DM Advice: handling 'he can't talk to me like that' ~cuts NPC throat~ players.

[robertliguori]

You know, in reality, many beat few. That is to say, when you remove the nastier forms of force-multiplication (few beat many when the few have armor and close air support), when you put a small band of elites against a large band of almost elites, or a really large group of competents, numbers win. The results of this is that in our world, people who large groups of people listen to are the ones with power.

In D&D, in the realm of combat, this is laughably untrue. Not only can the upper end of the elites massacre a wide swathe through the competents, they can also completely bypass them, hop over to their leader, give him a wedgie, and leave. The mental equations of power we are used to are utterly different. Suddenly, things like guest-hospitality become critically important; anything that makes an archmage decide, "Oh, damn, I killed a baron, now I have to slaughter the entire kingdom or I'll never get a moment's peace." is not a survival trait for a soceity.

Imagine, for a moment, a news story about a bunch of bank robbers who were, as they left the bank, ambushed by a full SWAT team with police backup and sniper support. Imagine that the robbers killed everyone and moved on, and are now at large. Now imagine that this scene was repeated multiple times, with escalation up to the level of direct military force, and that said force had been met with overwhelming response each time. Said robbers would be met with fear, disdain, and hatred, this is for certain. But I don't think that, if they happened to be on barrista duties and the robbers strolled in and ordered a round of mochas, most people would do anything than quietly serve up the mochas and try to be invisible until they left. In D&D, there exists the very strong possibility that the individual causing problems is in and of himself a greater force than the entirety of local law enforcement. PCs, as pointed out, should best be considered armor battalions past a certain level; my own personal metaphor is dragons. That is to say, if a hostile dragon shows up, the question is not "How much damage will it cause before it is slain?" but "Will any of us survive?"

Now remember what happens when PCs and dragons fight, and adjust your mental scales accordingly.

 

[Storm Raven]

In D&D, in the realm of combat, this is laughably untrue. Not only can the upper end of the elites massacre a wide swathe through the competents, they can also completely bypass them, hop over to their leader, give him a wedgie, and leave. The mental equations of power we are used to are utterly different. Suddenly, things like guest-hospitality become critically important; anything that makes an archmage decide, "Oh, damn, I killed a baron, now I have to slaughter the entire kingdom or I'll never get a moment's peace." is not a survival trait for a soceity.

Imagine, for a moment, a news story about a bunch of bank robbers who were, as they left the bank, ambushed by a full SWAT team with police backup and sniper support. Imagine that the robbers killed everyone and moved on, and are now at large. Now imagine that this scene was repeated multiple times, with escalation up to the level of direct military force, and that said force had been met with overwhelming response each time. Said robbers would be met with fear, disdain, and hatred, this is for certain. But I don't think that, if they happened to be on barrista duties and the robbers strolled in and ordered a round of mochas, most people would do anything than quietly serve up the mochas and try to be invisible until they left. In D&D, there exists the very strong possibility that the individual causing problems is in and of himself a greater force than the entirety of local law enforcement. PCs, as pointed out, should best be considered armor battalions past a certain level; my own personal metaphor is dragons. That is to say, if a hostile dragon shows up, the question is not "How much damage will it cause before it is slain?" but "Will any of us survive?"

Now remember what happens when PCs and dragons fight, and adjust your mental scales accordingly.

This line of thinking is only valid if you believe that the PCs are special snowflakes in the campaign world. It is also probably only true if the campaign world is poorly designed. The people in power in a D&D reality would be the people who can stay in power. Anyone who couldn't deal with a pack of miscreant adventurers would be replaced in short order by someone who could (or by the miscreants themselves). If the ruler doesn't have the resources to deal with a murderous archmage, or random groups of wild adventurers, he's not going to last.

If the campaign world is worked out to any reasonable extent, then those in power will be in power for a reason, and that reason has to include answers to the questions (a) how did they get into power, and (b) how to they hold on to power. If those two questions aren't answered in some way, then the world will probably appear to make little sense to anyone who spends more than a minute or two thinking about it.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

No idea about evilness, but the illegality is irrefutable. They're criminals. Start putting up bounty notices and bounty hunters everywhere they go.

Paladin's powers go 'bye bye'. If they are caught then have them tried and sentenced. If found guilty, which they most likely will, then have them hanged. Tell them about the merchants selling rotten vegetables to throw at them while they slowly strangle. Let them die, covered in stinking vegetables. Let them know that getting hit with a cabbage while they slowly swing side to side still hurts.

Have the Paladin wake up in the Abyss being tortured for his sins. This may get the point across. Let the torturing demon tell the ex-paladin that his god handed him over personally for his actions. 'Not often we get one of your kind around here, but always worth it when we do. 'Course Bubba here doesn't like the look of your face. That's why he's got the knives'.

Seems pretty straight forward to me....

And no, I am not joking much here. Maybe expanding on the theme for hyperbolic effect, but not joking. Actions have consequences, and sometimes those consequences result in a TPK. I once had a party hanged for killing an orc - when the local baron had a peace treaty to maintain. I told them about the orc widow and orphans... and how willing the baron was to let this band of strangers die to show that he honored the treaty.

The Auld Grump

 

[Imp]

aaaagh what a long thread.

a) I can't think of much of any setting aside from dawn-of-the-heroic-age-classical, barbaric, or else extremely campy, where going off and killing the king's man in the heat of the moment doesn't arouse the king's ire, duelling traditions entirely nonwithstanding; and

b) nobody in all these pages seems to have thought of this angle (if I missed you, apologies, it is really a very long thread): this King is surely not the king of everything, is he? There are neighboring kingdoms, enemies of the kingdom? Future allies of outlaw players?

Good lord, travel should be an option here.

I think where I'd go with this is to have the PCs play outlaw for a bit, and if they do a good enough job, they'll attract the attention of somebody on an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend basis, and this somebody can go send the PCs on a quest to find the magic whatsit in the heart of the mountain far far away from the kingdom where the king wants their heads.

"Oh, yeah. I can't go back to the Kingdom of Whazzamore. You see, they want my head." This is always fun to say.

And the business with the guys with the blue circles being nice to the guys in the plate armor and the big swords, especially now that they are wanted dead or alive in (at least one) kingdom.

(Pally would at least have some trouble with his powers. It's no fun having a ganked character for a long campaign, though, so try and have a way out for him so he can get some commensurate powers back if you decide to strip his paladinhood.)

 

[robertliguori]

This line of thinking is only valid if you believe that the PCs are special snowflakes in the campaign world. It is also probably only true if the campaign world is poorly designed. The people in power in a D&D reality would be the people who can stay in power. Anyone who couldn't deal with a pack of miscreant adventurers would be replaced in short order by someone who could (or by the miscreants themselves). If the ruler doesn't have the resources to deal with a murderous archmage, or random groups of wild adventurers, he's not going to last.

If the campaign world is worked out to any reasonable extent, then those in power will be in power for a reason, and that reason has to include answers to the questions (a) how did they get into power, and (b) how to they hold on to power. If those two questions aren't answered in some way, then the world will probably appear to make little sense to anyone who spends more than a minute or two thinking about it.

Well, given that the general status of D&D worlds sans adventurers taking specific action tends to be exactly "A great threat gathers, the existing forces of civilization are unable to beat it back, darkness conquers all, and evil rules the land.", I'd say that it's not so much poor design as default expectations. In fact, many D&D worlds explicitly answer the question "Why hasn't Evil X destroyed the world?" with "It has in the past. If you want to avoid the next generation of adventurers picking over the ruins of your cities and looting your dead for items, you'll stop it."

Basically, as pointed out previously, a world in which there aren't immediate, dire, and (most importantly) currently-uncombated threats to innocent life and limb is both a non-stable world, and the default expectation of a D&D world.

Besides, even if the expectation is that there are enough true-blue heroes to keep the darkest evil from destroying everything, the difference between survival and prosperity can be entirely based on how the local power structure treats adventurers. Adventurers both perform valuable services and tend to result in a massive influx of wealth and coinage; logic suggests that a population center that explicitly errs on the side of making adventurers welcome and comfortable may well suffer problems from the morally-grey (and morally-black-but mostly-kills-evil-people) adventuring population, but the rapid response time in between orcs setting up a fort and raiding the roads and said fort being reduced to ash burnt too thoroughly to smolder, and according minimization of loss, will well balance it out. Indeed, in a situation in which the marginal matters (such as when snubbing a single easily-offended adventurer can shift the economic balance of a region as he and his druid buddy decide to increase the food production of antagonistic states by 133%), "Yeah, he's an evil murderous bastard, but we're better off with him killing mostly them than they and him both killing us."

To continue the metaphor, a nation with a high adventurer population is like a nation surrounded by other nations with distinctly non-Euclidian borders. If a nation provokes you, you may well respond diplomatically, or militarily, if you are powerful enough. However, this response costs you; responding to every border incident will bleed you dry. It doesn't matter if the court wizard is level 15 and the adventurers making trouble are only level 10; yes, the court wizard will catch and trounce them, but not before horrible damage has been wrought. And once adventurers get it into their heads that the only way to survive making trouble in your kingdom is to ensure that you and your political structure don't, you'll see a lot of minor incidents blow up horribly. Unless your power differential is truly titanic (say, between that of the U.S. government and your average criminal gang), responding to every threat and provocation gets you...

Well, to bring it back to the original example, it eventually gets you into a fight you can't win. For all cases not N (where N = Pun-Pun), there is always a bigger fish: this applies to both states and individuals, and can be either.

 

[Mallus]

Your fundamental assumption here seems to be that this is explicitly run as a game for the benefit of the players...

Yes.

...rather than a simulation of a world, and that preserving this game is the highest priority.

Any simulation aspects of the game --if present at all-- have to be in service of entertaining the players. If not, it's just the DM masturbating. In public.

That is, you are assuming that metagame concerns can and should override all others.

Yes. Assuming that the metagame concern you're talking about is the players having fun.

Now, within those assumptions you are correct.

Yes.

But I know of many DMs who would rather keep their world consistent...

They're masturbating. In public.

So in short, not everyone is going in with the assumption that preserving the game is the highest priority.

Sure. But if the OP didn't want to keep playing, the topic of the thread would have been 'How can I leave a campaign that I'm running gracefully?'.

 

[Slife]

Just chiming in to say that "for the players' enjoyment" should include the DM as a subset of players.

 

[Mallus]

Have the Paladin wake up in the Abyss being tortured for his sins.

I once had a party hanged for killing an orc

Man, you are a grump...

Seriously though, at the point this starts sounding like good DM'ing advice, shouldn't you just lay off D&D for a while and go drinking with your mates instead?

 

[robertliguori]

Paladin's powers go 'bye bye'. If they are caught then have them tried and sentenced. If found guilty, which they most likely will, then have them hanged. Tell them about the merchants selling rotten vegetables to throw at them while they slowly strangle. Let them die, covered in stinking vegetables. Let them know that getting hit with a cabbage while they slowly swing side to side still hurts.

Have the Paladin wake up in the Abyss being tortured for his sins. This may get the point across. Let the torturing demon tell the ex-paladin that his god handed him over personally for his actions. 'Not often we get one of your kind around here, but always worth it when we do. 'Course Bubba here doesn't like the look of your face. That's why he's got the knives'.

Seems pretty straight forward to me....

And no, I am not joking much here. Maybe expanding on the theme for hyperbolic effect, but not joking. Actions have consequences, and sometimes those consequences result in a TPK. I once had a party hanged for killing an orc - when the local baron had a peace treaty to maintain. I told them about the orc widow and orphans... and how willing the baron was to let this band of strangers die to show that he honored the treaty.

The Auld Grump

"OK. McBard, you head down to Swadia and the Nord Kingdom. See if you can't stir up some good old-fashioned hatred of Vaygers, here. And don't forget to lay the blood libel on thick for the Nords; if we can get a natural border skirmish to blow up naturally, we won't have to engineer one. Wiz, put on your artificer hat for a while; when the war comes, we're going to need wands and scrolls, and plenty of both. When you're not doing that, see if you can't conjure up a few succubi; McBard's gotten us a list of a few nobles who could benefit from a little persuasion. Druidia, you're going to be the prime mover in this operation. Hit as much farmland as you can with Reduce Plants, and don't be afraid to take out any targets of opportunity while you're wildshaped. Heck, a few good firestorms during the summer months will do more than any spell. Well, any spell under eighth level. Sorcy, go look up Xitheras Brightflame, the Black Baron, that grimlock band...heck, anyone still alive that's willing to raise hell for coin. If it's a fight Vaygers wants, it's a massacre it will have!"

As you say, actions have consequenses. One of the consequences of enforcing consequences is that eventually, you run into someone who takes umbrage to you and has the means and motive to bring about your ruin. This can be the Watch arresting an apprentice wizard, or it can be an archmage shattering a city during his coffee break.

But really, most of the consequences will be less dramatic than that. An area that discourages adventurers will have fewer adventurers; depending on the ratio of threat to potential civic response, this can mean anything from fewer random assaults, a more stable currency base, and taverns and brothels suffering an economic downturn, to Bubba the aforementioned demon being able to take a brief break to Plane Shift to the prime and reap a few thousand souls for his personal use. Again, it's not just about the harm the adventures cause; its also about the harm they prevent.

 

[Mallus]

This line of thinking is only valid if you believe that the PCs are special snowflakes in the campaign world.

Well they are the protagonists after all...

It is also probably only true if the campaign world is poorly designed. The people in power in a D&D reality would be the people who can stay in power.

So a campaign world is logical and well designed only if every criminal act is punished?

Anyone who couldn't deal with a pack of miscreant adventurers would be replaced in short order by someone who could...

Perhaps the kingdom's military is currently stretched thin... say by a costly foreign war.