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

[Trudy]

I don't think my story hour of Speaker in the Dreams from 3E is still in the forums. But yes the border patrol of peace tying fingers was stupid. Depending on the group and dm, the dm may over look some law breaking to move the story along. In fact I think I don't have the module any more.

My notes for sections 1 and 2 are essentially "skip this". Pre-game, going to ask what they were doing while they were at the fair, then I'm thinking of starting with Part 3 in media res with the start of that initial wererat attack.

 

[manduck]

Well, I have a few ideas that I hope help you out.

Reliance on NPCs/interrogations.

Like it was said before, you can present other ways to get information. Perhaps a scrap of a note was dropped from a fleeing enemy. Perhaps a robbery happens and what was stolen is a clue or leads to clues. The other thing to consider is how reliable the person they are interrogating is. If they don't have a magical means to compel the truth from someone, some lies may be mixed in that lead to bad situations for the PCs. Or perhaps the creature being interrogated is compelled to tell the truth, but leaves out some details. That bearded devil may tell them "the scroll you're looking for is in the ruined temple of Moradin" but leave out that the ruin is guarded by a pair of golems. Mix ways of gathering information with some honesty issues from the NPCs and you can have a much more lively adventure.

Spell Management and Long rests.

Making time a factor is a great way to keep them under pressure. You can also throw in some siege style scenarios. The party has to hunker down or defend a position from waves of enemies. Maybe they have to defend their castle from invaders. Maybe they trip an alarm in a dungeon and all the monsters are after them. Maybe they have to survive a night of horror in that cabin in the woods. You can test their resources in a variety of ways. You can always have them travel to a harsh environment where a long rest may not be an option. Sure, you can try to make camp in the frozen north. Just watch those dipping temperatures at night and hope you brought warm clothes. That driving wind and snow will make it impossible to get a good camp fire going.

Poor life decisions

Give them a reputation. The baron is looking for someone for a job but he gives it to that other group of adventures, because he'd like it done this week. He doesn't have all year to wait for "The Sleepy Guild of the Long Rest!" and he laughs when he says it. Need to ask one of the nobles a question or for a favor? Too bad those guards caught you trying to pick pocket a prisoner in their possession. The PCs clearly can't be trusted. Let word get around about them. That goes for the good stuff too. Give them a chance to set things right and repair that reputation. It's supposed to be fun after all.

The big take away for all of your problems is give them consequences. Reward their good deeds. Let their mistakes come back to bite them.

 

[iserith]

I have looked through that. I told them that they can't play Evil-aligned characters in this adventure up-front, but people will find any way to justify anything. The module's pretty good at making the good decisions look obvious (e.g., saving people from a Wererat attack), so let's hope that that's enough to drive them to actually Do Some Actual Good In A Good Way, instead of hoping that the ends justifies the means.

What you can do here is have them put a statement about their alignment in their Ideal personal characteristic instead of the ones suggested by background or one they've come up with on their own. See page 34 of the Basic Rules for examples. A Lawful Good character might have "I can be counted on to do the right thing as expected by society."

Then when the player actually does that, they can claim Inspiration for it (limit once per session). This way they can get a tangible reward when they act the part and they are in control of when they get it. I recommend letting them do the same for their traits, bonds, and flaws.

Otherwise, there is no particular benefit to acting one way or another except as what the possible consequences in the setting might be, which they've clearly shown to not care about so much. Perhaps the carrot will succeed where the stick has failed.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=6902545]Trudy[/MENTION] Have fun DMing! Always great to see a player take the plunge

Some great advice already, so I'll offer my perspective... I suspect these particular players may have been "trained" by some, let's say, sub-optimal and adversarial DMing... So my advice is coming from that angle...

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

Players interrogating NPCs to the extreme is often a sign of underlying issues:

• The DM is not presenting enough truly friendly/helpful NPCs in the game.
• The DM is not being sufficiently forthcoming with clues, and needs to be more direct (and creative) in presenting info.
• And possibly the DM is not giving enough thought about the motives of his or her NPCs, and how differently folks / monsters will respond to various interrogation methods.

Now, it's possible your players just really enjoy interrogation scenes for whatever reason. Maybe they get a kick out of making NPCs squirm and how the DM roleplays that. In that case, I would suggest doing what I did: Spend time in advance prepping a potential/likely interrogation, with different levels of information, plot twists, and complications. You can read a detailed example of my approach over here. In other words, roll with what they want and make interrogation as big a deal as combat, exploration, or other interaction encounters.

Poor spell management.

The tendency for high-level spell unleashing is likely the result of the DM running "one-or-two-encounters-per-day." And really this makes sense if they have no incentive to be conservative/thoughtful. As DM, don't worry about it. Simply present a variety of adventuring days (some with 12 encounters, some with 1-2 encounters, some in between, some telegraphed in advance, and others surprising the socks off the players), and let the players come to their own conclusions about how/whether to conserve their spells. If they suffer, they suffer; at least it'll be a learning experience.

I will add that you want to be transparent about your approach to long rests. For example, I typically let my players know that I adhere to the 1 long rest/24 hours rule, and that they furthermore need safety & comfort to take a long rest. An inn or elven refuge would allow a long rest, hammering a dungeon door shut with goblins in the immediate vicinity would not, and camping in the wilds I often require a group check to see how much benefit of a long rest they get.

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

Consider this: For many, D&D is escapism; and for some players this means getting to act out things they don't get to do in their regular responsible lives. In other words, rogue PCs are gonna pickpocket NPCs when it would be wiser not to. It's part of the joy of D&D!

It's only if this gets to chronic levels (e.g. routinely screwing with or killing town guards, going on pickpocketing rampages in every settlement, etc) that you'll want to take a closer look.

Players accustomed to adversarial or mediocre DMing quickly develop disrespect towards most NPCs – they are there to ruin our fun, give us a quest and never be seen again, betray us, or simply be a thorn in our side...why should we care about them? If this is the case, the key is to create good foils for the PCs – NPCs with motives/agendas/personalities that will draw the players' attention, and furthermore with sufficient power to be useful allies or dangerous enemies. That's how you start to build back the players' respect in the supporting cast of non-player characters.

 

[Charlaquin]

• 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?

This specific example is pretty easy to deal with. You just narrate past it. “After several more hours of interrogation, you don’t manage to get any useful information out of him.” As for the more general problem, just don’t be afraid to tell your players in no uncertain terms that an NPC does not have the information they’re looking for. Do it out of character so they know it’s not the NPC lying to them.

• 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?

You need time pressure in your adventures to prevent this. Either have a ticking clock, like “In exactly one month, the stars will align for the evil ritual; if you don’t stop the cult before then, they’ll summon Cthulhu.” or to roll for random encounters every hour
(of in-game time). If there’s no time pressure preventing the players from taking a long rest after every encounter, that’s the adventure design’s fault, not the players’. Assume your players will use the optimal strategy, and design your adventures to make the 5-minute workday a suboptimal strategy if you don’t want the players employing it. And you do that by making time a meaningful cost of resting. Either by limiting time to complete the adventure, or creating a risk of danger that increases over time.

• 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.

In my experience, this kind of thing usually happens because the players lack direction. If the adventure doesn’t have clear goals and structure, the players end up just ing around. If the fun you’ve prepared for them isn’t obvious, they’ll make their own, and players making their own fun is often disruptive to the DM’s plans. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a make-your-own-fun game if that’s what the group is into, but it sounds like it’s not the kind of D&D experience you’re looking for. The time pressure will help with this. If the players only have three days to save the Dragon from being sacrificed to the evil princess, they won’t waste any time getting in altrications with the town guard unless they think it’s absolutely necessary to their plan to rescue the Dragon. The other thing that will help is having very clearly defined goal, structure, and resolution for your adventure. The Skyrim style “here’s a big open world, do whatever you want in it. Oh, and there’s a main quest you can do if you feel like it” approach doesn’t work very well for tabletop. The players need to know what the mission is, why they should care, and what happens if they don’t complete it.

I highly recommend the Angry GM’s series on adventure design, and in particular the sub-series on different adventure structures.
http://theangrygm.com/the-shape-of-adventure/

 

[Sunseeker]

So I guess here, it's not necessarily the stealing -- but the stealing after the DM's gone out of their way to emphasize that we shouldn't make trouble here, and then we do. In situations where the DM clearly lays out 'hey guys, probably not a good idea to do dumb stuff here', I think there should be repercussions when they do it anyway. Most of our DMs go the "Are you suuuuure?" route, and that's generally effective, but man, sometimes people power right through.

The DM basically painted himself into a corner. What were his options?
Another lecture? About the same as letting you off the hook.
A simple warning, ie: next time you're getting arrested/deported/etc.. Which is what he did.
Arrest? Seems like a lot of time and trouble for little gain.
Deportation of the party? Again, a lot of time and trouble.

I can think up a lot of in-world excuses for why the Guard didn't do anything over it. They may feel unable to contain the party, they may not have the manpower to actually force you out, they may really care a lot less about doing any of that than they let on. Sometimes a stern warning right off the bat works. The problem is of course, if it doesn't, things escalate quickly.

If the DM isn't interested in escalating things where there's no necessity (again ask yourself: what's the gain in escalating the situation?), why should they?

If the outcome doesn't result in interesting, exciting or productive gameplay, why bother? And quite honestly if I was a player at the table, I don't think I'd risk my neck to save the Party Thief if the Guard did decide to punish them. If I was A: the scoundrely type myself I wouldn't want to risk pissing off the law. and B: the lawful type I'd figure he got his just desserts.

 

[jasper]

As a first time dm, have a session zero with your players. Even if you play with them weekly. Tell them how deadly your are setting the campaign. What books are allowed. What is not allowed. (jasper can the @#$%^&* locker room talk when my sister and mom are in the room). Any changes in how you think spells work. Passive perception always on. ETC.
During play make a quick ruling and move on. But let the players know it a temp ruling. Don't worry about mistakes. If the mistake is minor tell Jasper "Forget about so I did 10 extra pts of damage to your pc last time, he is at full now".
Correct the big stuff, "Sorry Jasper, the werechicken did not have vorpal claws. You ain't dead." "No jasper you can't have that B-52 bomber from that wish I gave you last week".
And don't play with goobers unless your mom makes do so.