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View Full Version : How to do a roleplay-heavy campaign?



agumathebear
2011-09-20, 08:52 PM
Hi all. I am no stranger to roleplay but I just started a horror campaign in which the party basically never fights anything, in fact if they try they will most likely die. (of course i'm not mean so i let them make a new character and so far only one person has died) and we've been playing for over 5 sessions now and they said it was the best campaign they've ever played...AND THEY HAVEN'T EVEN FOUGHT ONE THING!!! In fact only one person saw a real life werewolf and lived. Anyway I'm setting up a medieval fantasy campaign and I really wanted to make it roleplay heavy as opposed to combat heavy since my players seem to really like RPing but I don't want it to get boring. Can someone give me some suggestions? All I can really think of at the moment is heavy politics and maybe a secret assassination here and there lol

Bearpunch
2011-09-20, 09:18 PM
HEAVY politics.
Don't go full RP, maybe one combat per session, but allow it to be avoidable if they can figure a way out.
Establish a core group of NPCs that the players can connect with, and allow them to develop as the players grow. When the characters see that NPCs they don't stab in the face become realistic and important, they will want to attempt to expand their own characters.
The main NPCs you establish will build up a reputation for other NPCs in your game, making your PCs give the NPCs more of a chance.
Make combat a life or death, always. If they are fighting a horde of goblins, they are fighting a HORDE of goblins. If they are fighting the most fearsome Barghest in the land, and he doesn't at the very least knock out one character, you've done your job wrong.

Dr.Epic
2011-09-20, 09:25 PM
RP XP is always nice as it will make people want to do this rather than just kill stuff.

Kaun
2011-09-20, 09:26 PM
Players will generally want to use the abilities their characters have, if they make combat based characters you can expect them to use combat to solve problems because its there strong point.

Your best bet is to figure out what the focus of your game will be and let your players know before chr gen. Tell them right of the game will be combat lite.

kaomera
2011-09-20, 09:40 PM
I'd suggest letting the players suggest ideas for some of the NPCs they will encounter. This not only gives them some input into the direction of the game (which helps ensure that they'll be interested in it), but also means that they will feel some level of ownership / responsibility for "their" NPCs and won't just off them first thing.

You can get some really cool stuff out of this, just be aware that not all of the players will like the same stuff. If one of the players suggests a villain that would potentially switch sides, another might not having that "spoiled" for them. A worst-case scenario would be a player who just wants to wreck the other players' plans, but hopefully you'll never have to deal with that - and if you do removing the offending player from the game is probably the best course of action.

I think if you look at cool dramas (and thrillers, and even some scenes in action-movies or TV) it's the characters that make them cool. The players are generally going to be attached to their own characters, so if you can get them attached to other characters and let relationships develop that's cool.

Mastikator
2011-09-20, 10:42 PM
Ask the players how their characters feel about things that occur during the game and what they are thinking about. It goes a long way for the players to get a feel for their characters personality.

For example; when the character sees someone dead for the first time, ask them how they feel about it. Does it traumatize him? Does it not bother him? These feelings will have consequences down the road about what kind of person the character is.

Try not to do combat so much, probably less than once per session, maybe even as low as once per campaign. Combats tend to take a lot of time, time which is limited and could be spent on the characters speaking with each other in front of the fire, telling stories about their childhood (if you can get them to do this then you win at roleplay).
One way to encourage the players not to use combat at every obstacle is to make it so they don't get any reward for killing an enemy. Another thing to do is to let warrior archetype characters have other skills than combat.

Quietus
2011-09-20, 11:05 PM
Two pieces of advice.

One - Think in terms of encounters/complications, rather than combats. Fighting is all well and good, and has its time and place, but thinking in terms of what sorts of obstacles you want your players to overcome (learning secrets, an ornery old guard who won't help, a bridge that's out and needs to be crossed) rather than what you want them to fight.

Two - Let your players tell you what they want. In some cases, this is direct, sitting down and saying "Okay, I want to run another RP-heavy game, any themes you want to see?". In some this is indirect, looking at what their characters can *do*. If one of them is playing a sneaky type, then some kind of obstacle that could involve infiltration is right up their alley. If you've got someone built strictly for combat, that's it, then every now and then throw in a situation where he can throw down.

Jude_H
2011-09-21, 02:23 AM
This could be obvious, but it helps to have a system that focuses on the themes and conflicts that you want the game to focus on.

If the system resolves social interactive elements with a single die roll, but ties most of the mechanics and defining character traits into a complex combat minigame, you'd be fighting the system to play a game of political intrigue.