before lowering the boom.

Good luck running your game!

Sounds like I'm going to be running with "Roll Insight. Yeah, you really don't think you're getting anything else from this guy."

I'm really hoping that with your advice (and the advice of others) I can condition them to be a little more careful with throwing their spells around willy-nilly; putting them in a few situations where there's a time limit, or potential conflicts that arise from letting too much time go by seems like the way to go.

Point taken re: boundaries. I don't want to suck out the fun and joy of DnD, but at the same time, people do some pretty ridiculous stuff, then continue to up the ante. We'll see how it starts in my game, and place limitations based on how bad it gets.

Thanks again for the help!

 

[Sunseeker]

As a player and a DM, I stick to a "Rule of Three"
As a player, I will not ask more than three questions (unless we're getting somwhere).
IE: If I ask them "Why are you here." and the NPC spits on my boot, I've got 2 more shorts before I'm no longer interested.
If I ask them "Why are you here." and they start spewing info, I will continue.
As a DM the NPC knows three important things. They may not be terribly important things but after they've divulged it I will freely inform the players "He really has nothing more to tell you." Or "You get the impression he's told you everything he knows."
-If the players refuse to discontinue engaging the NPC, I will pause the game and tell them straight up that this guy is done. I have no interest in wasting my time or everyone else's.

Similarly, I don't like to waste time haggling with shopkeeps and guards and stuff like that. Major NPCs may have more information, but they're not going to sit there and play 20 questions with the party if they have the option not to. Even then they will typically answer 3 questions, or provide 3 pieces of information before they have something else to do.

I wouldn't do anything about spell management. The only solutions here are:
A: the rest of the group tells them tough luck and pushes on.
B: the DM tells the group that a long rest is impossible here (remember you only get one per 24 hours and you need to be in a safe place).
-That's pretty much it. You can't MAKE them better at managing their spells.

I think you're overthinking the last part. The player did something silly and dumb and the guard let the player off with a finger-wagging. If the player isn't going to do it again, then it sounds like the situation is solved. I don't know how you may have run it differently, but I personally don't see the need for any kind of alternate resolution, what, the guard give him a beating? Arrest him too? Seems like an awful side-track for something very minor.

Some things are worth penalizing failure. Some things really aren't.