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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 6134486" data-attributes="member: 2">No house rules have been needed. I think there are a few secrets:1. Every action has consequences, and actions are ripples in a still pond. What you do today affect how people react to you later, and (more importantly) what they do to the people you care about when you aren't around. Think about your local state congressman. If he threatened to beat the crap out of the other politicians every time he wanted a bill passed, politics would be really amusing for a while, but he'd never get what he wanted. Same thing in D&D. Makes the stakes high and not easily attainable.2. Reward roleplaying. Make sure that the benefits from diplomacy far outweigh what they'd get from killing someone and taking their stuff.3. Once the PCs earn it, recognize their standing and political importance. Have villains defer to them from reputation alone, possibly trying to ingratiate themselves instead. Have lackeys compete for their attention. Have inn-keepers kick other people out of the best rooms so that the PCs can have them instead. Have people gossip about them, and try to arrange marriages, and present business deals that lead into adventures.4. Reputations matter. There's no mechanical benefit, but the group wants to be respected in polite society (usually), and that means that a reputation as simple uncouth thugs is embarrassing. Use this to your advantage. A NPC raising an eyebrow and sniffing as they walk past speaks volumes. You can't buy respectability.5. Give them family who are also important (MORE important?) and whose fortunes, good or bad, affect the PCs as well.6. Entangle the PCs in the family's troubles. The PCs will have great joy beating up the local tax collector, but the family may still owe several million GP to another rival family, unless the heroes can do something about it.Johnny, can you give an example of one problem you ran into?</blockquote>

Verification