Crafting Roleplay Scenes that Make Your Players Have an Opinion

Recently, I’ve been talking a lot about how challenging gameplay in D&D often makes you think about combat. And it’s true that a lot of DMs, those starting out and experienced DMs alike, often want to know how to challenge their players in combat.

And that’s very valid. Challenge is one of the 6 types of fun and very prominent in D&D players and DMs. If your combats aren’t challenging, that might disappoint your players, especially those that come up with specific builds, or your power gamers, or anyone that likes a game like XCOM or even Dark Souls. Your challenge-focused players? They’re there to win because of what they did as a player. And if they could have won just spamming Attack, or blindly rushing in, that may be disappointing.

But you run into the same problem going the other way. You want to make challenging gameplay, so maybe you up the Challenge Rating. That’s the first place a lot of DMs look. The party crushed your CR 4, so next time you try a CR 5. And the problem here is that when you go too far in this direction, when you up the difficulty too much, or in the wrong way, specifically in combat, then you introduce quite possibly the second worst outcome in D&D: total party kill, or TPK, where every last character goes to death saves… and then dies. POOF! There goes your campaign.

My next post, I’ll cover the combat levers, what they are and how to tweak them. It’s pretty simple and straight forward once you get used to it, and you get past some potential misconceptions you may have on where challenge in combat in D&D comes from.

But for today, I want you to think of challenge outside of combat. How can you make the game harder in areas like roleplay and exploration?

What Challenge Isn’t

One thing that can seemingly go hand in hand with challenge in D&D is frustration. If that makes sense to you, then you want to go ahead and take a step back on that POV with me for a minute.

Frustration is not really fun. However, frustration can lead to a sense of relief once that frustration is lifted. And it’s okay to have some frustration bubble up as you up the difficulty in your game. But what you don’t want is for that frustration to be the challenge.

See challenge-focused players want to win. They don’t want to lose. And they especially don’t want to be blind-sided, tricked, or misled… unless they can look back and go, “Oh, okay, that makes sense. Dang it, I should have seen that coming.” And that’s a hard vibe to pull off.

So for the most part, when you set out to create challenging gameplay, do your best to avoid frustration. If you try something challenging, and you notice frustration in your players, think about it. Analyze what you did and where the frustration came from. Did they have a chance to succeed, but made the wrong choice? If so, they’re not really frustrated, more disappointed.

And disappointment is not bad.

Non-Challenging Roleplay Scenes

Even if you’ve been a DM for a while, this may be you. You set up your combat encounter, it’s challenging. You’ve got your dungeon, and it has its challenges. You set up a noncombat encounter like a cliff face and that’s a challenge. Then, when your players roleplay, you go and design an NPC, maybe you even do what a lot of beginner DMs do and give them a whole character sheet instead of just monster stats or notes. You may even get inspired by a podcast and practice a funny voice for the NPC.

And then, when it’s time for your roleplay scene, the NPC comes up and talks to the player characters. Depending on your players this can go a few ways:

a) nobody wants to roleplay and it’s awkward and quiet. You’re forced to directly engage each player with the NPC. Eventually, it’s obvious that everyone is bored and it’s time to move on. You vow to never try and roleplay with this group again.

b) everyone wants to roleplay and they’re all excited to talk to the NPC. The conversation goes all over the place. Next thing you know, you’re making up the NPC’s whole family history, where they grew up, etc. This goes on until the end of session or until you get tired and introduce some conflict or even just wrap up the scene.

c) you create an NPC that is going to lie or try and hurt the party. You introduce them, your players immediately catch on, they roll Insight, succeed, and now they antagonize the NPC instead of the other way around.

d) same as above, but instead the party doesn’t catch on, they get completely misled and eventually when they’re frustrated with all the stuff they were told not actually being true, you remind them that not all NPCs tell the truth. They never trust or want to talk to another NPC again.

What do you think of the four examples above? There’s nothing inherently wrong with them. In fact, I will purposely even use some of those types of scenes in my game (except maybe D, and some parts of C). I am especially for blowing off steam with light-hearted roleplay with a random NPC that is believable in order to provide balance after a difficult story arc or tense and dangerous adventure.

However, the example that is missing above is the challenging roleplay scene.

Goal of a Challenging Roleplay Scene

The goal with challenging combat, from the DMs perspective, is to lose. Always. But lose in a way that makes the players think they earned it. This may be from specific choices they had to make, specific details of the combat that you prepared so that observant players could take advantage of and then they do, or maybe they really surprised you and had fire immunity ready against your fire monster.

The risk of a challenging combat is TPK.

For roleplay, the goal is also for your players to succeed. And again, you want them to succeed in a way that it seems like they earned it. They paid attention to what the NPC was saying, or some detail they picked up before, or even later, and whatever the conflict was with this NPC, they, through their charisma, smarts, and observation skills, circumvented it.

The risk of a challenging roleplay scene then is the characters losing. And the best part about challenging roleplay scenes is that, unlike combat, your campaign doesn’t have to come to a violent end if the players fail.

So very similar, but there are some major differences and things to note:

#1: Both can become the other. Your challenging roleplay can turn into a combat encounter. Often, that is even a design of some of my challenging roleplay scenes. I will literally think, “Ok, I feel like they might just agree with this NPC. So just to make it more challenging, I’m going to add X so that they kind of want to roll initiative on this NPC. And vice versa for combat, having a combat devolve into roleplay with everyone leaving initiative is totally valid and even a goal of many of my combat encounters.

#2: Roleplay challenge can be completely destroyed by an Insight check. Just as many beginner DMs struggle with flying characters, Silvery Barbs, and/or Sneak Attack, many DMs, at every level, struggle with a well-timed Insight check destroying their roleplay encounter. You may feel a bit dismayed or even frustrated if this happens, but here’s a reminder: you are supposed to lose as the DM.

#3: You have to do more to make the players win a roleplay encounter. With combat, if you want the players to win, pretty reliably cut the HP and damage in half, reduce the to hit bonuses and monster ability saving throw DCs, cut the number of monsters, remove cover and terrain that doesn’t benefit the party, and BOOM! You can be pretty sure the players will win. But what are the levers you can adjust as a DM for roleplay encounters?

As you can see, it’s a different arena.

The other, more nebulous goal of a challenging roleplay scene, is to take time. You want to see your players engaging with each other, the NPC, and even you as a DM. And you want them to have an opinion, but not necessarily all the same opinion. If you can get one person in your D&D group to say they should do Option A in the roleplay scene, while the rest say they should do Option B, and both groups believe very strongly and/or will be at least a tiny bit disappointed by the group not doing the Option they thought was best, then that’s a success.

You get real emotion, and expression during a challenging roleplay scene, and that’s a success. Making your players feel is a huge goal of a lot of the advice that you’ll find on this Patreon.

Challenging Roleplay Scene Guide

Alright, you may be tired of the context (and there’s always more context and insights to add), but even if not, I want to get to the guide. And the above should give you a good amount of insight where you might not even need this guide now.

1. Brainstorm the scene

You can do this as a DM without any of my help. Any of the four scenarios above are a fine starting point for your challenging roleplay scene. If you usually just do fun NPCs at the tavern, then brainstorm what you normally would for a fun NPC at the tavern scene. Where is it, what are 2-3 things to note, who is the NPC

2. Write the NPC

You can do your NPCs however you want for this specific guide, except for one thing. You must use a believable NPC. A quirk, funny voice, and a backstory won’t cut it here. In order to do that, you need to give them 2 or more of the following traits:

a vulnerability (e.g. defensive, cursed, sick, lonely, etc.)

a hope (e.g. to travel, to save their friend, to be happy, etc.)

value/s (e.g. honesty, community, individualism, etc.)

make them self-aware (e.g. “I can be fiery, but I mean best”, doesn’t travel but lives vicariously through their tavern patrons, etc.)

and/or give them agency (e.g. determined to fight, actively studying to get smarter, facing their fears, etc.).

After that, you need to give them something they want. For example, in the Gold Dragon Egg the Fish Fey want to eat people. This is a pretty aggressive challenging roleplay scene and directly relates to the conflict. As well, it is somewhat designed to lead to combat.

For something that tiptoes the line a little more, give your NPC/s a want that is in conflict with another NPC, or doesn’t specifically involve mortal danger to the party.

3. Design the Pre-Conflict

This step is optional. Sometimes you want the conflict to come up gradually, or are on a queue. This is fun as a DM because you get to enjoy the irony, as always. And it is also challenging for the players because you can start to seed signs of the conflict, while parading the scene around as casual roleplay.

This is great because you get engagement, as the players and their characters start to pick up on things. They might start asking questions like, “Can I see if they’re acting shady?” or “When they say that, can I watch the other one to see if they react in any way?”

For a pre-conflict, you often have to have the NPC be deceitful. This sets your combat up as a “trick.” However, keep in mind that the conflict is not the trick, and that’s because if the trick works, if the NPC lies to the party and everyone believes them, sometimes that ends the encounter. And while that’s fine, the party, in this situation, often doesn’t know that they were tricked, and there’s really not much else to roleplay until later.

Ideally, you want to start dropping hints that this conversation is not going to be 100% normal. Mention NPCs fidgeting, improvise suspicious responses to what your players say to the NPC, drop clues ahead of time that don’t seem to be true when the encounter starts.

4. Design the Conflict

This is the heart of the challenging roleplay encounter.

One way to design a conflict is on values. You take a value that you know the party has, and you give the NPC an opposing value. A classic example is being lawful, versus being willing to break or bend the rules. But you can also have things like progress vs nature, change vs tradition, individual vs communal, and other more nebulous conflicts.

If you don’t know your players yet, or maybe they don’t have super strong values or opinions as characters, or maybe you do know them but you haven’t thought about it before, you can put NPCs in conflict with each other along these axes. So one NPC is all about change, and the other all about tradition.

Another thing you can do is give a single NPC their own conflicts. This is great for immersion and believability because it instantly gives your NPC self-awareness (one of the optional key traits from above). So they want tradition, for example, but their community is rapidly changing, and now they’re going to do something, unless the party stops them. Which brings up stakes, which you will read about in step 6.

5. Add clues

Next you want to think about clues in your roleplay scene. Clues are generally points, quotes, or traits of the roleplay scene.

For clues, these can come before, during, or after the roleplay scene. They can either be straight forward, which helps with clarity and gives the players an edge, or they can be more nebulous or up for interpretation, which gives the players something, but also a bit of doubt. Less and/or less clear clues increases the difficulty and affects the “feel”.

When the clues are introduced is primarily a “feeling” adjustor for the scene as well.

When you introduce clues before the scene, it can make it somewhat easier because the players have some information and also may have already thought about the scene.

When you introduce clues during the scene, that’s when players start to get a little more engaged usually. And it is also more challenging because they have to process the clue during the scene. This is just like when something happens in combat right before the player’s turn that changes everything.

If you introduce the clue after the scene, this can create more immersion as well as bring a sense of relief or closure, depending on what happened in the scene. If the clue introduces such new information that the players would have done something completely different, then it is less relief, but it still makes your world feel more real.

6. Design the Post-Conflict (stakes and consequences)

The post conflict can also be the consequences or the stakes. Conflict is more about the issue and the decision, and in a lot of situations that isn’t enough.

For example, in the above you read about an NPC who wanted to keep traditions, whereas their community was rapidly changing. What if they were talking about drinking grape juice like they always had, but now all of a sudden everyone in the town started drinking orange juice.

The stakes here are pretty low, unless you left clues otherwise. And because of that, the party may just shrug and say, “Okay. Well, drink orange juice then. Or don’t, keep drinking grape juice and be yourself. The choice is yours.”

And that’s a pretty valid response, because there’s not really anything to raise the stakes.

Raising the stakes is done by adding any sign or piece to the roleplay, that indicates that something the players or their characters don’t want, or are not comfortable with, may be an outcome of the scene.

(Just want to bring up Safety Tools, and that you should know what is specifically off-limits for your table when designing these scenes.)

For example, the Fish Fey in Gold Dragon Egg have poisoned and held captive one of the other Fish Fey. The Fish Fey also like to eat people. And one of the Fish Fey is a bully. These are all things that the players and/or their characters might not want as an outcome.

In that example, the challenge is mostly coming from the delivery of clues, not the stakes. To create challenge through the stakes of the encounter, you have to set up more nebulous stakes, or even lose-lose situations.

For nebulous stakes, you make the outcome less clear. For example, in a murder mystery, the party confronts their suspect, but they aren’t 100% sure if the suspect is the right person. And the suspect is a powerful noble. And the guards are on the way. So the stakes here are high, and the outcomes aren’t 100% clear. They may get their suspect, and be right, and be the heroes. Or they may get their suspect, and be wrong, and be villains. Or they may not find out either way, but get hauled away by the guards regardless.

If you remove some of the stakes, by saying the guards aren’t on the way and this is happening out in a forest with no one else around, the scene is easier.

If you increase the clues or make the outcome more obvious, the scene is easier as well. For example, the party is 100% sure their suspect is guilty. Or the party knows that the guards won’t take them away because they’re working for the guards. Now the scene is easier because the outcomes are more obvious.

If you want to adjust the challenge of the roleplay scene, then you can add or remove clues (from above), adjust the stakes, and/or adjust the visibility of the stakes.

7. Roleplay Yourself & Add Information

At this point, you’re where I often am, best case scenario, when I start a session with a potential roleplay encounter coming up. You’ve got your believable NPC/s, your stakes, clues, and your conflict. For example:

Karl the Barbarian

Wants: grape juice

Vulnerability: being exiled

Agency: will never drink any juice just because everyone else is doing it.

Barbera the Cleric

Wants: to control the town with poisoned juice

Agency: the town killed her husband, now she’s getting back at them

Hope: to gain some favor with the god of poison if this all works

Stakes: Karl’s exile, town getting poisoned, Karl getting poisoned, confronting Barbera

Clues: party encountered poisoned orange juice before, Barbera seems nervous during the exile ceremony, Karl mentions how everyone gave up their town favorite grape juice after just one sip of the town orange juice, Barbera has a giant diamond wedding ring on, the party heard of Barbera’s husband’s fate

Conflict: mortal danger (for the town, or even the party), deception, exile

At this point, if you have time, you can go over the notes, and even roleplay it yourself. To do this enlist a friend, or just try to imagine your party’s interactions. This can often be a good place to prepare any explanations for common questions, add or remove clues, adjust the stakes, etc.

Final Thoughts

One final thing you can think about is the pacing of your encounter and the context of your encounter. This isn’t exclusive to roleplay scenes, but it is relevant enough to include as part of the guide.

For a challenging roleplay scene, I am often shooting for 15-30 minutes, assuming it doesn’t devolve into combat. You can follow narrative structure of setting the scene, introducing the conflict, rising tension, and then a moment of choice. Sometimes, to do this, I will say, verbatim, “Ok, I need you to decide right now One Eye, what do you do when Karl looks up at you and says, ‘Guess I’ll drink the juice then?’ He is putting it up to his lips right now!” That is very style specific, but just know that pacing will matter in roleplay scene, and get a feel for it.

Lastly, the context of your encounter is how it relates to everything else. When starting out, I try this on smaller scale things. A fruit vendor accuses the party of stealing. Something that’s small and minor, and not really related to anything else. But you can also use this in big confrontations, at the end of an adventure, or the stakes may have something to do with the overall plot of your campaign. You can start small, or if you were already planning a big roleplay event with big consequences, just think about everything else that’s in the rest of the guide.

If you have any questions or examples, let me know!