Adding roleplaying to combat heavy published adventures

[ArcaneSpringboard]

A common complaint about WotC's adventures is that they're combat heavy. There isn't nearly as much exploration as their used to be (though that's improved in the new Tomb of Horrors). There certainly aren't as many puzzles.

What I'm curious is what can be done about the lack of roleplaying opportunities. How does one add roleplaying to say, tombs?

 

[Skyscraper]

Players looking for role-play will usually not indulge in dungeon crawls.

Personally, I usually add roleplaying to combat-heavy modules by changing the storyline of the module and using the portions i want to use in-between the new story the players and myself are pushing for.


Sky

 

[Jhaelen]

What I'm curious is what can be done about the lack of roleplaying opportunities. How does one add roleplaying to say, tombs?

Remember the gameplay vidcasts with the guys from Robot Chicken?

Chris Perkins placed a dwarven face on one of the walls. It animated when the party got near and told them it was the ghost of one of the tomb's architects bound to the wall. A very neat idea, imho.

 

[Hussar]

I ran the World's Largest Dungeon for the better part of two years. This isn't exactly a high rp setting considering the primary goal of the module was to include an example of every SRD monster out there.

There are all sorts of ways to add RP to combat heavy modules.

• Talk. There's probably your best way. When the baddies see the PC's, don't immedietely call for initiative. Have the baddies actually talk and give the PC's a pretty good chance of talking themselves out of a combat.
• Add in (or possibly shift a bit) encounters that are not hostile. In Rescue at Rivenroar, there is a gnome guarding one of the prisoners. There's no reason for the gnome to be really hostile, so, heck, have him be neutral and allow him to be a source of information.
• On the same vein as above, give the players information. Don't be stingy with it. Info dump every chance you can in order to allow the players to make informed choices.

Those should be a pretty good start.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Role-playing is what happens between combat and comes from the DM, in ways for the players to interact with the other players (in character) or their environment.

One way of doing this is creating a link between the players and the enviroment they are in. Rangers and elves; may have special knowledge of the forest they are travelling. Dwarves (as above) may have knowledge of the dungeon they are in. It is all background!

Example of this:

• Had a player whose character was a dwarf; that could tell you about every dwarf hold's beer. As most of my dungeon crawls took place in old dwarven holds, the player had information and interacted with the other players. The greatest treasure to him was finding a lost brewer notebook.

So, read the module and look for ways of applying character background information into the crawl, so, that it gives the players something to work with during the game.

Other examples:

• Found body of friend - maybe it was a NPC or even a player that quit the game but put it in the first trap! This could also be father/mother/etc...

 

[Verdande]

Not all monsters are going to attack mindlessly. Let the intelligent ones want something other than the skulls of the player characters.

That said, it's true that people who want to roleplay aren't going to go out and buy a pre-made adventure. I never really saw the point of buying modules for exactly that reason. I can make my own stat blocks, thank you. If you have a clever idea, then I'll buy it, but I'm not going to buy it because you've calculated the hit points of a couple of ogres for me.

To answer the original question, to add roleplaying to tombs, make it a location first and foremost. In real life when you go somewhere, you don't notice it as a 20 foot by 30 foot rectangular room containing three baskets, with a hallway branching off the southern corner. You notice that it's dark, smells of mold, and that the stone is cracked and chipped. There's one torch in one side, and there are spider webs between the baskets and the walls. The floor is terraced, with multiple small steps leading from the entrance of the room ever downwards. The lowest dozen steps are covered in a yellowish slime, and the skull of something vaguely human rests broken on the ground. The baskets are made of a yellow wicker with a greenish tinge, and bulge slightly near the bottom, etc etc.

If it feels like a real life location, your players will react like it's a real life location. They can't react to dungeon features that you don't describe to them, so if you describe your rooms primarily as featureless corridors where monsters reside, then you're going to get a party that only interacts with things they can kill.

 

[amerigoV]

As others have pointed out, you may just have to insert them to spice up the game. In my games, I like the PCs to have interaction with the BBEG prior to the events that lead to the main conflict.

I'll give you an example from my Expedition to Castle Ravenloft game. The module opens by throwing the PCs into a mini-zombie apocolypse. That is fine in and of itself, but I wanted the PCs to have more of a tie to the event. So I had them go to Barovia prior to the events in the module. They got to know some of the townsfolk (heck, I even let them have dinner with Strahd, which was really interesting). When the events in the module started, the players had much more of an attachment to the events, and it seemed to give them more focus on what to do but also led to more discussions in character about the events.

 

[IronWolf]

What I'm curious is what can be done about the lack of roleplaying opportunities. How does one add roleplaying to say, tombs?

Centering on tombs can make it a slight more difficult, but there are still tweaks that can be made to help turn it into something more immersive than a dungeon crawl.

One of the first things is to add some details to the history of the tomb that might go above and beyond what the module included. Who is buried there? How long ago was the tomb built? What significance does *this* tomb have?

Now, what about the area this tomb is in? Is there a village or city close? What do they think of the tomb? Do they care? Are there stories about the tomb - possibly some made up to simply scare children or are there stories that ring more true?

Are any of the ancestors of the folks buried in the tomb still alive? Are they still in the region? Or has the family line died completely?

All of the above can be used to bring about opportunity to learn more about the tomb in the nearby populace before the group enters. This can all be learned via roleplaying conversations with the locals, learning the stories and such. Use this to help bring the tomb "alive" and more than just another burial place to go in and steal their stuff.

Then once entering the tomb, add some supporting details for the information you sketched out earlier. Carvings in the tomb with names of ancestors the group may have learned before. Again, working to bring the tomb to life.

Also, friendly ghosts, unfriendly ghosts - all who are more interested in helping or deterring the party through words than outright combat. Maybe the ghost is of an ancestor of someone in the tomb or a worker killed during the tomb construction and knows a secret passage past the killer trap. Add some quirks to the ghosts to help make them unique.

As for puzzles, just choose a door or room and change it from a near empty room or door with a lock to one with a puzzle.

 

[Umbran]

Role-playing is what happens between combat and comes from the DM, in ways for the players to interact with the other players (in character) or their environment.

Well, many will say that combat is also roleplay.

To avoid that rathole, I suggest you consider not "roleplay" but "social interactions".

In my experience the best resources a GM has to induce social roleplay into the game are... the players. You present only one person to role play with (at any instant, anyway). But among themselves, they each have several folks to talk with at any given moment. I find that, if the players are interested, this doesn't come from the GM, except insofar as you allow them the time to do it. There are ways a GM can make it more interesting or likely, though - run along the lines of interested professed by the players. In my current game, two of the characters are deserters from military organizations. So, darned tootin' those organizations are going to turn up.

 

[Crothian]

Role-playing is what happens between combat and comes from the DM, in ways for the players to interact with the other players (in character) or their environment.

I disagree with it coming from the DM. If my players want to talk to an encounter I let them. If I have a couple guards that they are intended to fight and kill but instead they choose to talk to them or do something else I go with it. I think it is great when it is the PCs that try to determine how an encounter is going to go. Of course sometimes they go and talk to the Sphinx and the Sphinx will just eat them.