Inspiring pragmatic PC's to heroics

[I'm A Banana]

As the DM of a slightly "morally ambiguous" group, I've had to face similar problems...

Advice I can give is as follows:

A) ALWAYS have the villains well-prepared. My Old Man Speech above isn't just superfluous...if they're dedicated cultists, why would they leave their treasure open to attack? If the hags didn't have something that concealed their alignment, they're playing with fire when they approach a party with an obvious Paladin in the group. Villains are capable of planning and preparing. Their reputations as heroes probably go before them.

So the kid was hit for 5 points of damage? They're clerics. They heal it.

B) Have the story driven by the characters rather than NPC's. This is a stubtle change, but a real one. They're not just saving the kid because They're Heroes. They're saving him because he's *they're* kid. Those elvish maidens are actually found in this area -- as one of the PC's wife is evidence to. Intricately intertwine a long plot with the PC's themselves and loved ones. Perhaps Destiny Foretold them, or perhaps they're to stop the advent of a villan that Destiny foretold. This is something I can't really explain well now, but I think that's the gist -- have the plot deeply affect the characters.

 

[rounser]

Ooh, good advice Midget. The kind worth copying and pasting into MyInfo for later reminders....

 

[I'm A Banana]

To help with B, you don't need much...just a set-up plot.

Say the players kill the baby. Well, then, the people who sent them on the mission (presumably the baby's relatives) now have reason to dislike the PC's. Or say somebody sees the PC's slaughtering elven maidens in the forest...how's an observer to know they're Hags?

One thing leads to another. If you've got time, I wouldn't plan more than an adventure or two ahead. This allows you to go over the events of last week and tie them into an otherwise random encounter here. Suddenly, those goblins they cleared out a few days ago have taken residence in the moutains and start sending elite strike teams at the PC's.

If the baby's giving you problems, introduce Vengeful Dad. His family was everything to him, and he trusted you to restore it. You violated that trust, and now he can think of nothing but destroying you as you destroyed him. After his child's death, his wife left him and he got fired from his job at a day-care center because he was "negligent."

Boom, you've got a reoccuring villan that the PC's are probably loath to kill.

Add to the list:

C) Don't try to anticipate what your PC's will do in any but the most general of terms. Anticipate what they would do on how you will motivate them to do it. Consider even utterly dispassionate PC's who have enough glory and money -- how will you get them into the adventure? Also, think from the standpoint of the NPC's. Think of how the cultists or the hags think, and then let your mind flow from their position. If your next meal depended on you killing a group of people walking along the path, would you target the Big Bad Armed Warriors? Or would you rather go for the Random Pilgrim Family that's likely to come down the street later. If you want the hags to attack, give them a reason to, and give them the proper preparation. Think of what treasure they give, and then equip them with optimal items for that treasure level. A ring of mind shielding is a minor magical item -- and it makes it impossible to tell if you're lying, find out what you're thinking, or detect your alignment. Nearly any CR 3 encounter could grab one of these things, and in a world with Paladins runnin' around all over the place, wouldn't you grab one if you were evil?

Hopefully, that's decent advice. Someone can probably give you better, but I've got the time to respond.

 

[Al]

Having read about your PCs a bit more, it seems perhaps you should throw them the gauntlet: a PC-protagonist campaign.
Now this sounds weird. Surely the protagonists are the PCs in any campaign?
NO! The PCs in a typical campaign are not proactive, but reactive. The enemy cult is killing the townsfolk, the evil knight has kidnapped the maiden, the dragon is destroying the livestock, the mad wizard is searching for the artifact etc. The PCs are then reacting to prevent the main protagonist (the bad guys) from achieving their goals. Even when good is the protagonist- the king's champion is searching for an ancient sword or whatever- it is rarely the PCs who are the actual protagonists. They're just the grunts to carry out the protagonists' work for them: they do not set themselves the quest and find them, but rather they are set the quest by an external power.
Thus, the PC-protagonist campaign would be an interesting change. The PCs would set themselves goals and missions, and go about completing them in the best way possible. Whilst this might be best suited to high-level campaigning, personal subquests can work at the low-levels, and depending on how long term the goals are, they can provide an entire plotline (reforging an artifact from many disparate parts may be a whole campaign). Intrigue also works well for this kind of thing: the PCs must do their own thing rather than rely on a 'quest-setter' NPC.

 

[Stormdale]

I ran the same adventure tonight with the same result! However, I’d been building up to it for a few weeks using one of the PCs background stories. The cult leader was his nemesis evil brother, who had taken over the Church in Hommlet (the original setting in T1, not the new version) a while back. The pregnant girl was his younger sister who was pregnant with the evil brothers child! (Boy did the player love that bit of news when it was dropped last week!) Anyway last week they returned to find good old safe Hommlet in disarray as Burne and Rufus had been arrested on grounds of homosexuality (I run a gritty style game) and the Church .(i.e evil brother) was now in charge of town. If found guilty the two former town leaders would have been burned at the stake. I’d alluded for weeks that Burne and Rufus "lived together" but the players stilla ren’t sure if they are gay or not. Questioning several witnesses in the case they’d discovered that the charges had been trumped up as a convenient way to dispose of the town leaders but only had a few days to find more prooof. Since another PC was Burne’s nephew they had twice the reason to try and free them. So tonight the party had to find evidence framing Jaeger (the evil NPC/brother) before the case went to trial. Just to make it even more difficult Jaeger was going to preside over the court case. Fortunately for the PCs an ally noticed the girl (in labour) being led out of town by armed guards (the evil clerics body guards) and followed them to an old abandoned farmhouse before going to get help (the PCs). They sprung into action ready to thwart the evil plans…

Things turned to custard when the monk was disintegrated (rolled a 1 for his save) and then the paladin did the same at the same trap (if you’ve run the adventure, you know where it happened, the three survivors suitably protected continued onwards and arrived just in time for the ceremony and packed themselves. One wizard was on the verge of running away (his standard reaction to stress/combat situations), the fighter wanted to get his brother who was conducting the ceremony- to hell with the odds-, while the third survivor, a fighter/wizard decided to take matters into his own hands. He cast truestrike and then, without consultation of the others, took out the newly born baby before the ceremony could be completed. The other wizard dropped a fireball and then the two brothers went toe-to-toe (boy was the player fired up for this one, for weeks he’s been trying to get his brother who enjoyed full protection of the church!) while the (few) surviving cultists ran screaming from the temple. The nemisis eventually bugged out as the player was carving him up and lived to fight another dayJ.

One of the most intense and fun sessions for a long time. The poor monk player went through his third character in three sessions tonight. I thought taking out the baby was a legitimate solution but the players are still arguing over the implications of the action amongst themselves. They sure stopped a greater evil but will have to live with the consequences. They also managed to find more than enough evidence implicating Jaeger in the cult and saved Burne and Rufus, to boot. All in all a fun nights gaming.

 

[Ivan]

My dillema then is, how to enable my players to play heroically and generally good in alignment, whilst catering to their love of outwitting their enemies and playing a self directed campaign. How can the players exert a high level of control over the direction of the campaign and choice of adventures, yet leave the campaign open for doing heroics, achieving good and providing enough of a storyline and purpose for acting that the campaign doesn't become stale.

It's tricky.

One of my fave GMs has a 'Bold And Stupid Men (tm) Bargain' written out with us. Our actions influence the world, and the behavior of others within the world.

For instance, if we give a disarmed villain back his sword to allow him to continue an honorable duel with us, then she'll have the villain's daughter fall in love with one of us and free us from prison at the last moment - because that's the way heroic mindset works.

If, on the other hand, we spend a lot of time plotting and planning the most tactically sound way to enter the dungeons, then the villain will be busy plotting the most tactically sound way of killing us off rather than imprisoning us at all - because that's the way the tactical mindset works.

That's a non-game mechanic means of doing it. Unfortunately, not everyone's down with that, and the D20 system still (sadly) lacks a mechanism for rewarding heroic rather than tactical play. I've been messing around with the following idea, influenced by the 7th Sea Drama Dice / Deadlands Fate Chip mechanism:

Announce that every time the heroes do something heroic, you will add one point to their "Hero Pool". This pool can be drawn from at any time by the players to add to a failed dice roll of any kind: For instance, missing a saving throw by two points means the player can draw 2 from the pool and add that to his roll.

This lets the heroes succeed more often than they normally would - IF they are taking heroic risks. If they continue to play tactically, then they continue to let the dice fall where they may.

I think it's a decent way of handling the issue, myself. Let me know if you try it, if it works for you!

Oh - and if I were you, I'd do the following: The demon was summoned, but trapped in the infant body until he can kill the PCs. Evil Babies are always good for a real horrific endgame.

 

[Inez Hull]

Thanks for all your comments. Al I like your suggestion and have actually discussed similar ideas with my group. However, they were not really interested and felt that goals were not as enjoyable to quest after if they had set them themselves. I think a bit of both GM and player input need to meet half way on this one. It needs adventures which leave lots of untidy plot hooks and surviving enemies and I think this is definitely something I can improve on, but the challenge will be to make it not seem cliched to my hardened players!


Ivan I like your suggestion and will run it by my players in our next sess'. D&D can be played a lot looser and riskier than Rolemaster and I think my players just need a bit of encouragement to make use of that. Their attitudes are probably well justified as our Rolemaster campaigns were always pretty dangerous and involved a lot of max-minning in the character creation process (goes with the game I think).


Stormdale, it's interesting to hear the similar result, but with one crucial difference, my players didn't really have any real moral objections to their actions. Interesting also that we both plugged the adventure into RttToEE, they made a rather natural connection though I found. I had the party being stalked by EEE assassins in revenge for the killing of the (un)holy child, which they eventually traced back to the cult of Elemental Evil, leading them to Hommlet to investigate.

 

[Stormdale]

Yeah, I’m using the original T1 village though.

I’m toying with the idea of using either TToEE or RttTEE. I think it would be kind of cool to have the players go through the original series and then move onto the sequel in a few years of game time 9of course that would mean somne major revamping of the original. My campaign is based around the village and the players are becoming local heroes- especially after last week. They are not aware of either the moathouse or Nulb yet and I’m not sure if I want to do a huge duengeon crawl (we got bored in T1-4 first time round). However I am dropping G1 into the general area and that is going to cause them one hell of a headache in the future when the giants start demanding tribute (already started foreshadowing that one in the past couple of adventures).

I like the asassins idea. IMC, the evil brother is going to be looking for revenge and a couple of assassins would fit the bill nicely!

I haven’t looked in too much depth at RttToEE but it does seem a bit dungeon crawly for my tastes.

Good luck trying to get your PCs to become more heroic though. Our paladin, who died in the Cradle of Madness, learned the hard way that I expect good actions. For minor transgressions I’ve been withholding her special abilities! "Subtle" actions like that can help to encourage the type of play you want or you could look at some form of xp penalties (or bonuses) to get the party more in tune with heroics.

Good luck

 

[Ace]

We has a baby kill in the last game I ran too with interesting consequences

The PC's were travelling to Fantasy Earth's Edinborough (sp?) when they ran into an eldritch horror in a village.

After some exploration the LG Catholic Dwarf who thinks he is human (don't ask) found a crying hideously corrupted and mutated baby with sucker feet clinging to the wall and mewling piteously.

The reaction was immediate, Axe the baby.

I wasn't bothered by this simply because the player asked me for a right/wrong judgement. He was worried if his charcter had followed alignment and if that was the right think to do.

I had to think about it for a while but given the prevailing attitude of the world (Pseudo Earth) they were in I said it wasn't evil and was, although horrible, the right thing to do.

The charcter was played with a slight case of guilt for the rest of the session and I was most pleased.

Now if they had Magic Missle'd a helpless infant to stop Tharuzdin

when there was another way to stop him that would have been Evil.

If it was the only way, well I wouldn't have left it the only way....

 

[Inez Hull]

I'm going to have a discussion with my players next session around this stuff. They like to play hard headedly, so I'm going to ask them outright which they would prefer of the following options. (or somewhere in between)

1) I take a similar stance to them and play the intelligence, forethought and outright maliciousness of their foes to the hilt.

2) Reward them for taking a few more risks by allowing them greater chances of success when doing so (perhaps using Ivan's Hero Points suggestion)

Hopefully when we all put our preferences on the table we can come up with a solution. I have a feeling they may just go for the first option, which while not my prefered choice I can certainly accommodate them with.


......must resist


......must


.......re


.......sist


Oh what the hell I'll give 'em a TPK and see how they like sodding pragmatic bad guys.