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WWFD: What Would Frodo Do?

by Jimmy Akin on January 1, 2005

in Miscellaneous

Too bad I’m not a GM anymore

I just got the most wicked cool idea for a D&D campaign:

  1. The player characters come into a region and start encountering monsters, which they proceed to kill mindlessly.
  2. They encounter a party of orcs, who are generally disagreeable and also end up getting killed.
  3. They enter a labyrinth, where they kill everything in it and take all the loot.
  4. Various juvenile actions are taken in various regards.
  5. Eventually, the heroes arrive at the central village of the region, where the populace hires them to help hunt down a band of roving marauders that has been terrorizing the countryside.
  6. The villagers have heard tell that the marauders are a very large group, much larger than the heroes’ group, so for backup, the heroes are accompanied by a band of villagers in case it comes to a fight.
  7. To get clues, they are escorted to the location of one of the sites the marauders have sacked–the private menagerie of a local nobleman.
  8. It’s the labyrinth the player characters themselves pillaged.
  9. The nobleman, who meets the party at the labyrinth, identifies pieces of his property which the characters had taken as loot.
  10. The villagers drive the heroes out of their territory with torches and pitchforks.

Just bringing a little realism to the mindless "kill & steal" mentality of many D&D campaigns.

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Justin West

What you need is this

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Hamilcar

Why are the villagers terrified about monsters and orcs getting killed? I think there's something suspicious about them...

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Jimmy Akin

The above is kind of plot is one I'd use with a new group of players to educate them about the consequences of such behavior in my world (and in real life).
The getting drunk and killing villagers behavior also would be met with swift negative consequences (such as summary trials and character beheadings).
(Rather than let their favorite characters stay dead, though, I'd probably allow a "do over" of the events--on the understanding that the characters are to behave more responsibly.)
Gotta let them players know the rules the world operates under! :-)
I once had to do this even for a player (normally a D&D player) in my Superworld campaign to educate him about the consequences that ensue from using one's superpowers to perform juvenile and illegal activities.
When he realized his character would face serious time in prison (effectively removing the character from the game) if he persisted in a particular course of action, he swiftly began to backpedal, and I allowed him to "take back" the massive illegality that he had just announced his character had done.
Didn't have the problem again. :-)

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Tom C

I was often lucky to get things to "kill & steal." I always started campaigns in a tavern, of course, and most of my players just wanted to get drunk (in the game) and kill villagers, throwing off my entire plot idea.
I rarely got to use my cool ideas and had to make up stuff on the fly instead.

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