Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Asisreo" data-source="post: 8335908" data-attributes="member: 7019027">You get a group of new players, they're all excited to play their character and have agency. They want to bash skulls and make their enemies fear them, but they're bred from videogames and only know one way to solve conflicts: Violence! So, they see a shopkeeper that isn't selling them that special sword at a discount and...they attack! You, as a DM that wasn't expecting the "lawful good" player to lunge at the shopkeeper with the explanation that them not cooperating is essentially an act of evil, fear that they just might get their way! They don't kill him, but still.Well, you get some guards set up and ready to lock them up, that'll show them! But alas, its too late. Them being locked up has completely thrown off the adventure and the BBEG had completed their plan 2 hours later. Why did they do this and how could it have been prevented? <h4>Responsibilities.</h4>Many players always think about who their characters are and where they come from but they never give their characters responsibilities. Their characters are always just existent in the world but without a call to adventure, they don't do anything truly productive. But responsibilities are what keeps us, as real people, in check. The reason we don't start picking fights with everyone that antagonizes us is because we can't afford the consequences due to our responsibilities. Giving players a house, a family, an important job or title, or even land right off the gate is a perfect way to make the players think twice about whether they want to jeopardize their character's foundational assets. <h4>Don't overdo it.</h4>While the advice can help players, trying to force them into responsibilities too important to ignore can derail the adventure in its own rights. A character with a family may not want to risk their family losing the only provider and may bow out of a particularly dangerous dungeon crawl. Try to make sure their responsibilities don't rely on them being safe and alive, just not being overly reckless especially to the law. A house can be revoked if the PCs have a 20,000gp bounty on their heads but the house itself will be perfectly fine if a PC dies. So, when working with new players, it could help to provide a reasonable responsibility to avoid players turning into the dreaded murder hobo.</blockquote>

Verification