How do I turn Powergamers into Roleplayers?

[Kestrel]

Ok, I'm at the end of my rope here...

I'm running Monte's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and I'm pretty much sick of my players. I made the mistake in the beginning of allowing them to roll stats and use the Class Books unrestricted. As one of my players says, Im a softy.

Now I was hoping that my players would try to approach the campaign roleplaying their characters and come up with characters that were reasonable and believable. I think the Temple has a huge opportunity for story and roleplaying and I intended to use it to this end.

Well, here I am with two characters that are so min-maxed that they aren't recognizable as human. They have used every power avialable to them and the characters are total asskickers. The only way I can even offer them a challenge is to up the people they encounter, something I really don't want to do because of the amount of work it would require. But this isn't the real problem to me. The real problem is that the players simply see the campaign as a "module to beat." They have no interest in the story and don't roleplay thier characters at all. They constantly refer to the baddies in gaming terms and refuse to get into the story. To them, this is just one big dungeoncrawl, where the goal is to simply kill em all and let St. Cuthbert sort em out.

For me as the DM, this is boring as hell. I feel like telling them, "Yay, you win, the temple is destroyed and you get mounds and mounds of treasure, I'll be in the comp room playing Morrowind while ya'll roll dice"

I've sent them emails requesting they lower thier stats to the 32 pts system (they are 50+ right now) and that I was going to restrict them from the Class books and well as allow no custom magic items. They pretty much freaked at this, saying that i was needlessly penalizing them and was trying to "win" the game.

At this point, I'm ready to call it quits and find some new players. I simply don't know what to do to get them to roleplay instead of powergame.

Any advice?

 

[Yuan-Ti]

I hate to say this, but this campaign can probably be tossed down the sh*tter. You should probably explain to them that it is boring for you to play this way and was not what you had in mind. If they are having fun with it, make sure you let them know you appreciate that--you could even have another session in which you try to wrap up the adventure a little bit, to at least give it some kind of ending.

Then tell them you want to start another campaign. Have them make new characters under whatever conditions you decide. Some will likely complain, since they liked having more powerful characters, but they will likely go along with it in order to keep playing as a group.

Now, the next thing is probably that you should not use a module like Return which may come across as a dungeon crawl because it is essentially a big dungeon that they have to crawl through (yes, there is other stuff, but the setting lends itself to that mindset). With weaker characters they might be more interested in roleplaying, though some of them will still be more interested in how many things they can kill. Which is fine. To each his own, and hopefully some of your players will get into the other aspects fo the game.

 

[TalonComics]

How can you turn power gamers into roleplayers?

Don't run Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. If there ever was a module that was hack n slash it's this one. Jeez, how can you roleplay in it when you're too busy rolling for initiative?

I open the door. Roll for initiative.
I walk into the room. Roll for initiative.
I walk up the stairs. Roll for initiative.
I look for the public restroom. Roll for initiative.
I think I can see my house from here! Roll for initiative.

So, aside from that here's what I would do: Ask your players what they want to do and what is fun for them. If it doesn't match what you're interested in I would do what Yuan-Ti suggests. Some players don't play D&D to roleplay as they just want to be the badass and kill everything. That's not my cup of tea either so I tend to avoid players like that.

I feel for you man as to me this is the biggest problem in D&D right now. D&D has had such a stigma when it comes to being a roleplaying game versus a rollplaying game. My guess it's something like 75% who just want the rollplay.

So that begs the question to everyone: Are you a roleplayer or a rollplayer?

~Derek

 

[BiggusGeekus]

On the forums at http://www.montecook.com there's some threads that have advice about maximizing the role-play in RttToEE.

 

[Kestrel]

Yup, posted there too

 

[LostSoul]

I don't think powergaming excludes role-playing. You can have powerful characters with interesting personalities.

Try and introduce NPCs into the adventure. NPCs that have nothing to do with combat.

Encourage some kind of inter-party conflict. Especially when they're deep in the dungeon and need each other to stay alive. That should force them to role play (or, if not, they'll get themselves killed and you've got a different sort of solution).

At any rate, talk to the players and tell them that you want more role-play. See if you can come to a compromise.

 

[Meridian]

From the other side of the screen, left of center...

I was invited by Kestrel to post my own comments here, especially since (or perhaps in spite of the fact that) two weeks prior to his post to our gaming troupe's board, I dropped out of his Temple campaign for my own reasons. I'm hoping that my comments will assist others in providing Kestrel with the advice he's asked of this community.

To paint a more detailed picture of the environment in which this is taking place: this specific troupe of players is a subset of the larger gamers' pool currently running within the metro area. This larger pool has existed for at least two years in its present roster, and consists of approximately ten to fifteen people who consistently play weekly or biweekly. We've met through mutual acquaintances in realtime and off of gamers' personals here and other places. There have been social OOC conflicts that have caused the subsets of gamers to gravitate around one or two GMs and/or move around in certain groups because of the battle lines drawn.

All this to say that with this type of situation, players start to expect a certain style of gamemastering from particular GMs. Each GM is known for favoring certain systems and settings. Common opinion of Kestrel as a game master for at least the subset of gamers of which I am a part tends to lean toward the favorable but specific: "Kestrel runs really good modules." Granted, I haven't known Kestrel as long as some of the others, but my perception is that his most successful campaigns were rooted in existing DnD modules and settings. The Temple has lasted for almost a year, and before that (before my time), it was the Underdark series.

Ironically, one of the Kestrel campaigns I enjoyed the most did not begin in a module, but something he created on the fly. The irony lies in that eventually he turned to a module to provide an adventure for the character party, which in the end proved to be the end of the campaign. He later confessed that games run off the cuff made him nervous sometimes, because he was never sure if he was entertaining enough.

Now, though I'm not the one who originated the comment, I would agree that Kestrel is in fact a "softy" when it comes to trying to please his group of players. His primary objective is for everyone to have fun. His main strength is his ability to admit mistakes in rulings and then correct them to be fair yet be sensitive to someone's entertainment level. He approaches running a campaign as an evolutionary process for his skill as a GM as much as development of the setting.

That's a very noble aspiration, but as he found out, players will accept only so many changes made retroactively to their expectations of their characters abilities or the capabilities of their party before they blow up. As an example unrelated to Kestrel, the group became stressed when after my paladin died, I decided to play a bard instead (don't ask). They freaked out about not having a fighter ("We're gonna get killed without a fighter!"), but moved on albeit grumbling back into the Temple. When I left the game proper, I'm pretty sure that while it wasn't visible, they were stressed again by having only three PCs and several NPCs to increase the party's chances for survival. When Kestrel posted his post, it seemed to them that he was intentionally finding ways to weaken the party enough so that he had more of a chance of killing them, which was an unfair though not unexpected reaction on their part. They didn't think he was trying to improve the game, they thought that he was backpedaling.

Here's the puzzling thing for me. While I haven't dared to run a game in 3rd edition since it came out, I have run DnD games for the individuals in question that are giving Kestrel his headaches, and I really haven't had any issues that I can remember regarding powergaming. What's really interesting is that these two players are capable of or are in fact role-playing in other campaigns, under different GMs, myself included. I for one don't mind powerful characters as long as they have the personalities to deserve being powerful, if that makes any sense.

My perception of the problem is that not only did these players agree to join this campaign knowing it would be a module, but they expected Kestrel *not* to emphasize role-playing while running. I don't know if it's true that in the past Kestrel might have foregone role-playing in favor of massive amounts of combat in all of the campaigns that he's run before, but I'm thinking that while Kestrel has evolved over the years of gaming to a point where he would like more role-playing in his campaigns, these players are fixed in their perceptions of him being an adversarial GM running a killer module.

I think the challenges Kestrel faces right now if he chooses to continue is overcoming their habits of thinking, and his own history as a GM. I will emphasize that this reference to Kestrel's style of gaming or his career history is not perjorative. Human nature is to react badly to change.

I also happen to think that the present popularity of online gaming in our crowd might be helping to cloud the issue in that it further enhances the powergamer's mentality ("Kill monsters, get gold, find treasure, trade magic items, form guilds, post on boards"). It's another tool of inertia, not to mention tainting people's perceptions just by association through enthusiasm of discussion.

My suggestion is for Kestrel to wrap up the module, just for closure's sake, and attempt something new and experimental with different characters and a different mix of players.

Delivery-wise, for his next attempt, I would also suggest to him that using the Central Casting tool this group uses for initial character creation only triggers the powergamer mentality if someone gains something tangible from the lifecycle flowchart contained within, so he should avoid it, and encourage organic background development, whether before the campaign starts, or between sessions. When a book presents you with a series of events for character history, it requires no investment in creating a character, just a willingness to roll dice.

Finally, some advice regarding preparation. I've played characters in DnD adventures that I had no idea were modules, simply because the GM ran it so many times before that she was completely familiar with encounters and descriptions to the point where it felt improvised. Reading out from passages in the module only further cements the idea that the GM is a computer running the campaign, and creates separation to actions directly affecting the flow of the adventure and "the superfluous stuff" that is peripheral to the adventure but critical in the role-playing development of the characters.

My Two Cents.

Meridian

 

[Juiblex]

Tough Row to Hoe

I was also encouraged by Kestrel to post here. I also know Meridian. However, I was not a member of said group. I just have a few random thoughts.

I do think that this group shows a very difficult dynamic to overcome - Rollplayer versus Roleplayer. Like Psion has said elsewhere, I don't really believe that anyone is actually a "rollplayer." I think everyone roleplays, its just that some have more of a gamesmanship paradigm. However, when I say Rollplayer most everyone knows what I mean - someone who has a larger emphasis on game mechanics than acting out a fantasy. While others who have more of an escapist paradigm are what people traditionally refer to as "roleplayers" in the same breath as "rollplayers." In any event, when you have conflicting personalities things tend to get rough - as we all would attest to I am sure.

There were a series of articles in Dragon magazine last year that explained the dynamics of different types of players and how to deal with them. I thought the articles were very good.

Now my experience is with my current campaign - The Classics of 1e. Well, this campaign begs for and is centered around modules. My campaigns usually have no modules. However this was classic DnD. Unfortunately, after the second module I found that the campaign was stagnant, the play (tons of combat) wasgetting boring and I felt like as a DM I was spinning my wheels in mud.

And I wasn't the only one. I think everyone was a bit grumpy that things were what I would call "rough" My group tends to lean toward the gamesmanship side of the equation with one member very much in the escapist camp. So I have decided to change some of my presentation, focus more on a cohesive story and try to smooth my classics of 1e into an overall story arch.

So I did something radically different. The last session was a murder-mystery in Greyhawk. Was it original? Hell no. It was worse than Perry Mason. We didn't roll combat once. However, it provided a nice change of pace and I think it showed my escapist player that I wasn't going to exclude him. I also think it showed my other players that I was going to try new things and it wasn't going to be all hack and slash - which I think they were tired of as well.

I haven't been a DM for a long time. But I think I have learned one thing that I have read over and over. It is very true. Although I'd like to please everyone - you can't. If they don't enjoy your game or your style (and there have been more than a few that haven't liked my games or my style) then there really isn't much you can do about that. In the end you change for them and then you are unhappy.

Just throwing out some ideas.

 

[Alejandro]

To thine own self be true.

As many others have pointed out, it's all about gaming styles. Since you're the DM, don't change yourself so much that you stop having fun. If the players cannot flex their own styles, they shouldn't be in this group. No group should be sacred.

No nuclear weapons!

Avoid escalating power levels. Upping the ante and buffing the opposition to "match" is a lot of work and results in character death.

 

[Henry]

Even Monte Cook will tell you this one:

No Module is designed to be run without changes.

This fact actually comes as a surprise to some DM's, I have found. As a new DM years ago, I used to run modules as Holy Writ, and the end result was a bunch of powerful characters with backgrounds that were paper-thin.

I later learned the most important lesson possible: Tailor the module to your party, and to the expectations of the type of game YOU want to run. With Return to the Temple, you seemingly ran into the problem of players who excelled at both dice rolls and rules optimization. Don't feel you have to punish them because they flew through. You need to adapt the module to their party.

Did they beat the crap out of the opposition? Then either up the opposition (though you say you don't like this), or change the nature of the opposition so that killing them is the WORST idea. Let's say one has crucial information to the rest of the game, and killing him has set back the party by months! Then the players learn this fact AFTER those in-game months have passed.

You seem as if you wish to punish them for optimizing the rules of the game as you have set before them. Unless you've done some real game breaking stuff, then they STILL aren't too tough to challenge - trust me on this.

But don't EVER run a module as is, or even close to as-is. It wasn't written for your party.

Those who say a module is worthless to them unless you use it as written is quite brain-dead as a DM, and in my opinion has no concept of what a module is REALLY used for - as a source of ideas.