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Another problem I've seen is the players just don't know what else to do. They attack just because they don't have a clue of what else would move the plot forward.Once, this happened to me. The players were confronted with a demonic horde led by a female general gone mad. They were unable to stop the horde, but they knew that there was a dragon that was the only creature in the world that the general would obey. For me, this clue was pretty obvious, but the players wouldn't realize that the dragon was their only hope (the horde was destroying a city and killing hundreds of innocent people so it wasn't just the PC's lives at stake). When I mentioned the dragon, a player immediately said: "That's it! The dragon! Let's kill the dragon! She loves this dragon, let's extract revenge on her by slaying this beast!". This surprised me, as the poor dragon wasn't even involved in the whole mess and by killing him they would ruin their chances of saving the innocent people that were at risk.

So I acted as the players' "Common sense". I said to one of the wisest PCs' player: "You don't see much point in slaying the dragon. In fact, it seems a rather foolish thing to do". By acting as their common sense, I was able to show the players that this wasn't time to do combat, this was time to ask for help against a n apparently unbeatable foe. So they did ask the dragon for help and everything was solved.

So what I am trying to say in this rather long example is: when the players attack because they are clueless, [you should] act as their clue!In general there are always brilliant characters in the group (the mage, the cleric, etc) and you can't expect the players to be so brilliant. So act as the common sense or consciousness of the PCs and see if they don't begin roleplaying when they realize it is the most efficient thing to do.


From: Scott P-M.

Johnn,

Here's what I do to encourage roleplaying among combat- focussed characters(/players): every once in a while, put them in situations where they are not the badasses. The reason players will feel no compunctions about charging immediately into the fray is because they don't feel like they are in danger when they raid the goblin caves or whatnot. Put them in a situation where they are made well aware that combat is going to result in an untidy demise. This will frustrate players if used excessively, but it will encourage players to communicate with their enemies, giving the GM more room to develop interesting, worthy opponents, rather than one-off cannon-fodder.

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From: Flatvurm

As far as the "Shoot first, ask questions later" attitude goes, I feel that it's usually a pretty simple matter to trick the players into having their characters attack someone they shouldn't. The consequences of this can be hard to enforce, though, depending on the (possibly already flagging) level of character development. If the players are into their characters, there could be personal consequences to the hasty action; the victim could have been a needed ally, a good friend, or either of the above to an ally or close friend of the characters. An NPC's NPC. :)

If the players are less motivated by character consequences, then story or system consequences are a more appropriate penalty; the victim could have been key to the success of the adventure, or the GM might want to withhold experience or other system reward points.


From: Leonel

Hi there, Johnn. Once again, congrats on your e-zine.

This time, I wanted to share with everybody some ideas about the problem of players that always favor combat instead of roleplaying. As we all know, this is a rather common thing, so here goes what I found to be of help when a GM is confronted with this situation.
• First, you should find out WHY the players do this. If this is their style of play and they just don't seem at all interested in changing, maybe you should leave them be. For some people, roleplaying is just plain boring, they'd much rather roll dice. As we all know, forcing your players towards a direction they don't want to go is asking for trouble. If that's the case, just maybe is time to find another group.
• If such is not the case, then maybe the players feel rewarded only for combat. In AD&D 2e this sometimes can be a problem: XP for character development is by far fewer than XP for killing monsters. As the recent editions of the e-zine have discussed masterfully about rewards, I'll just leave the warning : watch it, maybe you are the one moving your game towards hack'n'slash and you don't even realize it.

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But, by far, the best way to deal with combat is to do something that the American media is really bad at--realism and consequence. This means that perhaps the police will come after them, or the victim's mother will. People will be afraid of them. It will be in the news. People will randomly (actually for revenge) try to kill the PC's. They will sometimes fight people who are very weak (i.e. average human) and kill them easily, and then have to deal with the consequences. There will be lots of innocent bystanders. Make the combats full of repercussions and people will be a bit less willing to jump into combat so easily.
2. Background Check. So now that you've given a different spin to combat, how do you bring in role-playing? It starts at character creation. I have a character bio sheet that I give all my players (mine is actually 4 pages long!). I tell them that by the second or third adventure, I want the bio filled in. The bio is full of all sorts of questions that leads the players to think a bit more in depth about their character. The bio includes things like: name, address, birthday, etc, but also things like-where did you grow up? How was your relationship to your parents? Talk about your relatives, your childhood. Where did you go to school? What are you afraid of? Who is the last person you'd like to run into and why? How do you feel about your career? Etc. After people spend an amount of time working on their bio, they tend to want to incorporate it. Reinforce this by bringing up things from each character's past every now and again.
3. Plot. Give them plots where they have to keep someone alive--someone they have to role-play with. Give a succession of situations where if they just kill people they don't the info they need to complete the mission. Have the plots deal with a variety of combat and non-combat issues.
4. Supporting Cast. Make interesting NPCs that the players will want to interact with. I find it most effective to make them random people. I don't know why, but the PCs I've encountered will role-play with the plain-looking secretary who is shy and flirty or the drunk 7-11 guy with a mohawk for a half hour. Populate the world with interesting people, who seem to have a story, the players will follow.

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Make the dead NPCs have vital information memorized, they obviously won't be able to be questioned after being killed. Maybe the obvious enemy squad leader is not the one with the passcode into the enemy base because the rebels have a tendency to shoot the obvious leaders (a la Patriot).

Maybe the NPCs were not the enemy and the PCs just killed their only potential allies.

Make the enemies are too dangerous to attack and don't hesitate to grease one or two players or even the entire party. But never make it seem like you are simply out to get them. Life is not nicely arranged into dungeons of various levels (all level 1 monsters to the top!).

Lastly, make the PCs the bad guys for fighting: The king decides that any fighting within 10 miles of any town is punishable by 5 years in the salt mines. In modern and Sci- fi games this is even easier. The police tend not to care who was at fault when there is gunplay. Everyone gets thrown in jail and the courts settle it a couple of months/years down the road, assuming you have an honest justice system. In jail you are a sitting target for your enemies.

The hard part is keeping the players from thinking you are out to get them.

From: Stephanie P.

Hey,

I've been GM'ing for over 17 years, and I've often been faced with those people who were comfortable in a combat frame of mind. Before I bring out my tips to lure them into a role-playing space, I will preface this by saying that if someone *really* doesn't want to role-play they won't, but it can be encouraged. So, here are my tips:
Start with Combat. If the players like combat, this is where to begin adding roleplaying. This could be as simple as putting the combats in dramatic situations--like on top of a moving train or on a rickety bridge. This will probably have your players come up with more interesting options that--"I hit the guy."

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There have been times when he missed tips, since he doesn't always think of the NPCs in his background. This only creates more enjoyment when he realizes this later on, when it is too late to explore it.

From: Chris C.

In response to the question posted in the latest issue of "Roleplaying Tips Weekly" about discouraging or at least minimizing "shoot first" roleplaying, I have a couple ideas that have worked for me with my groups (most of my experience has been with Shadowrun, but these tricks should work in most any game):

Make it painful to do so: This is not my preferred method, since if you overdo it you end up simply punishing a player for their playing style. However, it can sometimes be useful: making the consequences of shoot-first gaming obviously unpleasant (being arrested for terrorism, ticking off the mob, etc.) and apparent to the gamers might get them to ease back. A slight modification of this method would be to let the players see the results of the violence- -assuming the players are adults, be graphic. The aftermath of a gun battle should be pretty horrific.

Make it difficult to do so: give them a bunch of obstacles or complications that would dissuade them from kicking in the door and holding down the trigger. For instance, if the characters have to kidnap somebody, put a bunch of innocent civilians in the way. Or, if they need to "liberate" some artifact, make it extremely delicate.

Sometimes, I've found that it helps to encourage a bit of conflict between characters so that they end up keeping each other in check. Often you can end up with a team leader who the other characters follow pretty much without question-- especially if the team leader is a shooter and the others are less combat-oriented characters. It might be useful, however, to get them to ask why the plan is just to kick down the door. It also might let them show off some of their unique abilities.

As a last resort, you might straight-out ask the player why they're doing what they're doing, although it's a big step out of character. It may reveal that the player is having a problem, such as not knowing what else to do or being frustrated with the game.

From: Orren

This is not my tip, but one that a DM used in a game I was playing in. He gave a percentage of experience bonus for good roleplaying. The percentage ranged from 0-10%. This also was a percentage of the total experience points of the character, not just for that game session. So if you have a bunch of good roleplaying, then that bonus could easily exceed the experience for the combat.
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From: Dan W.

To answer your call for ideas on how to steer a group away from hack-n-slash toward RPing: The obvious one is to penalize the shoot-first-ask-questions-later behavior.

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Last Hope: Talk it out. This is somewhat of an emergency exit just before you quit the stage. If your players aren't listening to you, or are plainly ignoring your in-game attempts to get them roleplaying, tell them. After all, you're GMing for fun - and if you're not having fun, something should change. And if you've done all you can to change the situation without success, it's the player's turn. Tell them that you don't want to GM anymore if they don't start roleplaying. Now _they_ should act -either they help you in creating a good story, or they'll have to find another GM...


From: Jones T.

I believe that your points in [Issue #51] speak to the very heart of a truly enjoyable and exciting campaign.

With regard to your first Point, wherein you speak of 'spending time on each character', I have a method which has proven to get all players excited about their PC's.

Whenever a player wishes to join one of my campaigns, they roll up their stats and then are required to provide me with a background. The background must come first.

From each background, I go over it in fine detail, taking notes, giving NPCs names and adding bits and pieces to fill it out. I then provide the player with his "Player Information". This sheet of paper gives him the names of the NPCs as well as a few other bits of seemingly trivial information (of course, my PCs are catching on that these tidbits are not trivial.)

From here, I develop small, long term campaigns with each Player's background. My games generally take the form of several long term campaigns, each one taking the characters through many levels and, sometimes, many years. In the backdrop, I provide what I refer to as "mini-campaigns" and "one-shotters." The "mini-campaign" is a series of 2 to 4 adventures, the 'one-shotters' being one adventure. The players never know what kind of adventure they are participating in at any moment.

From the Player's backgrounds, I create long-term 'mini- campaigns." Perhaps an adventure with the initial hints at 1st level, another one at 4th level, then an adventure that leads directly into one that relates solely to the PC's background and so on.

I have rarely seen a player not become very excited about his player with this method.

For an example, I have a Fighter from Neverwinter in one of my FR campaigns. At the start, he provided as a reason for his military skills the fact that he spent much time with a retired captain in the militia of Neverwinter. I expanded this background to say that this man actually found the Fighter as a babe in the Nether Mountains, halfway across the continent. This Captain was given the babe by a powerful figure who told him to watch over the babe carefully, for reasons not mentioned. He brought him back to the family that he believes to be his own and watched him throughout his upbringing. I have been playing off this (with more detail then I can give here) for nearly a year's worth of real-time gaming and the player is very excited about every bit of info that happens to drop his way.

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Now, let's see what I've got for this one...

First In-game possibility: Combat Experience 'wears off'. Of course, in most systems, there's an experience value given for slaying a certain kind of monster - but it wouldn't be too realistic to award this amount of points each time the PC slays one of them as soon as it becomes routine work... if the brave hero slays his 20th Ancient Giant Multi-Headed Red Dragon, it's surely not an experience as impressive as his _first_ one, so I would also only award about 1/20 of the Dragon's XP value. This forces the players who want to advance to come along with new ways of surviving such encounters - the first Ancient Giant Multi-Headed Red Dragon being _talked_ into submission would be worth as much XP as the first one - maybe even more, depending on how brilliantly it was done.

Second In-game possibility: Involve PCs in Non-combat action. Maybe the Player's favor towards combat comes from the simple fact that they haven't encountered any other things that really are fun to them... WHAT exactly you should do to get your players out of their roleplaying lethargy depends heavily on players and GM. Maybe you could get one of the PCs involved in a love affair? Maybe a few puzzles would do them good? Maybe you could come up with an enemy the players cannot possibly defeat in combat, but only through roleplaying? Depending on the solution, it could even be helpful to confront them with an _extremely_ boring combat situation short before you come up with The Other Possibility. Sometimes contrast does a lot.

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1. Opened subplot for another player. (Ex: Tom shoots his mouth off about how Rex can shoot even better than William Tell, and so the local Baron demands that Rex compete in the upcoming competition against his champion Sir Tell.)
2. Opened subplot for Self. (As above, but lesser xp award.)
3. Unselfish bonus. (To reward the Good Guys who either stick to their character's character in spite of evil reward or who try to stay honorable in spite of the other characters.)

I also penalize xp for reusing the same ability over and over or trying to milk an ability for all it's worth.



From: John B.

With regard to Encouraging Roleplaying over combat I think one good way to encourage players not to shoot first, ask later is to allow them to go into a combat situation, slay the bad guy and then present an unexpected outcome from the combat.

For example, one of the "villains" just killed could have been an undercover agent for the king and the players actions instead of being heroic have just put the kingdom on the brink of war. For this to work properly you do have to provide the players with some way to figure it out before they enter combat through roleplaying. If they rush into combat without thinking they face the consequences of their actions...


From: Tony

I've found that the most effective way to encourage roleplaying is to ask each player to write a detailed history for their character before the campaign begins. Some players will be able to write detailed histories without any trouble at all. For those that have difficulty, spend some time outside of your normal gaming sessions talking to them about the game world and asking them questions about their character. Throwing around ideas for an interesting character background can be a lot of fun.

Player: "Maybe he used to be a soldier in some army." GM: "Yeah good idea, the Kingdom of Arthania is at war with the Gors at the moment, your character might be a Knight of Arthania, or a hired mercenary?" Player: "A mercenary yeah cool! He'd be a hard old guy like Clint Eastwood except with a soft heart..." etc.

It's a lot of fun and really primes the player, even a new player, to start roleplaying from day one. Character histories are great for the GM too, as they usually supply a whole bunch of NPCs and story ideas ready to work into the campaign.


From: Toran