For the longest time, I have preferred dungeon crawls as my primary play style in D&D. Exploration of the chthonic underworld in all its glory, with devilish traps and horrifying monsters and mind-bending oddities just scratched all the right mental itches for me: the game part of RPGs. And yet, lately, I've found myself starting to think more about story and characters. I'm more willing to think about the wider world and what NPCs want and all the bits around social interaction: the role-playing part of RPGs.
Mike Shea (now a writer here on DDB too!) wrote recently on The Story Focus of D&D. But I'm interested in what suggestions you other DMs have for this. How can I transition my games to focus less on combat and more on characters?
I found many players, and DMs alike, naturally transition from the dungeon crawl to the story mode as their time with D&D grows. The transition for a player is going to be a little difficult since they are a bit more limited by their DM's style. By this I mean; if you have a DM who's more of the hack-n-slash play style you're probably not going to get much role-play spotlight, where as the story driven DM will probably not throw much in the way of dungeon crawl scenarios in your way. A DM is going to find it challenging because old habits die hard, they've "trained" their players to expect certain things, and story mode has a lot more cogs moving simultaneously. The best way to start down this path is to think about the 5 Ws, and then grab your favorite writing tools.
Start small, create a one shot in the normal play style that you've become accustomed to. Let's call it a crawl through the ancient catacombs of a sect of Yuan-Ti. Now, your brain instantly pulled up stats, pulled up the maps, you even had about a dozen battles figured out in the span of finishing this sentence. Write all of that down as notes, then write down this first question: Why do the players need to go down there? (because treasure and blood is not an appropriate answer this time!). Who sent them down there, who/what sends them on the quest? What happens if they fail, death is not the only failure state. How are they going to enter the catacomb? Then create problems, why do they need to go down? Because mummified yuan-ti have started to rise and are eating all the orphaned puppies. The quest starts because the group's barbarian wanted to adopt a puppy, but the puppy orphanage didn't have any left. What happens if they fail? The barbarian gets a cat instead, finds out cleric is allergic, and now they need to go on a quest to invent antihistamine.
From there you invite players to play in your one shot. Give them a briefing of your one shot, and ask them to create character back stories that might fit into the world. Take those back stories and create a plot based on them. A simple plot, an easily remembered plot, and something that intersects with either another player, the puppy orphanage, or the catacombs. Write all of this down, put this stuff in a bullet point, spreadsheet, notebook, or whatever. Then put one thing in to your story that touches on those back stories specifically to have that plot you wrote down become apparent. Do this for all of your players. The Dwarven fighter who has a missing tooth from a bar brawl, finds that dentist who forgot to use anesthesia. The Elven priestess, who has a fear of giant turtles, runs into the stranger she's dreamt about so often trapped in a pipe on the second floor of the catacombs.
Lastly, listen to your players, they think they know what's going on. Let them be right if it sounds fun, you have the blazing yuan-ti fire mummy set up for the next session, but the players are anticipating finding some strange puzzle room, give it to them. Let them be wrong if it sounds fun, they've gathered clues about why the mummies came alive, they've talked about how one of the locals just wanted to scare people out of town for better property rates. Have them walk into the next session, open a door and stuck in a cage hanging from the ceiling is that poor sap, and there's a giant scarab pit under him. Don't be afraid to blatantly steal ideas from other media...I've taken ideas from video games, anime, movies, books, and other D&D streams...there's no shame in it.
The last piece of advice is simple: Don't be afraid to fall on your face. Everyone will give you grief if you run a trope and they recognize it. As long as you have fun, take your licks, and make it entertaining, it'll all be fine. You willget better as you practice/play more.
Personally, I like milestone XP. I think it lets the players know they can reach their goals through problem solving as well as killing things. And when players don't look at everything that moves as a potential XP increment, I feel like it frees them up to attack less often and be more creative in their gameplay.
If you are going to concentrate on the story - remember that it is the story of your players.
Sure - you set up the initial conditions; the opposing forces with their own goals, motivations, tactics, and limits - but the story happens when your setting and their characters interact.
To that end, encourage them to build backstories! Character backstories are a DM's best friend for mining plot hooks, and world details! You do not need to get them to fill out 20 pages of detailed questionnaires however! Just ask questions. That's all you need to do. Not all at once - just when you're curious about some part of a character's past, as the player: Hey Ellen, does your barbarian Kenrelso have any family? Parents still living? Siblings? - and make sure both you and the player write that down. After awhile, your player may run with it, and start telling you aspects of their character backgrounds that they've invented in between-session downtime.
Then - weave those aspects into your world and your story line. Not everything in the world needs to be directly related to the players - but it must fit around your players and their stories. I've had an entire hegemony of island city states, complete with history and a recent civil war "spring into being" based on the conflicting backgrounds of just two of my characters ( one from a noble house that has a considerable amount of power in the city-state dominating the hegemony; one a fallen soldier from the losing side of a failed rebellion, where he lost everything including his family ).
If you do it that way, they will feel involved, and ( here's the dirty secret for DMs ), they write the damn story line for you, as their characters go off pursuing the goals and aspirations they set for themselves.
It doesn't mean you get to take it easy! You will be scrambling to flesh out parts of the world that you didn't know needed development until the player-characters started interacting with it. You will be making moves for NPCs, factions, etc - reacting to what the party ( and each other! ) are doing.
You are going to be busy! But you'll be busy with a vast, epic, collaborative story line where the players will entertain you as much as you entertain them.
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
As mentioned above, character backstories are an excellent place to start, as this both makes your players think more deeply about their characters' past and motivations, as well as giving you additional ideas for factions, NPCs that the characters already have relationships with, and a large collection of plot hooks.
In addition make sure that your characters feel rewarded for their role-playing interactions they perform. If you award XP on an Encounter basis (kill the monsters, get the XP) also think about ways to award XP for when the players take the time for their characters to chat and interact with the world around them, or for particularly wonderful role-play moments. Also, allow XP awards for "Combat" Encounters if they defeat the encounter in a way that didn't require them to kill the monsters. What if instead of killing the tribe of Goliaths that have been raiding mountain caravans they instead negotiate with the Goliath Leader, coordinating a peace treaty between the Goliaths and the surrounding regions. Make sure they get the full XP they would have for fighting their way through it (or more XP as these things are often much more difficult than solving something with swords.) Or, as mentioned above you can use Milestone XP to change the way that they complete things.
When designing dungeons consider having multiple factions that have different motivations and objectives. This allows the players to interact with these factions, perhaps siding with one over others in order to gain additional support in their dungeon delving.
Another option, if you and your players want to do a hard transition into a heavy role-playing session, you can also run an Intrigue Heavy Campaign. I ran a campaign where all members of the party were in a market city with connections to a single noble family (players were Captain of the Guard, Adopted Daughter that worked as a rogue, Merchant Partner that Tutored the Children, Friend from another Noble House, and the Lawyer often working for the family that was happy to use corrupt tactics to win any case). The players discovered that someone (or faction) were planning to try and sabotage the family's business, so the players worked together in order to uncover secrets of the family business, other Noble Houses and merchant factions that might have wanted to bring ruin to the party's family. Stealth, conversation skills, and uncovering secrets in ledgers and peoples' history were the main skill challenges. Over the course of the 30 hour or so campaign there were only 3 or 4 moments of combat, most of which were planned as traps/ambushes by the party in order to increase their chances of success.
They take additional time in preparing the details of motivations, plans, allies and enemies for the important NPCs, although over the course of the adventure then the actions of the players can often guide and develop the further changes to see how much the characters (players and NPCs alike) can grow. With the extra focus on role-playing watching the development of the characters and how they change over time become all the more rewarding and significant.
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For the longest time, I have preferred dungeon crawls as my primary play style in D&D. Exploration of the chthonic underworld in all its glory, with devilish traps and horrifying monsters and mind-bending oddities just scratched all the right mental itches for me: the game part of RPGs. And yet, lately, I've found myself starting to think more about story and characters. I'm more willing to think about the wider world and what NPCs want and all the bits around social interaction: the role-playing part of RPGs.
Mike Shea (now a writer here on DDB too!) wrote recently on The Story Focus of D&D. But I'm interested in what suggestions you other DMs have for this. How can I transition my games to focus less on combat and more on characters?
I found many players, and DMs alike, naturally transition from the dungeon crawl to the story mode as their time with D&D grows. The transition for a player is going to be a little difficult since they are a bit more limited by their DM's style. By this I mean; if you have a DM who's more of the hack-n-slash play style you're probably not going to get much role-play spotlight, where as the story driven DM will probably not throw much in the way of dungeon crawl scenarios in your way. A DM is going to find it challenging because old habits die hard, they've "trained" their players to expect certain things, and story mode has a lot more cogs moving simultaneously. The best way to start down this path is to think about the 5 Ws, and then grab your favorite writing tools.
Start small, create a one shot in the normal play style that you've become accustomed to. Let's call it a crawl through the ancient catacombs of a sect of Yuan-Ti. Now, your brain instantly pulled up stats, pulled up the maps, you even had about a dozen battles figured out in the span of finishing this sentence. Write all of that down as notes, then write down this first question: Why do the players need to go down there? (because treasure and blood is not an appropriate answer this time!). Who sent them down there, who/what sends them on the quest? What happens if they fail, death is not the only failure state. How are they going to enter the catacomb? Then create problems, why do they need to go down? Because mummified yuan-ti have started to rise and are eating all the orphaned puppies. The quest starts because the group's barbarian wanted to adopt a puppy, but the puppy orphanage didn't have any left. What happens if they fail? The barbarian gets a cat instead, finds out cleric is allergic, and now they need to go on a quest to invent antihistamine.
From there you invite players to play in your one shot. Give them a briefing of your one shot, and ask them to create character back stories that might fit into the world. Take those back stories and create a plot based on them. A simple plot, an easily remembered plot, and something that intersects with either another player, the puppy orphanage, or the catacombs. Write all of this down, put this stuff in a bullet point, spreadsheet, notebook, or whatever. Then put one thing in to your story that touches on those back stories specifically to have that plot you wrote down become apparent. Do this for all of your players. The Dwarven fighter who has a missing tooth from a bar brawl, finds that dentist who forgot to use anesthesia. The Elven priestess, who has a fear of giant turtles, runs into the stranger she's dreamt about so often trapped in a pipe on the second floor of the catacombs.
Lastly, listen to your players, they think they know what's going on. Let them be right if it sounds fun, you have the blazing yuan-ti fire mummy set up for the next session, but the players are anticipating finding some strange puzzle room, give it to them. Let them be wrong if it sounds fun, they've gathered clues about why the mummies came alive, they've talked about how one of the locals just wanted to scare people out of town for better property rates. Have them walk into the next session, open a door and stuck in a cage hanging from the ceiling is that poor sap, and there's a giant scarab pit under him. Don't be afraid to blatantly steal ideas from other media...I've taken ideas from video games, anime, movies, books, and other D&D streams...there's no shame in it.
The last piece of advice is simple: Don't be afraid to fall on your face. Everyone will give you grief if you run a trope and they recognize it. As long as you have fun, take your licks, and make it entertaining, it'll all be fine. You will get better as you practice/play more.
You could shrink dungeons part to one-shoot lentght and with each adventure add more and more story (and rp wpc with npc) around it.
Try to build the plot around characters bonds and flaws
Personally, I like milestone XP. I think it lets the players know they can reach their goals through problem solving as well as killing things. And when players don't look at everything that moves as a potential XP increment, I feel like it frees them up to attack less often and be more creative in their gameplay.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
If you are going to concentrate on the story - remember that it is the story of your players.
Sure - you set up the initial conditions; the opposing forces with their own goals, motivations, tactics, and limits - but the story happens when your setting and their characters interact.
To that end, encourage them to build backstories! Character backstories are a DM's best friend for mining plot hooks, and world details! You do not need to get them to fill out 20 pages of detailed questionnaires however! Just ask questions. That's all you need to do. Not all at once - just when you're curious about some part of a character's past, as the player: Hey Ellen, does your barbarian Kenrelso have any family? Parents still living? Siblings? - and make sure both you and the player write that down. After awhile, your player may run with it, and start telling you aspects of their character backgrounds that they've invented in between-session downtime.
Then - weave those aspects into your world and your story line. Not everything in the world needs to be directly related to the players - but it must fit around your players and their stories. I've had an entire hegemony of island city states, complete with history and a recent civil war "spring into being" based on the conflicting backgrounds of just two of my characters ( one from a noble house that has a considerable amount of power in the city-state dominating the hegemony; one a fallen soldier from the losing side of a failed rebellion, where he lost everything including his family ).
If you do it that way, they will feel involved, and ( here's the dirty secret for DMs ), they write the damn story line for you, as their characters go off pursuing the goals and aspirations they set for themselves.
It doesn't mean you get to take it easy! You will be scrambling to flesh out parts of the world that you didn't know needed development until the player-characters started interacting with it. You will be making moves for NPCs, factions, etc - reacting to what the party ( and each other! ) are doing.
You are going to be busy! But you'll be busy with a vast, epic, collaborative story line where the players will entertain you as much as you entertain them.
You are in for a fun ride! :D
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
As mentioned above, character backstories are an excellent place to start, as this both makes your players think more deeply about their characters' past and motivations, as well as giving you additional ideas for factions, NPCs that the characters already have relationships with, and a large collection of plot hooks.
In addition make sure that your characters feel rewarded for their role-playing interactions they perform. If you award XP on an Encounter basis (kill the monsters, get the XP) also think about ways to award XP for when the players take the time for their characters to chat and interact with the world around them, or for particularly wonderful role-play moments. Also, allow XP awards for "Combat" Encounters if they defeat the encounter in a way that didn't require them to kill the monsters. What if instead of killing the tribe of Goliaths that have been raiding mountain caravans they instead negotiate with the Goliath Leader, coordinating a peace treaty between the Goliaths and the surrounding regions. Make sure they get the full XP they would have for fighting their way through it (or more XP as these things are often much more difficult than solving something with swords.) Or, as mentioned above you can use Milestone XP to change the way that they complete things.
When designing dungeons consider having multiple factions that have different motivations and objectives. This allows the players to interact with these factions, perhaps siding with one over others in order to gain additional support in their dungeon delving.
Another option, if you and your players want to do a hard transition into a heavy role-playing session, you can also run an Intrigue Heavy Campaign. I ran a campaign where all members of the party were in a market city with connections to a single noble family (players were Captain of the Guard, Adopted Daughter that worked as a rogue, Merchant Partner that Tutored the Children, Friend from another Noble House, and the Lawyer often working for the family that was happy to use corrupt tactics to win any case). The players discovered that someone (or faction) were planning to try and sabotage the family's business, so the players worked together in order to uncover secrets of the family business, other Noble Houses and merchant factions that might have wanted to bring ruin to the party's family. Stealth, conversation skills, and uncovering secrets in ledgers and peoples' history were the main skill challenges. Over the course of the 30 hour or so campaign there were only 3 or 4 moments of combat, most of which were planned as traps/ambushes by the party in order to increase their chances of success.
They take additional time in preparing the details of motivations, plans, allies and enemies for the important NPCs, although over the course of the adventure then the actions of the players can often guide and develop the further changes to see how much the characters (players and NPCs alike) can grow. With the extra focus on role-playing watching the development of the characters and how they change over time become all the more rewarding and significant.