By James Gildard

 Chris has been posting a lovely little series on intelligent monsters, and what they might do to you instead of swinging a rusty battleaxe at your head for the 8th round in a row while on 2 hit points.

Here’s what I took away from Chris’ posts so far.

Basically, there’s a problem GMs run into arising from a couple phenomena. Enemies in DND can be kinda boring as written, and oftentimes players will play for themselves rather than the realistic moment to moment interests of their character, ESPECIALLY during combat. This makes for a bland back and forth of I whack at you and you whack at me until one of us dies. It’s exciting for about 30 seconds. We can do better.

Let’s add some spice to that rather bleak diagnosis by allowing our monsters some cleverness, wit, some sense of self preservation, and lord willin’ some gah dahm personality. Look at that vampire queen! She’s got absolutely massive personalities!

I agree with this diagnosis, but I have some thoughts to add, and boy do I love sharing my thoughts!

Making the characters cry

So we wanna spice up your D&D combat. Well there’s two categories of actors we can target to bring that spice: PCs and NPCs. Let’s take a look at the PC side of things first.

Chris is right about trying to enforce a system for tracking morale or some other aspect of internal character experience. It’s exactly the kind of extra dimension to combat we’re looking for, but it’s hard to pull off. Meddling with the PC’s internal experience is something we do sparingly. Generally the GM narrates the external setting and allows the players full jurisdiction over how their character chooses to respond. So when we encroach on their territory we risk pissing off the players. 

Now that is not to say it’s an illegal move. Many games do indeed have whole systems devoted to things like madness, stress, concentration, etc. The point here is that these things are done with great forethought, intention, and most importantly they are telegraphed to everyone involved before the game even starts. You know damn well when you sit down to play Call of Cthulu that your precious character might go insane, that their internal experience is not entirely up to you. You know that, and you sign up for it, so when it happens it isn’t a rug being pulled out from under you.

This is one of my favorite topics in rpg design to spend a daydream or two exploring. How to smoothly connect the player’s feelings and those of their character, especially in a mechanical sense. One of my favorite takes on this problem is found in a game called DREAD. It’s a horror game meant to imitate the vibe of an 80’s slasher movie. Now, put yourself in the shoes of that designer for a second, trying to build a game with that kind of feel. How in the hell are you going to instill a whimsical but terrible sense of fear in a group of nerds sitting around a table in your living room eating pizza and probably playing chess on their phone while waiting for their turn? 

Their solution is brilliant. DREAD requires you to set up a Jenga tower before the game starts. Whenever a player attempts a difficult action, they must pull a piece from the tower. If you collapse the Jenga tower, your character DIES. 

So there you have a rather steep threat to the character, but the important part is that the player is now tied to this stress. You can TOUCH the object of your own potential doom, and you feel the stress and pressure of performing to save your precious character sheet from the fire.

It’s such a simple and beautiful little trick, and there are tons of nifty little mechanics like it out there that we can borrow to get our players really in the heads of their characters when it counts most. I chose to talk about this one however, not only because I think it’s elegant and effective, but also because it is extremely niche, and can only really be used in specific cases. 

If your group is playing DREAD, and for whatever reason they aren’t really sold on the idea of slasher horror or just aren’t expecting their characters to die, then everyone is going to simply avoid doing tasks that prompt Jenga pulls after the first few moves. The game becomes either silly or boring, and everyone agrees the Jenga tower is too harsh or impractical and needs to be replaced. It only works if when you sit down to play everyone understands that this is a one-shot horror game, and most of the characters are probably going to die. 

This is what I’m talking about when I say telegraphing intentions to everyone. Yes I’m sure everyone gets the picture at this point, “communication” is the favorite talking point of every big public figure in the RPG space. We get it, talk to our players, dead horse, geez. I’m harping on it here not only because it’s relevant generally, but because it’s something that needs to be incorporated into our thinking long before anyone sits down to play: when we’re out on the hunt for a juicy new mechanic to throw into the game. Does it actually fit the tone we’re going for? Am I about to throw a super heady madness mechanic into a silly goofy scooby doo mystery game? Are we sure that fits? Is the DREAD Jenga tower going to go over well with our year long west marches style fantasy campaign group? 

Making the Players Cry

Personally when I run games for my group I tend not to touch this stuff. It can be really dope, but I have a different solution to the problem that I find can work just as well, it just requires a little more work. The payoff though, is that you get to leave the internal emotions and thoughts of the character COMPLETELY up to the player.

What I’m talking about, of course, is using elements of the story to hook your players’ emotions in. What if I want my players to get angry? Kill their favorite NPC in front of them. Or for that pesky high morale that’s so unrealistic and disconnected to be blown away and lost to the wind? Let the objective mcguffin they’ve been hunting for ten sessions roll off a cliff and shatter into a million pieces on the rocks below and wash away into the sea. Then have the bad guys descend on the party and see what the player’s faces look like. What if I want the players to be actually scared of the Monster? It doesn’t need a zillion hit points. In fact it can have 5. Just wait til that super strong friendly npc is around and have the dragon swoop down and eat him for breakfast. Make it super casual, like he isn’t even breaking a sweat. If we’ve built that one guy up properly, the PC’s are gonna think twice before they run into a fight with his destroyer head first. In fact I’ve run basically this exact scenario with some of my dumbest, most headstrong murderhobo players and sent them running for the hills.

What I’m saying here is that we don’t need mechanics to affect our players emotions, we can do it with just the putty of the game world in our hands. Of course there is a significant hazard here that must be taken into account. Using the narrative like this is a slippery slope to overplaying the role of God. Some of the examples I gave just there run the risk of making players feel that their actions don’t matter and the GM is dictating the plot unfairly. 

The main way I avoid this is to always make sure that a potential outcome I plan ahead of time doesn’t render the overall objectives of the players impossible. If the mcguffin they’ve been hunting for ten sessions might roll off a cliff and shatter into a million pieces, we should probably make sure there’s at least 2 or 3 ways WE as the GM can think of to still accomplish the end goal, and ideally that some of these potential strategies have been discussed by the party already, or at least alluded to.

Making the monsters cry

So here we are, trying to make combat (and other parts of the game surrounding NPC interaction) more interesting. We can tie player emotions to their characters with some kind of mechanic or table gimmick. We can mold the game world to be emotionally tantalizing. The easiest option I think however, is exactly what Chris is writing about. Let’s give the monsters a brain. Our brain, specifically. No really, let’s pretend we ARE them and say “what would we do?”

I think the avenue of NPCs intelligently strategizing is explored pretty adeptly already, so I’ll leave that as it stands. But maybe we aren’t the brilliant evil mastermind we want our villain to be. Maybe putting ourselves in the NPC’s shoes doesn’t really get the job done. Let’s be honest, if we were in the Lich’s shoes, we’d start feeling bad for all the skeleton slaves and start dolling out creams and salves to prevent their poor joints from rubbing away into ruin. we’d probably completely botch our cover as an ambassador when visiting the Ivarian King to gain legitimacy for our shell state island nation. After just a short while living as a lich, we’d probably either try to return to humanity somehow or craft ourselves an undead partner to fall in love with and forget the whole world conquest thing entirely… until someone finally came to slay us and found it much easier than expected, as we forgot most of the powerful magic years ago. Maybe you can see where I’m going with this…

This kind of imperfection makes great adventure content! It’s easy too! Throw yourself into the bad guys shoes and just see what happens. More often than not there’s some version of it that ends up being incredibly interesting and fun to play with.
 

The point I’m making here is that we don’t have to make our monsters “intelligent” specifically for them to be extra fun and interesting, but most of the time we do have to give them a brain of some kind.

Except when we dont…

Coming soon:

Mindless Monsters

and Non Localized Enemies