Many moons ago, I DM's for a group of 5 players that told me while they were generating characters (we didn't know the term 'session zero' yet) that while the occasional fight would be fun, they wanted to spend more time on RP, backstory, and world-building. We didn't actually start that night so I had a couple of weeks to prepare. I'd had parties where 1-2 players were less excited about fighting but never a whole party. It turned out to be a long-running and very fun campaign but I found myself scrambling at times because D&D doesn't have a ton of material for things like owning property for profit, steering a ship in combat, and 'how long does it take to build a wall all the way around the town'?
Have any of you encountered this (extreme world-building and deep background play) before and how did you deal with it?
I played once with a mixed gender group in Washington DC area where the players were all about city intrigue. Yes, they had combat, but not every session. From what I understand, the DM built a group of 10+ NPCs up with clear goals and had them free-wheel roleplaying.
Major incidents involved
1) party with people attending where the players knew someone was planning on poisoning someone
2) Infiltrating a working transport barge to see who was smuggling, what they were smuggling, and why.
3) discover who was funding the strange orphanage and why.
I'd say long running campaigns come into this. Honestly, since it sounds like the players' PCs want to make their place in the world largely without being involved in the usual adversarial scenarios of the game ... except in moments where the game world does put the PCs position into some sort of adversity, you sort of have the luxury of world building with the PCs. Let them determine the system for building a wall encircling a town, and city upkeep etc. It sounds like they're building a community, let them put the systems in place ... it's your job to work with them to make the systems something "playable" or create situations that may challenge the upkeep of the systems.
Not in D&D but this happened to me in the original Twilight: 2000. The characters were _done_ with the war. The largely marooned in Europe characters 1.) thought the likelihood of any loved ones back home surviving the famine in unrest was low and if they had survived the prospects of reunion even bleaker and 2.) were _done_ with all the last gasps of WWIII b.s. between NATO and the Warsaw pact, and among the factions within what was left of the U.S. So they just set up a sort of benevolent fiefdom, working with a communities labor and professional classes to restore infrastructure, traded and stockpiled for resources ... to the point when France started its expeditions, they were actually pretty impressed with the egalitarian set up and sort of knighted the characters fiefdom into a regional power whose name and significant figures popped up as easter eggs in our game of Traveller 2300AD, including as a methodology of planetary settlement.
It's sort of simulationist, which Twilight: 2000 definitely leaned more toward and D&D leans hard away from despite some of the threads here thinking otherwise; but sure, it happens. If you're interested in entertaining the drive, keep it going.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
A better question is if you want to DM a skewed campaign, where gameplay is an afterthought (it sounds like about 10% of the campaign time where playing the game). If you are more into a choose your own adventure type campaign with mostly social skill rolls to take you to the next page, then go with it. You'll still have exploration, but combat won't be much. To most players out there, roleplaying and exploration are there to make the combat meaningful and fun, but at the minimum combat is usually a 1/3rd of the game, balanced with the other pillars.
My table is an RP heavy (voices & everything), combat light table. I only run meaningful combat about 1 Adventuring Day out of 3, and the other 2 Adventuring Days there is little to no combat at all. When I do run a combat day however, I run a meatgrinder day of 3-4 Deadly+ encounters back to back to back, usually with a timer running for some reason or another to make it even more tense. That usually takes a couple sessions to resolve, and after that it’s another several sessions with only light combat.
I've had a party like that, but there was never any suggestion that was what they wanted before the campaign began, which was highly problematic. One player had zero interest in combat, a second was neither here nor there with it, and one decided to become a pacifist around level 6 (after having thought the idea was cool on some forum they read) and actively avoided all combat. The campaign then collapsed, partly because I had no interest in running a game that way and partly due to toxicity between two of the players. What made it especially bad was that they were also generally disinterested in any of the plot points that I put forward, and wanted instead to find a nice place to settle down.
If I had known, I wouldn't have run the campaign at all; I like fast paced, thriller-style campaigns with about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time spent on combat. I could imagine running a combat-light campaign if the focus was on intrigue, spying, that kind of thing but I would choose a different system as almost all of D&D's rules are about combat.
I would agree that using a different system might be more agreeable to you, but not necessary to make the game fun.
Past that, I've had some measure of success in keeping background tension visible, so to speak, to draw attention to the importance of the party's success or failure. If combat isn't going to be the party's conflict resolution fall-back plan, it can still be demonstrated or narrated in the background as a consequence of failure.
If combat is off the table entirely, I might suggest assessing your willingness to participate. If that's something that intrigues you, go for it, but don't be ashamed of voicing your opinion to the players before things get invested in too deeply.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
I've had a party like that, but there was never any suggestion that was what they wanted before the campaign began, which was highly problematic. One player had zero interest in combat, a second was neither here nor there with it, and one decided to become a pacifist around level 6 (after having thought the idea was cool on some forum they read) and actively avoided all combat. The campaign then collapsed, partly because I had no interest in running a game that way and partly due to toxicity between two of the players. What made it especially bad was that they were also generally disinterested in any of the plot points that I put forward, and wanted instead to find a nice place to settle down.
If I had known, I wouldn't have run the campaign at all; I like fast paced, thriller-style campaigns with about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time spent on combat. I could imagine running a combat-light campaign if the focus was on intrigue, spying, that kind of thing but I would choose a different system as almost all of D&D's rules are about combat.
Yeah, I think in my response a group that's more interested in world building sort of absolved the DM from DMing in many ways, the DM basically posing problem/challenges to the world builders, and they worldbuild a solution. I agree D&D is not really the best game system for this situation given the general obligation of a DM to create a campaign to play in. The sort of collaborative "post D&D game" I was recognizing presumed these were players who were sort of at the been there done that stage of their campaign.
I was curious about your and anyone else's (like the OP) experience with "non combative/combatant" characters being played by players ranging from violence avoidant to violence and combat disinterested to "I read playing a TTRPG as a pacifist is a cool challenge" type (like reverse edgelord I guess?). I'm noticing this being a definite trend among younger players (teens in my GMing experience, and from earshot gathering at ye olde gameshop young adults too)*. It's definitely not an upbrining thing as I've done a few games where parent and child were at the same table with the parents playing with traditional force meets force sort of aggression levels while their offspring ones would just turn tale or basically get out of the fight by any means necessary (including leaving their IRL parents' characters in the lurch). The amusement of watching a parent find a way to articulate "dude, wtf?" to their own flesh and blood aside, this play style is something WotC is clearly aware of hence Wild Beyond the Witchlight ... but I think a lot of modern DMs are coming into table dynamics where you have competing components of pacifist and "reasonable use of force" gamers being the new thing to contend with in campaign design moreso than the traditonal "murderhobo" vs "reasonable use of force" split. I say I strive for balance where both "factions" or "styles" of play get entertained, but it's a stemwinder that would have likely led me to throw in my GM towel had I come across this dynamic much earlier in the hobby.
It's not a universal among young players, when I explained the possibility of a nonviolent Wild Beyond the Witchlight, I've heard plenty of "what would be the point" or "In Dungeons and Dragons? Why would anyone want to play that" among younger players. It's just that this "By any other means than bloodshed" style of playing a character is more prevalent among the younger players in my experience.
And it is strange because you're right there are so many other rules systems out there much more suited to this style of adventuring, but I think that requires a level of hobby awareness that a lot of entry level players don't necessarily want to realize.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I've had a party like that, but there was never any suggestion that was what they wanted before the campaign began, which was highly problematic. One player had zero interest in combat, a second was neither here nor there with it, and one decided to become a pacifist around level 6 (after having thought the idea was cool on some forum they read) and actively avoided all combat. The campaign then collapsed, partly because I had no interest in running a game that way and partly due to toxicity between two of the players. What made it especially bad was that they were also generally disinterested in any of the plot points that I put forward, and wanted instead to find a nice place to settle down.
If I had known, I wouldn't have run the campaign at all; I like fast paced, thriller-style campaigns with about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time spent on combat. I could imagine running a combat-light campaign if the focus was on intrigue, spying, that kind of thing but I would choose a different system as almost all of D&D's rules are about combat.
Yeah, I think in my response a group that's more interested in world building sort of absolved the DM from DMing in many ways, the DM basically posing problem/challenges to the world builders, and they worldbuild a solution. I agree D&D is not really the best game system for this situation given the general obligation of a DM to create a campaign to play in. The sort of collaborative "post D&D game" I was recognizing presumed these were players who were sort of at the been there done that stage of their campaign.
I was curious about your and anyone else's (like the OP) experience with "non combative/combatant" characters being played by players ranging from violence avoidant to violence and combat disinterested to "I read playing a TTRPG as a pacifist is a cool challenge" type (like reverse edgelord I guess?). I'm noticing this being a definite trend among younger players (teens in my GMing experience, and from earshot gathering at ye olde gameshop young adults too)*. It's definitely not an upbrining thing as I've done a few games where parent and child were at the same table with the parents playing with traditional force meets force sort of aggression levels while their offspring ones would just turn tale or basically get out of the fight by any means necessary (including leaving their IRL parents' characters in the lurch). The amusement of watching a parent find a way to articulate "dude, wtf?" to their own flesh and blood aside, this play style is something WotC is clearly aware of hence Wild Beyond the Witchlight ... but I think a lot of modern DMs are coming into table dynamics where you have competing components of pacifist and "reasonable use of force" gamers being the new thing to contend with in campaign design moreso than the traditonal "murderhobo" vs "reasonable use of force" split. I say I strive for balance where both "factions" or "styles" of play get entertained, but it's a stemwinder that would have likely led me to throw in my GM towel had I come across this dynamic much earlier in the hobby.
It's not a universal among young players, when I explained the possibility of a nonviolent Wild Beyond the Witchlight, I've heard plenty of "what would be the point" or "In Dungeons and Dragons? Why would anyone want to play that" among younger players. It's just that this "By any other means than bloodshed" style of playing a character is more prevalent among the younger players in my experience.
And it is strange because you're right there are so many other rules systems out there much more suited to this style of adventuring, but I think that requires a level of hobby awareness that a lot of entry level players don't necessarily want to realize.
Very odd problem that the hobby is having. What do you think is driving this? It makes sense in some situations to try and talk your way out of or duck and hide from a fight, I get that, but to actively avoid combat as a matter of course? That’s like avoiding kicking the ball at the net in a game of soccer.
I think that these pacifists are just as disruptive and toxic to a game as any diehard murderhobo on the opposite end of the spectrum. My characters would be calling these folks untrustworthy cowards in game.
The players are also just cheating themselves. If you never participate in combat, you don’t develop tactical skills at it and never get better at the game.
I found myself scrambling at times because D&D doesn't have a ton of material for things like owning property for profit, steering a ship in combat, and 'how long does it take to build a wall all the way around the town'?
There are official books with material that covers this kind of thing, but they are spread out and not easy to find. A lot of this wont just pop up in a google search and a lot of this stuff is largely ignored because most players aren't super interested.
-RP/Backsotry: Xanathars introduced things like bonds/flaws etc. Wildemount has the "Heroic Chronical" to highly flesh out a character (some stuff is stetting specific but it's easy to adapt. If your group leans into the story and background more I highly suggest checking this out for your next game.
-Acquisitions Incorporated: This book has guidelines/resources for running an adventuring party as a company. It can easily be used for a guild, faction, town, etc. It has things like rules for utilizing hirelings, untrained and trained, rules for running, upgrading, staffing a headquarters, running side hustles and businesses, it also leans heavily on downtime activities to accomplish things over time that you might not do in session.
It also has rules for running, crewing ships/airships and/or turning them into your headquarters
-Salt marsh has some rules for ships
The kind of stuff is out there but it's not used very often, but it sounds like your table would really get a lot of enjoyment out of expanding the game to cover these areas.
So the players I had this issue with were all adults, all around 26-30.
Becoming a pacifist character is intentionally disruptive behaviour in a campaign that has no history of that, and it can dump all over the DM's work as it just doesn't tie in with reasonable expectations of what the game is supposed to be about. The scenario that happened in our penultimate game before I canned the campaign altogether was as follows:
First of all, the PC gave away his magic greatsword to a commoner and told him to protect his home. OK, I thought, cool RP. Next the PCs travelled through space and time in a Tardis style merchant's wagon, and crashed. Seeing a city nearby, on the way there they encounter a fleeing woman who was running from some obviously malfunctioning cyborg type guards. When they tried to help her, the guards would then engage them, leading on to the story in the city. I'd homebrewed three different types of guards for the encounter, a big one, some roguey ones and some shield carrying ones. Quite a lot of effort had gone into it, plus designing the VTT battlemap from scratch. So the paladin walks forward, declares he is a criminal and surrendering to them, lays down his gear and insists they take him instead. One of the guards stop and arrests him; the other guards pursue the woman. Bemused, the other players all then decide to just let the guards continue on. The encounter was a wash. The player was taken to the city, and I ran it that he had to talk his way out of the situation, which was quite hard given he still had a severed head in his bag. Following that, he refused to participate in any combats or dangerous activity, and became angry and refused to heal a previously friendly NPC who was in danger when the party were being ambushed.
Some might say "He was well within his rights to surrender and do that," and hey, that's true, players can do what they want. But it made absolutely no sense. He hadn't done anything wrong, and it came totally out of the blue, skewed the intended storyline and I seriously considered just having them execute him. In a way it wasn't just being a pacifist; I think in some ways he just had this idea that he didn't want to follow the DM's story at all.
As for the other players, one I'd been playing with for a few years and she just didn't like combat. Her character's ambition was to settle down and find a home. She later ran a campaign (which a couple of my players briefly joined) where nothing happened and the characters didn't reach level 2 after four sessions (there was one combat with a single Wolf across 4 sessions). D&D was clearly the wrong system for her to be playing.
I have noticed a big trend in players (mostly as a result of Critical Role, of which I'm largely a big fan) to want to pursue relationship storylines over anything else. I regularly include romance storylines in my own game, but they are not the point of the game, and there's a big proportion of the online fanbase who seem more interested in who cuddles who at night than they are with killing monsters. Fan art produced for CR seems to be skewed heavily in that direction.
I make it really clear now in session zero that my table is fast paced (my characters have gone from level 1-10 in around 5 weeks of in-game time using XP), with major story elements and action heavy from the beginning. I am lucky enough to have the right players for this style of game now.
So the players I had this issue with were all adults, all around 26-30.
Becoming a pacifist character is intentionally disruptive behaviour in a campaign that has no history of that, and it can dump all over the DM's work as it just doesn't tie in with reasonable expectations of what the game is supposed to be about. The scenario that happened in our penultimate game before I canned the campaign altogether was as follows:
First of all, the PC gave away his magic greatsword to a commoner and told him to protect his home. OK, I thought, cool RP. Next the PCs travelled through space and time in a Tardis style merchant's wagon, and crashed. Seeing a city nearby, on the way there they encounter a fleeing woman who was running from some obviously malfunctioning cyborg type guards. When they tried to help her, the guards would then engage them, leading on to the story in the city. I'd homebrewed three different types of guards for the encounter, a big one, some roguey ones and some shield carrying ones. Quite a lot of effort had gone into it, plus designing the VTT battlemap from scratch. So the paladin walks forward, declares he is a criminal and surrendering to them, lays down his gear and insists they take him instead. One of the guards stop and arrests him; the other guards pursue the woman. Bemused, the other players all then decide to just let the guards continue on. The encounter was a wash. The player was taken to the city, and I ran it that he had to talk his way out of the situation, which was quite hard given he still had a severed head in his bag. Following that, he refused to participate in any combats or dangerous activity, and became angry and refused to heal a previously friendly NPC who was in danger when the party were being ambushed.
Some might say "He was well within his rights to surrender and do that," and hey, that's true, players can do what they want. But it made absolutely no sense. He hadn't done anything wrong, and it came totally out of the blue, skewed the intended storyline and I seriously considered just having them execute him. In a way it wasn't just being a pacifist; I think in some ways he just had this idea that he didn't want to follow the DM's story at all.
As for the other players, one I'd been playing with for a few years and she just didn't like combat. Her character's ambition was to settle down and find a home. She later ran a campaign (which a couple of my players briefly joined) where nothing happened and the characters didn't reach level 2 after four sessions (there was one combat with a single Wolf across 4 sessions). D&D was clearly the wrong system for her to be playing.
I have noticed a big trend in players (mostly as a result of Critical Role, of which I'm largely a big fan) to want to pursue relationship storylines over anything else. I regularly include romance storylines in my own game, but they are not the point of the game, and there's a big proportion of the online fanbase who seem more interested in who cuddles who at night than they are with killing monsters. Fan art produced for CR seems to be skewed heavily in that direction.
I make it really clear now in session zero that my table is fast paced (my characters have gone from level 1-10 in around 5 weeks of in-game time using XP), with major story elements and action heavy from the beginning. I am lucky enough to have the right players for this style of game now.
Yea I agree. I watched the first episode of CR campaign 3 recently and it just seems like Talking and Dragons. I really hope that new players don’t think that is the focus of D&D. Slaying monsters and plundering treasure is the focus of D&D.
So the players I had this issue with were all adults, all around 26-30.
Becoming a pacifist character is intentionally disruptive behaviour in a campaign that has no history of that, and it can dump all over the DM's work as it just doesn't tie in with reasonable expectations of what the game is supposed to be about. The scenario that happened in our penultimate game before I canned the campaign altogether was as follows:
First of all, the PC gave away his magic greatsword to a commoner and told him to protect his home. OK, I thought, cool RP. Next the PCs travelled through space and time in a Tardis style merchant's wagon, and crashed. Seeing a city nearby, on the way there they encounter a fleeing woman who was running from some obviously malfunctioning cyborg type guards. When they tried to help her, the guards would then engage them, leading on to the story in the city. I'd homebrewed three different types of guards for the encounter, a big one, some roguey ones and some shield carrying ones. Quite a lot of effort had gone into it, plus designing the VTT battlemap from scratch. So the paladin walks forward, declares he is a criminal and surrendering to them, lays down his gear and insists they take him instead. One of the guards stop and arrests him; the other guards pursue the woman. Bemused, the other players all then decide to just let the guards continue on. The encounter was a wash. The player was taken to the city, and I ran it that he had to talk his way out of the situation, which was quite hard given he still had a severed head in his bag. Following that, he refused to participate in any combats or dangerous activity, and became angry and refused to heal a previously friendly NPC who was in danger when the party were being ambushed.
Some might say "He was well within his rights to surrender and do that," and hey, that's true, players can do what they want. But it made absolutely no sense. He hadn't done anything wrong, and it came totally out of the blue, skewed the intended storyline and I seriously considered just having them execute him. In a way it wasn't just being a pacifist; I think in some ways he just had this idea that he didn't want to follow the DM's story at all.
As for the other players, one I'd been playing with for a few years and she just didn't like combat. Her character's ambition was to settle down and find a home. She later ran a campaign (which a couple of my players briefly joined) where nothing happened and the characters didn't reach level 2 after four sessions (there was one combat with a single Wolf across 4 sessions). D&D was clearly the wrong system for her to be playing.
I have noticed a big trend in players (mostly as a result of Critical Role, of which I'm largely a big fan) to want to pursue relationship storylines over anything else. I regularly include romance storylines in my own game, but they are not the point of the game, and there's a big proportion of the online fanbase who seem more interested in who cuddles who at night than they are with killing monsters. Fan art produced for CR seems to be skewed heavily in that direction.
I make it really clear now in session zero that my table is fast paced (my characters have gone from level 1-10 in around 5 weeks of in-game time using XP), with major story elements and action heavy from the beginning. I am lucky enough to have the right players for this style of game now.
Yea I agree. I watched the first episode of CR campaign 3 recently and it just seems like Talking and Dragons. I really hope that new players don’t think that is the focus of D&D. Slaying monsters and plundering treasure is the focus of D&D.
I would say that the focus is what you make of it, but as has been said before, D&D is not the ONLY system out there and some might be better suited to groups of players who like to travel far and wide from the 'trinity' of RP, Travel, and Combat.
GURPS is (or was...I haven't played for ages) a wonderful system when you don't want your characters to have so many hit points that a single arrow is merely an annoyance. It's built around skills (There are no Feats but there is magic) and has enough supplements to cover a wide range of genres.
I feel (based on some of the comments) that I should clarify that I had no issues with running the campaign...merely that I'd never had to do so for an entire party before. I've played in games (not D&D) where we would spend time dealing with a crisis and then the GM would fast-forward a month or so because we were spending time doing long-term things like learning new skills and trying to figure out how to best build a bridge.
I love RP, especially as a player, but I don't go out of my way to mess up someone else's campaign. As I said in my OP, we didn't know what Session Zero was way back when (I'm over 50 and have been gaming since my teen years) but it was understood that if the DM was creating a world (we almost never used pre-generated material except for maps) where, for example, there were relatively few thieves and (publicly) no such thing as a Thieve's or Assassin's Guild, I wouldn't make up a character just to screw all of that up. Having run many games in the past, I know how hard it is and while I like to throw curve balls during the game for fun, there are lines that should not be crossed IMHO.
So the players I had this issue with were all adults, all around 26-30.
Becoming a pacifist character is intentionally disruptive behaviour in a campaign that has no history of that, and it can dump all over the DM's work as it just doesn't tie in with reasonable expectations of what the game is supposed to be about. The scenario that happened in our penultimate game before I canned the campaign altogether was as follows:
First of all, the PC gave away his magic greatsword to a commoner and told him to protect his home. OK, I thought, cool RP. Next the PCs travelled through space and time in a Tardis style merchant's wagon, and crashed. Seeing a city nearby, on the way there they encounter a fleeing woman who was running from some obviously malfunctioning cyborg type guards. When they tried to help her, the guards would then engage them, leading on to the story in the city. I'd homebrewed three different types of guards for the encounter, a big one, some roguey ones and some shield carrying ones. Quite a lot of effort had gone into it, plus designing the VTT battlemap from scratch. So the paladin walks forward, declares he is a criminal and surrendering to them, lays down his gear and insists they take him instead. One of the guards stop and arrests him; the other guards pursue the woman. Bemused, the other players all then decide to just let the guards continue on. The encounter was a wash. The player was taken to the city, and I ran it that he had to talk his way out of the situation, which was quite hard given he still had a severed head in his bag. Following that, he refused to participate in any combats or dangerous activity, and became angry and refused to heal a previously friendly NPC who was in danger when the party were being ambushed.
Some might say "He was well within his rights to surrender and do that," and hey, that's true, players can do what they want. But it made absolutely no sense. He hadn't done anything wrong, and it came totally out of the blue, skewed the intended storyline and I seriously considered just having them execute him. In a way it wasn't just being a pacifist; I think in some ways he just had this idea that he didn't want to follow the DM's story at all.
As for the other players, one I'd been playing with for a few years and she just didn't like combat. Her character's ambition was to settle down and find a home. She later ran a campaign (which a couple of my players briefly joined) where nothing happened and the characters didn't reach level 2 after four sessions (there was one combat with a single Wolf across 4 sessions). D&D was clearly the wrong system for her to be playing.
I have noticed a big trend in players (mostly as a result of Critical Role, of which I'm largely a big fan) to want to pursue relationship storylines over anything else. I regularly include romance storylines in my own game, but they are not the point of the game, and there's a big proportion of the online fanbase who seem more interested in who cuddles who at night than they are with killing monsters. Fan art produced for CR seems to be skewed heavily in that direction.
I make it really clear now in session zero that my table is fast paced (my characters have gone from level 1-10 in around 5 weeks of in-game time using XP), with major story elements and action heavy from the beginning. I am lucky enough to have the right players for this style of game now.
Yea I agree. I watched the first episode of CR campaign 3 recently and it just seems like Talking and Dragons. I really hope that new players don’t think that is the focus of D&D. Slaying monsters and plundering treasure is the focus of D&D.
I would say that the focus is what you make of it, but as has been said before, D&D is not the ONLY system out there and some might be better suited to groups of players who like to travel far and wide from the 'trinity' of RP, Travel, and Combat.
GURPS is (or was...I haven't played for ages) a wonderful system when you don't want your characters to have so many hit points that a single arrow is merely an annoyance. It's built around skills (There are no Feats but there is magic) and has enough supplements to cover a wide range of genres.
I feel (based on some of the comments) that I should clarify that I had no issues with running the campaign...merely that I'd never had to do so for an entire party before. I've played in games (not D&D) where we would spend time dealing with a crisis and then the GM would fast-forward a month or so because we were spending time doing long-term things like learning new skills and trying to figure out how to best build a bridge.
I love RP, especially as a player, but I don't go out of my way to mess up someone else's campaign. As I said in my OP, we didn't know what Session Zero was way back when (I'm over 50 and have been gaming since my teen years) but it was understood that if the DM was creating a world (we almost never used pre-generated material except for maps) where, for example, there were relatively few thieves and (publicly) no such thing as a Thieve's or Assassin's Guild, I wouldn't make up a character just to screw all of that up. Having run many games in the past, I know how hard it is and while I like to throw curve balls during the game for fun, there are lines that should not be crossed IMHO.
I don't think that there's anything wrong with a combat-light campaign either. The important thing is to ensure that the players and the DM are all on board for the same kind of experience.
Traditionally, there has been a fairly standard expectation for D&D - you will play a warrior or a magic user who will be performing heroic missions, slaying monsters and looting ancient ruins. But that expectations has changed recently. Now there are D&D live streams whose focus is roleplaying steamy relationships, or building friendships. Those things are not wrong to do, provided that everyone wants to play that kind of game. But some players no longer approach the game as a way to slay monster and have deadly adventures, which I do find a bit puzzling (the game is in the game name, guys) or at least it's a side consideration in those games, and I largely put down to a significant and growing subsection of the community who seem to be using role play games to explore things that they perhaps find difficult in real life. This just means that it has become increasingly important for DM's to determine not just what their players want, but to be clear about what they want to run, and to be firm with potential players about what kind of adventures are on offer. D&D can run the spectrum from pure hack and slash all the way to pure dating sim, and most campaigns fall somewhere in the middle.
There's also nothing wrong with downtime, skipping forward, building up businesses, fortresses or whatever you wish to. I am looking forward to doing that as my players head towards some potential downtime soon. It can be fun designing your house, for interest, but there's a limit to how much I want to do that in the game before I send a bunch of giants to burn it down.
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Many moons ago, I DM's for a group of 5 players that told me while they were generating characters (we didn't know the term 'session zero' yet) that while the occasional fight would be fun, they wanted to spend more time on RP, backstory, and world-building. We didn't actually start that night so I had a couple of weeks to prepare. I'd had parties where 1-2 players were less excited about fighting but never a whole party. It turned out to be a long-running and very fun campaign but I found myself scrambling at times because D&D doesn't have a ton of material for things like owning property for profit, steering a ship in combat, and 'how long does it take to build a wall all the way around the town'?
Have any of you encountered this (extreme world-building and deep background play) before and how did you deal with it?
Thanks in advance.
I played once with a mixed gender group in Washington DC area where the players were all about city intrigue. Yes, they had combat, but not every session. From what I understand, the DM built a group of 10+ NPCs up with clear goals and had them free-wheel roleplaying.
Major incidents involved
1) party with people attending where the players knew someone was planning on poisoning someone
2) Infiltrating a working transport barge to see who was smuggling, what they were smuggling, and why.
3) discover who was funding the strange orphanage and why.
I'd say long running campaigns come into this. Honestly, since it sounds like the players' PCs want to make their place in the world largely without being involved in the usual adversarial scenarios of the game ... except in moments where the game world does put the PCs position into some sort of adversity, you sort of have the luxury of world building with the PCs. Let them determine the system for building a wall encircling a town, and city upkeep etc. It sounds like they're building a community, let them put the systems in place ... it's your job to work with them to make the systems something "playable" or create situations that may challenge the upkeep of the systems.
Not in D&D but this happened to me in the original Twilight: 2000. The characters were _done_ with the war. The largely marooned in Europe characters 1.) thought the likelihood of any loved ones back home surviving the famine in unrest was low and if they had survived the prospects of reunion even bleaker and 2.) were _done_ with all the last gasps of WWIII b.s. between NATO and the Warsaw pact, and among the factions within what was left of the U.S. So they just set up a sort of benevolent fiefdom, working with a communities labor and professional classes to restore infrastructure, traded and stockpiled for resources ... to the point when France started its expeditions, they were actually pretty impressed with the egalitarian set up and sort of knighted the characters fiefdom into a regional power whose name and significant figures popped up as easter eggs in our game of
Traveller2300AD, including as a methodology of planetary settlement.It's sort of simulationist, which Twilight: 2000 definitely leaned more toward and D&D leans hard away from despite some of the threads here thinking otherwise; but sure, it happens. If you're interested in entertaining the drive, keep it going.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
A better question is if you want to DM a skewed campaign, where gameplay is an afterthought (it sounds like about 10% of the campaign time where playing the game). If you are more into a choose your own adventure type campaign with mostly social skill rolls to take you to the next page, then go with it. You'll still have exploration, but combat won't be much. To most players out there, roleplaying and exploration are there to make the combat meaningful and fun, but at the minimum combat is usually a 1/3rd of the game, balanced with the other pillars.
My table is an RP heavy (voices & everything), combat light table. I only run meaningful combat about 1 Adventuring Day out of 3, and the other 2 Adventuring Days there is little to no combat at all. When I do run a combat day however, I run a meatgrinder day of 3-4 Deadly+ encounters back to back to back, usually with a timer running for some reason or another to make it even more tense. That usually takes a couple sessions to resolve, and after that it’s another several sessions with only light combat.
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I've had a party like that, but there was never any suggestion that was what they wanted before the campaign began, which was highly problematic. One player had zero interest in combat, a second was neither here nor there with it, and one decided to become a pacifist around level 6 (after having thought the idea was cool on some forum they read) and actively avoided all combat. The campaign then collapsed, partly because I had no interest in running a game that way and partly due to toxicity between two of the players. What made it especially bad was that they were also generally disinterested in any of the plot points that I put forward, and wanted instead to find a nice place to settle down.
If I had known, I wouldn't have run the campaign at all; I like fast paced, thriller-style campaigns with about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time spent on combat. I could imagine running a combat-light campaign if the focus was on intrigue, spying, that kind of thing but I would choose a different system as almost all of D&D's rules are about combat.
I would agree that using a different system might be more agreeable to you, but not necessary to make the game fun.
Past that, I've had some measure of success in keeping background tension visible, so to speak, to draw attention to the importance of the party's success or failure. If combat isn't going to be the party's conflict resolution fall-back plan, it can still be demonstrated or narrated in the background as a consequence of failure.
If combat is off the table entirely, I might suggest assessing your willingness to participate. If that's something that intrigues you, go for it, but don't be ashamed of voicing your opinion to the players before things get invested in too deeply.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
Yeah, I think in my response a group that's more interested in world building sort of absolved the DM from DMing in many ways, the DM basically posing problem/challenges to the world builders, and they worldbuild a solution. I agree D&D is not really the best game system for this situation given the general obligation of a DM to create a campaign to play in. The sort of collaborative "post D&D game" I was recognizing presumed these were players who were sort of at the been there done that stage of their campaign.
I was curious about your and anyone else's (like the OP) experience with "non combative/combatant" characters being played by players ranging from violence avoidant to violence and combat disinterested to "I read playing a TTRPG as a pacifist is a cool challenge" type (like reverse edgelord I guess?). I'm noticing this being a definite trend among younger players (teens in my GMing experience, and from earshot gathering at ye olde gameshop young adults too)*. It's definitely not an upbrining thing as I've done a few games where parent and child were at the same table with the parents playing with traditional force meets force sort of aggression levels while their offspring ones would just turn tale or basically get out of the fight by any means necessary (including leaving their IRL parents' characters in the lurch). The amusement of watching a parent find a way to articulate "dude, wtf?" to their own flesh and blood aside, this play style is something WotC is clearly aware of hence Wild Beyond the Witchlight ... but I think a lot of modern DMs are coming into table dynamics where you have competing components of pacifist and "reasonable use of force" gamers being the new thing to contend with in campaign design moreso than the traditonal "murderhobo" vs "reasonable use of force" split. I say I strive for balance where both "factions" or "styles" of play get entertained, but it's a stemwinder that would have likely led me to throw in my GM towel had I come across this dynamic much earlier in the hobby.
It's not a universal among young players, when I explained the possibility of a nonviolent Wild Beyond the Witchlight, I've heard plenty of "what would be the point" or "In Dungeons and Dragons? Why would anyone want to play that" among younger players. It's just that this "By any other means than bloodshed" style of playing a character is more prevalent among the younger players in my experience.
And it is strange because you're right there are so many other rules systems out there much more suited to this style of adventuring, but I think that requires a level of hobby awareness that a lot of entry level players don't necessarily want to realize.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Very odd problem that the hobby is having. What do you think is driving this? It makes sense in some situations to try and talk your way out of or duck and hide from a fight, I get that, but to actively avoid combat as a matter of course? That’s like avoiding kicking the ball at the net in a game of soccer.
I think that these pacifists are just as disruptive and toxic to a game as any diehard murderhobo on the opposite end of the spectrum. My characters would be calling these folks untrustworthy cowards in game.
The players are also just cheating themselves. If you never participate in combat, you don’t develop tactical skills at it and never get better at the game.
There are official books with material that covers this kind of thing, but they are spread out and not easy to find. A lot of this wont just pop up in a google search and a lot of this stuff is largely ignored because most players aren't super interested.
-RP/Backsotry: Xanathars introduced things like bonds/flaws etc. Wildemount has the "Heroic Chronical" to highly flesh out a character (some stuff is stetting specific but it's easy to adapt. If your group leans into the story and background more I highly suggest checking this out for your next game.
-Acquisitions Incorporated: This book has guidelines/resources for running an adventuring party as a company. It can easily be used for a guild, faction, town, etc. It has things like rules for utilizing hirelings, untrained and trained, rules for running, upgrading, staffing a headquarters, running side hustles and businesses, it also leans heavily on downtime activities to accomplish things over time that you might not do in session.
It also has rules for running, crewing ships/airships and/or turning them into your headquarters
-Salt marsh has some rules for ships
The kind of stuff is out there but it's not used very often, but it sounds like your table would really get a lot of enjoyment out of expanding the game to cover these areas.
So the players I had this issue with were all adults, all around 26-30.
Becoming a pacifist character is intentionally disruptive behaviour in a campaign that has no history of that, and it can dump all over the DM's work as it just doesn't tie in with reasonable expectations of what the game is supposed to be about. The scenario that happened in our penultimate game before I canned the campaign altogether was as follows:
First of all, the PC gave away his magic greatsword to a commoner and told him to protect his home. OK, I thought, cool RP. Next the PCs travelled through space and time in a Tardis style merchant's wagon, and crashed. Seeing a city nearby, on the way there they encounter a fleeing woman who was running from some obviously malfunctioning cyborg type guards. When they tried to help her, the guards would then engage them, leading on to the story in the city. I'd homebrewed three different types of guards for the encounter, a big one, some roguey ones and some shield carrying ones. Quite a lot of effort had gone into it, plus designing the VTT battlemap from scratch. So the paladin walks forward, declares he is a criminal and surrendering to them, lays down his gear and insists they take him instead. One of the guards stop and arrests him; the other guards pursue the woman. Bemused, the other players all then decide to just let the guards continue on. The encounter was a wash. The player was taken to the city, and I ran it that he had to talk his way out of the situation, which was quite hard given he still had a severed head in his bag. Following that, he refused to participate in any combats or dangerous activity, and became angry and refused to heal a previously friendly NPC who was in danger when the party were being ambushed.
Some might say "He was well within his rights to surrender and do that," and hey, that's true, players can do what they want. But it made absolutely no sense. He hadn't done anything wrong, and it came totally out of the blue, skewed the intended storyline and I seriously considered just having them execute him. In a way it wasn't just being a pacifist; I think in some ways he just had this idea that he didn't want to follow the DM's story at all.
As for the other players, one I'd been playing with for a few years and she just didn't like combat. Her character's ambition was to settle down and find a home. She later ran a campaign (which a couple of my players briefly joined) where nothing happened and the characters didn't reach level 2 after four sessions (there was one combat with a single Wolf across 4 sessions). D&D was clearly the wrong system for her to be playing.
I have noticed a big trend in players (mostly as a result of Critical Role, of which I'm largely a big fan) to want to pursue relationship storylines over anything else. I regularly include romance storylines in my own game, but they are not the point of the game, and there's a big proportion of the online fanbase who seem more interested in who cuddles who at night than they are with killing monsters. Fan art produced for CR seems to be skewed heavily in that direction.
I make it really clear now in session zero that my table is fast paced (my characters have gone from level 1-10 in around 5 weeks of in-game time using XP), with major story elements and action heavy from the beginning. I am lucky enough to have the right players for this style of game now.
Yea I agree. I watched the first episode of CR campaign 3 recently and it just seems like Talking and Dragons. I really hope that new players don’t think that is the focus of D&D. Slaying monsters and plundering treasure is the focus of D&D.
I would say that the focus is what you make of it, but as has been said before, D&D is not the ONLY system out there and some might be better suited to groups of players who like to travel far and wide from the 'trinity' of RP, Travel, and Combat.
GURPS is (or was...I haven't played for ages) a wonderful system when you don't want your characters to have so many hit points that a single arrow is merely an annoyance. It's built around skills (There are no Feats but there is magic) and has enough supplements to cover a wide range of genres.
I feel (based on some of the comments) that I should clarify that I had no issues with running the campaign...merely that I'd never had to do so for an entire party before. I've played in games (not D&D) where we would spend time dealing with a crisis and then the GM would fast-forward a month or so because we were spending time doing long-term things like learning new skills and trying to figure out how to best build a bridge.
I love RP, especially as a player, but I don't go out of my way to mess up someone else's campaign. As I said in my OP, we didn't know what Session Zero was way back when (I'm over 50 and have been gaming since my teen years) but it was understood that if the DM was creating a world (we almost never used pre-generated material except for maps) where, for example, there were relatively few thieves and (publicly) no such thing as a Thieve's or Assassin's Guild, I wouldn't make up a character just to screw all of that up. Having run many games in the past, I know how hard it is and while I like to throw curve balls during the game for fun, there are lines that should not be crossed IMHO.
I don't think that there's anything wrong with a combat-light campaign either. The important thing is to ensure that the players and the DM are all on board for the same kind of experience.
Traditionally, there has been a fairly standard expectation for D&D - you will play a warrior or a magic user who will be performing heroic missions, slaying monsters and looting ancient ruins. But that expectations has changed recently. Now there are D&D live streams whose focus is roleplaying steamy relationships, or building friendships. Those things are not wrong to do, provided that everyone wants to play that kind of game. But some players no longer approach the game as a way to slay monster and have deadly adventures, which I do find a bit puzzling (the game is in the game name, guys) or at least it's a side consideration in those games, and I largely put down to a significant and growing subsection of the community who seem to be using role play games to explore things that they perhaps find difficult in real life. This just means that it has become increasingly important for DM's to determine not just what their players want, but to be clear about what they want to run, and to be firm with potential players about what kind of adventures are on offer. D&D can run the spectrum from pure hack and slash all the way to pure dating sim, and most campaigns fall somewhere in the middle.
There's also nothing wrong with downtime, skipping forward, building up businesses, fortresses or whatever you wish to. I am looking forward to doing that as my players head towards some potential downtime soon. It can be fun designing your house, for interest, but there's a limit to how much I want to do that in the game before I send a bunch of giants to burn it down.