I had a talk with my friend and to a great extent mento John Davis about interacting with Non-Player Characters in D&D. I was mightily surprised that his strategy was usually to either ignore or eliminate them as sources of unreliable information and more than a little peril. It floored me a little, until I realized that magic in d20 makes one thing easy: getting the truth from people. This made me very, very angry. It forces the DM to give players information. They didn't earn it except by possibly beating a few mooks to get it, and it has absolutely no RP value except to lead them by the nose to the next part of the adventure; they don't have to worry about people lying to them or leading them into traps, because the rules nicely say that the subject of their interrogation is now incapable of doing so. I envision the world of d20 to have very smooth inquisitions and coups; you bring in any wannabe wizard who can cast Charm Person, or any sap of a cleric to cast Speak with Dead after you've publicly executed the pour soul, right?
After I calmed down, I took a look through the SRD. Yes, there are some spells that allow for some guarantees of truth. That's the nature of magic in d20: past a certain character level, most normal situations have specific magical solutions. How, in the face of these, do we preserve roleplaying? The answer I finally came up with made me feel a little dim; it once again comes down to preparing the right material.
To best describe what I'm talking about, I'm going to quote one of Murphy's Laws(he had several; they are lolsome) "If you percieve that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop." Unlike BioWare games, where everything your PCs can do is restricted to one of on-average four numbered responses, there are dozens if not hundreds of mechanical ways for a PC to react to any situation, not to mention the near-infinite variables of real human thought. Even better, most of the mechanics and reactions are not "plot interesting," and will reduce your witty, perilous encounter with Dr. Evil to a bulleted list of information.
"But that's not interesting roleplaying!" was my shocked response to a system that had just trashed about a dozen encounter ideas. Well, it isn't, but that's my fault, not Wizards of the Coast. The problem is that players can't read your mind. If your adventure relies on them finding a specific way to resolve a situation, the entire encounter has a good chance of either becoming a maddening game of role-playing charades, or a completely wasted batch of preparation when the players kill Dr. Evil and use Speak With Dead to get the Spark Notes version of his Evil Plan. As I described in my last post, I've had PCs find a reasonable way around massive amounts of preparation. I have also heard of campaigns where the players finally had their characters self-destruct in frustration at an inflexible DM. Both cases are not what I'd call enjoyable dungeoncraft.
Where does this leave you? The answer there is simple, and something I should have realized after the Incident of the Avoided Kobolds I described last post; Improvise. Unlike writing fiction, where the core of the story is the thread of events that runs from trigger to conclusion, your job as a DM is to merely provide a set of situations for the player. Give the PCs a scenario, let them play it out and then process what they've given you to create the next scenario. Under this system, the information I was trying so hard to protect becomes less of a sticking point or challenge, and more another kind of treasure; make the story of how they use it interesting, not the story of how they got it.
This is great. What I've just described is the traditional set of 8x8 rooms and one-paragraph flavor blurbs that make up the most basic dungeon. How then, is a DM expected to present anything beyond a combat heavy mechanics-bash if they can't plan for complex plot? The answer: quite easily. Have your NPCs come alive by reacting to your players. Instead of creating complexity by having Dr. Evil force the characters to live through his Evil Plan, give the PCs an opponent who reacts to their presence reasonably (or, for the sake of comedy, unreasonably). With you reacting to your players and them reacting to you, both sides of the screen get to play out the scenario as they imagine it. Although I've only tried this strategy in a very limited manner; it has already proven rewarding.
The funny thing is, I should have realized this all along. I am terrible at reading a prepared speech; I invariably wind up chucking the note cards over my shoulder a few lines after the intro, because what I've come up with at the moment sounds better. Applying this to d20 will be a challenge, but if I'm right, it will be worth it.
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