Transition from Hack & Slash to RP: Help

[Andrew D. Gable]

I've been DMing and/or playing (usually the former, though) practically non-stop since 3e was released. In that time, the campaigns I've run have been very hack & slash, not that there's anything wrong w/ that.

Now, I want to run the Swashbuckling Adventures/Ravenloft crossover I've been working on (I'm calling it Dark Seas of Theah, BTW, not that that means anything...) and want to concentrate more on roleplaying rather than monster-hunting. I've tried this before, with my abortive CoCd20 campaign, but that quickly became hack & slash, too - which is part of the reason I aborted it. I'm not sure if the unwanted hack & slash is the fault of my DMing style or my players' attitudes towards the game.

Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone has some advice for me on how to make the jump from hack & slash to roleplaying - and also on how to help my players follow suit.

 

[Zaruthustran]

Well one way would be to force your players and yourself to roleplay. Take away the party's ability to hack and they'll be left with one alternative: roleplay.

Some ideas:
1. Have the party attend a remote formal function. Then toss in a murder or other mystery. No weps, no spell components, no hack and slash.
2. Capture the party and put them in a POW camp. Only by gaining the trust of the other POWs and asserting leadership can they organize an effective resistance or escape.
3. Pit two "Good" groups against each other (workers vs. nobles, young vs. old, two competing churches of Good deities) and challenge the party to prevent bloodshed.

Alternatively, you can just start penalizing on hack & slash behavior and rewarding RP behavior. Have some thieves threaten to mug the party. If the pcs simply kill the thieves then they've earned the anger of the local thieves' guild, and they'll be harassed or murdered whenever they're in town--and they might even get in trouble with the law. If they bluff or initimidate the thieves, then they'll earn the respect of the guild.

Bribery also works. Give players a reward of 10% of the XP they need in order to get to next level, in exchange for a page or two of character background. Give players 5% of the XP they need to level up in exchange for drawing maps of their travels, keeping a notebook of campaign info, or otherwise investing time in their characters or the game world. Start handing out 1-2% XP bonuses "For good roleplaying" at the end of every session. Your players will respond.

Another option is to experiment with non-D&D roleplaying. The "How to Host a Murder" games are excellent for this, as is Diplomacy. This'll get your players (and yourself) thinking about how to act out roles.

-z

 

[Agback]

Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone has some advice for me on how to make the jump from hack & slash to roleplaying - and also on how to help my players follow suit.

Well, there are three techniques that I have found helpful for making the shift, but all of them are a bit hard to implement in an ongoing campaign. Are you prepared to kick off a new campaign with new characters?

1) Try a plot arc that centres on conflict within society and subject to its strictures, rather than centring on open conflict by champions of society against its avowed enemies. That will make it harder for PCs to rely on simply killing and robbing all their opponents.

2) Try a campaign (with suitable characters designed to order) that is explicitly based on some genre or sub-genre that gives players a clear example of things for their characters to do other than kill and pillage. For example, you might try running a 'private eyes' campaign.

3) Players tend to be drawn to modes of action that allow them to depend on robust, explicit rules, to techniques that they can depend on without staking all on pleasing the GM. In D&D, PCs rely on combat because players can rely on the combat rules. So you might try adopting (and telling the players about) a set of specific, dependable rules for charm, persuasion, dissimulation, seduction, seeing through deceit, stealth, observantness, pursuits on foot and in vehicles, designing, building, damaging, and repairing equipment, etc, etc.

Unfortunately, D&D makes it very hard for members of the fighting classes to accumulate any useful abilities outside of combat, and spellcasters, too, have few few non-combat abilities. That is one reason why the kind of thing I am suggesting used to be called "a Thieves' Campaign". You might like to consider a Rogues' Campaign. Or adopt rules variations that open up the skill lists a little. Or take a break and try some game other than D&D.

And then there are techniques I have found helpful for GMing and playing a character in a less-than-hack-and-slash campaign once it is going, described in this essay.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Brisk-sg]

Hey Zaruthustran,

Make it deadlier, and make sure the players know it. There are several options that would work for this:

1) Give the character's max HPs and Con bonus at 1st level. Then at 2nd and every level after that, have them only gain 1 hp per level with no con bonus. Do the same for human NPCs you create.
CONs: Can really destroy CR calculations, and may make the PCs run from everything supernatural.

2) Enforce the laws of the lands the heroes are travelling in. If a hero commits murder then have them tracked down and imprisoned or executed. Make sure the guards who find them are not wimpy or not well enforced.
CONs: This doesn't always work, and can often lead to the oppisite effect with the "heroes" becoming enemies of the state and becoming more "players" vrs "dm"

3) Use the 7 Sea Rules instead of D20 for a little while to get them use to the fealing of the campaign setting using the more deadly rule set.
CONs: Diffrent ruleset, have to purchase books, not D20

Anyhow, those are just a few suggestions.

 

[Chrisling]

You might also try disjoining XP from fighting. In the d20 COC they have some suggestions how to do this, the easiest being for the GM to say, "You gain a level ever 4 sessions you attend." Adjust that to fit your game, of course.

This simple rule change takes away one of the biggest reasons many D&D players like fights: to gain XP. If they gain nothing from fighting in terms of advancement, they could well seek other options for success in game. I mean, why fight and risk your character if talking can work and doesn't risk your C?

 

[ced1106]

One other thought is to have players run NPCs. That is, whenever there's a scene with an NPC, give the player a short description of the NPC, whatever information the NPC has that the PCs will want, and let him run with it.

You could also make an pregen NPC -- an ally with better skills more suited for the adventure. If the player decides to play the pregen instead of the PC, so much the better.


Cedric.
aka. Washu! ^O^

 

[Humanophile]

Bribery also works. Give players a reward of 10% of the XP they need in order to get to next level, in exchange for a page or two of character background. Give players 5% of the XP they need to level up in exchange for drawing maps of their travels, keeping a notebook of campaign info, or otherwise investing time in their characters or the game world. Start handing out 1-2% XP bonuses "For good roleplaying" at the end of every session. Your players will respond.

Another option is to experiment with non-D&D roleplaying. The "How to Host a Murder" games are excellent for this, as is Diplomacy. This'll get your players (and yourself) thinking about how to act out roles.

-z

These two are some of the best, with the last being the better of the two. There's no magical trick to making PC's play subdued, social characters. If there were, I'm sure a great many game systems would be based around it. The best you can do is encourage and hope.

If you have the people, though, LARP'ing it might be a good way to get the players in the mood. It might be subtle, such as taking up the role of the character the PC's are talking to, complete with minor props, or it may very well be a full-blown How to Host a Murder type thing. (The latter's nice because you can get the NPC's to come in for a one-off murder mystery, and you might pick up a new player if you're lucky. The downside is getting people to come in the first place.) I wouldn't reccomend a MET/NERO style LARP quite yet, though. Those things are really tricky to do right...

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Someone already mentioned notebooks, but what about character journals? Keeping an in-character journal might help them get inside the character's head more and pull out some motivations.

You could also have them write up a few personal goals of their characters. 3 each or so. Reasonable goals, personal to the character, not things like "I want to become the best swordsman ever" or "I want to take over the world." Then you would build these goals into your story so they would act as plot hooks. Ideally, you could intertwine the different characters' goals so that a given adventure would attract more than one of them.

Also, make them RP the things that make them more efficient hack n' slashers. If a PC wants his character to become a Blademaster, for example, tell him he has to find an appropriate teacher. Drop some hints about where he could find such a teacher. Then, when he finds the teacher, have the teacher test him in a Samurai/Yoda-ish way. Make the character prove patience and proper respect to the teacher before the teacher accepts him as a student.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Here is my suggestion: Work a lot on your first session. Make the location where the PCs first meet an interesting town with interesting NPCs that they can interact with.

Also don't introduce the PCs to each other all at one. Let them meet in small groups, and make it in a way that they can't be sure of these people's agenda at first. "It seems that a shift-looking person has gotten the same room in the inn as you did. What do you do?" (Note: In medieval times, it was pretty common for strangers to share a room...)

Here's an example from our GURPS Warhammer campaign:

First, I put some thought into the starting location. I created a town called "Bad Tiefenbrunn", a very small city famous for its hot springs. It was a peaceful and quiet town... too quiet. One of the players told me that he wanted to play a halfling innkeeper and militia member, and who has I to reject such a great hook?

Other prospective party members included:

- A thief.
- A gambler and soldier-of-fortune.
- A soldier
- A dwarven Trollslayer who wasn't too bright (for those of you who are unfamiliar with Warhammer, Trollslayers are dwarves with a serious death wish - and that's not a metaphor...)

So the adventure started when the halfling's milita patrol stumbled across a weird-looking dwarf with a head wound who was dazed and wandered aimlessly around the forest. The militia patrol decided to put him up in the halfling's inn because he was the one with the most room (ain't democracy great?). The dwarf's wounds healed over the next few days.

Next, a caravan came into town. A small girl distributed flowers to all members of the caravan and said "Welcome to Bad Tiefenbrunn!" - and was promptly scolded by its mother for giving flowers to "mere guards" (throwing in a few NPC encounters like this adds a lot of color to a town) - two of the guards were, naturally, two PCs who had been hired previously to guard it. So the gambler and the soldier-of-fortune had entered the scene.

One other character who had travelled with the caravan - the thief - made his way to the vice mayor's office (At this point, I took the thief's player out of the room to explain all this in detail). The vice mayor, a certain Martin Hofhammer, had previously hired the thief to "recover" a family heirloom, and asked him if he was interested in another job. The thief said "yes", and Hofhammer explained that his town had experienced some "bandit trouble" as of late, and he needed someone who could get "into the bandits' mindset"... They worked out the details (such as the fee), and Hofhammer asked the next two people to come to him - the two previously mentioned caravan guards.

He explained to them the problem with the bandits, and asked them if they were interested in helping dealing with it. They said yes, and Hofhammer introduced them to the first PC - without mentioning the "thief" bit. Then he told them that for "political" reasons, he would have to put a local in charge of the investigation - but he had already someone in mind, and that particular halfling shouldn't present any problems if they were firm and looked as if they knew what they are doing.

Then I (as Hofhammer) called the halfling's player out of the room. First, I told him that Hofhammer let him wait half an hour in front of his office, with a large cuckoo clock as his only companion. Then Hofhammer called him in, greeted him cheerfully, and asked him whether these malicous rumors of food poisonings at his inn were true. The halfling immediately grew flustered and naturally denied everything.

With the halfling off-balance - and thus in the right frame of mind - Hofhammer told him that a halfling member of the City Council had recently complained to him that "there were not enough halflings in a position of authority in this city". So he, Hofhammer, decided to rectify that, and put the halfling PC "in charge of dealing with the bandit problem". Then he introduced him to the other PCs, gave him 100 gold crowns for additional expenses ("but I want to see reciepts for everything!") and the right to draft others into this as long as they were volunteering, and shoved him out of the door.

And after a few futile attempts to draft other members of the halfling militia ("My wife will beat me if I stay away from home for that long!"), he decided to draft the dwarf...

So now the party was together, and they could start plotting on how to find the bandits...

If you start the campaign on the right note - by introducting each party member like this - your players are much more likely to role-play than by just throwing combat encounters at them from the beginning. And that's worth more than any rules changes or XP penalites...

 

[Kibo]

Funnily enough what primarily helped me make the transition was mekton. I was somewhat into anime at the time. Anyway, me and one of the guys I played with just started experimenting.

I decided I wanted to do a venus wars type thing, that would end up with mecha instead of bikes. So we did the before the war stuff and he was in a bike gang not all to different from the start of Venus Wars or Akira. A funny thing happened, we didn't have any guns or anything in the game. A little knocking heads on motorcycles. Anyway word gets around that we're having a blast, maybe not the most cinematic story, but better than some of what we'd been doing as a group where we we're playing in. So we invite them, I show them how to make the characters and explain how no one is going to start with any guns or junk like that. One, and I still shudder to this day when I think of what they did and the things they said.... They ended up choosing weapons, one was discret in this selection if not others and chose a dagger, another chose an axe, and the last, Strongbow, who could shoot an arrow up three stories, had a bow.

The guy with the axe, rolled up white hair and red eyes and combat fatigues for his personal appearence, and he didn't leave his axe at home. (In retrospect he should have gotten a bonus on his intimidation rolls.)

So many classic lines, from so many strangely horrible characters....

Anyway, it started off rough, and quickly got better through repetition. I think what really helped me break the cycle and stop the insanity was the limitation of no fire arms. Now with DnD, I'm not sure you could do the same thing and have it be fun. Me and the first guy got to the point that when run adventures, particularly in modern settings, they just come off like movies. It's almost sick. Once you get a taste of that, from any side of the table, just a taste, you're done with hack and slash.

But if I had a dnd group, and just wanted to go with it.... I suppose I'd fold in a love interest, with a dark past that she tries to hide, for fear that it will return to haunt her in more ways than one, and besides *that* incarnation of herself is truly dead, shes a different person now kinda thing. If you build a relationship between this npc and a pc, where they will suffer for the sake of the other, then you've got drama. And you've got leverage for your story. A good example of this is sepulcraves story hour Lady Despina's virtue or something like that. Even if it doesn't work out, it doesn't matter, all you need is that one scene, that one moment, that one taste. And that will setup future successes.