NPCs Lie, Rekindling the Spark, and You're Not Eddie Brock [DMAcademy Advice]

0:00 Sometimes talking with friends feels like role playing. Sometimes it feels like combat. Join us at the round table and roll an isha too. This is Curmudgeons and Dragons. Hello adventurers, Welcome back to another Communitions and Dragons. My name is Jason Portiso. Once again, I am joined by mister Jim Crocker. Hey, yeaw are we doing? And that's it today? Me and Jim today, which and that's how you know. Today we're doing dm Academy.

0:41 If this is your first gam academy, Hello, But what we're gonna do. We're gonna go through Reddit's our slash dm academy and look for posts that are at they're asking you for advice. Every now and again we'll find something that's offering advice, but posts that are asking for advice, and we'll see if we can help them out a little bit. That being said, I'm ready to jump in, Jim, We're ready to jump in. Yeah, let's do it. Let's jump in, all right. Our first story is posted by user a nag ay naeg no am pronouncing that one right. The title is my players believe everything my MPCs say, what do I do? My players never question what my NPCs are saying they've gotten themselves into difficult situations because of that. One of the PCs almost died because of that.

1:26 One time, even an undead person who they knew it doesn't care for PCs, gave them wrong information which got them called by an opposing faction, and the players immediately assumed that the undead person was badly informed and he wasn't in the wrong, because how should he have known. I told my players time and time again that sometimes the NPCs are lying or hide information. It frustrates me that they never question any NPC. Maybe comes down to me being a very good liar, but it baffles me that my players never question anything that my MPCs say. Is there a way to make my players start questioning my MPCs every now and then? Or should I let them continuously round the problems when they don't question even the shadiest NPCs that they encounter, Maybe they're not shady enough. I don't know. I'm really curious how old these players are, because what this sounds to me is like they're taking a video game NPC approach to this, like the NPCs that they're running into are basically just there to like go through a dialogue tree and like give them a quest and they go and do their thing. I will say this that actually, this is fine. This doesn't this isn't a problem because it seems like they have incorporated as players into their play style and into their approach to the game, the fact that, yeah, okay, cool, some of these characters, these NPCs may be lying to us, but the DM has done a really good job of making that interesting as posed to annoying. Right, you know,

3:01 like like they get in trouble or whatever. This guy lies, And I mean, I think if if you have an NPC lie to the players whatever, I'm sorry, the NPC is lying to the player characters, and the players go, you know what, we're going to decide not that he's a dick, but that he's still our friend and he just didn't know better or somebody lied to him. Then, you know, as the DM, and you've got a couple of options. One, you can say, you know what, you're right, he is your buddy, and he's just a you know, he's the terrible judge of character, you're undead friend, sure, you know, getting his information from shady sources and stuff like that. You know, and because all of us have friends who are reliable, you know, like one out of three times or something like that. But but because we're friends with them, and you know whatever, it's that one out of three makes it worth it for the other two times when maybe they're giving us bad advice or they don't know what they're talking about or something. Sure Like, I kind of like that that they're not so binary about it. Like the second somebody gives them bad information, they're like, you're dead to me, Like, because like that's people don't really do that in real life necessarily.

4:21 Like, I think this is a gift, and what you should continue to do is, you know, every now and then, have those NPCs be wrong or be lying or whatever, but always make the result of that, you know, interesting and compelling, as opposed to just completely hosing them because they didn't do an insight check on somebody. Sure Like, I think this sounds great to me. This sounds like like he's you know, he's got a great situation. Though. Yeah, my first take on this was that, I don't know, he says a good liar. If you're such a good actor that it seems like you're not lying, you should also be a good enough at going to make it seem like you are lying. Uh. So if you if you really want to just like just just to hold their hand a little bit and get them used to mistrusting in PCs. Get a couple of them that are just like super obviously lying. Um, if you have to give them the shifty eyes while you give them the speech, give them the shifty eyes while you give them the speech. Um, make it two, make it two treasure chests. What is a trap? What is treasure? And have them just like to have the fifty fifty lie it's like, oh yeah, it's in the left one. You can trust me.

5:28 It's okay, big thumbs up. And then uh and then you know, mimic and then after the fight maybe a little or something. Um. And again, I don't know how all these players are, how experienced they are. Um, Like you said with with the dialogue tree, this this does sound a little bit like a sky Rim player, uh taking their first four way into D and D in which case punished, punish them harder. Um. Yeah, like but so so so I'm gonna push back on that a little bit because I think like there's a balance that you want to walk there. Um, it's cool if you want to have the players push back against um. You want to have the players like occasionally not trusting somebody or have a reason to be dubious about information they get. But like there's a line there, of course, so you don't you don't want to cross it into they don't ever trust anyone you get in front of them. And that's that can actually be a little bit of a tightrope that you got to walk there. I mean, of course, that can be a delicate balance.

6:24 Yeah, you want to you want to introduce the notion of mistrust um and not the default. You also want to make sure that if they don't figure out that that person is lying that, like I said before, it's going to result in something interesting, maybe something dangerous. You know, they can get in trouble, but it won't like totally hose them in a way that you know makes them gunshy of trusting anybody. You want it. You want to have that be like an oh my god, I can't believe you fell for that kind of a situation that they can, you know, afterwards, not necessarily laugh about, but they'll they'll get out of it in a way that doesn't make them feel like, oh my god, now we can't trust anyone. I'm looking through the comments here and I found a comment here by user dumb dumb d m which may or not be a reference to the dumb dumb mister story that we told them our first wholesome stories. But they the TLDR here is that they bring up one of the most underutilized and often forgotten stats on the player's sheet. And do you have any clue what I might be talking about? Passive insight, passive insight, passive wisdom. Yeah, passive insight, aassive perception is something He's always asking questions about. Passive perception.

7:44 Yeah, but passive insight is sitting right there for when people are trying to put one over on you. Yeah. Yeah, So what I do, especially because I'm all doing right now as one shots. But you know, the first thing I do after the characters introduced themselves in character, of course, I get their max HP, I get their seeing, I gets their passive, their passive perception. UM for new players, all explain to them. It's like, listen, if I if I need to uh sneak up on you, I don't need you to know that I'm trying to sneak up on you. That defeats the purpose of me sneaking up on you. But a passive insight is like socially sneaking up on somebody. So um, this is it's a stat that like never gets used. In fact, I forget how to calculate it. Uh So, so they suggested that using passive insight just to give them a hints and tell them that their character thinks that the NPC is not telling them something or maybe or maybe deliberately lying or holding something back, depending on how far off they are, And you can even like you know, you can quietly roll a deception check versus their passive insight unless they want to do an active insight check. Um. So that that might be a solution too, if if they don't start picking up on hints.

8:50 But um, I don't. I don't think the solution is have have the NPC stopped lying, because then that's just that's just a boring game. Um. But like I'm all four continuing to let to let them walk into traps until they start to learn how many times, how many times we have to teach you this lesson, old man. That may also be a thing where it's not that you're such a fantastic actor. It's that like, if you're friends with these people and you are, like I r L an incredibly open, transparent and trustworthy person, and then you sit down to be the DM and your friends who like are just in the default habit of trusting you all the time and assuming you're not lying to them. Ever, I don't have that problem, you know, well no, but but you know there are people that that like like if um, you know, there's a couple of people I know, if they were to run a game and they were to just like look me in the eye and say, you know, and he tells you that this treasure map is totally legit, I go, well, yeah, of course it is all right, because you're telling me that I wouldn't it be, you know, because that exactly because Joe is telling me that though Joe is you know, um embodying you know whatever, shady Traderson. So yeah, So, like I said, our campaign, we recently moved it to in person instead of online, and now we have a little we have more FaceTime. Um. Actually, this is only the second time ever that the four of us were in the same room, and the last time was for a DM's bachelor party, not even for D and D.

10:20 So, um, that's a little side note. Um, Our DM is, uh, he's getting pretty good of voices and stuff. He's like, he's actually like he's he's really getting into that kind of that style of DMA and is and is absolutely improving. Um. Not that he didn't start bad. He just had two accents that he was good at and stuck with those. Now he's now he's branching out of it. Oh yeah, everybody was Scottish, got your Cockney, you got your Boston. Yeah, everybody everybody was Scottish exactly. Yeah you got you go two kingdoms over, still Scottish, but good Scottish. I can't do a good Scotish anyway. So we, uh, we find this guy who's the the like interim mayor of this like swampdown, and we got shady vibes from him immediately, mostly because of the way Joe is acting. Um, and I think I still we haven't resolved this part yet. I still think we're right, um, but I think it's for the wrong reasons. He hasn't really given us much reason to distrust him, other than when we were speaking with him. The DM was a little shady eyed and that, and we are harping on this thing.

11:31 I still think he's bad. That's totally fine, and tool in your toolbox to lay that ground work down for that. Yeah, it's like, instead instead of turning left, we just made three rights and just and we still got to the same spot, just by the stupid way, which for those of you listening outside of New Jersey, that doesn't make any sense to you. But that's just something we do here in New Jersey. We go three rights to make a left. Um, look up Joe Candle. It's weird anyway, but yeah, I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. This one is posted by user nerd Big Energy and Yes, and they are looking for advice. It says what does a DM have to do for a bit of character development? And what they say is I recently had an epiphany. I'm bored with my multi year campaign because my PCs are exactly the same people they were when we started. Their circumstances have changed significantly, but their reactions haven't. My players consider themselves role players first and foremost, but they've stopped engaging with each other's characters and are tunnel visioning on the plot in front of them, which both makes me feel like a trained monkey trying to keep them entertained and makes me think they're bored of each other's characters too.

12:50 So here's my question. Have your PCs shown character development in your long campaigns? So how did you make it happen? And this was a particular interest to me because a lot of stuff we get is new dms or you know, like like I'm starting a campaign, what do I do? But this is like, you know, I'm several years in and suddenly I'm realizing this is a thing. I was really hoping looking forward to talking about this. Yet, Yeah, we don't get that. We don't get a lot of late stage problems. Yeah, what's your take on that? My immediate thought here, this is my first time hearing this story, so this is just like gut reaction stuff. So my immediate reaction would be that if the plot is moving, if the plot is taking over all their role playing. Um, in a campaign that's this long, you should have some space to breathe and have it be less on plot in story and more on character story.

13:48 UM. So maybe taking a few sessions or even a few months worth of sessions and having less to do with a big bad and more with developing characters. Um. We've talked about having like like a home base. Um. Uh, that could that could be one way of doing it. Um. Maybe they's one of the Yeah, absolutely that I was gonna I was gonna go back to that conversation. We've had a couple of times about about how useful that can be. Yeah, maybe if they finish an arc. Maybe if they finish a one bait bad or one small bad, um, and they're in between major arcs, there could be some downtime role playing um where whether it's their their home base or like, if they go back to their respective hometowns for a while and uh and do things with the riches that they've gotten from their adventures. Um. I've heard of PCs that like they finished, they finished the campaign and still keep meeting every week because they want to role play their characters starting a farm. That's a little that's a little too.

14:50 I would never do that, but um, but that's not the kind of roleplayer I am. Um, all the top of my head, that's that's where I would do. Where you're like you uh, you know, finish a part of the story you're on get an in between arc and had that focus on the players a bit, like incorporate parts of the backstory, incorporate stuff that they've learned since the start of the campaign, and kind of see where see where that goes. I think it's a good place to start. Yeah, and so like I see this, and there are two immediate thoughts that I have, And one is that I'm going to go back to a thing that I always say when we have these conversations, which is I'm going to talk about emergent backstory, which is this idea that you don't need a ton of backstory when the game starts. You just have to say, why am I an adventurer? Why are we together on this adventure? Maybe one or two questions about like what's going on locally, But that's all you need. And in fact, the less the PCs give you, the better, because then what you can do is create backstory as you play forward like this. You know, when you hit a lull like this and you realize that the PCs aren't talking to each other, just ask somebody, you know, ask the fighter who taught you how to fight, who was the first person to put a sword in your hand? And then they'll you know, give them a week to come up with an answer, and when they come

16:22 to you, you turn to the bard and you say, okay, how do you know this famous sword fighting instructor? And then you drop that character in and you've got a ready made triangle there that gets them talking to each other. You know, by involving that character. Backstory doesn't have to stop when you start playing the characters. You can asking questions, incorporating it, reincorporating it, and you know, and certainly backstory that you created for that you created before. Like you said, go back to town. Have somebody from the town show up and say, oh my god, your deeds have reached us back there. We can't believe that you made good. Just letting you know that there's a great big hole opened that swallowed the fountain in the center of town and we're all terrified to go down there. Can you come back with your friends and go do that for us, you know, and then you can have you know, the sweetheart they left behind, and you know whatever, the younger, you know, whatever, their sister who falls in love with another PC or something like that. All of that stuff is all stuff you can do. But the other thing that I think you can do with this, even if you don't want to go back and create a bunch of backstory, is when you talk about that kind of tunnel vision on the campaign. Usually what that means is you have laid a plot in front of them that is like your plot that to make progress, to go anywhere

17:55 in the game, they feel like they have to work on that plot to get anything done, to move forward. And what I've done, and I would argue probably the most successful campaign I ever ran. I as much as I could, didn't come up with pre made stuff. I tried to drive it based on what they were interested in. But there was a thing where we would do an arc of whatever the kind of overarching story was in our big fantasy city. It was like a you know, like a fantasy megalopolis thing where all like the whole game took place in the city and the area underneath it and stuff like this. But we would do like an arc of the main story, and then I would ask each player, what's a story you want to see, however outrageous it is, however crazy you want to make it, and then I would do that spotlight adventure. And because everybody knew eventually they were going to get their own spotlight. They were invested in those Spotlight adventures, and the Spotlight Adventures sponned NPC that became people that we liked and stuff like that. I mean, and this was literally like, you know, the Dwarf and Fighter was like, I want to have a Western. I want to have a dwarf Western where we're like driving cattle and stuff like this. So we had it. We had a dire cattle stampede through the middle of town and stuff like this where they were like like on the backs of the of the dire cattle doing a fight against people that were like shooting at them from buildings and the stampede and everything, and so you

19:27 know. But but the point of that was then like we met some of that character's relatives who were dwarven cowboys, and you know, we had that whole area and everything, and the other players were super invested in. Like if I just in like if I just introduced some dwarf and cowboys who were just like here's some dwarf and cowboys, they would have gone Dwarven cowboys cool. But when you invest when you introduced dwarven cowboys, one of whom is you know, the fighter's little brother, and the other of whom is the fighter's dad who's angry at him that he became a fighter instead of a cowboy like he was supposed to. Suddenly everybody's way more invested just because they're connected to another player character, even if it's not connected to them. Everything that you mentioned and like, and again I'm gonna brand mad Poduct, but like it's just that that first first campaign is just that good. Everything you mentioned is stuff that is stuff that they've done. Um where like you know, finding the old love interest, like listen to the frost Wan arcum, which is just some of the best storytelling that I've heard, and like it's it's not until you just like spelled it out there for me that I even realized that that's what they did. And that's where that's where a lot of the character stuff, not so much the story stuff, but the character stuff really started coming forward. And by the time Heat episode one hundred, which is over two years in the making, um, you are so so so invested in these characters. Yep, I have pulled over on the highway to sob

20:59 during like a any minute monologue. But yeah, that that's fantastic advice. Um, I can't really, I can feels to add to that. So do that because because I've actually run games that have gone three and four years and stuff like this, uh and and and that was what we did in that long running game to engage people. Because you know, if you're like, if you're going six months, then you know a module or two will carry you. But if you really want to get into it long term and you don't want that siloing where it's just plot plot, plot, plot plot, you've got to do those callbacks and ensure and then get their personal stories involved. Yeah. Cool, and then and it's never too late to do that. Like that's the other thing that's important here, I think is is this is not a thing where like he needs to scrap that game and then do another thing. You can just say, hey, we're gonna set this, we're gonna set the plot aside. It's not going anywhere, and we're going to focus on this for a little while. Yeah, and then we can get back to it when you want to get back to it. Yeah.

21:56 And that can even go on twice that before about like having in between major arcs yep, yep. But I do want a dwarf Western to see if I we had we had like this was fourth edition, so like we had tokens for the dire Cattle and all that kind of stuff. It was great. We had a lot of fun line. All right, let's do one more of these. I've got one. I got one from user of Viral Tiger oh four And he's asking the real question here, is it bad to kill a player character on purpose? The text here is, well, let's just let's just read the story. Um yeah, context. I'm a new DM running my first campaign. We are three sessions and about eleven hours, and one of the players has a very interesting character. Okay, so he's I don't love where this has gone, but he wants to remain very mysterious and informed a group that he has a beast within and we'll try to keep it under control. He's a Level three transmutation wizard and really wants to be similar to Venom from Spider Man. His whole sort of personality is to go against the grain of the group and be mysterious. Lone Wolf heard it.

23:07 He's been asking me many times if I came a scenario where he can unleash the beast Aka use a ninth level transmutation spell to turn himself into an uz Gallam. I feel like this is overpowered because he hasn't unlocked the spell yet. Well, yeah, you're right, yes, yeah, this is his first character ever. I couldn't tell I've tried to talk to him about what I tried to talk to him about waiting until he unlocks the spell, but it really wants to use it and say it's the whole point of his character. Okay, I'm even gonna finish reading this because this isn't about killing a character. This is about vetoing a character when that she even hits the table. Yes, you're a new DM. A milestone for a new DM is saying no to a player's idea for the first time, and it feels so good not to shoot down ideas, but to like just to like remind them. It's like, no, you can't just be the most powerful thing in the world because you said so, there's no story there. Yeah.

24:02 Um, so this this one is this story itself aside um because that player that that character should not have been a thing to begin with, and that should have been taken care of on the first place. Um, you made your bad nag out lying it and if you kill that character, you kill that character. I really don't care. Um. But the question here was that is it bad to kill a PC on purpose? So let's I'm gonna kind of hijack their question and turn it into my scenario. Um, and this is going to come back to my story one shots and I have I have a few players that have been coming to all of them so far, and I'm super thankful for them. UM asking all those guys who if you're listening to the show, I'll see you next week. UM, but I don't know if the answ your listener and I we'll see if we'll see if they do. UM ask you if you are listening and you uh and you uh tell me that you heard this episode and tell me tell me you heard me call you out. I'll um, I'll let you. I'll let your guy find something interesting. Well, we'll give you. We'll drop an ext your magic guy. I'm I don't know, well show to one shadow cares um so um. So big thing to keep in mind here is that these are not long running campaigns. These are with These are one shots at a store level with regulars mostly it's it's about I would say like maybe two regulars per session and a lot of new players. Um. So for all of those reasons, I think it is important for players to realize that there are stakes to every fight, especially when the fights ramp up to the uh you know, when we know when we just look at the clock and know,

25:33 like, hey, this this session was scheduled, so at five o'clock is four thirty, one of us might die. So the last one, in particular, we were in this like Unicorns pocket dimension and everything was like everything was made of candy. All the animals were stuffed. It was adorable, and they were tracking down a poacher, and I needed them to know that yes, things are cuddly in this spot, but still dangerous, and yes that waterfall is doctor Pepper, but but you can still drown in it. Yeah. Yeah, actually, uh, there was a mechanic built in that, Like if you're putting this into a longer campaign, there's a mechanic built in that, like, um, all this sense, all the food is is sugary. Um. Yeah, that they start taking, well, they like they get cavities, and you can turn that into like hust you can turn them into constitution implications dental horror. Yeah, okay, um so, but I need the players to know the mistakes. So the one player in particular, and I recall that ash, I tried very hard to kill him.

26:37 I really need uh now, Grant I didn't just I didn't have the big bad target him just for the stake of targeting him. That would be that woud be a d M metagaming. However, he did throw the first fireball, so he had every reason to targeting him. Sure, and I really just made him no, would use all three attacks to get him down, hit him for death saves, and someone kept u healing wording him and kept bringing him back up, and I think I think I downed to him like three times before the fight was over. And then in the second session we r we ran it again with new players. I finally did kill one and it was another one of our regulars, and again through the first fireball and kind of deserved it. But I needed the new players to know that, like, yeah, your character is not safe. Your character doesn't have plot armor m except for the Rangers mastered iff. I gave him plot armor, but not the Ranger of the Paladin. But yeah, it is there a situation Jim, where specifically going for the kill is okay. Like, I think it depends on the social contract that you guys have established at the start of the game. Okay, Um, I run a particular kind of game where I don't like to tell players you can't play this character anymore.

28:00 Um, And to some extent there, I mean, there is a way that if at the beginning of the game, everyone agrees, okay, you can get taken down, but failing you know, failing three death saves or getting knocked down to whatever negative hit points or something like that doesn't mean that you have to stop playing that character. There are like I will make sure there are ways that you can get raised from the dead or if TPK it's not really a TPK, you all wake up naked or something like that, and to some extent that kind of lets you take the kid gloves off in a way that if perma death was like like I think the question is um uh, I think it is totally okay to incapacitate characters because that's interesting and that's part of the game. Yeah, perma death thing is, Yeah, that's a little tougher question. So this and we'll take my situation in particularly again, this is a one show, um, and in one game we can that's and that's a different kind of thing. If if at the beginning of the game, everybody knows, and especially if there's ten or fifteen minutes left in the game. Yeah, um, you don't want to kill a PC an hour into a four hour demo, right, that's just not you know, you should know better to do that on purpose. But like I've had I've had them, I've had them try to die but they didn't know they were trying to diet. But they weren't trying to die. But like you would think that with the way they were acting, they might have been trying to die. But uh, but I agree with uh, with you

29:33 giving them the ways to get out of what would normally be a permanent death. And that's um yeah, uh, and I agree with that kind of game, especially if you're you've been playing for a while and you're getting attached to these characters, um to where I like, yeah, you go, you go find a high level cleric in the next town over or or something along those lines. Um or at the very least, you know, you get being reincarnate, come back as a different as a different race, and that could be a lot of fun too. What I'm really getting at is like going for the kill and not just for the down. I just don't play that way. I just don't. I just don't find that fun. I mean, this is one of those things where this is very much a to taste sing. Different tables have different levels of that. But when I ran my games in the store, when I owned my game store, we were very careful about calibrating. We had kind of different tables with different dms, and I was the kind of story based, um good for younger kids.

30:36 I had the special needs kids and stuff like that that might have been really upset if their character just got killed by die roll, and so I was a lot more you know, I was a lot looser and easier on them. But we had one guy that was the like, you know, like if a PC didn't get killed every session, the players at his table would be disappointed that he was going too easy on them. Yeah, but we calibrated that. We were like, what kind of game do you want? Like, yeah, kill Gil Gil, Okay, you're gonna go over with Mark, you know exactly, you know, And if somebody else was like you know, we want complicated court based intrigue and stuff like that.

31:18 Okay, you're going to go over with you know, with Sarah a kind of thing like that. And if you're you know, if you're a parent there with a with a eleven year old kid on the spectrum that uh really wants to play D and D but hasn't known where to do that, then yeah, come to my table and we'll we'll all work it in and we'll talk it out and yeah, that kind of thing. So yeah, as long as everybody's on the same page, then then you should be. Okay. Yeah, it's important to get everybody on the same page. I will say that the player that I did actually kill said that was his favorite session yet, So character character that you kill, I said what I said, Jim sometimes talking with friends. So a couple of a couple of good stories to David, that's going to do it for a DM academy. Go find everything that we do over at Curmudgeons and Dragons dot com. Send us your advice seeking column whatever posts, and just just send us an email and ask us for stuff. Whether you're sending us yes, whether you're asking you for advice or or you've get your horror story or your wholesome story, or even just want to say hello. It's Curmudcons and Dragons pod at gmail dot com or everything is at curmudgeon dragons dot com. You can go to the contact and send us that thing. On there. We get a little voicemail which it too. You can even you can even read us a story yourself.

32:39 But that is going to wrap it up for today. Jim, thank you so much. Yeah, you're very welcome. Goodbye adventures. Thank you for listening to Courmudgeons and Jackons. Please share us with your favorite adventures, leave a review on Apple, and follow us on social media. All thanks. We found at Comudgeons and Dragons dot com practice safe for Venturing my friends