Author Topic: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?  (Read 6068 times)

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Prak, the Mad

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #20 on: April 15, 2009, 06:38:03 PM »
I frequently have dwarves, dragons and other things with big appetites and high resistances to alcohol in the party, so a character specifically ordering tankards the size of their heads, or even kegs and creating a hole to drink through, is not particularly uncommon in my games... of course I also try to stick the party to "Adventurer's Districts" and such, so the odd sights aren't that odd to most of the people in the tavern.

bhu

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #21 on: April 20, 2009, 12:02:19 AM »
In my campaign the bars are usually weirder than the PC's.   My last one was run by a married couple.  Bull minotaur married to an Athasian halfling.  They had 6 daughters, one of whom was slightly mentally retarded with a pet Owlbear named Mr. Hooey.  They came in on the night the bar was reserved for a meeting between the Thieve's Guild and Assassin's GUild. During drinks ninjas from both sides sprang from everywhere and starting blowgunning the place like mad.

bartender had to call out the Awakened Dire Ape bouncer...

jamestguy

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #22 on: April 20, 2009, 12:07:08 AM »
For me, it's strictly a "don't speak unless spoken to" thing. We don't really role play out the selling of things because thats really boring for me.

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #23 on: April 20, 2009, 12:30:11 AM »
I'm usually pretty good with NPCs. I'm never an evil character, and even when I am, I'm LE and just stare them down if they're getting annoying. I've never actually killed any NPCs, but in the current campaign I'm in, we've come pretty close.

The other players, well, hmm. How do I talk about them? One's CE, and the other is CN. They have a tendency to make the NPCs fear us, and run. If Reputation was part of our game, I'd be the only one with a large positive number. Granted, the warblade and sorcerer would have a positive number as well, but not high. The other two would be in the low negatives (especially the dragon). Heck, in a previous campaign, one village apparently found out something they shouldn't have (or rather saw something they shouldn't have) so despite being of a good alignment, they had to eradicate the entire populas so no one could say anything. Needless to say their alignment's changed (even the half-celestial).

I've been a part of a one-shot group who, despite being N or CG characters, would randomly all become CE characters, sell all their loot to the townsfolk, then steal it all back, and do it all over again in another town. When they got to a town that already knew about what they were doing, they massacred the entire town. Then they got upset because the DM wouldn't give them any XP for what they'd done in a ONE-SHOT.

I remember one friend being a LN fighter, questioning people and failing his diplomacy check horribly, not getting the answer he wanted, and then killing the NPC for giving him that kind of answer.

You find all kinds.

I'm good with NPCs, and I get rewarded for that. Everyone else beats, kills, maims, badgers, and scares the NPCs and get what they deserve for it (ie no magic box that allows you to summon a mercane who'll sell you any kind of magic item you want for the right price). Not the that others don't take it out on everyone else later.  :banghead
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NecroticBanana

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #24 on: April 23, 2009, 06:38:50 AM »
Any legal defense starting by: ''I was drunk'' is bound to fail.

I'm sig'ing that one!
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NecroticBanana

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #25 on: April 23, 2009, 06:55:08 AM »


The cleric carries toys that she can give out to local children, and wanders around doing good works and trying to keep the peace (or disturbing it if she sees something suitably bad going on).

 

I had a wizard very similar to this, its was one of the few times i had the opportunity to play a higher level heavy hitter...so to speak. went with the wiz/incantatrix/archmage build. pretty much unstoppable in a magic heavy fight. Well i managed to squirrel several leftover skill points in woodcarving. We got to an impovershed (sp?) village and my character immediatly sets out to brighten up the lives of the locals ( the rest of the party was kinda dumbstruck, as they never seen this side of my character before...never had the oppurtunity, nor did they ever ask what i was whittlin' every night) so long story short, my character set out and lumped huge sums of gold at the local baker, and various other shops, and set up big picnic style festivals....it was fun. every once and a while the other players would ask if i was santa or something. lol.

i wanna play that one again. :::sigh :::
« Last Edit: April 23, 2009, 06:57:02 AM by NecroticBanana »
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Prak, the Mad

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #26 on: April 23, 2009, 07:53:11 AM »
necroticbanana's story reminds me of my desire to play a pumpkin king sometime... it's a necromancy class with a pumpkin theme, and can actually create full patches of pumpkins from individual seeds in about a round (of course the pumpkins in them are poisonous...) But I just have an image of an autumn colour wearing necromancer handing a little girl a handful of dried (harmless) pumpkin seeds, just because he likes children and is nice to them. I like the idea of playing quirky evil. Totally foul individual who'll torture without a second thought, but is kind to animals and children, stuff like that.

veekie

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #27 on: April 23, 2009, 03:30:52 PM »
necroticbanana's story reminds me of my desire to play a pumpkin king sometime... it's a necromancy class with a pumpkin theme, and can actually create full patches of pumpkins from individual seeds in about a round (of course the pumpkins in them are poisonous...) But I just have an image of an autumn colour wearing necromancer handing a little girl a handful of dried (harmless) pumpkin seeds, just because he likes children and is nice to them. I like the idea of playing quirky evil. Totally foul individual who'll torture without a second thought, but is kind to animals and children, stuff like that.
Heh, lets see, a homicidal druid who massacres entire families over dead bunnies and abused children? "FOR THE CHILDREN!"

Spends his spare time using the extracted pain and souls to craft wonderous toys for kids, to give away.
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NecroticBanana

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #28 on: April 23, 2009, 06:08:47 PM »
....For Pony!
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Samb

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #29 on: April 24, 2009, 01:03:58 AM »

Pretty much, just this. I've even gone so far as to provide consequences for doing this things (such as children from the bar maids being used as hostages, the Dragons overlord of the Kobolds, etc) only to have the entire idea fall flat on the ground because three of my players don't act their alignments.

In example, the most effective RPer is my best friend. He's also the party's optimizer, and is capable of making characters so far beyond the other player's capabilities that he ends up as the default leader. He's very sensible, rational, but somewhat easily irritated by the exploits of the other players (namely Midge). He takes his characters very seriously, and deals with the situations on hand with the thought of recurring consequences happening. He often plays Warlocks, Psions, Wizards, Swordsages, or Shadowcasters (odd as the last may be, he's surprisingly effective with them).

Then there's our resident Swift Hunter. The only reason he's effective is because he specifically asked me to make his character as powerful as I could. I gave him a TWFing Swift Hunter with Travel Devotion and a damn arsenal of optimized weaponry. Yet he forgets about everything, is obsessed with making his characters drunkards, and requires me to explain his options to him every turn. It's gotten to the point where I've written the tactics down on a note card and stapled it to his sheet, only to have him ignore it completely.

Recently, the Swift Hunter went on a drunken raping spree. He impregnated 15 women before the authorities captured him. He was about to be executed for his crimes, when the Warlock stepped forward and convinced the city to let him live on the grounds that he would have to pay them 12,000gp every year for the rest of his life. Being adventurers, this was easy enough to accomplish and was a brilliant RP on the Warlock's behalf. Needless to say, an alignment shift was in order for the Swift Hunter. I'm a lenient guy though, so I only turn him CN instead of the outright NE

There was a snag in the plan though, something I threw in to use as a plot hook. One of the women assaulted was the local priestess of Pelor. She was the only one who went unaccounted for, as she went into hiding over the ordeal in an effort to conceal the fact from the rest of society.

Fast forward half a year. The party's Artificer (me) had established a cheap and effective method of transferring the gold to the town in question. Every month, the Ranger forked over 1,000gp of his earnings. The party eventually returned to the city in question, only to find that the scandal had been revealed. Now that the women had either given birth or aborted the children (and most of them did), the Ranger had to live up to his responsibilities and crimes. He was banned from the taverns in the city to prevent another incident like the previous one, and 5 guards were assigned to him to prevent him from drinking inside city limits.

The player decides to start hitting on the women who had kept children, only to find out that the priestess had been one of the victims. I expected this to jar him, as the woman in question had helped the party several times in the past (Healing, Rezzing, and general comfort and information). He didn't even blink. The party's tank (a Crusader) gave him one hell of a lecture and beat him to a blood pulp (the guards actually held him down for it, just to show the severity of what he had down).

A few sessions later, and the party had managed to offend a Lich who pledged loyalty to Kas before the epic betrayal. This lich managed to gather enough information to identify the children related to the Ranger, along with several other NPCs who held ties to the party. Cue teleport, kidnapping the relevant targets, and threats to the party.

The only ones who didn't react appropriately were Midge (because he's had to change characters 6 times and thus had no ties to the party), and the Ranger (who seemed to have forgotten the reason for the 1,000gp monthly fee and had complained about it several times).

The time comes for the party to face down this lich, and rescue the captives. It had taken them 2 years IC for them to gather enough info and strength to face the bastard (they had been subverting his plans along the way, just to give him the Epic FingerTM). By this time, a few of the irrelevant hostages had been killed off. Dramatic purposes and all that, a villain's got to keep a good rep in the underworld after all.

They get there and find that the Lich has used magic to artificially age one of the ranger's kids into a diabolic killing machine. Guess which one I picked. Just guess it.

The last time I saw my party give me this kind of a reaction was when I had Tulket Nor Ahm in the game as an NPC, and had him killed off by the Order of Seropaenes (Tome of Magic) for summoning demons (despite the fact that he would kill them immediately to study them). But the ranger's reaction was goddamn infuriating. In his exact words: "What do I give a damn? I didn't want the kids to begin with."

I'm at the point in the game where I'm giving him one final alignment shift before I sick an Elder Evil on him.

I have to say that this is partially your fault.  Did you set the ground rules that "if you become or act evil you will become an NPC"?  This may be a pretty standard rule for non-evil campaigns, but if you don't state this from the beginning some gamers might not assume this.

Maybe you did state this explicitly but you completely fail at enforcing this.  You change him to CN instead of what his actions show (CE).  I can onlyy assume that you have never been drunk, but being drunk does not make you a sociopath.  12k gold a year for the honor of rape victims?  You basically cheapened the NPCs with a price tag already and you expect your psycho PC to value them?  The way you as the GM handled the situation shows that you tolerate his behavior hence he sees nothing wrong with his behavior towards the NPCs.  If you wanted to punish him you don't need an elder evil, you just make him a NPC mid boss, and make him roll another character and tell him the rules again.  It is your job to enforce the rules which you completely did not do.

On a side note:  I don't understand PCs that want to bed NPC females.  I play to have fun, and flirting with my male GM is not fun.

veekie

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #30 on: April 24, 2009, 02:22:38 AM »
Quote
I have to say that this is partially your fault.  Did you set the ground rules that "if you become or act evil you will become an NPC"?  This may be a pretty standard rule for non-evil campaigns, but if you don't state this from the beginning some gamers might not assume this.

Done right though, PC going evil can be fun too. Especially if that's clearly what the player is acting like, turning him NPC would just leave the new character to turn evil, until you alienate that player. Unless hes being disruptive to the other players(which he doesn't seem to be too bad on that end), no sense wrecking the game over NPC welfare. Players don't always feel for their characters consequences, and it seems to me he managed to remember the monetary penalty more than any RP related conseqence.

Most PCs are sociopaths by nearly any normal society standards anyway.
The mind transcends the body.
It's also a little cold because of that.
Please get it a blanket.

I wish I could read your mind,
I can barely read mine.

"Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. At 2:15, it begins rolling up characters."

[spoiler]
"Just what do you think the moon up in the sky is? Everyone sees that big, round shiny thing and thinks there must be something round up there, right? That's just silly. The truth is much more awesome than that. You can almost never see the real Moon, and its appearance is death to humans. You can only see the Moon when it's reflected in things. And the things it reflects in, like water or glass, can all be broken, right? Since the moon you see in the sky is just being reflected in the heavens, if you tear open the heavens it's easy to break it~"
-Ibuki Suika, on overkill

To sumbolaion diakoneto moi, basilisk ouranionon.
Epigenentheto, apoleia keraune hos timeis pteirei.
Hekatonkatis kai khiliakis astrapsato.
Khiliarkhou Astrape!
[/spoiler]

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Samb

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #31 on: April 24, 2009, 03:09:11 AM »
Quote
I have to say that this is partially your fault.  Did you set the ground rules that "if you become or act evil you will become an NPC"?  This may be a pretty standard rule for non-evil campaigns, but if you don't state this from the beginning some gamers might not assume this.

Done right though, PC going evil can be fun too. Especially if that's clearly what the player is acting like, turning him NPC would just leave the new character to turn evil, until you alienate that player. Unless hes being disruptive to the other players(which he doesn't seem to be too bad on that end), no sense wrecking the game over NPC welfare. Players don't always feel for their characters consequences, and it seems to me he managed to remember the monetary penalty more than any RP related conseqence.

Most PCs are sociopaths by nearly any normal society standards anyway.
The fact that he is complaining about this PC means that he did not feel that this was in turn to the kind of campaign sinfire wanted to run in the first place.  Evil campaigns have evil characters and that would be expected but that is clearly not what sinfire wanted.  He was disruptive to the rest of the group but sinfire let him off easy by only charging 12k a year. 

His job is to enforce the rules plain and simple something that he did not do.  I'd go as far to say he was naive to think this ambusher would even care that he had to some son that he never met or even cared about.  Why he even wasted effort on revolving a plot hook around someone who clearly only wanted to pretend to a mega-misogamist is very misguided.  It was a nice tie in but it did not have the effect he wanted because he had no real grasp on his players motivations.

Alastar

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #32 on: April 25, 2009, 11:41:14 AM »
This just reminds me of the dread baker of pastry street.

It's a character concept i devised with a friend of mine, in witch an undead fallen shadow sun ninja, uses his negative energy channeling to bake bread.  He also infuses the bread with liquid pain, that he extracts with a pain extractor.

This results in a bread that is like drugs or alcohol to undeads, the pastry's being the only thing that can inhibriate them, being immune to poison and drugs in the first place as they are.

I can just imagine a horde of gravetouched ghouls charging at the pc's yelling: kill them, kill them so we can get bread.

Or a zombie shuffling around yelling: breaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaddddddd.

It was nice to elaborate ;) :P

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Re: How do you (or your players) treat NPC townsfolk?
« Reply #33 on: April 25, 2009, 12:03:25 PM »
Done right though, PC going evil can be fun too. Especially if that's clearly what the player is acting like, turning him NPC would just leave the new character to turn evil, until you alienate that player. Unless hes being disruptive to the other players(which he doesn't seem to be too bad on that end), no sense wrecking the game over NPC welfare. Players don't always feel for their characters consequences, and it seems to me he managed to remember the monetary penalty more than any RP related conseqence.

Most PCs are sociopaths by nearly any normal society standards anyway.

QFT.  I once played a dread necromancer that started out LN, ended up NE, and became the BBEG of the campaign.  It made for some good times.

On topic though, in the same campaign we had a psion who became a slumlord and treated all the NPCs like shit.  He even started scamming some small village and overcharging them for stuff like potions and whatnot.  Another player(goliath frenzied beserker/bear warrior) constantly got drunk and ran around town getting into fights.  Most other games we played with these guys they were respectful to the NPCs or just outright avoided them except when necessary.

I tend to play the BSF of the group so my social interactions leave much to be desired, but when I do have dealings with NPCs, I'm not a complete ass to them.  I'll usually start out indifferent and change my attitude according to the situation.
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