It’s Ask Angry time again!

Once a month, I select one or two or more questions sent in by readers to answer with my characteristic mix of sarcasm, hyperbole, insults, and brilliant correctitude.

Want a shot at being one of my future Ask Angry victims? Just send your question to ask.angry@angry.games. Remember to cut to the chase — I get bored quickly reading anything not written by me — and tell me clearly what I should call you.

Randall asks…

How do I get my players to stop treating every NPC they meet with immediate suspicion and/or outright hostility?

Plus the change, plus the memes they chose, eh, Randall.

If you’re not a cosmopolitan sophisticate like me and don’t speak Esperanto or whatever, that just means, same shit, different decade. You see, this is one of those questions Game Masters have been asking since Gary Gygax crawled out of the primordial ooze and it’s one they’ll be asking until the cold, dark heat death of the cosmos. That’s partly because players are sociopathic little shits and partly because most Game Masters suck at mastering games.

By the by, if any one of you jackholes types the word murderhobo in my comment section, I get to bludgeon you with a copy of the The Muchkin’s Guide to Powergaming until language stops coming out of your noise-hole. I will not allow the original intent behind the phrase murderhobo to get lost the way the meanings behind Karen and “super easy, barely an inconvenience” have gotten lost.

Murderhobo doesn’t mean sociopath. If you want to say sociopath, just say sociopath. Or say asshole. Or say player.

My contractual obligation to spend three paragraphs on ramblingly and sarcastically not answering the question is now fulfilled, so…

There are several reasons why your players might react to every non-hostile non-player humanoid in your game with suspicion or violence. The first is simply that they don’t see them as actual people in an actual world. Which, of course, they’re not, but the whole premise of roleplaying gaming is that we’re supposed to pretend these games are about actual worlds full of actual people.

The second possibility is that your players have learned that the safest way to play is to assume the worst intentions of every nonplayer character in the world. They might have learned it from you, they might have learned it from each other, they might have learned it from past Game Masters, or they might have learned it from the internet. It might just be that you had one toxic asshole in your player batch and now they’re all poisoned.

The third and fourth possibilities are that your players are stupid or they’re assholes. They also could be both.

The problem is that there’s no way to know for sure why your players are acting this way and my usual go-to of, “talk it out like fucking adults” is pretty unlikely to help. See, talking it out only solves problems of the stupid or asshole variety and, while those are possibilities, it’s actually much more likely that it’s either the game you’re running or trained, habitual responses.

The best move here, therefore, is the Dr. House approach. You need to start treatment and see if the problem goes away.

Let’s start by addressing the most likely cause: the players don’t treat the nonplayer characters well because they don’t see them as people. The thing is, most players actually aren’t assholes or sociopaths, despite all I’ve said. Most players just respond to stimuli. Meanwhile, most Game Masters struggle to populate their worlds with actual people and, even when they’re kinda okay at it, they can always do better.

Let’s assume, first, that for some reason, the nonplayer characters in your world appear to your players to be toys in a sandbox or action figures to smash together and not actual people in an actual, living, breathing world. All you have to do, then, is bring the world to life better. Make every character seem like a richly detailed, living, breathing human. It’s that simple.

Why don’t you start doing that and see if it helps? I’ll wait.

How? What do you mean how? Fuck, man, I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this subject. Everything you need is buried somewhere in hundreds of thousands of words in my nearly two-decade untagged, disorganized archive…

Okay, fine, this one’s on me.

You can find the most important stuff I’ve written on the subject in Recognizing Non-Humans For What They Aren’t and Angry’s Two-Note NPC, but if you don’t remember those or don’t feel like going back through them, I’ll give you a quick summary.

People want to see people in everything. It’s how we’re wired. That’s why we get attached to fictional characters and talk about our cars as if they’re conspiring against us every time the check engine light comes on. If something seems even a little bit like a person, we can’t help but think of it like one.

Thus, if a nonplayer character seems to have motivations or aspirations or dreams or fears or pain or virtues or flaws or any one of about a dozen different characteristics I highlighted in those articles, the players’ brains will react to them like they’re people. Which is what you want. Generally, when people see people as people, they treat them like people, and most people treat people pretty okay. Mostly.

So make your people people-like. That’s the first trick.

The second trick is to show the players that everything doesn’t revolve around their stupid adventures. Show that the world turns regardless of what they do and people have lives outside of selling the players’ characters swords and renting them rooms and pouring them beer.

I detailed one method for doing so in The Second Story last year. In short, that was about having a narrative running in the world that existed alongside the main campaign narrative. In my campaign, there are two different things that look like second stories to the players, though, for spoiler avoidance, I can neither confirm nor deny that either one is actually an unrelated second story. While the players are chasing a demon across the landscape and hunting down some magical MacGuffins, the kingdom is dealing with a drought that’s threatening to cause a famine and its armies have marched to shore up the kingdom’s western border in response to rumors of a military threat. This shit impacts the civilized parts of the world in ways the players see every time they go to town.

Rather than implementing some grand B-plot to run in the background, though, I suggest you focus on smaller second stories. Just show the players that the nonplayer characters have lives that don’t stop when they’re off camera. For example, the next time one of your players’ characters goes to buy a sword, maybe play up how distracted the blacksmith is. Ask the player to repeat requests and describe the way the blacksmith keeps staring off into the distance. Eventually, if the player doesn’t ask, have the blacksmith apologize. “I’m sorry… I’m bein’ rude. Got a lot on me mind. Worryin’ about me little one. I’ll give ya me attention.”

Now, this goes to a trick I like to call this isn’t the hook you’re looking for. That’s when you, as a Game Master, do something that triggers your players’ adventure hook radar only to reveal it’s not really a hook at all. “A sick kid,” says the player brain, “sure sounds like a magical malady or a hunt for curative spring water or something.” But then, the blacksmith says, “Nah, it’s just a normal spring fever. She just got it bad. Mandra the physic’s takin’ care of her and says she’ll be fine. It’s just… it’s me little girl, you know? I can’t stop worryin’. It’s nice of you to ask, though.”

The point here is to actually get the player paying attention when you demonstrate the world doesn’t spin around them and their next adventure while also giving you a chance to show the players that the nonplayer characters have some of those humanizing notes I mentioned above. The blacksmith just has normal, humanizing, fatherly anxiety and he loves his family. He’s obviously people.

Of course, you gotta do this shit sparingly but, fortunately, a little of it goes a long way. And to pull it off, you gotta force the players to actually sit through some mundane interactions. That means taking your time to play two or three interactions in town that you might otherwise cover with narration and inserting a single this isn’t the hook you’re looking for somewhere in the session while also letting any second story you’ve got going shape the way you describe everything.

Another trick along these lines is one I call Janeway hunting for coffee. That’s a Star Trek reference, specifically Star Trek: Voyager and it’s worth explaining the name because it’ll help you remember the trick.

Everyone agrees that Star Trek: Voyager was pretty crap for most of its run. The only thing that saves it these days is that literally every other Star Trek installment after Voyager — every series, movie, and spin-off bar fucking none — has been such complete and utter dogshit that they’ve elevated Voyager to watchably, charmingly bad. Kind of like how Disney saved the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. But I digress.

There were actually moments of really good writing and directing in Voyager though and Janeway hunting for coffee in the season one episode The Cloud, written by Brannon Braga and directed by David Livingston, was one such moment.

Several of the main characters on the starship Voyager were sitting in the ship’s galley having this dry, static, expository info dump of a conversation. Now, the ship’s captain — and the show’s unintentional primary antagonist — Kathryn Janeway was already established as a raving coffee addict, and with the ship constantly running low on supplies due to being stranded in unexplored space except in most of the episodes because the writers somehow kept forgetting the single overarching premise of the entire f…

Sorry.

So, while the characters are having this plot-important but incredibly boring, technical discussion in the foreground, you can watch Captain Janeway frantically tearing through the galley’s kitchen in an increasingly desperate search for coffee in the background. Chuck Sonnenberg called this out in an episode of his amazingly fun Opinionated Voyager Episode Guide.

By the way, the reason I keep telling you to watch shows, play games, and read books super attentively if you want to be a good Game Master is so that you notice shit like this and use it to inform your Game Mastering. Or you can count on me to point it out.

Anyway…

So, let’s say the players’ characters are in some public place talking among themselves or doing some kind of chore or whatever. They’re in a tavern or a marketplace or at the gates to the city. First, you never want the players to forget where they are, so you should always be interjecting little scene-setting snippets while the players are chatting. Like, cut in when a player says, “We need to decide how to divide up the gold,” with something like, “A barmaid brushes past as she responds to the demands of a raucous drunk for a refill at the next table as Ardrick brings up divvying the gold,” then turn to look pointedly at Chris so he can respond to the remark you interrupted.

That’s not Janeway searching for coffee. That’s just normal Game Mastering practice. At least, it should be. Never let the players forget there’s a world around them. Never let them forget the setting. Especially if you’re not using a map. Practice not using maps, by the way. It’ll make you better at this shit.

Anyway…

Janeway searching for coffee is when those little interjections play out an ongoing story. Like, maybe you keep dropping in lines from the increasingly silly ribald the minstrel is belting out or maybe you describe an escalating argument between some gamblers or call attention to a creepy kid sketching creepy drawings in his creepy sketchbook. See? It’s like Janeway searching for coffee in the background while, in the foreground, the main plot is happening.

You can even put little, human second stories into your Janeway searching for coffee moments. So, in one session, the players are in the market and, in the background, there’s a kid asking out this girl he likes. He’s nervous, but she ultimately says yes, and after she leaves, he’s really pleased with himself. Normal human stuff. Two weeks later, the players are in a tavern and now the Janeway searching for coffee is that couple having a serious talk about the boy being invited to apprentice with the local carpenter. Then, next town session, after an adventure or two, the tavern is joyous and everyone’s clapping the boy on his back because she’s agreed to marry him just as soon as the regional priest passes through the village next.

I have actually had clerics at that point offer to preside over the wedding right then and there even though I had no idea they were even noticing Janeway searching for coffee this whole time. That shit is just irresistibly heartwarmingly human. Players are suckers for emotional manipulation provided you pick the right emotion and manipulate it right.

Again, though, you want to do this shit sparingly and you want to do it small. You don’t want to distract the players with wacky antics every time they try to make plans or meet with a nonplayer character contact or whatever. The key, again, is to just drop this kind of thing in once during a town session and keep it low-key enough that the players can’t tell the difference between background narration and stuff that’s supposed to hook them. After all, that’s the whole point. The world’s alive and it’s full of people other than the player characters. Not everything’s about them.

I know this seems hard — it seems like a lot to keep track of — but that’s precisely why I give everything a dumbass nickname and attach an anecdote to it. It helps me remember how important it is to plan some second story incidents or Janeway hunts for coffee moments when I know a town session is coming up and to never forget to assign every nonplayer character at least two humanizing elements.

If you keep doing this shit, two things are gonna happen. First, it’ll become habitual. You’ll start to do it automatically. Second, it’ll become improvisational. You’ll be able to do it off the cuff. For example, keeping the players grounded in the scene should become second nature, and, eventually, turning that into Janeway searching for coffee will just feel natural too.

Hopefully, you can see now why I’m telling you to assume the problem is your world and to do better at breathing life into it. Pretty much every Game Master needs to improve their breathing life into the world chops. Even if that’s not the problem and even if it doesn’t solve your problem, it’ll still make you a better Game Master.

Though, actually, even if the players have other problems — even if they’re habitual cynics or stupid or sociopaths — all of the crap I’ve outlined still has a pretty even chance of snapping them out of it. It’s actually hard to remain habitually cynical or stupid or sociopathic if your emotions are engaging.

So, for the next little while, commit to this crap and see if it helps quell the issue. It might take some time, but if you see the players respond even a tiny little bit, you probably just need some patience to let the magic happen.

But now let’s assume it doesn’t work. Let’s assume the players refuse to engage. Let’s say they assume the sad blacksmith is trying to scam them and they ignore the kid’s engagement — by the way, when I say kid, I mean anyone under thirty; that’s how it works when you’re staring down the barrel of fifty — or worse, let’s say the increased opportunities for interaction just make them meaner. What then?

Now it’s time to assume you’ve got a party of habitual assholes. Note, by the way, that’s not the same as calling them sociopaths or even calling them assholes. Habitual assholes don’t actually have a personality problem, they have a behavior problem.

Most human responses and behaviors are actually habitual. We do a lot on autopilot, even when we think we’ve got our hand on the stick. Habits are also remarkably easy to build accidentally. All it takes is doing one thing once and getting a good outcome — or avoiding a bad outcome — to plant the seeds of a habit. That shit doesn’t even have to be related.

Say you’ve had a bad day. On your way home, you decide to treat yourself to a latte and a donut. While you sit and enjoy your treat, you find yourself calming down. Maybe it’s the pleasure of the donut or maybe it’s just the act of treating yourself or maybe it’s just the fact that you slowed down and reflected for a bit and that calmed you down. It doesn’t matter. What matters is you had a donut and you felt better.

Congratulations. You’ve just taught your brain to compulsively eat its feelings. The next time you stop for a donut after a bad day and end up feeling better, you’re just reinforcing the habit. And so on.

When you do a thing and it’s rewarded — or punished — there’s a risk it’ll turn into a habit and eventually you won’t even notice that it’s no longer really a choice. Well, in some roleplaying games, dealing with nonplayer characters just leads to trouble. Even if every nonplayer character in the world isn’t a complete sack of dicks, if the players encounter enough greedy, selfish, corrupt, lying, conniving d-bags, they learn to assume the worst of everyone. Some Game Masters are especially prone to this because, often due to their own biases, they include a few too many corrupt authority figures or hypocritical priests or greedy businessmen or whatever.

Even if you’re the one who’s taught your players habitual assholery, you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself. It’s a shockingly easy mistake to make. After all, games are about conflict and challenge so you’ll naturally devote a lot of your play time to your players’ interactions with dick-bags who mean them ill and very little play time to their interactions with nice, normal, non-dicks.

Worse yet, you don’t even have to punish interactions to make your players into habitual assholes. You see, any behavior that’s not rewarded eventually goes extinct — that’s the correct psychological term, I shit you not — any behavior that’s not rewarded eventually goes extinct, so, even if you’ve never punished the players for their kindness if you’ve never rewarded it, you’ve also taught them not to bother. If, after that, they just have one negative experience, however minor, you’ve planted the seeds for an asshole habit. If being nice never pays off and it bit you in the ass one time, why bother ever?

Unfortunately for you, breaking a habit is way harder than creating it. For a while, your game world’s going to have to be on its best behavior because you’re going to do three things. First, you have to stop punishing interaction. Second, you have to give the players a clear sense of which interactions are safe. Third, you’ve got to reward interactions.

If you were paying attention to my examples above, you might have noticed a really strange pattern. I cited a lot of nice, positive, charming, heartwarming, feel-good crap. That ain’t an accident and it ain’t just something I’m doing for this article. You see, with some rare and purposeful exceptions, the worlds I run are primarily populated with pretty nice people.

Seriously. Players new to my table always comment on this shit. The first time players meet an authority figure in one of my games, they’re always like, “I don’t get it. That lord seemed like he was actually trying to do a good job for his people.” I actually do that on purpose. The first authority figure the players meet in any of my worlds is always a decent one. Unless, again, I’m running a crapsack world on purpose. Like, say, I’m running Warhammer Fantasy. But then, I don’t like running those kinds of games.

Given that I’m a giant asshole — self-proclaimed — and given that I’m constantly reminding everyone how nasty and brutish adventure game worlds are and given that I cling to irredeemably evil, savage orcs and shit like that, it might confuse you to learn that I go out of my way to fill my world with decent people. Do you know why I do it? Do you know why most of the civilized, human people in my worlds are at least trying to be good, decent people? Why they mostly try to get along and treat each other well with allowances for normal human sinfulness?

It’s because I actually want my players to like visiting my worlds. I absolutely cannot fathom the kind of brain damage it takes for a Game Master to drop his players into a shitty, dark, corrupt, cesspit of a world and then say, “Okay, now risk your life for the world and its people!” Why would anyone want to help that kind of world or its miserable, corrupt, shitty people? Why would anyone even want to spend their free, fun time in that world?

Of course my fantasy worlds are deadly, dangerous places. They’re fantasy worlds. The chaos of the wilderness is a constant threat and the civilized people are beset by monsters and savages and demons on every frigging side. They respond by gathering together. They find safety in faith, family, and community. Shared values, basic trust, and normal human kindness hold them together against the adversity of the world. Most of the civilized people in my world are happy to see the adventures. They’re good for business and they kill monsters! Who wouldn’t want them around when you’re struggling and poor and surrounded by monsters?

Is there greed and corruption and villainy in the civilized world? Abso-frigging-lutely. But, in civilized spaces, it’s the exception and not the rule. It’s the cancer to be cut out, not the body, and once you cut it out, the body can and will heal. And I’ve earned the right to throw greedy, corrupt, deceitful, traitorous villains at my players because they trust that most of the world is not like that. Even if they get burned trusting the wrong person, they’ve learned that trusting is still the better overall strategy.

Which, by the way, is how civilization actually fucking works.

Anyway…

It doesn’t matter who your players were watching when they learned that assholery was the better strategy and now default to it. What matters is that’s how they are and it’s a problem and you’ve got to fix. That means your world’s got to be extra nice to your players for a while. You’ve got to treat them kindly and reward their kindness and not punish their trust. Once you’ve earned the right to it, then you can bring in some corruption and deception.

First, adopt the basic principle that civilization is safe, the frontier is guarded, and that the wilderness is hostile. That’s how it’s supposed to work anyway. In civilized spaces, the players can safely trust people and they’re trusted in turn. In the frontier, people will trust the players if they act civilized, and the players can safely trust anyone who acts civilized. Everything else is suspect. In the wilderness, the players shouldn’t let their guard down.

Honestly, that’s how it should be anyway.

Next, treat your players like they’ve been hurt before and gently rebuild their faith in humanity. The greed, corruption, and deception stop at the gates for now and, inside the walls, people are kind by default. Bartenders give the heroes their first drinks free sometimes, provisioners will knock a few coins off a bulk order, a blacksmith won’t ask for gold for a minor repair, and people say “hi” and “how are you” and “welcome to Corneria.” Try to capture the culture shock a native New Yorker feels the first time he visits the South or the Midwest. People aren’t fawning or fake or ingratiating, they’re just friendly and willing to do a good turn to make someone feel welcome.

It need not all be sunshine and rainbows and bunny farts. The people still need to be real. They’ve got hurts and flaws and vulnerabilities. Just assume most people are doing the best they can and mostly want to get along with each other. Because civilization is where everyone wants to feel safe. If it’s surrounded by a wall — even if it’s just a wooden palisade around a village — everyone wants the crap left at the gate.

Allow the players some leeway for initial suspicion. It takes a while for the expatriate New Yorker to go native in Wisconsin, but do make it clear that rude behavior is a losing strategy. Start by just calling it out. If they’re rude to someone who’s being nice to them, respond appropriately. A blacksmith might say, “What’s your problem, man? I’ve been nothing but helpful. Don’t be a dick.” A barmaid might respond with bewildered hurt and give an anguished, “Why are you like this?” Everyone will turn and look. You want to show the players that, when the circle forms, they can be on the inside or they can be walled out. It’s up to them.

This, by the way, is called socialization. It is how humans have learned that trust is good and that being an asshole is bad since civilization was invented.

If the players either respond with immediate violence or else their hearts don’t eventually grow three sizes after Hooville’s been nice to them for weeks, then, unfortunately, you’ll have to conclude that you’ve got stupids or sociopaths or stupid sociopaths. The problem isn’t that your world doesn’t seem real and it isn’t that the players have picked up bad habits, it’s that your players either don’t know how roleplaying games work or they’re actual assholes who just delight in watching worlds burn.

At that point, all you can do is stop the game and have the talk. You explain to the players what they’re doing and you explain that it’s not how you want to run games and you see what happens. If you’re lucky, your players might be willing to fix their stupidity or sociopathy and you can patiently teach them how to play right. If you’re unlucky you’ll either need to accept that you run a game for stupid sociopaths or replace them with a fresh batch.

If that’s the case, at least you’ll be inviting your new players into a truly living, breathing, dynamic world, so nothing you did was a waste.

Good luck.