The Player vs DM attitude
Bear in mind that there are different degrees of adversarial play. There's the kind where it's all in good fun; the players get a kick out of the way the DM makes their characters' lives hell, and the DM is careful to "play fair" and not abuse his/her authority. Players accustomed to this type of play are skittish and suspicious (which, when you think about it, is a sensible attitude for an adventurer to have), but they don't usually act like sociopaths.
And then there's the kind where the DM's hostility is directed, not at the characters, but at the players. The DM deliberately abuses the players' trust and punishes them for doing anything other than egregious metagaming. In this case it all gets very ugly very fast and leads to the behavior you describe.
I notice that a lot of your trouble seems to revolve around the PCs being absolutely unwilling to trust your NPCs. That's likely a response to DMs who look upon "the players are forming a bond with this NPC" as a reason to have that NPC be a traitor.
My suggestion is: Stop trying to make the players trust NPCs. Players have an exquisitely attuned sense for when the DM is pushing to gain their trust, and any player with even a little paranoia (which is most of them, IME) is going to run screaming in that situation. Instead, concentrate on making your NPCs cool and funny and memorable. Give them crazy accents, funky mannerisms, and bad-ass attitudes*.
Chances are, if you do this well, your players will soon come to like some of your NPCs, because they're just so entertaining. That's your cue. You've gotten past the paranoia and established a bond; now build on it. Have the NPCs do favors for the party, and ask favors in return. Each interaction that doesn't result in the NPC betraying the party will develop trust. Eventually you'll have a firm bond.
Just remember that if any of these NPCs ever does betray the party, all of the work you've put in will be instantly shot to hell and your players will be more paranoid than ever.
[size=-2]*But don't make them so bad-ass they take over the story. That's a whole different issue.[/size]
And then there's the kind where the DM's hostility is directed, not at the characters, but at the players. The DM deliberately abuses the players' trust and punishes them for doing anything other than egregious metagaming. In this case it all gets very ugly very fast and leads to the behavior you describe.
I notice that a lot of your trouble seems to revolve around the PCs being absolutely unwilling to trust your NPCs. That's likely a response to DMs who look upon "the players are forming a bond with this NPC" as a reason to have that NPC be a traitor.
My suggestion is: Stop trying to make the players trust NPCs. Players have an exquisitely attuned sense for when the DM is pushing to gain their trust, and any player with even a little paranoia (which is most of them, IME) is going to run screaming in that situation. Instead, concentrate on making your NPCs cool and funny and memorable. Give them crazy accents, funky mannerisms, and bad-ass attitudes*.
Chances are, if you do this well, your players will soon come to like some of your NPCs, because they're just so entertaining. That's your cue. You've gotten past the paranoia and established a bond; now build on it. Have the NPCs do favors for the party, and ask favors in return. Each interaction that doesn't result in the NPC betraying the party will develop trust. Eventually you'll have a firm bond.
Just remember that if any of these NPCs ever does betray the party, all of the work you've put in will be instantly shot to hell and your players will be more paranoid than ever.
[size=-2]*But don't make them so bad-ass they take over the story. That's a whole different issue.[/size]
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Nah...I keep all such things a secret. No jokey name, either, unless that's standard for the setting. The closest I came to tipping my hand was when I played the sacrificial PC- I named him Roteshemd (German for "Red Shirt")...and AFAIK, nobody in the group besides me speaks German.
OTOH, I did do something like this with pregens, and the doomed one had notations to the effect of "You are the Chosen One...chosen to die, that is." He also had some nifty abilities to keep concealed until he was to take on the party at a certain point. In a sense, he was a hidden BBEG.
OTOH, I did do something like this with pregens, and the doomed one had notations to the effect of "You are the Chosen One...chosen to die, that is." He also had some nifty abilities to keep concealed until he was to take on the party at a certain point. In a sense, he was a hidden BBEG.
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Nifft
Penguin Herder
Drizzt!
Who's the black Ranger drow
That's an angst machine to all the emo?
(Drizzt!)
You're damn right
Who is the elf
That would risk Icingdeath for his brother Elk?
(Drizzt!)
Can ya dig it?
Who's the cat that won't cop out
When there's danger all about
(Guenhwyvar!)
Right on
You see this Ranger is a bad spider--
(Shut your mouth)
But I'm talkin' about Drizzt
(Then we can dig it)
He's a complicated multiclass
But no one understands him but his lass
(Drizzt Do'Urden)
Solid!
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
The very design of the game assumes DM-player conflict at the story or plot level: the players' characters are (almost always) trying to effect some sort of change to the game world, and the DM-as-world is trying in various ways to resist that change.
The problems only arise when things move out of character - where instead of Balkor the Fighter arguing with (NPC) Count Morningstar over taxation policies, it's become Bob the player arguing with Diane the DM over a rule - and yet oddly enough even that, though undesireable, can be counted as a strength of TTRPGs over computer games: the parameters in a TTRPG are set by a person interpreting a rulebook rather than a computer interpreting code, and thus can be challenged.
It's the game's job through the DM to challenge the players through their characters. It's the players' job through their characters to respond to those challenges in whatever way they see fit, and the DM's job to filter those responses through the game rules and determine what happens. Of course they're in conflict - if they weren't, one or both would not be doing their job.
Lan-"smashing a bottle over the DM's head is, however, highly excessive"-efan
The problems only arise when things move out of character - where instead of Balkor the Fighter arguing with (NPC) Count Morningstar over taxation policies, it's become Bob the player arguing with Diane the DM over a rule - and yet oddly enough even that, though undesireable, can be counted as a strength of TTRPGs over computer games: the parameters in a TTRPG are set by a person interpreting a rulebook rather than a computer interpreting code, and thus can be challenged.
It's the game's job through the DM to challenge the players through their characters. It's the players' job through their characters to respond to those challenges in whatever way they see fit, and the DM's job to filter those responses through the game rules and determine what happens. Of course they're in conflict - if they weren't, one or both would not be doing their job.
Lan-"smashing a bottle over the DM's head is, however, highly excessive"-efan
Imaginary Number
First Post
This. My gloss would be that you don't even need a whole lot of crazy accents or funny mannerisms to make this work, although it's great if you can pull that off. Mostly, what you need to do is to make sure that the entire campaign world is not hostile to the PCs, and to give them a chance to make meaningful alliances when appropriate. To give just one concrete example, my PCs a while back decided to spare a brigand leader they had captured rather than kill him, so it made sense later that the same brigand leader would use his men and resources to help the PCs escape when they (rather stupidly) wound up imprisoned by a local lord who was hostile to the brigands. Give the PCs some safe havens, at least temporarily, when they get in over their heads. You don't want to make the players give away their 10' poles, but in order to earn the players' trust you also don't want them thinking that absolutely everything in the setting is out to get them.
Celebrim
Legend
You don't. You just make it friendly and jocular. It's impossible to stop the DM vs. Player attitude because one of the hats that the DM wears is Antagonist.
What really tends to be going on in a game that degenerates is not that there is too much DM and player rivalry, but that there is not enough respect for the players by the DM or not enough respect of the DM by the players. The goal of the DM should to be cultivate respect, so that even when the DM is being a 'rat bastard' his players aren't angry about it but want to buy him a beer. The DM has to be tough but fair. The players have to feel as if they have been put in control and that whatever happens is the fair and natural consequences of their empowerment.
Winning is the only way to play. You don't play to lose, because generally that disrupts the game. And that is the secret here. Though the DM must play to win, he must not be trying to win - because for the DM winning is easy. The trick to being a DM is stack the deck against yourself and then to lose with style. But if you are expecting your players to play to lose, you are being unreasonable.
What you are describing is a game where trust is never rewarded. If every father figure and kind old lady turns out to be a psychopath, of course you are going to stop trusting people. If the DM uses NPC's solely to decieve, trick, and ambush players, then its not disfunctional to not trust NPCs. Conversely, if NPC's are valuable resources that can only be accessed if you gain and keep their trust, then players will eventually adapt.
Exactly why would I let my character be kidnapped? In your post I keep hearing this subtext of, "I would love to jerk my players around, but they keep pulling on their leash." One thing DMs have to get away from is creating plots rather than situations. This isn't a novel. This isn't a story you can lay down ahead of time. If your adventure depends on the players being kidnapped or arrested, then something is wrong. Of course players are going to resist having their characters be kidnapped or arrested.
Which suggests a game where such behavior is rewarded, perhaps because the good guys are weaker and richer than the bad guys. Usually this sort of thing develops in game worlds where the DM is utterly stingy about the resources he makes available, where the bad guys live in death trap dungeons and the good guys live in defenseless houses and are clearly unable to defend themselves and so the players start looking for alternate sources of wealth than the direction the DM is pushing them in. Torturing and looting are generally outlets when the players feel disempowered and need to have a situation when they are in control.
This is the attitude I call 'neutral survivalist'. It's actually fairly realistic. The characters adopt moral or immoral behavior as they think it necessary without any strong consideration for consequences beyond the immediate. Lots of real people act the same way when their survival is threatened.
Experience is the best teacher. Your problem is you don't seem to respect your players. And apparantly, you've given them no reason to respect you - probably because they know you don't respect them.
See, there is your problem. You aren't trying to run a RPG. You are trying to run a movie, book, or novel. You don't have a right as the DM to set the players stakes in the story. Players choose what stakes that they have in a scenario. You can't set out to choose that this is a scenario about betrayal and loss. That's the players choice.
It sounds to me like you are in a group that has been burned several times before. It also sounds to me like you've not helped the situation any (though you probably aren't responcible for it). Winning your players trust is going to take time, but if you are trying to force the story to be one about betrayal or loss, and if you are trying to force the players to surrender, be kidnapped, or be arrested then its little wonder you aren't making progress on that front.
I don't know your game state, but I would suggest that talking to your players about this won't help but will be rightly percieved as just another attempt to manipulate them. There are alot of times when communicating with your players is the right thing to do, but sometimes you just have to show them.
I would suggest dropping all betrayal twists for at least 5 or 6 levels. If you want betrayal in your story lines make it about NPC's betraying other NPC's. Introduce characters that manage to communicate their moral uprightness, and make them legitimate allies. Have incorruptible Paladins, upright lawmen, clerics of impeccable virtue and wisdom, tough hardened bounty hunters, street kids with hearts of gold, wise old apothecaries, honest jovial merchants who always have the best deals, and so forth. You need characters with clear White Hats (from the players perspective of what a white hat is). If you've got a world where everything is some shade of gray or black, being a pyschopath is the natural reaction. Alot of this is going to depend on the player. Seduce them. Present them with the sort of characters that they admire and empathize with, and don't do it to trick the player. Don't do it with the intention of this being the character that is going to let the player down. Make knowing this character valuable - access to spells, cheaper equipment, information, access to the powerful - whatever the characters want.
In other words, you've got to start cultivating legitimate friendships between the PC's and NPC's. These relationships are one of several important proxies for how the players themselves percieve their metagame relationship to you as the DM.
Celebrim
Legend
Some thoughts on training players out of 'attack everything on sight'.
The tactic of attacking everything on sight has several origins that reinforce each other.
1) D&D tends to have short combats where going first is a big advantage.
2) DMs like to get the most from their monsters, and tend to over favor 'ambush' in their imagination.
3) Most monsters are there just to kill and take their stuff, so the players are just being reasonable in most cases. DMs rarely reward negotiation, evasion, or other tactics - no XP (from most DMs) and you don't get the stuff. Even NPC's that aren't intended as fodder for the PC's are often best exploited by simply killing them and taking their stuff.
The outcome of this is that in some groups, players always attack at first sight. As a DM you can't blame players for doing this, because they are doing what works for them.
To train PC's out of that behavior, you have to reward other tactics and that means setting up tactical situations where winning is not easily accomplished with a straight foward attack.
For example:
1) Negotiation: The PC's need to get from point A to point B, but something has created a strong fortified position blocking the path and they have a clear view of the surrounding terrain (meaning that they are hard to ambush). Attacking the position is difficult but not lethal, because the main advantage of the defenders is the strong position - not high HD or big attack bonuses. This situation favors negoation, and the defenders are in a position to parley because they can't easily be overrun.
2) Evasion: The PC's have a durable and near perfect source of concealment (they are in a dense jungle, for instance), when they encounter something that they clearly can't overcome. Ideally, this encounter is with something that the players recognize and now from the monster manual. The classic here is a collosal dragon outside its lair, currently occupied with eating a mastadon or other large creature that doesn't prompt the PC's to heroicly intervene. The dragon clearly has no special interest in the PC's. This situation favors evasion, because the PC's don't have anything to gain and everything to lose by getting involved. Once you introduce a situation like this, you can begin introducing situations where evasion is warranted despite a more active interaction with the creature. An example might be something like a maze of twisty passages and a slow moving, obdurate, fire breathing golem.
3) Stealth: Present a situation similar to #1, except that the inhabitants aren't open to negotiation (or negotiation has failed). Allow an open attack if the players want. Since its a static position, the PC's are free to control the time and pace of the battle - that is, they can run away without fear of pursuit. Include in the design of your encounter opportunities to use stealth. For example, a secret passage can be located at some distance from the fortification that lets it be entered, partially, or wholly bypassed. The inhabitants regularly let allied parties pass through, and the players can disguise themselves as allies of the gate owners or bribe a group to let them join them.
Remember to allow for oppurtinities to gain treasure independent of this encounter and remember to reward full experience for solving the encounter by something other than combat. In fact, when I do a situation like this, I tend to give full XP for solving the encounter in the most expedient fashion, and only partial XP for fighting through it. That is, I reward the characters according to how much the players have learned, and vica versa. While you don't want to do that all the time (favoring non-combat solutions has its problems as well), the fact that you might sometimes do that encourages players to look at all their options because they know that alternative solutions might in fact sometimes recieve greater rewards.
The tactic of attacking everything on sight has several origins that reinforce each other.
1) D&D tends to have short combats where going first is a big advantage.
2) DMs like to get the most from their monsters, and tend to over favor 'ambush' in their imagination.
3) Most monsters are there just to kill and take their stuff, so the players are just being reasonable in most cases. DMs rarely reward negotiation, evasion, or other tactics - no XP (from most DMs) and you don't get the stuff. Even NPC's that aren't intended as fodder for the PC's are often best exploited by simply killing them and taking their stuff.
The outcome of this is that in some groups, players always attack at first sight. As a DM you can't blame players for doing this, because they are doing what works for them.
To train PC's out of that behavior, you have to reward other tactics and that means setting up tactical situations where winning is not easily accomplished with a straight foward attack.
For example:
1) Negotiation: The PC's need to get from point A to point B, but something has created a strong fortified position blocking the path and they have a clear view of the surrounding terrain (meaning that they are hard to ambush). Attacking the position is difficult but not lethal, because the main advantage of the defenders is the strong position - not high HD or big attack bonuses. This situation favors negoation, and the defenders are in a position to parley because they can't easily be overrun.
2) Evasion: The PC's have a durable and near perfect source of concealment (they are in a dense jungle, for instance), when they encounter something that they clearly can't overcome. Ideally, this encounter is with something that the players recognize and now from the monster manual. The classic here is a collosal dragon outside its lair, currently occupied with eating a mastadon or other large creature that doesn't prompt the PC's to heroicly intervene. The dragon clearly has no special interest in the PC's. This situation favors evasion, because the PC's don't have anything to gain and everything to lose by getting involved. Once you introduce a situation like this, you can begin introducing situations where evasion is warranted despite a more active interaction with the creature. An example might be something like a maze of twisty passages and a slow moving, obdurate, fire breathing golem.
3) Stealth: Present a situation similar to #1, except that the inhabitants aren't open to negotiation (or negotiation has failed). Allow an open attack if the players want. Since its a static position, the PC's are free to control the time and pace of the battle - that is, they can run away without fear of pursuit. Include in the design of your encounter opportunities to use stealth. For example, a secret passage can be located at some distance from the fortification that lets it be entered, partially, or wholly bypassed. The inhabitants regularly let allied parties pass through, and the players can disguise themselves as allies of the gate owners or bribe a group to let them join them.
Remember to allow for oppurtinities to gain treasure independent of this encounter and remember to reward full experience for solving the encounter by something other than combat. In fact, when I do a situation like this, I tend to give full XP for solving the encounter in the most expedient fashion, and only partial XP for fighting through it. That is, I reward the characters according to how much the players have learned, and vica versa. While you don't want to do that all the time (favoring non-combat solutions has its problems as well), the fact that you might sometimes do that encourages players to look at all their options because they know that alternative solutions might in fact sometimes recieve greater rewards.
Thornir Alekeg
Albatross!
If they fear NPC betrayal, make sure they have ample opportunity to figure out if an NPC is really trustworthy or not before they end up betrayed. Too often NPCs can appear to be the perfect companion, until the DM toggles the betrayal switch and then it is too late for the PCs to do anything except react to the puppet strings the DM is pulling.
Maybe it has to be really, really obvious to start, but eventually you can make it a little more subtle. The mistake comes when it is impossible to figure it out. Without real world cues like NPC mannerisms and body language to actually view, the players are at a distinct disadvantage. You need to make sure as DM that you provide the social cues and information that real people automatically pick up on just by being around each other.
Maybe it has to be really, really obvious to start, but eventually you can make it a little more subtle. The mistake comes when it is impossible to figure it out. Without real world cues like NPC mannerisms and body language to actually view, the players are at a distinct disadvantage. You need to make sure as DM that you provide the social cues and information that real people automatically pick up on just by being around each other.
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