How to make your players stop talking and FIGHT

★ Edited by Bia

★ Music from Epidemic Sound

► INDEX
0:00 Why fight?
1:33 Pacifist players
2:44 Sentience
4:45 Social encounters
8:20 Bad guys

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[Codex_of_Wisdom]

Who hurt you, girl?
Ginny: "Wells Fargo. I think I made that pretty clear."

[deeps]

GM: "Please fight!"
Players: *bickering about tactics*
GM: "Not like that..."

[zichera]

I saw the title of this video and I couldn't relate more. My players FINALLY got into a fight (with undead skeletons) and then started with "I've forgotten how to do this, we haven't fought in a year!". I checked - it was 9 months...

[JKevinCarrier]

As an old-timer, I gotta say that I genuinely love the fact that D&D has expanded, evolved, and diversified so much that "players who don't want to fight" is an actual problem you can now have.

[Thandi]

So...
DM: "Sigh, okay, roll perception"
Player: "16?"
DM:"You notice the Goblin is wearing a Wells Fargo T Shirt."

[DannyboyO]

I was very proud of my players when I gave them an evil-but-chatty monster. It wasn't the foe they were after, and it wasn't loyal to anything... it just hadn't decided whether it would be more fun to have a good fight, or start some chaos that could lead to either group being quite weakened and easy prey. The party was terribly unsuccessful and instead got directions to a trap instead, having unwittingly insulted the creature during negotiations. The creature was very willing to be extremely petty in keeping the players from getting what they wanted.

The creature also did not survive even 2 rounds of combat with an angry party that pulled no punches and spent some lovely damaging consumables... a grenade, by any other name. Not much I could do against 3 solid crits. And when the baddie they were after said "Hey, if we work together to crack this ancient vault, I'll pay you. I just need the scroll." They were... less interested. The party having discovered the corpse of his last co-conspirator the previous session may have contributed.

On reflection, that was actually a very *very* good module... ^_^

[paxtenebrae]

Yeah, the Bad Guys segment is super important. After all, a Dragon is not a person. If you ask the average Dragon, they're BETTER than a person. A Dragon is "What if a hurricane was a narcissist obsessed with gold?" You might be able to trick it, to get out from under it, but it's not going to talk to your party like, "Hey guy, let's just sit down and hash it out, man to man." Because it thinks about mortal people of the realm the same way I think about the ants that keep somehow getting into my house to eat on my food: It's not even going to kill you because it hates you. It's going to kill you because you are so very insignificant in comparison to it and your party is especially annoying. And they'd stamp out a small town to get the gold they've stored up while muttering to itself, "Ew, gross...where do all these humans keep coming from, anyway?"

[partyfrogmarkle]

("Books" looks at Ginny menacingly from the doorway) "Trying to cut me out of the action?"

[Fenikkusu]

The black buisnuess suit with sword earings and goth like aesthtic is making me wonder if Ginny is about to offer me a Warlock pact. I accept.

[MayHugger]

Just have your big bad cast Silence on that party. Pretty sure most people will get the hint that the time for talking is over when they are forced to be unable to.

[total_betty]

"A 20 isn't mind control" absolutely nails it. If a person isn't going to be convinced then even if the roll is amazing it's just not going to happen. Just like rolling a 20 for investigation when there really is nothing there to find.

I also use what I call "the jam jar rule" which is if players are trying to do something like a strength check then they can all have a go, but a persuasion check for a person is only really going to be possible once. The party can't all have a go at persuading a guard to let them through a gate, for example. The more party members try, the more the guard will be annoyed and the less it will work. But the more members of a party try to open a jam jar lid then the more likely they'll get it open. Jelly, for my USA friends. ☺️

[herrhartmann]

Here's something to swipe as a house rule:

In Savage Worlds, NPC Reaction comes in 5 levels, not 3. And it's flat out impossible to improve the reaction by more than one level oer encounter.
So, if an NPC starts out Hostile, no amount of sweet talking will make him any better than Unfriendly.
And against an Unfriendly opponent, a "diplomatic solution" means that he's willing to accept your surrender.

[MTCHSMLN]

Ginny: "...girl, who hurt you?"

Also Ginny: "...Wells Fargo..."

[zachgaskins]

Statements like "sometimes there will be no way to successfully talk certain enemies out of violence to get what they want" reinforces the idea that crits don't apply to non-combat rolls - which is rules as written (and intended).

[EricBohm]

Plenty of villains are happy to let you talk yourself out of fighting them, then go right on ahead and do their terrible stuff after you've wandered away. It is very rare to find situations where your chances of changing someone's whole worldview in a single conversation is measurably above zero. Maybe you can convince them to try to accomplish their goals in a different way, but it is typically nigh impossible to change those goals.

[christhewritingjester]

"That's why I always carry a sword." I always appreciate how down to earth and relatable you are, it's one reason I love your videos.

[xur]

I have the otherway problem. How to stop my players being murderhobos and actually talk to NPS with lengthy backstories and who actually knew the PC's lost father.

[elvacoburg]

One tactic that I have used to get players to fight some bad guys was to have the bad guys seriously hurt an NPC that the party cared about.
The NPC (a street urchin) had been gathering information on a cult that the players were investigating in a large city. The players were trying to talk their way through encounters with this cult, with most of the cult being fanatics, and talked themselves out of combat on more than one occasion, which ended up with many of the cult members escaping encounter after encounter. And I got the feeling that they were not taking the cult seriously.
So I had one of the cult members summon an imp (low level demon) and set it on the street urchin who was spying on them when the party was not around. I let the street urchin survive, just, and sent a city guard to tell the characters.
They went ballistic, and over the next month literally took the city part looking for the cult, offering no quarter to any cult members that they found, all thought of diplomacy with the cult being thrown out the window. I must admit that their reaction made me thing that I might have gone too far.
The street urchin had been a contact for one of the roguish characters since the start of the campaign, and had regularly given them information (for a fee), and the imp attack happened about 12 months into the campaign, so the characters had got to be very close and protective of the urchin. This probably would not have worked if the urchin was an NPC that the party had just met.

[obviousalias]

"Make your bad guys actually bad". Indeed, Ginny! I used this constantly and can recommend it. I've found that I didn't even have to go into morbid or grisly detail either, and could just let the players piece together what was going on. A Search check reveals "child-sized bones" in a goblin communal stew pot, for example. That's enough for most players to realize that they're dealing with dangerous, predatory forces which care nothing for anything beyond their own desires. Cheers!

[Szystedt]

GINNY! YOUR MAKEUP AND EARINGS THIS VIDEO AND IT'S TOO GOOD T-T