I thought it might be useful to do a bit of an 'agony aunt' GM column, taking questions I see in the wild or get asked personally (feel free to contribute any in the comments) and provide some useful and insightful answers on the issues involved. For our first question, I harvested this from Reddit's r/DMAcademy, with a question from user /PigeonSouped:
"How do I stop my players from immediately murdering my NPCs for no reason?" "Title says it all. I'm a new DM and my brother asked me to run a campaign for him and some of his friends who haven't played before, online. I'm putting together a loose campaign for them to play to get the hang of the game and learn the ropes. "One of my players (my brother) claims that his character "doesn't like people", and his alignment is chaotic evil. He has literally asked me (ooc) "at what point can I kill them?" after I told him not to point blank try to kill my NPCs for no reason. "I worked really hard on these NPCs; none of them are aggressive (little shopkeepers and folks who run the various little things around town), and I love them a lot - I don't want them to be killed off at first glance just because one of my players wants to be a dick. "How do I combat this?" Well, that's a big question, and one that comes up more often than any of us would like to see. There are a few portions of this, so I'll try to break it down. First, well done on GMing a game for the first time! That's a big step, and a really useful role to have. As a GM, you'll rarely find yourself short of players, and there will be a lot demanded of you, but there's a lot of joy to be found in the role to pose great challenges for your friends, and to tell and share stories. As a writer and creator, it can be really hard to put together a plan and watch it all go to pieces. There's a piece of writing advice attributed to Nobel Prize-winning laureate William Faulkner, which is "kill your darlings". He meant it as a method of stripping away all the little bits you love that don't tell your story, but in our medium of second-person fantasy storytelling, it can also be taken as letting that those things you love which you've created, be exposed to danger. I appreciate that you've put effort into crafting a whole town of NPCs and shopkeepers, but once they hit 'contact with the enemy', you can't easily control what happens to them. Whether that's an arrow going astray in the middle of a battle, or a band of murderhobos rampaging through town, once you've made something, you have to be ready for it to be destroyed in the context of the story you're telling. This is something I struggle with as a 20-something year veteran GM, too- making lasting decisions that can entirely destroy or rewrite something that you've put effort into is really hard. But it's a skill that you need to embrace as you tell more and more stories- there have to be casualties and collateral damage, or your stories won't feel like they land. It sounds like the second problem here is your players. It feels like your brother, at least, is taking the "your characters can do anything you want them to" concept to the extreme, and thinking that that won't have consequences. Especially since you mentioned that you've already point-blank asked him not to kill them all and he seems to have refused or tried to find a way around that. For first-time players, this is not going to give them a good idea of what to expect in a game of D&D, and they're likely to pick up on the tension at the table is your brother is raring to kill some helpless folk, and you're desperately trying to protect what you've crafted. Often, the best way to avoid this is to hold what's called a 'session zero' so that the players (which includes you!) can discuss what their expectations are, and any issues you'd like to avoid or confront, where you can. In this instance, telling your players that you'd like them to be what you'd consider "standard fantasy heroes" - people who can at least get along to a degree, and aren't kill-crazy murderers with an evil alignment. If your players aren't willing to play along those guidelines, maybe you can compromise- whatever happens to your town and beloved NPCs in this game might be just a 'bad dream' that you can reset from, or you could use it as some kind of past event, and the next time you use the town might be some time down the road, with scars on the inhabitants and burned-down buildings dotting the landscape. This lets you keep moving forward, inventing some new NPCs who have moved into town, taken on new roles, or taken advantage of events to change. If you keep moving forward like this, it's also good practice in writing, and being able to adapt your plans to deal with the events your players bring up. You can beef up the guards of town or have some skilled bounty-hunters hanging around, but this doesn't solve the problem, so much as cutting it off, and that means that it'll likely frustrate your brother and maybe escalate some of his actions. This could have a flow-on effect to the other players - you don't want to stop someone having fun, but it sounds to me like that kind of game is not your idea of fun, and you're a player too. What's really at stake here is that it sounds like your expectations and your brother's aren't on the same level. I'd recommend having a heart-to-heart with your brother to discuss this idea, and especially to talk about the idea of providing a good experience for completely new players, and giving you a break as a first-time GM. For a one-off game, I'd also recommend either using pre-generated characters which have basic personalities and some links to one another, or everyone building their characters together (which is more fun, but can take up a lot of time for a single session). Either of these means your players have an expectation of working together, and not being evil-aligned, which can be really hard to work with for first-time players, and a first-time GM. See how these ideas work for you, and if you have any ideas of your own, feel free to let us know in the comments! Also posted on Game Masters Stash on 11 December 2021. Comments are closed.
|
AuthorI'm Luke. He/him pronouns. Archives
May 2022
Categories
All
|