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In your RPGing, who chooses the antagonists/opposition - players or GM?
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<blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 8226886" data-attributes="member: 6787503"><p>In my current D&D 5E game, I think I (as DM) have introduced most (if not all) of the antagonism. I make a reaction roll whenever I introduce an encounter with a monster/NPC with an Intelligence higher than 1, and a result of <em>hostile</em> on the roll indicates the creature is antagonistic to the PCs’ goals. An example of this was a powerful tribal chief who wouldn't allow a PC to pass by his village to rejoin the party after he had been out foraging. The PC was looking for information about his missing wife, and the result of a failed Charisma check was that the PC learned some unwelcome truths from the chief about why his wife left him. (edit: Now that I think of it, the unwelcome truths themselves were something that the player had authored into his character's backstory.)</p><p></p><p>Non-intelligent (INT 1) creatures just act however they're supposed to, which is usually to attack on sight. I've introduced a few encounters like this. The tables I use to generate encounters (from the 1E DMG) seem skewed towards non-intelligent creatures.</p><p></p><p>Another form of antagonism is when the players decide to attack a creature, I will have it become antagonistic to that effort. This came into play when the players had their PCs take it upon themselves to rid the bog of giant toads. I still see this as me introducing the antagonists because I told the players there were giant toads out in the bog eating people.</p><p></p><p>One source of antagonism has been some weather I introduced. I established early in the campaign that it was winter, which I had determined randomly. One morning when the PCs were journeying home from the bog, it was extremely cold and windy, and the wind-chill threatened to force the PCs into a state of exhaustion, which they overcame through perseverance.</p><p></p><p>The only time so far in this campaign that I think is slightly close to the players introducing their own source of antagonism is when they decided to go to the city council to establish a patronage relationship after having been successful at killing some toads out in the bog. The council was something I had mentioned when describing the city, including that it was led by a reeve, so they were elements of the fiction I had introduced, but not to provide opposition -- merely to give the city some depth. I decided to treat their visit as a social encounter, however, and upon their audience with the reeve in the council chamber, I rolled a hostile reaction, making the attempt to secure the council's patronage quite difficult. When the party druid's Charisma check failed to convince the council that the party's services were needed, the reeve proposed that instead of supporting the PCs in continuing to rid the bog of monsters that they instead be sent into a dungeon below the city where they could find treasure with which to support themselves. Strangely, the players had their PCs agree to this.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Hriston, post: 8226886, member: 6787503"] In my current D&D 5E game, I think I (as DM) have introduced most (if not all) of the antagonism. I make a reaction roll whenever I introduce an encounter with a monster/NPC with an Intelligence higher than 1, and a result of [I]hostile[/I] on the roll indicates the creature is antagonistic to the PCs’ goals. An example of this was a powerful tribal chief who wouldn't allow a PC to pass by his village to rejoin the party after he had been out foraging. The PC was looking for information about his missing wife, and the result of a failed Charisma check was that the PC learned some unwelcome truths from the chief about why his wife left him. (edit: Now that I think of it, the unwelcome truths themselves were something that the player had authored into his character's backstory.) Non-intelligent (INT 1) creatures just act however they're supposed to, which is usually to attack on sight. I've introduced a few encounters like this. The tables I use to generate encounters (from the 1E DMG) seem skewed towards non-intelligent creatures. Another form of antagonism is when the players decide to attack a creature, I will have it become antagonistic to that effort. This came into play when the players had their PCs take it upon themselves to rid the bog of giant toads. I still see this as me introducing the antagonists because I told the players there were giant toads out in the bog eating people. One source of antagonism has been some weather I introduced. I established early in the campaign that it was winter, which I had determined randomly. One morning when the PCs were journeying home from the bog, it was extremely cold and windy, and the wind-chill threatened to force the PCs into a state of exhaustion, which they overcame through perseverance. The only time so far in this campaign that I think is slightly close to the players introducing their own source of antagonism is when they decided to go to the city council to establish a patronage relationship after having been successful at killing some toads out in the bog. The council was something I had mentioned when describing the city, including that it was led by a reeve, so they were elements of the fiction I had introduced, but not to provide opposition -- merely to give the city some depth. I decided to treat their visit as a social encounter, however, and upon their audience with the reeve in the council chamber, I rolled a hostile reaction, making the attempt to secure the council's patronage quite difficult. When the party druid's Charisma check failed to convince the council that the party's services were needed, the reeve proposed that instead of supporting the PCs in continuing to rid the bog of monsters that they instead be sent into a dungeon below the city where they could find treasure with which to support themselves. Strangely, the players had their PCs agree to this. [/QUOTE]
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In your RPGing, who chooses the antagonists/opposition - players or GM?
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