On Learning to Go With the Flow

I recently began a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with four of my friends. I volunteered to be the Dungeon Master and run the world they were going to play in.

Now, the world that I created is basically a mash-up of David Gemmell's Drenai series, Glen Cook's Black Company series, and a few bits and pieces from Skyrim all within the framework of the 3.5 ruleset. 

Basically, I set it up so that there were pretty clear 'good guys' and 'bad guys' in this world and I was interested to see if my friends were going to choose to become heroes intent on deposing the Dominator and his evil empire, or villains to enslave the last few bastions of free and good people. 

My friends chose to become con-men.

I was prepared for brutish warriors, intellectual wizards, and greedy rogues ready to be anti-heroes or villains looking to slaughter villages for the fun of it.

But how do you handle a group of people who, with world shattering events happening around them, simply want to dupe everyone they meet out of their money?

From a story telling perspective, what they want to do is actually kind of hilarious. And they do make me laugh a lot.

From the technical aspect, that laughter usually ends up in the tired/incredulous category with me wondering "What's the rule for that?"

This last time that we played was pretty much the best example I can come up with for their behavior. 

After scamming a military officer out of 2000 gold pieces, the party took a boat headed for the south. Unfortunately, during a random encounter with dinosaurs (because I can, that's why!) one of the party members turned into a werewolf for the first time (whoops). When everything was settled, the ship's crew was a little... miffed... that one of their passengers has torn out the throats of some of their friends. A little bribing and a lot of high diplomacy rolls convinced the captain to allow the party to stay onboard until they made port the next day.

So what do my lovely little scoundrels do the moment that their feet touch dry land? Well run a huge scam of course! First they found passage on another ship heading along their course leaving in two days (that's important), forge some official looking documents, and then they hire a bunch of unskilled labor to begin constructing a ring for a tournament. They make posters and hire town criers to spread the word about a single combat tournament that's happening in three days. So one of them sits and takes admission fees from hopeful fighters from all walks of life, another sits and sells tickets to the rich and poor alike, while the last two help the town criers. The morning of the tournament they're on a ship heading south with a few hundred more gold than before and they didn't even leave so much as a note saying sorry at the unfinished stadium.

The most annoying part is that no matter what I set the dice checks for their rolls,they made them. The only control I had was how much they made.

And of course, on their new ship, they just had to look for things to steal. Well, they found some, and in the process, they killed a guard, a druid, and framed an innocent indentured servant for the crime while making it look like one of the Dominator's lieutenants was responsible for instigating the act against another lieutenant even though the druid was creating gifts for the former at the behest of the latter.

This story is getting complicated.

Like I said, I was ready for the normal archetypal characters that most people make, and I thought that I was ready for the chaos that inevitably follows the actions of two of my friends when they're players (when one of them is DM and the other is a player they tend to counter each other fairly well).

You can see why I have fun with this even though they make my brain tired.

There are some DM's who will try to control and influence the path of their players as much as they can. Some groups are just fine with that, but that's not how I want to play. I'm going to keep giving them the opportunities to interact with the big events happening in the world as the Dominator keeps trying to, well, dominate it. And if they want to keep pulling scams and running away from angry mobs well... I guess I'll just have to deal with it as best I can and learn some new rules. 

Thanks for reading!