Players' only ever response to enemies and threats of any sort is witty one liners and quips

>Players' only ever response to enemies and threats of any sort is witty one liners and quips
Haha nice one dudes real sick burns. I guess I should just stop putting effort into making opponents anything other than faceless stat blocks if you can't bear your characters to ever come across as anything other than constantly calm, cool and collected bad asses. God forbid they have any fear at all or ever feel pain or take a dangerous encounter seriously.

Your villains are badly written/played if your players aren't taking them seriously. It's your own fault.

Also, show, don't tell. Dispense with the threats and make your bad guy actually do something.

You do know a reasonable character would flee from a fight they didn't think they could win?

Blame the Marvel movies for making people think delivering deadpan quips is a good substitute for meaningful dialogue.

Show don't tell
Which is hard in tabletop gaming
But follow it.

It isn't sufficiently scary until the players are scared. They might be poor roleplayers, so test their mettle

Have them fight bigger monsters. They'll have a tougher time staying cool and collected bad asses during a real challenge

What you're saying is, you can't pull off scary bad guys 1-to-1

That's fine, plenty of bad guys aren't scary, but it's really your own fault, given what we currently know - tell us more about your bad guys, that we may judge you more

It could also be possible that the player are "bad" role players in the sense that they know their character is fake, thus whatever happens to them doesn't matter, and the player then acts indifferent or apathetic because there's no loss in an imaginary character dying.

>GM's only response to players is to insist they do the opposite of whatever they did

>Players kill the enemies? "Well you should have used nonlethal and taken prisoners!"
>Players use nonlethal takedowns? "Why didn't you just kill them!"
>Players take prisoners? "Well, he tells you nothing and is useless to you in every way!"
>Questgiver wanted a loud mission, and players gave it? "Why are you so un-subtle!?"
>Try to negotiate with the baddies? "You're all idiots! They take the surprise round and party wipe you"
>Shoot first ask questions later? "You're all psychos! You didn't even figure out why they're here!"
>Roleplay fear and injury? "For god's sake! Just go fight the bad guys and stop bitching"
>Go and fight the bad guys? "For god's sake! You never show any fear or remorse! You're not real people!"

In the realm of the GM's after-the-fact expectations, the player can never win. The GM will always claim to have wanted precisely the opposite of what the player did.

This is so true it hurts.

If the players don't want to have their characters be scared, they won't do so. At the most you'll get if they run away is "ha, you couldn't even kill me before I got away! Ha ha ha ha!"

>players unironically have a great time and loving the session? "What the hell?! You're supposed to be thinking my GM's terrible! I'm a terrible GM!"

This is why I never expect anything in particular from an encounter. That way, no matter what the players do, I'm not caught off-guard.

One of the best parts of being a GM is knowing you can use after-the-fact knowledge to benefit the players or account for unexpected actions.
For example, a player 'realizes' that a particular NPC is a criminal using clues you never intended to drop. If the whole party gets on board with him, you can make it so that said NPC was always a criminal and the PCs never noticed until now.
It's worth using, but only sparingly, as part of the regular act, or they realize the 'truth' (which was always up to you anyways) and the magic vanishes.

The thing is, the players don't blow off the enemies entirely. They remember most of the fights they've been through. They can remember particularly liking or disliking a villain, thinking he was an asshole or thinking he qwas actually quite sympathetic. It's just that, whenever they are actually face to face with the bad guy, there is pretty much no interaction but
>check out this mad pun i'm about to make
I guess I do need to figure out how to make villains 'scary' rather than just 'memorable' though.

I honestly do man. I can't stop fucking noticing now how almost every mass appeal film coming out recently is just fucking packed to the brim with these shitty little jokes and sick burns, even if the overall tone of the film is meant to be serious. I imagine this is where the players are picking it up from.

They're not bad players, not even bad roleplayers. They're more than capable of having emotional moments or back-and-forthing with NPCs or amongst themselves for a long time. It's just this one little thing that bothers me. It's not a huge issue. I mean, a lot of the time their stupid one liners are actually quite funny or witty. I just came here to vent because it'd be nice if they portrayed their characters as something other than stone cold bad asses for once.

>it'd be nice if they portrayed their characters as something other than stone cold bad asses for once.
Why are you getting upset that your players are using an escapist fantasy game for escapist fantasy? It's like saying "I wish my players would stop swinging swords or casting magic." Because that's the point of the game.

Not really, hollywood has just bombarded us constantly with heroes who are so calm and cool and think up witty one liners! Hell, when I started reading old novels more and more it blew me away how most of the main characters are just normal people with flaws.

EZ solution: Make the villains one-liner back proportionately. Either they'll love it, and you've enhanced their play experience, or they'll hate it and you can tell them that if they tone down the quips then so will you.

>Nice joke; here's the PUNCH line.
Ok, you're now at half health.
>You call that a punchline? It was pretty weak!
>Ok, then, here's the real kicker.
Annnnnd you're at 1 HP.

>blaming modern media

Okay grandpa.

Your villains either come off as chuuni, manchildren, poorly conveyed threats or a combination of the latter with some more spliced in.

It's really easy to make players take an opponent seriously. You make them actually care about your game, you fucking retard.

>heroes who are so calm and cool and think up witty one liners!
>blamed on modern invention

>"With an asses jawbone I have made asses of them"
Did hollywood write the Bible? Were all heroes prior to 1950 jittery anxiety-ridden cowards who never spoke during fights?

This. OP is cancer, and if you disagree then so are you

Possibly the most lucid and accurate post Veeky Forums has ever seen

Fuck off, Grandpa. Larger than life characters have been a staple in fiction for ages now.

Not everyone wants to aspire to be 'just some guy with flaws' you know. It really is just you who is okay with that kinda mediocrity.

...

That is possibly the single least appropriate use of that meme I have ever seen.

Why should my character who has beaten "insurmountable" odds on almost a daily basis be afraid of anyone? This guy is hardly scarier than that dragon.

>play game designed to hack and slash prebuilt statblocks.
>complain that players dont care about anything other then to do what the game was designed to do.

Please tell me more about how dnd mechanically encourages rp and any kind of storytelling other then:
Search for bad guy -> kill bad guy,

>things_that_never_happened.txt

Well, if you can do all that and he thinks he can beat you, he's either delusional, ignorant, capable of doing it , insane, or bluffing. 1 in 5 is worse than Roulette odds.

Given that if the DM gives the party an encounter with anything more then 'deadly' they are not playing by the rules anymore, there rely is no point in being afraid of anything.
Its a tactics game with the option to roleplay.
Do you fake being afraid of enemies in crpgs too?

>Given that if the DM gives the party an encounter with anything more then 'deadly' they are not playing by the rules anymore
It's funny to me that you think that.
>Its a tactics game with the option to roleplay.
That depends on the game, but that's part of the whole 'roleplaying' bit. You could indicate that your character is defying his nerves to fight a particularly vicious flesh golem while carefully calculating where you want to put him next on the field.
>Do you fake being afraid of enemies in crpgs too?
I usually don't roleplay my way through crpgs outside of dialogue options, so probably not.

You just made his point though. There's plenty of other ways to do badass without being a marvel hero quipmaster. OP, next time you run a game just let them know at the start it's going to be a more serious tone and to try to keep that in mind making a character.

>probably not.
I rest my case.

You're making a false equivalence here. A CRPG is played alone with the intent to complete the game. This isn't guaranteed for a tabletop RPG. If you were playing a gamebook a la Fighting Fantasy, you would be perfectly entitled to simply work your way through the book without roleplaying in the slightest.
But I said that it depends on the game because while a pure tactics perspective is a legitimate form of play, if the group as a whole wants to roleplay more, you might be off finding a group that better suits your tastes.

it doesn't. but don't try to sell anyone on other systems not having this exact same problem. It's a societal thing, has nothing to do with systems.

have you even read the DMG

This fella has it right. Player disconnection is a problem in a vast number of systems, and becomes more pronounced the less lethal and more vague the mechanics are. It also has notable effects in systems where player death is either expected (it tends to happen in CoC quite a lot because you genuinely don't give a fuck about your character when you made him fully expecting to be hastur-chow) or not a serious problem.

Make the villain someone they like and respect, from a rival national/house/faction. Have them all go "Why did it have to end like this?"

Make them fight something absurdly overpowered. If the players are making in character jokes, it means their characters don't feel threatened. If they have a very close shave, they might become more fearful of any encounter, even easy ones. After all, if all your encounters go well, why be afraid of anything? The problem comes with trying to get a close fight without TPKing them.

You could try fear or other mental effects that aren't outright mind control. Let them be cool and collected for a while, then hit them with a mindfuck and tell them to roleplay being afraid, temporarily insane, or in a berserker rage. Let them go back to being a badass afterwards, though.

It might annoy them, but it might also introduce them to roleplaying outside of their narrow range. They might discover they like being the guy who's scared as shit but gets it together enough to put up a fight, or the unhinged psycho with an alternate but consistent worldview, or the dangerous ragemonster whose friends need to calm him down. Basically, pick the characteristics you want them to roleplay, and slowly introduce them to what it's like playing them. However, it is IMPORTANT that you do it sparingly and continue letting them play their own characters.

Kinda show the sad state of the dnd mentality when the only fear is death.
You could be playing world of warcraft, you would louse as much from dying.

A lot of games give you mechanical intensives to both care about other things then xp/gear, and to engage with the narrative.
...there are even system out there where you cant die, shock horror!

>if the DM gives the party an encounter with anything more then 'deadly' they are not playing by the rules anymore
The combat encounter difficulty categories just categorize the difficulty of fights, they don't explicitly constrain the GM.

Also, I think the "deadly" category doesn't have an upper limit, so any encounter over that threshold would be categorized as deadly. For instance, if your level 3 party somehow came to blows with a mind-flayer, that would fall into the deadly category.

...

Yep. Although marvels are just the recent popular thing on that trend, it's been going for several decages.