Do your players ever befriend the monsters instead of fighting them?

nonviolence is a virtue when done buy choice, forcing it becomes an attack on free will

I always try but my DM never lets me. Hes even told me before to just give it up.

All the time. I'm a combat monkey at heart, so it's really challenging for me as a GM since I never plan on the enemy trying to negotiate and broker a deal.

Improvisation ahoy.

Reminder that Alphy's is literally a monster who turned her own people into souless abominations by experimenting on them and did things we had Nazi's lawfully executed for as war-crimes and crimes against humanity.

Also a reminder that everyone in the game, except maybe maybe Toriel, wanted to (or was willing to allow it to happen) put your soul in a tube so Asgore could use it to conquer humanity and kill millions.

But, yeah no, the real message here is that Pacifism is always the best option and everyone is redeemable. Fuck consequences, everyone in the world gets to do horrible things, but the minute you even try to defend yourself from it, YOU'RE the monster, not them. Fucking cancerous mentality.

I actually struggle with this because my players are all too willing to be diplomatic in many instances and resolve the fight without murder. In one instance, I got around this by letting one of my players successfully woo an enemy general (in this instance, a winter-touched Atomie), but she never actually stopped being the enemy general. As such, they mostly interacted while fighting each other.

Things you can befriend:
>Something you rescued or helped.
>Something you traded with or made a mutually beneficial deal with.
>Something that shares common interests.

Things you can't befriend:
>Something that thinks you look like prey.
>Something that thinks you're a threat to their territory/tribe/kin/etc.
>Something that was hired to kill you.

Befriending isn't always the only non-combat option, though. Threatening, negotiating, bribing, etc. are all options against the right type of monster.

If you try to make friends with every enemy, you're not gonna be very successful. But most of the things that my players fight can be avoided somehow.

>>Something that thinks you look like prey.
Wrestle/otherwise dominate it to cement your place in the pecking order, then befriend it
>>Something that was hired to kill you.
Make them a better offer, then befriend them with your winning personality.

Isn't that the way of it though? They get the fun, we take the fall. No, the real message was that everyone is people. To bring Sir Pratchett into this:

"It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”
―Terry Pratchett,Jingo

That's alot of fancy words, but if someone or something makes it flatout obvious they want to kill me, I'm sure as hell going to defend myself and not feel bad about it. I get that murderhobo parties are bad, but GMs who get all asspained when they try to kill players and the players fight back are just faggots.

There is literally nothing wrong with scientific experiments on nonhumans, and wars are justifiable in the name of peace.

I try, but I have a player that will go out of their way to kill any creature I have convinced to stop attack, aggravate creatures that are borderline hostile that we are talking with and even has reactivated traps that spawn monster and golems after I deactivate them.

Alphys isn't human though, so her experimenting on her own people is pretty much the same as humans experimenting on humans. Lets also not forget that her and Asgore hid the truths from the families of the victims and pretty much managed to erase the whole thing harder than Hillary Clinton's emails.

But no, Alphys is a "good" character, and you're a bad person for trying to fight her. Forget that her various projects include a death robot, machine that sucks souls out of livings things.

Animals kill animals, but that doesn't mean we get to go moralfag on their asses because of it. It's the circle of life, and it moves us all.

Also there is literally nothing wrong with death robots when used for good. Drones are death robots, and they kick terrorist ass. Are you in favor of terrorists?

You aren't treated as shit for defending yourself by the 'GAME' you're treated like shit, by certain characters. Mostly Undyne, who'd try and kill you regardless. Of course, just like in real life, killing one person, may get a small group to dislike you, the majority of the world will understand it was in self-defense...just like in Undertale.

Now, if you go and genocide, yeah..you will be treated like a monster. Especially since quite a lot of enemies are harmless, and even more are easily avoided. To the two people who know about your save states, one of super not that judgemental(sans), and the other is just a dick you can't save anyway(Flowey).

This. Poor Asriel, the most innocent pure-hearted character in the game gets fucked over in the end because he made a legitimate mistake, but that's the way consequences work.

Alphys who willingly and knowingly did horrible things gets off completely fine because she's "changed". Bullshit.

Rarely.
Funny thing,
this instinct often bites them in the ass. They go straight for the waifubait and get totally rekted half of the time. A drider lures them into a web trap, a faerie exploits their trust and turns them into cats for a week or a daemon avoids getting destroyed because it took the form of a cute alchemist.

They have befriended a giant (It guarded a mountain pass, they kept bringing it cows and a few barrels of alcohol), eventually it bro´d up with them.
After a social exchange, they allied up with a vampire to deal with a daemon infestation in the city. After another social exchange she agreed to change her drinking habits.

wait, are you for consequentialism now or not?

Why should Alphy be punished, that would just be additional bad consequences that don't prevent any more bad consequences?

I really preferred how Iji handled pacifism/violence. It didn't really make a moral judgement on either of them and more explored how people would react to it.

That and it actually did a good job of making it fun to be both violent OR non-violent.

Why do we put people in prison? It's just additional consequences that doesn't prevent any more bad consequences (in fact, it actually makes them MORE likely to offend again int he future).

My players befriended some glamour trolls once. A couple of the PCs attacked the trolls, but the rest of the party wanted nothing to do with it, so the trolls managed to kill the two PCs. The rest of the party left on shaky but passable terms with the trolls and eventually came across them again later where they helped the party fight some undead who were threatening the forest.

I play a good Dragon Disciple and my skills are focused on social stuff. I don't try to befriend many monsters, but my character has a soft spot for kobolds.

In the last few sessions, he tried and failed to befriend no less than 12 different kobolds, and then was forced to kill them.

So he sees yet another group of kobolds. Instead of trying to talk to them, he immediately charges, grabs one by the throat, slams him against a wall.
> I'm SO SICK of killing your kind. Don't pick up your spears. Just leave them, and you don't have to die
Intimidate roll fails, kobold's friend pokes my character with a spear. So I rip the kobold's arms off with my growable dragon's claws and roll intimidate again. The remaining two finally listen. I finally have what I wanted, a kobold friend!

I'd like to interject here, these weren't malicious experiments, it was supposed to be a life-saving procedure performed on monsters who were near death. It's made pretty clear the the monsters who "fall down" don't get back up, ever. It didn't work and Alphys acted like a coward when faced with the failure of the procedure. She covered it up. But in the end she's owning up to it, and the families don't seem all that angry about it at the end. They have their wives and mothers back, just not how they expected. Is the result really that bad?

Yes

I'd be pretty pissed if my loved ones were returned as souless husk chimeras, just sayin. I'd rather they have died naturally than be turned into that.

In a 5e campaign I'm in, our party accidentally stumbled into a situation in which we befriended a talking, socially awkward, awakened mimic named Shaun. He has been one of our favorite NPCs ever since, and we have gone out of our way multiple times putting ourselves in harm's way to save his life.

ALL THE TIME ALL THE GODDAMN TIME EVERY TIME I CAN BARELY KEEP UP

ALLLL THE MOTHER FUKKEN TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
>EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

My players befriended one of the first major foes I threw at them, and it was the moment that gave me inspiration for the campaign. It was some pre-made scenario with some old, ruinous keep that was inhabited by goblins and bandits. Both sides were at war, but due to the fact that the goblins were not only territorial they were religiously adverse to people in general after a near genocidal crusade from the humans only the bandits were designed to be reasoned with. When I presented them with the barricaded keep of the bandits, they immediately set to work clawing it down like crazed animals: any attempts at diplomacy were nothing short of yelled threats, and the attempts at self-defense were perceived as reassurance that whatever in here must be murdered and pillaged. I was all too afraid that the dear friends I'd sat down to run a game for were on a dangerous path. It was only until I decided to throw in a couple of goblin prisoners that the rogue became oddly insistent that he befriend them. For whatever reason, in spite of the fact that the rest of the party was still in combat AND that the goblins spoke pretty much entirely in obscenities to him, he still opted to sit down and pull out a bottle of booze and drink it with them. Due to a combination of high rolls and blatant cleverness and generosity (he even had the sense to drink out of the same bottle to prove it wasn't poisoned) he somehow managed to befriend some of the most racist and violent tribes around. They eventually used this leverage to bribe the whole population of goblins into accepting them and, by extension, their leader. With just a bottle of grog and some quick thinking they managed to turn one act of good faith into a much faster path through the dungeon and some campaign-long friends to boot.

Good times.

My DM is of the murderhobo only persuasion. He cant handle what happens when we befriend anyone we are not explicitly able to. He let us once long ago and it ruined the adventure and pissed him off so were flat banned from even trying. We cant even make diplomacy rolls.

I wish they did...
pic is my players

Because mercy is not justice.

>Is the result really that bad?

You tell me, Doc.

You know, there is a scene in the Mahabharata, THE Indian Epic, in which a rakshasa uses his sister as in the pic. The hero and her end up having a kid.

Our resident Forever DM usually plays with a group that does nothing BUT interaction and they get whiny when they can't talk/seduce their way out of a situation.

He uses me and my friends as a way to get a break every now and then since we're all about sub-mongoloid violence murderhobo-gaming.

THAT DEPENDS ARE YOU IN FAVOUR OF DEATH ROBOTS, user?

I wish this guy was more popular. I love his Trolls/Orcs/Giantkins!

Yes, Killbot1000 for president 2020. Make death robots greater than they already are, which is already pretty damn great.

i wish he was more active

Why does something need to have a soul, if it can feel happy and survive?

>Hi mom!
vs
>Hi mom's corpse fused with five random dead people that occassionaly says my name in reverse and melting all over the place!

No. Fucking no. Put them out of their misery.

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Posting relevant story.

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I've had one female player, on an attack against an orc village that had been plaguing the Barbarian player's tribe, instead fucking sell us out and run off to get herself stuffed full of orc dick.

We didn't invite her back. She was a bit weird as it was. Next session, her character was demoted to NPC because she got the boot, and the Barbarian beheaded her with a critical during our breakout.

He was a total faggot even before getting REAPERed though

Man this reminds me of those twins in real life who are two heads on one body

Just a That Player living out their magical realm fantasy at the expense of everyone else, honestly not even all that out there compared to some of the examples you hear about.

>Showing dominance over the Owlbear by wrestling it into a vulnerable position
>Not proceeding to fuck it

Why waste time to establish dominance, then?!

Well, the monsters weren't. She did imply she'd just own up to what she'd done and see how people responded. She just got lucky that monsters are insanely positive and were all like "Nah, it's cool, we'll deal with having weird fused-together zombies replacing our loved ones."

It's called being siamese, brah.

I've tried in the past but my DM is a "Kill everything" type of person which annoys me sometimes, hate that I even put points into diplomacy in the current campaign he has us in, could have put it into something useful.

Sure. They don't instantly trust anything that doesn't immediately attack them/is friendly since I go enjoy a good honey trap once in a while but it's an option.

I'm interested in what their sex life is like, in an entirely academic way.

I didn't want to feel this early in the day, I was excited waiting for pokemon sun to arrive here..Well I know what I'm naming my starter at least.

It must be tough to find clothes when your torso is double wide

nah it's just called fat people clothing.

Befriended a basilisk in a D&D 3.5 game. Best/worst decision we ever made - the basilisk now has more kills than the rest of the party combined. It's been getting XP and acquiring templates and hit dice to increase the save dc for its gaze attack, so at this point any encounter with creatures that have eyes and con scores is trivial. Undead, constructs and oozes are the only things that can really challenge us anymore.

We have a green dragon "statue" waiting to be made into a stone golem using a golem manual we got from a friendly wizard, once we've saved up enough gp for the rest of the material components.

If you kill it..D-do you get all of it's exp?

Toriel allowed six innocent people to go to their deaths and possibly in the process to murder innocent monsters because she was too busy feeling sorry for herself to take any fucking responsibility. The queen of the Underground doing jack shit to help anyone at all once they were out of her sight. Some mom, huh?

Yes, I know she tried to talk down Asgore at the very beginning, but she failed and then just absolved herself of all responsibility? Just what the fuck.

Are you high? Asriel made a conscious decision to be an evil genocidal jackass. His reasons for being a villain, in his own admittance, was because he got bored of being nice. He kept killing and making others suffer because he was tired of being nice. That's not pure or innocent.

Friends don't kill Friends for the EXP

Except they weren't soulless husk chimeras. They were fully conscious, some of them are even perfectly lucid, and the only one that seems to be in pain was the snow bird thing's mother, and that seems to be mental pain rather than physical.

agreed but if the BBEG kills it, does he power up?

I got the impression that they were only miserable because they were locked in a basement with only themselves and Alphys for company.

Yea, if you had only Alphys for company, you'd want to die too.

You understand that Alphys was experimenting on corpses, right? Monsters crumble to dust instantly when they're killed, but when they die of natural causes there's a period where they're just corpses before they crumble away. I don't think anyone would judge a scientist for performing medical experiments on cadavers.

For the same reason we do a lot of stupid shit - that's how we've always done it, and that's how we're going to always do it until we literally can't keep doing it, at which point we're going to blame everyone else for not making us stop earlier.

He gets a power up, just in time for the rest of the grief stricken party to reduce him to a fine red smear on the wall.

>You have a kobold friend?

>Don't worry. He's 'armless.

Befriending intelligent creatures is fun, and often my primary reason for taking leadership. So at least there's an in-game excuse

...

Well, at least Kinstrel gives you goodies

I had a lawful good crusader once try to convert and befriend some gargoyles to the side of good and justice.

He was basically paladin-mode and due to shenanigans, these creatures were left without a purpose, guarding a portal that was now defunct. Knowing they'd fly away because they were evil creatures, and not wanting to kill them because they were made that way, he set out to convert them.

So he tied them up and brought them with him and through several long diplomacy checks where he discussed ethics, morality, the benefits of living a good life and other things.

He actually did convert them from evil to lawful and if he'd spent more time with them, he may have even changed them to good. They flew off and he was at least satisfies that they weren't evil anymore.

Is that a troll? I'm getting some Huldra vibes, what with the cow tail and all.

>not purposefully deciding as a DM on a case-by-case basis

I bet you roll dice to name your characters, too

You might be surprised. Morale checks and reaction rolls can be the spice that turns a boilerplate encounter into something unusual and memorable, and a lot of fun of GMing is being creative with the unexpected (rather than "writing" every event like a story).

If you've already established a character's personality and motivations, it may be silly to roll, but it's kind of cool to discover that the random band of pirates you just rolled up are potential allies instead of just a pile of hitpoints to chop down.

Reminder that the reason everyone is a dick is because "sins of the father", being almost wiped out by humans for no real reason and driven into the Underdark where nobody poops has made them an insane group.

Pacifism run ismore being a therapist than a warrior.

Technically that was when he was soulless and felt no emotion.

The pacifist system in Dishonored is pretty good, even if it sucks that it boils down to good end/bad end with good end not letting you use all your cool powers and weapons.

See, there's a logical reason for it. The city and soon world is dealing with basically a zombie apocalypse spread by rats. The people who want to kill you are the peacekeepers. The more you kill and the less people there are to contain the plague and the more corpses there are for the rats to feed on and breed. Not to mention your actions influencing the only guys keeping the government stable as you destroy the current regime. So either you can get revenge the easy way, or focus on restoring the princess to her rightful throne with a stable government in place.

So it actually makes sense to avoid killing within the context of the world rather than contrivances.

>Make them a better offer, then befriend them with your winning personality.
Wouldn't that make the bounty hunter or whoever it is to lose their reputation? That's not a very good idea.

Depends on what their reputation is, if it's for always finishing a job it wont work, if it's for being the best at killing it just might work.

Kid in the OP Gon git raped

Makes sense.
Is it 100% lethal? I can't check right now.

Indeed.

My home game has befriended the Beast of Lepistadt in my Ustalav Campaign that did not use the Carrion Crown AP. They also have Manticore cubs, and a secretly magical toad.

My Adventurers League SKT party, we've befriended a down on his luck Hill Giant we defeated in battle and now he's working with us to find the banished wives of Grud Haug.

You can kill, but there's a limit on how many people. 20% of the humans on any given level results in High Chaos, 50% of the population dead by the end of the game results in the worst ending where the empire falls and world is hit by apocalyptic plague. But there's a lot of friendly or non-threatening NPCs so to get that end you basically have to not even try to be stealthy or non-lethal.

Constantly as they're cowards and monsters often look more threatening than men. If they can feel any empathy towards the monster, they will often side with him, turning against their initial employer if necessary.

Yes, one got so bad I actually had to ban him. Dude would not let any fucking combat happen and whined at me for not letting the game be 'comfy' with non violent quests.
Motherfucking this game is about hunting monstrous horrors not making the best cup of chocolate.

I want to know the story about them discovering masturbation and porn. Wonder if they fought over trying it the first time.
Or have different preferences.

>now this will be my fetish for at least half a wekk

Thanks, Veeky Forums!

Your GM is a fag

Sounds like you needed to run VtM.

Why is the hobgoblin smaller?

Hobgoblin means Hob Goblin. Hob means Hearth.

Goblin basically means Fairy in Old English. So Hobgoblins are Hearth fairies. It makes sense for them to be smaller really.