RBDM - How?

[Numion]

To my mind, one of the important aspects of being a RBDM is to have a world where things are happening and plots unfolding *whether or not the PCs have anything to do with it*. The PCs have free reign to decide what they want to do and where, but who knows whether they will tackle all the right things in the right way?

DM: "You remember when I asked you if you want to play Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and you said no?"
Player: "Hmm, yeah, I heard it was a bit too much dungeon crawling for our tastes.."
DM: "Well, the thing is, the adventure happened anyway, you just weren't there, and you see, since nobody stopped them, the world is destroyed. You die."
Player: "Cool."

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Its a lot easier to pull some excellent Rat Bastardry if the PC's are engaged with the world beyond the dungeon walls. They need to be interacting with NPC's as if they were real folks, not challenges to overcome. I don't know if in your game this is the norm or not. As others have mentioned, the butt-kicker is eventually going to kick the wrong guys butt, and the kender is going to steal something that would have better been left alone.

If you can give some more general information about your game, maybe we can provide suggestions? How much of the game is dungeon/non-dungeon? What kinds of roleplayers are your players away from the combat and dungeon scenarios? Are there any major NPCs/organizations/mentors/etc that they interact with regularly? Are there any major potential power struggles within the dungeons they plunder - many monsters make great plotters and can have plans going on under the PC's noses...

 

[Darklone]

Yes. And I was taking a break from grading when I posted that. I guess it shows

It's a gift, not a burden

Now I wanna know, how many teachers are here ?

Back on topic:
Second best RBDM act: Players started in the typical mercenary style campaign. A rather wealthy old merchant looked for caravan guards. The players do fine on the first caravan and rescue another one as well.

They get more and more contracts for special missions with royally payment. The merchant trusts more and more in them and sends them after some minor artefacts "to keep some fanatic doomsday dudes from gathering power".

More and more paladins and clerics show up on the missions... as enemies. Still, the players don't like fanatics and send them to their god.

The merchant was a lich in disguise and he proved to be pretty good at using people. Over the course of two years, the players slid more and more down on the way to hell and didn't really notice their missions became worse.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

One player is a very cautious, jaded gamer. The "Okay, let's move in as a swat team" type tactical commando. Her attitude at the moment is just "Burn it all down, and sift through the rubble", since they're sort've in a dungeon filled with nasty things and she doesn't want to walk into the enemy's traps. Considering where they are, that wouldn't be out of the question.

There is more to being a RBDM than setting up traps for the players to walk into. Though I will admit that this level of caution can make certain things difficult. The answer lies in the "Burn it all down" mentality. There are plenty of things you can do to make this aspect of their strategy work against them.

The first thing that comes to mind is that you may want to consider using the 'old school' definition of dungeon, and start stocking them with large numbers of prisoners. You actually do not even need to make the prisoners dangerous at all. In fact, make them all genuine victims of the villains. Once it becomes clear to the SWAT player that they should want to try to rescue the players, than you can start using that goal against them.

- Assuming you have prisoners chained to posts and in cages that are all over the place, using area attacks becomes dangerous to the prisoners.

- You can make your villains much more hateful if you have them start harming the prisoners. Give a "surrender or the prisoner gets it" ultimatum, and then carry it out. Also, I am sure that the villains will have no reason to not use Fireball type spells.

- If there are NPC allies with the party, you can have them inclined to knuckle under when the threats start to get close to home.

- Another failing of 'burn it down' tactics is that it is very easy to get the players to kill someone they should not have. It is alarmingly easy to provide the players with reliable evidence that a particular person is evil and must be killed / taken out if they are too gungho. However, this is also easy to unravel if your players hit everything with Detect Evil, Zone of Truth, and Detect Thoughts. There are ways around this, however.

As a last resort, you really may need to master the Xanatos Gambit (linked earlier). For those too lazy to click the link, the Xanatos Gambit is a name for any villainous plot where after the heroes complete a task that they think works against a villain, the villain can then turn around and say "That was my plan all along, you fools!". The entire plot of the Starwars prequels can be considered a Xanatos Gambit by Palpatine to become emperor. The trick to a Xanatos gambit is that you have to successfully do the following.

- The players need to know that the Villain wants to accomplish X
- The players need to think that if they perform a task Y, that the Villain cannot accomplish X.
- In order for the players to perform task Y, they must also perform task Z.
- The completion of Z must enable the villain to acheive X+N.

Here is a fairly basic example:
- Villain Mc Nasty wants to obtain the Sword of Doom from the Crypt of the Lich King.
- The players discover the nefarious plan, and learn that in order to steal the Sword of Doom, they must first slay the Lich King, and bring the sword to the Temple of Light to destroy the sword.
- The players storm the dungeon first, and kill the Lich King, stealing the Sword of Doom.
- When the players enter the Temple of Light with the Sword of Doom, they break the seal imprisoning the Greater Demon Tyrant because they fulfilled the Prophecy of Obscurity.
- Villain Mc Nasty is actually the last surviving member of the bloodline of the ancient hero, and with the demon freed, he is now able to take on the power of the Ancient Hero, and bind the demon to his service (If he weren't a bad guy, he could imprison it anew instead).
- Villain Mc Nasty saves the town from the Greater Demon Tyrant, and now has the very same Greater Demon Tyrant firmly under his control. The priests of the church of Light anoint Mc Nasty as the Hero Reborn, and pledge themselves to his service. Mc Nasty promptly tells the priests that the players wanted to release the demon, making the Players the new public enemy. As the players flee, McNasty uses a Message cantrip to thank the players for killing the Lich King for him.
- The players now chase the DM from the room, and vow revenge against Mc Nasty.

This will work because while the players may know that McNasty wants the Sword of Doom, they cannot possibly know why without looking into it. And if they find out having the Sword of Doom is a pretty sweet deal for a bad guy to begin with, they probably will not look past the obvious. It is also a Rat Bastard DM thing to do simply because you will have gotten the players to screw themselves over.

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[Rechan]

If you can give some more general information about your game, maybe we can provide suggestions? How much of the game is dungeon/non-dungeon? What kinds of roleplayers are your players away from the combat and dungeon scenarios? Are there any major NPCs/organizations/mentors/etc that they interact with regularly? Are there any major potential power struggles within the dungeons they plunder - many monsters make great plotters and can have plans going on under the PC's noses...

It's a frontier-style campaign set in the Demon Wastes in Eberron. The PCs were basically assembled by the Crown and told, "Hey. We have all these refugees from a war, and we don't really want them in our country. So, we're sending you across the bay to this fiend-infested forsaken desert. There is abandoned colony that the inhabitants have disappeared three times, and your job is to clean out all the monsters that have moved in so we can send the refugees there. Oh, and then we'll be putting you in charge of the community for a year, so you'll be responsible for training guards, ensuring they have food/medicine/protection, etc."

Right now the PCs have mostly cleared out the town. They've got a little imp following them around, leading them into traps and throwing around Suggestion to get the party members to attack the Spirit Shaman; at least two NPC monsters cajoled/bargained with them to kill a powerful priest that had set down in the area*; opened a door where several demons were trapped, and while they kicked the crap out of most, one escaped, intending to round up a posse and engage in hit-and-run tactics; found two ghosts (one helpful, one animating dolls to try and possess PCs); oozes that came from vomit that two PCs threw up after failing fort saves; other sundry unintelligent monsters.

Once the town is clear and the rebuilding starts, it's going to be more roleplaying, resource management, interspersed with "Woah, there's something really freaky going down", monster infiltration, and the occasional dungeoncrawl. For instance, the breakout of a fiendish virus that is spread via spoken word, etc. If you can't tell, I like horror (even if my jaded players barely bat an eye at it).

*One of which came to a PC in their dreams, directed them towards the priest and offered a reward in exchange for freeing one of the cleric's prisoners. The NPC in question is a disguised hag, the prisoner a desert dryad who keeps an oasis healthy. I've yet to decide the Hag's motivation beyond that; she might have serious issues with a human community springing up near by, or see it as an opportunity to exert her power. The other is a monster psion and his choker disciples who agreed to leave the town in exchange for the party killing the priest.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

The RBDM has to be very adaptable. Shilsen and others mentioned player freedom, that is key to being a RBDM.

One of the hallmarks for being a RBDM for me is the ability to take something innocent from the PCs past - whether during an adventure between adventures or from their PCs background, and have it come to haunt them.

One of my players had a background where she had run away from her privileged life because her parents didn't approve of her use of sorcery. She didn't expect to discover bounty hunters hired by her parents to bring her home. Later on the rest of the party didn't expect to see posters listing themselves as her kidnappers, accusing them of brainwashing her.


The best RBDMs I have seen and heard about give the players the rope, but then let the players tie the knot. The RBDM gives them a tree, but lets the players throw the rope over the branch. The RBDM then waits for the players to stick their own necks through the noose before kicking the stool out from under them.

 

[Rechan]

The best RBDMs I have seen and heard about give the players the rope, but then let the players tie the knot. The RBDM gives them a tree, but lets the players throw the rope over the branch. The RBDM then waits for the players to stick their own necks through the noose before kicking the stool out from under them.

I've done something sort've like this. Two PCs hunting food after making camp came across an abandoned mine entrance that had collapsed. In the rubble, a ruby was sticking out. The rogue grabbed it - it was attached to a wooden pole. She yanks it out. Under the rubble, they found a dwarven skeleton. The pole was the broken haft to an axe, and the bladed portion was nearby. PCs took the haft and axe, then left.

The skeleton was a vampire, who had been staked and left. Since the PCs took his axe, he began hounding them because, well, the axe had sentimental value. He followed them all the way back to their base of operations and started harassing the town. Then escaped when they came to put the kibosh on him.

 

[Pbartender]

Now, a lot of people are talking about giving the players rope to hang themselves with, misdirecting the players, having serious consequences for their action, and such. That all great, but there's one critical piece that's missing...

A chance of success.

No matter what they do, no matter how slim the odds, you always need to give the players a chance to succeed. Doing everything else suggested here, while failing to give your players the hope of winning, will only turn them into churlish, sullen, cynical, frustrated players who never stick their characters' collective necks out, because either A) it's likely to get them killed or B) they'll almost certainly fail somehow or C) both.

Remember, Pavlov showed that the most effective positive reinforcement is occasional but unpredictable success. Letting your players "win" spectacularly from time to time gives them enough confidence and trust in you, the DM, to make it through the shocking Rat Bastard moments with good-natured aplomb.

In other words, give your players enough wiggle room to be Rat Bastard Player Characters.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

It's a frontier-style campaign set in the Demon Wastes in Eberron.

Ok, there's a lot of good stuff there!

Here's the kind of things I would be thinking. I'm always look to gray out the sharp distinctions so that PC's can't always make snap judgements.

Starting with the colony location, the first thing that occurs to me is to wonder about motivations for sending a new group of colonists. Perhaps the Crown has a batch of refugees that are troublesome for one reason or another, and they actually hope the colony gets wiped out? In this case, the first inkling the PC's might get is when the first ships show up, with really odd colonists (in Eberron they could be changelings, or lycanthropes, etc). Or perhaps there is some kind of resource there that they feel is too valuable to let go unexploited, in which case, the PC's could be faced at the end of the year with the new "management" that comes in being clearly looking to exploit both the resources and the colonists, with little regard for the work the PC's have done. This could set up some nice conflict later on, and could be something you could build towards over time. It's also a good place to use Shilsen's "Schroedinger's Plot", as you don't have to decide WHO the new guys taking over will be until they step off the boat; politics could cause things to change at any point. I'd be trying to involve them in royal intrigues - making them wonder who they can really rely on. This will help set up things later on, I think.

The Imp intrigues me - Imps are messengers of the fiends, and he might be there furthering some infernal plot. They can go incognito and start messing with the PC's behind the scenes rather than directly through suggestions.

I also like hags. I like to run them as small "e" evil, rather than Big "E" Evil, and that could work for you for a while if she stays disguised. I'd imagine she'd like having people around, especially refugees, with lots of orphan children/baking goods. She could be playing it safe, being a little helpful here and there with potions and divinations, while occasionally giving in to the "bake a small child into a pie" urges that make hags fun.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

It's a frontier-style campaign set in the Demon Wastes in Eberron. The PCs were basically assembled by the Crown and told, "Hey. We have all these refugees from a war, and we don't really want them in our country. So, we're sending you across the bay to this fiend-infested forsaken desert. There is abandoned colony that the inhabitants have disappeared three times, and your job is to clean out all the monsters that have moved in so we can send the refugees there. Oh, and then we'll be putting you in charge of the community for a year, so you'll be responsible for training guards, ensuring they have food/medicine/protection, etc."

Your setup is actually pretty good for providing potential Grand Bastardly Hooks. Obviously you have set before the players a difficult task and your doing great things with the imp. There are a number of things you can do. Kid Charlemagne is definitely on the right track here.

The first would be to have it set up so that the person who chose this site did so specifically because having loads of people killed off by the local fiends serves a nefarious purpose. Perhaps the crown just does not really want the players to succeed at this, and actually desire failure. The tricky part is coming up with an ulterior motive for why the players need to be killing the fiends in the area beyond just setting up a successful colony.

An easy answer would be within the history of Eberron. The setting mentions that Changlings, Shifters, and warforged are all the results of what amount to super soldier programs. Perhaps getting a colony set up in a fiend infested land is a way to create yet another type of soldier race. The players kill all the dangerous fiends, but the Erinyes / Succubi types evade the slaughter. Throw in some McGuffin item, or special property of the locale, and rather than Half Fiends, you end up with something else. You do not even need to use half fiend types, you can go with some other thing entirely.

Kid Charlemagne's idea of having some new sinister types take over the colony at some point works great with that.

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