I am a new DM with one session under my belt and am planning to run the campaign as a "West Marches" D&D 5e campaign. One of my players requested I have some social encounters next time and I am wondering how to have these in a WM game, especially as it progresses and players spend more time away from the main town.
[RPG] Social Encounters in a West Marches Campaign
dnd-5eencountersnpcwest-marches
Related Solutions
This depends on a number of things. Do your players like to favor combat over other forms of role-playing? How long are your sessions? Do your players understand the rules well enough to where things are going to move by quickly (sounds like no, in this case)? Do you as a DM mind running a lot/a little/no combat in any given session? This sort of thing is highly customizable depending on your needs, and is thus unfortunately somewhat unanswerable.
Anyways, my personal recommendation would be to run a quick module or two before your main campaign. This will allow you to understand the sort of preparation a DM typically has for an encounter, as well as learning a couple of tricks here and there with DMing before you start your own campaign, which, in the long run, will be for the good of your story!
More importantly, it allows you to assess your player's desire for and prowess in combat. If it turns out they only make it through one encounter, then want to roleplay or ask questions or drink beer and relax for the rest of the session, you haven't wasted hours of preparation. But if they turn out to be some kind of death dealing blood-for-the-blood-god-skulls-for-the-skull-throne party, you are unlikely to run out of encounters! You don't even have to finish the module, really. Once you are confident in your ability to prepare adequately for your players, you're all good to go. Happy DMing!
I have experience playing the low levels. I can briefly summarise the impact as follows:
- It will make encounters much harder. With many characters dying in combat, and possibly a few total party kills as well.
- This can be demoralising, but some players might be up for it.
- But something perhaps easily overlooked is that it removes a wonderful suspense building mechanic from gameplay. With current rules, a character going down leads to a change in tactics to keep the party member alive. By removing death saves, this falls away. And the only decision is: Is it time to flee, or can we still win this?
Characters in our party are regularly taken down (which would mean death with the house rule) and require in-combat healing to bring them back into the fight. Failure to do so in some cases would probably have resulted in total party kills.
In your comment on Dale's answer you consider:
players were encouraged to retreat if the going got tough
The problem with this is that there's not necessarily enough time to make an escape. The fact is that even as it stands (without the house rule): "level appropriate" monsters have a decent chance of 1-shot killing most level 1 characters. (When I say decent chance, I'm not even talking about needing a critical hit.)
NOTE That a single CR 1 monster is considered level-appropriate for 4 level 1 characters.
Consider a Specter (CR 1): It does 3d6 damage with +4 to hit. This is only an average of 10.5 damage. But it's special ability states that if a CON saving throw is failed, the target's maximum hit-points are reduced by the same amount (and if reduced to zero, the character is dead).
Of course if you and your players are up for a much more difficult challenge, then then feel free to tweak accordingly.
However, changing the death-saves rule is not the only way to do so. Remember that removing death-saves also removes a tension creation mechanism of combat. So instead of removing death saves, consider the following ideas:
- Have your monsters fight more "intelligently". Let them make good tactical decisions, and you'll see difficulty ramp up without any extra work.
- Tweak difficulty of encounters by adding monsters, or using stronger monsters. This might require a little more planning on your part, because it can be a little to easy to overdo it.
- Reduce the character's opportunities for rest a little. This means they rarely recover their abilities between encounters. It has a similar effect to the second point but is possibly a little easier to manage.
Best Answer
Every encounter with an intelligent creature can be a social encounter
In some cases, it is really smart for your PCs to first parley before deciding to get violent. You need to discuss with your players what their operating mind set is: when they meet a bunch of humans or humanoids (you don't need to say "you see seven bandits") what is their first reaction?
Fight, flight, or parley?
Let their choices and actions determine whether the encounter is social or not, at the beginning. An encounter can change in character as a consequence of the PC's actions and decisions.
Social encounters can happen anywhere
In a sandbox campaign, in which category West Marches generally fits, the players are not guaranteed that their encounters are level appropriate. It is in their best interests to do some intelligence gathering on what/who they encounter before resorting to violence.
Originally, most encounters with humanoids began with parley
When I first began playing OD&D (1975) and as I've found in some campaigns in 5e, and in the editions in between, encountering an unknown party of humanoids (or other intelligent creatures) is more often than not best begun with a parley. We have bargained with orcs and ogres, dervishes and brigands, dwarves and cut purses, and evil high priests. In dungeon crawls we made deals as often as we fought the encountered monsters/NPCs back when we first started.
Our D&D 5e group tends to still do that unless we have a reason to jump right into combat with a given group - we don't normally default to combat (an exception being the wizard in my brother's campaign, who I now call Quickdraw). Black puddings? Not a lot of room for parley with them. Hungry owl bears rarely go in for small talk. :)
Caveat: If a party encounters someone we've met before who are our enemies, trying to surprise / ambush them is usually a better choice, or evading them if they are far too powerful or too numerous.
The creatures / NPCs that your PCs meet may have clues and information; they may be potential allies; they may become foes if the social encounter does not go well. As a DM, it's good to introduce unknown friendly, neutral, and even hostile NPCs into encounters as sources of information for where a ruined old tower or lost temple is, where a dangerous swamp is, where a legend says a magic mace is housed in an Ogre's lair, etcetera. That way the world feeds the PCs information - not the DM.
DM Tip: Use the NPC reaction tables in the DMG to help you assess an initial attitude toward the PC's by the NPC's/monsters if the encounter begins as a social reaction - unless you have a good feel for how that creature already feels. My rule of thumb is "don't roll the dice unless you are at a loss for ideas" for the DM side of social encounters. OD&D had a 2d6 roll modified by Charisma that I still use1, but the 5e DMG's NPC reaction section fits into the d20 system a little better. (DMG, p. 245, "Conversation Reaction" table, part of the Social Interaction section; p. 244-246).
Experience from a sand-boxy published adventure:Tomb of Annihilation
Our party of four 3rd level PCs ran into a party with a dozen soldiers, and a couple of Zhentarim (which we later found out was an Assassin NPC accompanied by a Knight NPC). Not realizing that if we had initiated combat we'd have been destroyed, we parleyed with them anyway and we all went our separate ways. My PC "in world" reason was numbers: there were too many of them for us to take and we had another mission / quest that we were on. Not worth starting a fight in the first place.
Later, when we got to 4th level, we ran into three frost giants who were escorted by pet winter wolves. (If you check the book that's way beyond a deadly encounter for four 4th level characters). We had a social encounter: as it worked out the parley helped further the mission we had been assigned by a merchant prince from Port Nyanzaru. We earned XP for getting that mission accomplished.
How do I award XP for that?
I'd suggest reviewing the Dungeon Masters Guide (pages 260-261, and Chapter 3) for the options there. The XP award / level is up to you based on the risk / reward of the encounter, and how it moves the narrative forward.
Some encounters can't be social encounters
When we ran into a T Rex in the jungle there was no parley. His alignment was hungry.
When we ran into a ghast leading a pack of ghouls, there was no parley. It was fight or flight.
1 The OD&D system is fast and easy to use (Men and Magic, p. 12, 1974, TSR, Gygax & Arneson)
While that table was based on hiring NPC's or convincing them to do something for the PC, using a 2d6 roll to gage the reaction of an NPC with a + or a - based on the charisma of the PCs works well enough - but it isn't strictly a d20 based outcome as the DMG's NPC reaction section is.