I rarely find players in my world are willing to gamble on NPCs. I admit, one should be hesitant to trust, but making an arrangement with someone that doesn’t threaten my life is a perfectly sound chance to take. Yet players won’t take ANY chance ... to their detriment, I say.
Why not offer a considerable tithe to the church? Yes, you might not be able to buy that plate mail you so desperately want, or the four white stallions, but aren’t friends worth something? Can’t you think of any good reason why you shouldn’t take a thousand gold and offer yourself as a silent partner to some well-established businessman? You don’t think you’ll get your investment back? Silly player ... who would be a better source for rumours, gossip or warnings than a well-situated member of the town – all the better situated on account of your well-invested plunder?
But no, players don’t think like that. And no wonder. As I remember, the DMs used to be largely untrusting themselves. Give a thousand to a merchant and he is sure to blow town the next day, immediately, with your money. As if that makes any sense at all. Give it to a church and somehow you’ll find yourself on trial as a thief – as though churches have scruples about taking money from thieves. Sure as the sun will rise, if I gave 60 g.p. to a stranger I’d rescued from orcs to buy me men and weapons from town, the stranger would be high-tailing it in the other direction.
It isn’t that players aren’t willing to trust, I think ... it is that they’ve learned that never, ever, under no circumstances will a DM reward them for thinking out of the box. DMs are far too avaricious about depleting a player’s resources, as though that were the purpose of the game. Give them the money and take it back. It isn’t just hack, slash and haul away the loot. You can add ‘and watch the DM screw you’ to the old mantra.
As I said in my comment to the post, there's a temptation with certain GMs to constantly screw players over for trusting an NPC or trying something unusual. The feeling is that this creates "drama" through "conflict." In fact, it just nets you neurotic players who don't feel safe trying fresh ideas, and lack of a feeling of depth in the campaign ("Oh, here's another NPC--they're either a plot hook or here to screw us over.") If there's one thing I can't stand, it's neurotic players. And if there's one more thing I can't stand, it's lack of depth in a game world. If I can avoid both situations while simultaneously building up player-GM trust, then everyone wins!
What I've found is that my players level of trust in NPCs varies wildly. Ultimately, though, they trust when they need to: if there's something they need, be it info or goods, that they can't get themselves, they will seek NPC help. They're good at deciding who to talk to, from whom to ask help and when, and they get better all the time.
ReplyDeleteI think the key is to have deeply-constructed NPCs, or a pretty intuitive grasp of what each NPCs motives might be. If you, as the DM, can play your NPCs with motivation, a little interaction between the PCs and NPCs can allow them to make a decision about trust, just like in real life.
Sometimes that trust will be misplaced, but it can only happen sometimes. You have to let the PCs instincts be right most of the time, unless you need them to be wrong to further the story. You're building a world together - if a player finds that his understanding of the world is constantly being undercut, he or she will withdraw.
The idea of giving a large tithe to a church is particularly interesting to me. A well-played Paladin or Cleric might certainly do so. What would motivate another character, I wonder? Perhaps a kindly priest who helps the party can plant that seed. And there's a lot of story that could be wrung from the fall-out from such a gift without the gift itself turning out to be some kind of double-cross.
I just had a party kill an NPC, albeit an evil one, who had never offered them anything less than hospitality and goodwill (it was in his own interest.) Sheesh, what's a guy gotta do?
ReplyDeleteAfter they shot him in the back, he had the gall to fight back! So the party resolved just to kill evil and evil-seeming NPCs in the future without bothering to engage in "frustrating" dialog.
I don't know how I led them down this road, but I'm not excited about plans to slaughter my NPCs.
For a while, I had an awful habit of making every NPC either neutral or hostile to the PCs. It was terrible of me.
ReplyDeleteIf the PCs can't make meaningful connections to places and people in the setting, they start to get out of hand.
These days I'm trying hard to throw in a mix of friendly, neutral and mean NPCs in equal proportions.
Sometimes, I think, characters "not trusting" NPCs is actually just players "not wanting to get involved with a subplot involving NPCs".
ReplyDeleteThere's a jewel-appraising dwarf over in a PBEM Noisms is running that my character probably "trusts"--but I'd (literally) rather fight a horde of slavering ratmen then talk to him about how much some emerald is worth.
I have tended in the opposite direction, feeding the party lots of friendly or at least ambivalent NPCs. . . thus, they tend to trust me so eventually I can plant a real traitor in their midst, heh heh. But really, I have been able to condition my players into going for those "subplots involving NPCs," as in fact they tend to be the MAIN plots in my campaigns. I always reward PCs with experience points for good "role-playing" and/or thinking outside the box.
ReplyDeleteI briefly played under a DM who did the whole NPCs-as-weapons thing very often. If you had a mentor helping you learn to control your powers, then that mentor was using you as a tool to his own ends and prepared to kill you to get what he wanted. If you came from a noble family, then by session three your family became embroiled in scandal, and you were laughed out of court. Anyone you let close to you was kidnapped by a cult, or an enemy all along, and the more you tried to protect an NPC the more brutal their inevitable sacrifice. I think he wanted us to overcome the odds and become true heroes, but his DM burnout was so bad that he hastily finished games with almost no resolution, so instead you were left with a lingering feeling of, "What just happened? Where did those demons come from, and why did they kill Sir Tristan? Wait, did my character survive?"
ReplyDeleteI've seen his ex-players at other tables, and they're very paranoid. If an NPC is ever hesitant about giving information, then they're a double-agent, and every creepy NPC is met with, "Let's light the house on fire and run!" Now they all make wandering anti-social orphan PCs.