Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Geron Raveneye" data-source="post: 2516182" data-attributes="member: 2268">Well, it appears to me that one way to set the sights of players and their characters outside the boundaries of combat encounters is to make them interested in the world around them...provided that you have players who play along, or actively pursuit that kind of interest. As such, there is nothing better than getting their characters involved with NPCs who aren't combat targets at all, but great for interaction. Possibilities are plenty, like:- somebody showing a romantic interest towards them- somebody being grateful for something they did during their last adventure- somebody trying to make them do something for him during their next adventure- competition rising up in a non-violent way about reaching some goal.Having interactions like that, and making them interesting for the players and characters of course needs a minimum amount of preparation and familiarity on the side of the DM where his NPCs, their personalities and motivations are concerned. Ideas about long-term plans and about reactions towards sudden changes in circumstances, brought on by the characters, can help a lot in fleshing that out.Another point touched here was that characters don't get the story behind the encounters, which is kinda surprising. There's two simple methods of giving a player an idea what his character his fighting for, or against. One, build on his existing skills. If a character has ranks in a skill related to the problem, let him make a skill check. Scale the amount of information gleaned from that to the success, like the Bardic Knowledge table does, and feed him a few facts, rumors or stories he knows. Two, introduce parts of the ongoing story either through NPCs who have an interest in it, and want to see the characters successful (Tolkien did so admirably through Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond and a handful of others), or through a PC who joins the group in that adventure (Aragorn would be a prime example for that, returning to Tolkien). That way, characters get a glimpse into the story developing, and players get an idea what the game is about.Of course, all this only works if you have players who want to play along and are interested in that kind of game. If you have a group that is only out to kill monsters and loot them, they'll probably be not too happy with that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification