Engaging players 3.x

[Mike Miller]

I am preparing a campaign and have hit a bit of a writer's block. I want to come up with ways to engage the players and give them more power to take action without forcing them onto the DM railroad. What are some ways to use the 3.x system to get creative actions out of players?

I don't want to write the specifics of what I have already, as I know at least a few of my players are on the boards. Generally, I am looking for advice beyond having unique NPCs, quests, locations... What would make players think outside the box when they are inside 3.x?

[Kayblis]

The "inside the 3.X system" is a bit broader than what's possible to answer. It's like asking what kind of fish lives in the water, without specifying the kind of water and its location. What are you looking for, more specifically? Combat engagement? Thinking outside the "I move and attack" mindset? Story engagement? Having unique goals? Doing things other than travelling and killing? Starting a business? All of these options have wildly different answers, and they mostly depend on the kind of setting you're running. Some more information would come a long way in helping people make meaningful suggestions.

[Quertus]

Give the players tools, not paths.


A cleric receives a letter indicating one of their deity's temples has been destroyed by servants of another deity and the cleric is the closest available resource. Please go clear out the temple and make the area safe for the priests that follow to rebuild.


This is not a player led adventure. This is a DM led adventure which has a player-specific hook.

If the DM has to tell the players what to do (i.e. "go clear out the temple"), then the players aren't leading. A player led adventure looks more like this :

DM: "While in the market, you hear the news that the temple of Mitra in the next town upriver has been ransacked and burned by followers of Set (that snake cult which has been growing rapidly over the past few years). Apparently, the priest and acolytes were killed by a group of Setite riders who torched the temple before heading east into the hills."
PC Cleric of Mitra: *goes to other PCs* "I need your help! We have to go upriver and investigate what happened to the Temple of Mitra. The clergy will need a proper burial and I need to salvage whatever I can from the rubble before scavengers loot it."

Or

"We must avenge my murdered brethren! If we leave immediately and strike northwest over land, we might be able to pick up their trail and catch up to them in the foothills before they disappear into the mountains."

Or

"While you guys are resting and resupplying here, I'm going to take a boat upriver to lay the murdered priests to rest and check on the villagers. I'll be back in 3 or 4 days."

Or

"Damn! Bad place to be a Mitran! Let's get our supplies together and get out of here!"

Or

"We've got to go take care of those frost giants raiding the coast. Stopping the giants before they get down to the port city of Imelas is more important right now than fighting some snake worshiping bandits up in the hills. I can only pray that they will be brought to justice before they hurt anyone else."

One of the things most beneficial to my fun is handing me a huge, broad toolkit, and the GM saying, "have fun".

So, my classic example: rocks that float through the air.

I want the GM to already know the underlying mechanics, and for those mechanics to be… hmmm… reasonably interfacable. I want to be able to research it, and utilize it. Maybe I use it to make Shoes of Water Walking, or super skipping stones, or juggling statues, or flying castles. I don't want to find that it's already been Explored, and is the home of the Flying Rock School of Martial Arts, the one and only possible use for this anomaly ever. :smallannoyed:

And I don't want the GM to hand me just this one tool. Much like the Rule of Three, I want to be handed *lots* of tools, of various types, like… An orcish invasion. A lonely Driad. Dungeon mummies who "just came in to get out of the rain". A kidnapped princess. An evil king and his noble vizier. Cabbage migrations. The elemental plane of taffy. Phoenix extinction. A new technique for ascension. Floating rocks. A Wizard war. An underwater portal to the elemental plane of taffy, with invisible, incorporeal guardians. Troll bridges viewed favorably. Sentient bats. Dragonfire legions. The library in the mirror realm. The source of freckles. Suicidal immortals. A beaten dog. An artifact ice cream truck. Contagious visions. A lake of gilding. Mass enslavement of Kaorti for their weapons. Pumpkin-headed zombies spontaneously appearing.

My perfect game would almost certainly involve an all but unexplored world, with a rich, thought-out toolkit for the PCs to do whatever they want with - including ignoring any arbitrary subset of the tools - as they see fit.

there is no plot

Sure, lots of NPCs are plotting lots of things. The PCs may even foil some of those plots - or even help them along!

But the PCs are the ones Exploring the World, are the ones with all the cool toys, who get to decide what their story is about.

If you ever find yourself saying, "I want…" - as in, you want the PCs to, or you want a scene to go a certain way - you have probably failed.

That should about cover it.

Note that none of that has anything to do with 3e.

[MR_Anderson]

Give the players tools, not paths.

...

If you ever find yourself saying, "I want…" - as in, you want the PCs to, or you want a scene to go a certain way - you have probably failed...

Having an intended plan on how an event or encounter will play out is important, but just make sure you aren’t all in on that as how it has to play out. Players will ruin your plans, sometimes for the better and you didn’t even know it.

Hand the players multiple options and stories of the local area, and listen to what they say they are looking and deliver. Create engaging NPCs that have contacts to get them what they want or what they want to do. Build a nemesis or two out of these helpful NPCs, and it will make a great villain.

Biggest thing is the ability to be flexible and quick on your toes with new content sometimes on the fly.

[RNightstalker]

I am preparing a campaign and have hit a bit of a writer's block. I want to come up with ways to engage the players and give them more power to take action without forcing them onto the DM railroad. What are some ways to use the 3.x system to get creative actions out of players?

I don't want to write the specifics of what I have already, as I know at least a few of my players are on the boards. Generally, I am looking for advice beyond having unique NPCs, quests, locations... What would make players think outside the box when they are inside 3.x?

We can only control ourselves, not other people. Thinking outside the box is up to the players. Creative action out of players is up to the players. As a DM you play a crucial role. Do they get shutdown every time they go outside the box? Can you run with them when they stray from the path you expect they'll take?

The last DM I had would give an overview of the plot and then ask a question. For example: "The sun doesn't seem to be shining as bright as it usually does and it seems to have affected the mood of the people of the city you just walked into. There doesn't seem to be a lot of energy, and any that is there feels suppressed. What Do You Do?"

In closing, if you're having writer's block, it's not a cop-out to let them help tell the story. If the players know what they want their characters to do, just help them along. If the party just leveled up and the fighter just bought a new shiny sword, maybe the weaponsmith goes "Hey! Psst! Are you looking for some "thing" to practice with that new sword on?" in a whispered voice.

[Zarrgon]

Well an easy way to get players to take action is Greed. Have an immediate reward, mostly in hard cash or magic. Want a player to take an action like walk into a room: put a ring of wishing on the table in that room.

A way more complicated way is role playing actions. If a player chooses to role play their character, you can hook actions off of that. For example, any hero character would jump up and take action to save someone.

To get a player to do a creative action....well, you can't do much most of the time. The player is creative or they are not. If you have teaching skills and roughly a year, it's possible to teach someone to be creative.

The same is true about thinking outside the box: a player is that type of person....or they are not. Either way that is just who they are. And, again, If you have teaching skills and roughly a year, it's possible to teach someone to think out side the box.

[rel]

3.x has rules for a lot so it's easy to fall into thinking that if there are no rules it isn't possible.

Figure out a few ways You would like to see the game progress beyond doing quests involving delving dungeons for random yahoos. Ask the players if there are any things they haven't done before that they would like to see.
Work out some basic frameworks to help push your chosen paths forward in the background and some good rewards you can offer.
You still delve dungeons but with a different focus and additional rewards.
Talk to your players, at the start of the game and again every few sessions reminding them of their options.

As an example, I wanted to explore town improvement.
So I restricted the scope of the game to a single town and the surrounding environments.
I made the town start off small and limited in terms of services.
I worked out a metric for improving the services available and some potential extra rewards for town improvement quests.
Then I looked at some possible town improvement quests and ways to introduce them.
Finally I incorporated all that into a game pitch and found some interested players and talked the concept over with them in session 0.
This helped me refine the idea. Some players wanted to take an active role, others wanted me to handle things and just give them quests. Whenever there was an obvious end to an arc I would remind the players about the town improvement angle as a possible option.

[Bucky]

I co-ran a campaign that successfully gave the players sandbox-level freedom. This required a lot of preparation, and the combined creative juices of two GMs, to pull off the way we did.

The biggest change from a linear campaign was how we handled antagonists. In a linear campaign, we would put together a sequence of encounters. But if the players have freedom, the antagonists also need the freedom to adapt. So, rather than scripting, we'd make sure each antagonist was provisioned with goals, resources, and plans, and use that to slap together the encounters during the session.

Goals are what the antagonist, whether a character or an organization, is trying to accomplish. While their goals can squarely oppose the player, it's more common for the players to be an obstacle that the antagonist might not care about. That means compromise is possible. It's also important to work out why an antagonists holds a goal, because that dictates how they'll go about solving it, and when they'd give up.

Resources are the ingredients they can bring to an encounter. Statblocks are the most important part here. But it also includes information about the party, locations to defend, and the means to organize and deploy in response to the party's actions.

Plans are what the antagonists will do during the session if the players don't interfere. Depending on how well coordinated they are, the plans may be adjusted or abandoned on contact, or the pieces might train-wreck into the party.

All three of these need to be adjusted after every session for every relevant antagonist; that's why this approach takes so much work.

For example, the campaign had the party come into conflict with a tribe of territorial giants. Before the first session, a few solitary giants (Resources) were on the lookout for "small folk" who had been poaching on their land (Goal), keeping an eye on their semi-wild herds (Plan, with an accompanying resource). Later, they were investigating the violent death of one of their own (second Goal) and got false information (Resource) from the other antagonists implicating the party, as well as information about their location. This led one of them to attempt an ambush (Plan for revenge (Goal) while the herd-guards started roaming in pairs (alternative Plan).

Two sessions later, with more dead giants, the tribe brought in an elite member and her entourage (Resource) to shut down the brewing blood feud (Goal) and tried to corner the party (Plan). The party ended up winning their respect without further bloodshed, and negotiated a three-way meeting that included representatives of the poachers (another antagonist faction). The meeting took a whole session; the giants managed to obtain everything they wanted in negotiation except for revenge, which was only a (Goal) for a few of them anyway, most of whom had died pursuing it.

And that was just one of the three antagonist factions who were active during that entire arc; both the liar and the poachers got similar treatments, and several other antagonists came up during one or two sessions. Needless to say, this was quite a bit of work to keep up with.

[Fizban]

I am preparing a campaign and have hit a bit of a writer's block. I want to come up with ways to engage the players and give them more power to take action without forcing them onto the DM railroad. What are some ways to use the 3.x system to get creative actions out of players?

I don't want to write the specifics of what I have already, as I know at least a few of my players are on the boards. Generally, I am looking for advice beyond having unique NPCs, quests, locations... What would make players think outside the box when they are inside 3.x?
Are you sure that you want your players to think "outside the box," -are you sure that they want to? People say "railroading" a lot, but the vast majority of prepared content is not "railroading." I'd worry about having something to engage with before worrying about how to make the players do it themselves. Most people show up to play the game that's set in front of them.

What does "get creative actions out of players" mean? Do you want them to make characters that aren't just one class with PHB feats? Do you want them to use wacky cheese combos? Do you want them to use a wide variety of skills? Do you want them to buy into some intrigue plot and play mindgames with the NPCs? Do you just want them to actually use the basic tactical rules to stand in the correct places so that enemies can't just "walk around" them and they can actually shoot or use sneak attack without 11 feats to give them permission?

In terms of "using the 3.5 rules" to "encourage creativity," the Factotum is the standard-bearer. Moreso than the Chameleon, which you can't enter until after 5th, with specific requirements, and a bunch of bookkeeping. The Factotum just has the ability to use every skill in the game with a useful bonus 1 per day per skill, and the ability to just pick a new couple of sor/wiz spells every single day with zero prior setup. It is not a powerful direct combatant, but if you're the kind of DM that will let people do just about any wacky plan if they can roll some appropriate skill check and maybe the right spell, then the Factotum can do almost anything- and once they've used a particular skill or spell that day, they've got to pick something else for their next "great idea." Later on their ability to take extra standard actions while not having much to do with them results in the ultimate magic item user, someone who might actually care about this cool unique thing you wrote up for them, or try to figure out how they can win by activating items x, y, and z, which aren't even combat items.