NPCs Lie

I want to say as a DM that there is little that frustrates me as much as role-players who must treat every encounter with excessive dramatic importance, that see every NPC like a pantomime villain or themselves as the center of the setting's universe.  Of course, this is trained into players, who are the center of the universe as far as most settings go.  It is no mystery for a player that the king of the country wants to meet with them personally, or that some powerful wizard has taken the time to choose this particular no account group of wanderers for the most important adventuring business imaginable.  The tropes surrounding role-playing are as anvilicious as they are common, particularly in that savvy players ~ most of all ~ come to expect the anvil to be dropped right on their heads, all the time.

So much that they can't help themselves from looking straight up at the DM, waiting for it.

This is a trial and a half if the goal is to run a nuanced, subtle campaign where the NPCs have their own lives, their own agendas, and couldn't care a whit for the party's involvement ... in fact, the party's involvement is often directly not desirable.  Yet with some parties, as the DM sets up the scene where the townspeople all appear to say, "Get out, you're not wanted here," we can count on the players to hear that with a *nudge nudge* *wink wink* no matter what we say or how we say it.

This is probably the hardest issue I have with experienced players.  It is a problem I never have with newcomers.  This tells me that it is a problem that is trained into players, most likely by badly designed adventures, supported by poorly written exposition to enable the most cliched of motivators.  The ever-present MacGuffin, for example, that we cling to as DMs because it's easy and players understand it.

All too often when we don't use a blunt instrument to put the adventure into the player's skulls, it just doesn't get there.

At the start of my online campaign in 2009, members of the party stepped out of the town of Dachau and into the nearby countryside.  Whereupon I described this simple scene:

DM: You find a small collection of eight cotter's shacks, cotters being landless people allowed to occupy the lord's land in exchange for their perpetual labor. This being Sunday, none are at work in the fields, but are instead commanded to not work at any activity.

Despite your efforts to remain hidden, your darker appearance against the white boughs is noticed rather quickly. Several men, who had been lounging and waiting for the sun to fall, rise now, grasping the nearest club like object to hand and stand staring at you distrustfully.

Here we have a perfectly reasonable reaction on the part of the cottagers.  This is their home.  It is Sunday and they are surrounded by their families.  Strangers show up, armoured and with weapons, in a place where no one with the money to buy armor has any reason to go.  Of course they're going to be distrustful!  Of course they're going to be sure they have hold of a club or two.  Being that its a party, there's no livery on these strangers, no indication that its the guard.  The party could be anyone!

Here is the party's response:

Anshelm [the thief]: "Ah, friend Delfig, perhaps we should join our compatriots back at the Pig? I suddenly have a thirst." Anshelm begins backing himself the way he came.

Delfig [the bard]: I sigh and hold up both hands to show peaceful intent, while smiling. I stage whisper to Anshelm "If you run, you're liable to bring them down upon you. Perhaps they can shed light on the burnt Inn..." I take a slow step forward and continue to show non-aggression. If they come at me like an ugly riot, I'm hightailing it outta there. Otherwise, I'd like to chat with them.

Anshelm: [chuckles] "I trust you're good with a rowdy crowd, or at least handy with your instrument," he whispers back.  He falls in behind Delfig.

Delfig:  "I hope I don't die finding out ..."

I think most readers would find nothing wrong with this ... but I am baffled.  I don't understand this certainty that a group of private farmers could be seen as the threat here ... except that it is played that way on endlessly bad television shows, where every small group of houses is a meth lab and every stranger is casually killed, butchered and disposed of in the local lime pit.

Nor can I blame these players.  Clearly, they've played in enough worlds where the DM also buys into this idea.  Everyone in the world is automatically a potential murderer, every group a lynch mob.  But then, this is the murder/hobo mentality.

Murder/hobos are, unquestionably, a problem ~ but not because they kill things.  It is this pervasive paranoia that underlies the expectation that everyone else in the world is also a murder/hobo, and must be killed first.  Or treated with at a distance.  It puts the DM in the position of having to put every bit of exposition into the mouth of someone whom the party can't kill; which is tiresome.

Am I not at fault myself, however?  Look at my response:

DM: They seem to have no inclination to riot. All told, there are five men, and behind them two women. One of the women is holding a rusty knife about ten inches long (she's not bad looking, by the way), the other some kind of hoe. The men are holding, from left to right, a cherry tree branch, a grain flail, a hand scythe, a wooden stool and an eighteen-inch piece of stone that might have been used for sharpening.

The runt of the group, being five-foot-three, the one with the scythe, asks menacingly, "What do you want, stranger?"

That certainly looks like I am feeding the party's paranoia!  That one woman has rusty knife.  That guy with the scythe is "menacing."  Damn.  The party is in real trouble, now ...

Seriously?

Are there readers out there who really think that these two leveled players couldn't carve up this group of poverty stricken cottagers for breakfast?  Yeah, that's a rusty knife.  It would probably break the moment it came in contact with a player's dagger.  And that menacing guy?  He's likely scared out of his mind.  Who is kidding who?

But, of course, the players don't see that.

Anshelm: "This is your chance to shine, Delfig."

Delfig: I smile as broadly and winningly as I can. "Good friends, we are just out for a Sunday stroll to take in the lovely country. We mean you no harm and in fact, as I am a musician, I would be happy to play for you, should you be so kind." I keep my hands outstretched, but I'm also waiting to see if they're going to remove my head from my neck.

If they're agreeable, I'll get my lyre out and settle down for a bit of music and dance.  Yea, or time to die ... LOL.

And so the cottagers relax.  There's no need to roll any dice.  It's suddenly clear.  This is nothing but a down-on-his-luck bard, probably one who can't talk his way through the town gate, hoping to get a free meal.  And, as it happens, since Delfig is at least good enough with a lyre to have a level (most people are not a leveled anything), the players do get a free meal.  These are Lutherans and it is the sabbath; charity is a thing, so long as the strangers are not, you know, murder/hobos.

Naturally, during dinner, this is a terrific opportunity to start an adventure. Not with a king in a palace, talking to a bunch of first levels, but an ordinary person talking one-to-one with players, as ordinary people do.

Problem is, most players (and DMs) have no idea how ordinary people talk.  Which is strange to me, because we are surrounded by ordinary people talking all the time.

For example:  you go to your Father's Day dinner and your Uncle Bob shows up.  And while he's there, he goes on some tear about, oh, something he doesn't like, shouting that it's a great wrong and that something ought to be done about it, and would be if those bastards in the capital ever did anything about it, which they won't, because they were all went to college or they're all wet behind the ears or they're book smart but not street smart, or whatever argument sounds most familiar coming out of Uncle Bob.  We've all been there.  We've heard it a thousand times.

So, you're a player character and you're sitting down to dinner with a bunch of cottagers ~ which, you'll remember, I described as landless people allowed to occupy the lord's land in exchange for their perpetual labor.  They are practically slaves. They have much more to be disgruntled about than poor Uncle Bob and they have a lot less power besides.  They're more ignorant than Uncle Bob, too, though that is hard to imagine.  These people can't read; they have no newspapers; they get rumours at best, mostly wrong, mostly tenth hand and as accurate as playing telephone.  So just imagine for a moment what sort of dinner conversation you're going to get.

To set this up, I have to add that the world is taking place in 1650.  It is just 18 months after the end of the 30 Years War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.  Bavaria, which contains the town of Dachau, was right in the heart of that.

The speaker here is Emmanuel [which sounds more German-Medieval than Bob].  He's just one of many cotter present, but he's the most talkative.  The party asks him about a nearby blockhouse that was ~ for the party ~ mysteriously burnt some months ago, and what the town knows about it.  That's when Emmanuel gets his back up:

DM: “The town knows nothing about it. They’ve been told Jan and his wife were sympathizers who gave comfort to Protestants during the war. They were innkeepers! They gave comfort to whomever knocked on the door!”

His wife Suzanne tries to soothe him but he won’t have it.

“It’s the war that’s done this,” Emmanuel says. “I’m naught but a cotter, and I’ve naught to do but tend the lord’s sheep and find what food I can, but I can say there’s an evil loose on the land. It’s these men taking pay for doing nothing. My father could remember when the men who owned and worked the land would rise in war to defend it—but those days are gone, and but in one generation. Now it’s the soldier, always the soldier, fighters with no master but the paymaster, who defend not the town but the purse of the town. Hired to fight the Protestants and now kept in hire to fight innocent innkeepers and their wives!”

Emmanuel stands up, needing more room to continue to rant.

“And who holds the purse? The merchants, that’s who! None of them landowners, none of them with a stake in this town nor any town, who gather their things with them whenever they wish to steal from us before moving on to steal from someone else. It’s they who dictate to the army, its they who pay the soldiers and feed the soldiers. If you go into the town, and you look in the town hall, do you know what you’ll find? There’s a notice there asking for more soldiers! For what I ask you? For the good of the peace? Not at all! For the good of destroying the peace, that’s what, to make more monsters to hulk out from the town and pillage the gentle folk here! God, I beg you, put an end to it! Deliver us from these money-loving sinners!”

This is a great opportunity to paint pictures.  The most important one being, even though the war is over, there are still catholics and protestants fighting.  Quietly, yes, but persecuting innocent people.  And the town of Dachau is turning a blind eye.  There's adventure in that: learning who is committing the crimes, how they're organized, what powers might be behind it, and so on.  But these three keys of the speech above are ALL that is reliable about Emmanuel's speech.  I mean, consider the source.

The players don't.  Being good, savvy D&D players, they take Emmanuel at his word.  Can you guess why?

Anshelm: "You speak boldly, friend Emmanuel. I'm not so sure we can put an end to what you describe on our own. We might at best cause them annoyance, like flies on horses' hides. But even a small service might give you some satisfaction...what other depredations are the soldiery responsible for?"

Delfig: I listen quietly to Emmanuel's speech and after he's finished, I'll strum up a quick note on my lyre and nod. "Indeed, it is often the common folk who are left to bear the burdens and depredations of those who hold the purse. Certainly the wars of late have left most of the common man grasping for what little was left by the mercenaries.  Tell me, were all the town leaders of Dachau united in this or is there unrest between the landowners and the merchants?" ... and as a quick aside, I'll ask whose lands we are currently sitting on.

For people who make such hay out of role-playing, they're certainly ready to equate the words of every peasant as though they came straight from the DM.  They can hear me perfectly clearly, telling them that I want them to go on an adventure to fight against the merchants, the soldiers, the town hall and everyone else in Dachau.  Because those were my exact words ... well, Emmanuel's exact words, but what's the difference?

DM: You receive the answer that certainly, the town fathers were unanimously united in this, as they all expected to increase their wealth. Those who were first opposed were won over with benefices and grants of land, and have become the loudest proponents.

You are on the land of the Baron Egbert Wittelsbach von Asper, a name you recognize as part of the family controlling much of the territory around Dachau.

Anshelm: Do we know much about the Baron von Asper beyond his name?  I ask if any others have expressed discontent.  If so, who and how many?  And is any of the town fathers particularly notorious for committing these injustices?

Delfig: nods at Anshelm's question and waits for an answer, strumming idly on his lyre.

And I am in deep, deep trouble as a DM.

Consider.  First of all, Emmanuel's answer is a complete fabrication.  He has no idea what the town fathers do from one minute to the next, much less what the actually expected to have increase anything about their lives.  Emmanuel is spewing Uncle Bob's bullshit.  But Emmanuel doesn't know that's what it is, because this is what this poor cotter wants to believe; this bitterness is what gets him through the day as he tears his body apart digging into the earth and shortening his life every season.

And as far as whose land are they on, well, it's got to be somebody's land.  And since they're within half a mile of Dachau, a town of more than 2,000 people, it's bound to be someone important.  Or at least sounds important.  The players don't know the Baron from the next guy, but surely the Baron has to be involved in this massive conspiracy to destroy this poor couple of innkeepers: everyone is.

Look at Anshelm's questions, as he builds the conspiracy theory in his own head.  And like McCarthy, he's already demanding names, building a case, looking to start indicting suspects ... to a room full of disgruntled, impoverished, very badly informed Uncle Bobs who are certainly ready to name names, picking anyone whom they happen to dislike most heartily, probably because the individual raised their rents (paid in labor) last year.  As far as "role-playing" is concerned, I have no choice but to play it straight, to pour out the ire against the noble class to the nth degree, which the players eat it up with a spoon.  But what gets accomplished?

Nothing.  These are 1st level characters.  They're certainly high enough level to track down a group of hooligans with a taste for arson, as the adventure I conceived was actually about ... but having created the bugbear of the whole town in their heads, based on their willingness to suppose that there's no way that the DM would have an NPC be ignorant and mis-informed, there's absolutely no way the players are going to pursue this.  They're not high enough level for that!

I got into trouble like this often when I started running online.  I had never met players so willing to accept my word as gospel, no matter what NPC spoke those words.  But then, I had been out of gaming with strangers for almost 20 years.  The party I ran throughout the 2000s were mostly newcomers, or with less than a few years' experience.  When I began to run online, I found myself running very experienced players again ... and found myself faced with having to adjust my taste for subtlety quite a bit.

Which brings me to the advice here.  Unless we're ready to handle the consequences, we can't be subtle.  Chances are you see the potential for it, and you're not wrong there ... but players have to be trained to operate in a subtle world.  If we don't give them the straight up, heavy-handed world they're used to getting, they'll assume that's what we're doing anyway.  For them, adjusting things like exposition and delivering the adventure so that these are subtle things is like changing the game's rules.  That rule change has to be explained.  And then the players have to be given time to adjust to that change in rules.

Your best tactic ~ and I'm sorry, this isn't going to be popular ~ is to back off on the role-playing for a bit. Not altogether, and not permanently.  Just until an adjustment is made.

Today, I could easily adjust the delivery of the adventure above just by couching Emmanuel's rhetoric by skipping the role-playing language.  "The cotter is plainly full of it, he's just angry and bitter and even though he says all these things, it is plain that he doesn't know what he's talking about.  The only things you can be really sure of is that the inn was probably burned down by someone who hasn't gotten past their hatred for Protestants."

And that's it.  Immediately, the guilty party diminishes a great deal in the player's heads; they don't see themselves has fighting the whole town.  They get that Emmanuel isn't Mr. Expert here.  He's not the DM.  He's just a guy giving a rumour.

It's funny, because the party prior to this kept asking me again and again if they had heard any rumours about things that had been going on around Dachau ... but when I delivered one, exactly in the way that rumours are really given by people, in real life, full of falsehood and nonsense, the players did not recognize it for what it was.  They assumed it was ME, the DM, telling them what to do.

As DMs, it takes time to build paths of communication with a party so that they understand that we're just giving information, we're not giving orders.  It takes time to play the game on the level that someone holding a weapon is often more afraid than murderous.  Or that when NPCs shout about injustice, that might be based on false ideas.  Or that just because the NPC says it doesn't mean the streets are full of bugbears.

DMs, speaking on behalf of NPCs, must be true to the NPC, not the DM.  The NPC doesn't know what I know.  The NPC's motivations are not my motivations.  The NPC isn't running the game, and doesn't have all the answers.  NPCs lie.

No matter how much they sound like me.


UPDATE:

Looking over the content surrounding the scene above, I realize I left something out of the above discussion ~ I simply forgot about it (a circumstance I am starting to fix, so it doesn't happen again).

I set the seeds for the player's misunderstanding in one other way, that deserves telling.  Just before meeting Emmanuel and the Cotters, the players had met a farmer.  This farmer told his own version of the story about the burnt Inn, the Innkeeper Jan and his wife.  Here's how that went:

Farmer: "Ya. Those town father swines. You see that?” He points. “That Inn’s been there since the year 1112. Those hanging there are the innkeeper and his wife. His father and his father’s father for twenty four generations have tended that, and the town’s murdered them. They say the Inn’s a danger to the town. They say that marauders might use the Inn to attack the town. They say that, ya. It’s not that that threatens them. No, they want that we should pass through the town gates and pay our silver to drink there. They warned Jan, and Jan warned them. And now Jan’s hanging there. It’s not right."

The players CAN'T be blamed for jumping to the conclusion they did ... and in case it wasn't understood, that was definitely my fault.  But as I have tried to explain, players are too willing to believe everything they hear, regardless of the source.  The farmer is just as likely as the cotters to be wrong about what happened here.  It is the same rumour, spread from country person to country person.

It's the DM's responsibility with a new party, presented with this sort of exposition (where we are deliberately lying to the players) to warn them that the D&D world can be just as duplicitous as the real world.  And help them navigate that reality.  So that the "story" players hear isn't so easily assumed to be the one the DM wants the players to believe.