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<blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1922981" data-attributes="member: 16936"><p>This deserves to be read over and over again, because it's absolutely correct.</p><p></p><p>It's harder to think of ways to reward and encourage "good" behavior than it is to just forbid specific "bad" behavior, but believe me, it's worth trying.</p><p></p><p>If you're sick of combat being an exercise in ruthless, brutal efficiency, the trick is to find out <em>why</em> they feel they have to play it that way, and then stop letting that be a useful strategy. You could, for example, reduce the lethality of combat. Or just reduce its overall importance to the game. You might stop using faceless, interchangeable monsters and enemies and start using only named NPC opponents that the player characters interact with in other settings as well. Perhaps you could try eliminating ALL experience awards from combat, and just hand out story XP awards instead, with bonuses for good roleplaying. Maybe you could reduce the penalties for failing in combat: D&D assumes that losing the fight means that you're dead, but what if the default punishment for failure was something more interesting?</p><p></p><p>You could even do the unthinkable, and ask your players why they're doing things that way and what they think would encourage them to try playing the game your way instead. (You know, instead of just complaining about it on the internet to people who will never, ever be gaming with you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> )</p><p></p><p>--</p><p>there may be a stick, but it's the carrot that really gets the donkey moving</p><p>ryan</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Herpes Cineplex, post: 1922981, member: 16936"] This deserves to be read over and over again, because it's absolutely correct. It's harder to think of ways to reward and encourage "good" behavior than it is to just forbid specific "bad" behavior, but believe me, it's worth trying. If you're sick of combat being an exercise in ruthless, brutal efficiency, the trick is to find out [i]why[/i] they feel they have to play it that way, and then stop letting that be a useful strategy. You could, for example, reduce the lethality of combat. Or just reduce its overall importance to the game. You might stop using faceless, interchangeable monsters and enemies and start using only named NPC opponents that the player characters interact with in other settings as well. Perhaps you could try eliminating ALL experience awards from combat, and just hand out story XP awards instead, with bonuses for good roleplaying. Maybe you could reduce the penalties for failing in combat: D&D assumes that losing the fight means that you're dead, but what if the default punishment for failure was something more interesting? You could even do the unthinkable, and ask your players why they're doing things that way and what they think would encourage them to try playing the game your way instead. (You know, instead of just complaining about it on the internet to people who will never, ever be gaming with you. ;) ) -- there may be a stick, but it's the carrot that really gets the donkey moving ryan [/QUOTE]
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