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Originally Posted by CactuarJedi
Souring one NPC relationship is hardly "punishment" for the players. It's a minor inconvenience. You can always invent another NPC to carry out whatever task you invented that one to do, if necessary for the adventure. It's a pretty bad deal for the NPC, but he's an imaginary person who doesn't exist, so I'm not really that worried about him being mad at me for killing his family.
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The PCs are also imaginary persons that don't exist. Are you not going to be worried about killing their families, either
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Yes, I make no difference between PCs and NPCs. That's one of my greatest assets as a player, and probably one of my weaknesses as well. But it worked for me for the last couple of decades, I'm not planning to change it now
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I mean, it's a game where choosing the wrong door can sometimes get you killed.
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So? Choosing to move left instead of right can get you killed every day.
It's even got a name, "driving".
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I don't see how choosing the wrong person and getting some other person you don't know killed is especially punitive to the players.
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The part I object to is "and kill those NPCs to drive home the lesson that you guessed right". The way you're presenting it, unless I misunderstood you, there's no IC connection between the two.
And personally, I find that to be a bad habit for a GM to develop.
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Sure, give them a Sense Motive check, but if they fail that, well, it's no different than if they failed a Search check for traps.
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Search check? What is that Search you're speaking of? Are you talking about pouring water on the floor and using a 10-foot pole
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(Joking aside - that's what I suggested before you even posted. The trap, however, kills the PCs, or a henchman. It doesn't get up and goes to kill the henchman's family, because they'd need the henchman and you need to emphasize they'd failed the check.
Which seems to be what you're suggesting).
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It wouldn't bother me in the slightest. Making and killing NPCs happens all the time; they have no value besides how they influence the events of the story. They're tools. I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to feel bad about here.
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Funny enough, the same can be said about PCs, if you're so inclined.
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There's no reason the players, who are real people, should be actually upset that the GM, who is also a real person, killed off a bunch of imaginary people in the imaginary world that they all agreed to give the real GM total control over. If the real players decide that their imaginary characters want to be upset about the imaginary deaths, that's fine. That's great, even. But that imaginary anger won't be directed at the real GM, who the imaginary people don't know exists, but at the villain, who is yet another imaginary person.
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...yes, of course. But OOC, we can talk, and I can ask myself "why the hell did the villain go after the NPCs that had nothing to do with those plans?"
And if I conclude that it was for OOC reasons, well, we're going to have an OOC issue.
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A villain is presumably capable of changing his plans and deciding to do something else based on how the PCs are acting, so I see no reason to limit myself to things I planned beforehand when playing one, as long as they act within the boundaries of knowledge they could reasonably obtain somehow (that the family is currently unguarded, for example). I change villain plans literally all of the time during play, that's what makes them villains and not random encounters.
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Well, that right here makes no sense.
The villain is either aware that the PCs exist, or not. And if he is, he's either aware they suspect the "good guy", or not.
If he's aware of both, he shouldn't be attacking. Instead, he should be sending the good guy monetary gifts, publicly, and delivered by easily-traceable intermediaries.
If he's aware they exist, but not that they're suspecting anyone, the villain would either go after them, or create distractions. He probably has no reason to believe they would care about the NPC's family, so it's more likely they'd get a false lead towards something they want, a threat to their own family, or the like...none of which cue them about who the villain is.
If he's not aware they exist, there's no reason the villain would change his plans at all.
In all three cases, the suggested course of action would make no sense.