Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="kitsune9" data-source="post: 1873364" data-attributes="member: 18507">Needless violenceHi Die_Kluge!I too had the same dilemma when I was reading a module and saw some artwork that "pricked" my conscience about my player characters who will more than likely just kill an NPC that they could possibly role-play out an encounter with.  If you want to run a campaign without a lot of senseless violence, you must define a campaign that avoids it.  For example, your villains are power hungry, greedy, but they see their victims as people to manipulate, rob, intimidate, not kill.  An example is the tyrannical baron who taxes his populace.  If the people fail to pay their taxes, punishment will be harsh, but dead peasants do not pay taxes.  Villains should be constructed this way and can be realistic.  Another aspect is to make violence an unpalatable choice unless absolutely necessary.  Many DM's tolerate their player characters to flaunt the laws of the land that would normally put someone in prison for years and years (thus effectively ending their character's career) for the sake of continuing the adventure.  Don't allow that.  If the character(s) breaks the law of breaking and entering, looting, pillaging, murder, attempted murder, property distruction, it doesn't take but a few spells to find out who's responsible and the characters are hunted down to be brought to justice, even if it was all the name of doing the greater good.  If I was going to implement dire consequences, I would never use this as a Catch-22 situation (the PC is forced to kill vile noble to free the people, but now he's caught and hanged for it--realistic, but not fun at all).  This would be a tool to let the players know up front that they should think about their character actions, before they engage in the interests of the greater good.To continue to make violence an unpalatable choice, it must have realistic consequences to the character.  D&D uses the abstract system of hp, but a character who has 100 hp being reduced to 1 hp still has the same ability to dish out damage, fight, and not die of exhaustion and shock.  While this system is fun for D&D, it does make violence as easy solution to every problem, because the characters begin to the "feel the pinch" when they are in negative hp approaching -10, but there are no debilitating effects during the actual combat itself.  Mechanics that deal with critical effects, maiming, and a fairly easy way to get killed could make players think twice about engaging in an all-or-nothing fights every time they run into someone who cops a bad attitude toward them.  If you don't want to add such realism, you can take away all the raise dead spells, so that player characters know that if their character gets killed, death is permanent.Another thing is that as a DM, I wouldn't want to subject the player characters to engage in unnecessary confrontations, thus random encounters are gone.  Any encounter should be a meaningful encounter.  In addition, I wouldn't award XP based on the current system.  A DM would award XP on mechanics other than "defeating" or killing monsters.Of course, if your players are the type who get a great deal of enjoyment of hacking every evil monster in sight, then forcing them into an environment where they got to role-play their encounters out wouldn't necessarily be fun for them, so I would only implement these changes if it's something their apt or willing to do.  I had a DM once who forced a campaign style of non-violence on us when we are a bunch of players who like to roll dice, dish out damage on monsters, and take their money.  After a couple of sessions of not rolling dice, we started to complain about the lack of action and he refused to accommodate us, so we asked him to leave.As a player who wants a more pacifistic game, you would have to see if your DM and other players would agree.  Well, good luck with your games!</blockquote>

Verification