When you construct all these factions and alliances between the various monster bands in the area and the party just...

>When you construct all these factions and alliances between the various monster bands in the area and the party just blows through all of them without even noticing

>expecting the party to care about unimportant information
if you want to give the players information about something you have to make it clearly useful to them

Yeah but one of those factions is legitimately antagonizing them and has a demon in charge, and would be really hard to get rid of, while the other side's just there. Wouldn't the presence of a potentially crucial ally count as useful information?

not if you set up the encounters so that they can just breeze through all of the enemies without needing any help

It would help if your factions weren't just 10 goblins in a room versus 6 hobgoblins in another room versus 12 orcs and a demon.

Try 600 goblins versus 200 hobgoblins versus 400 orcs and a demon, all spread out with the dungeon they are in being partitioned into territories they control by fortifying or blocking off key choke-points, laying plenty of traps around to make sieging those choke-points more difficult.

Goblins in 5e might be ΒΌ challenge rating each, but fighting 52 at once is CR 13.

It's more like a couple hundred bugbears on one side, close to a thousand goblins on another, all spreading their influence across a whole small mountain range and being occasionally encountered in dungeons and adventures, always opposing one another. The demon is on the former side.

The party met some of the latter, had a perfect and acknowledged opportunity to identify as their friends, but instead chose to get into a fight and waste all their spells in stupid bullshit that left every goblin killed. It was incredibly disheartening.

>NPCs have leitmotifs
>The allegiance of an NPC can be determined by comparing it to other NPCs
>Players don't notice because they don't pay attention to music

This is my greatest fear.

Ok so you have two evil monster races who fight each other.
How is exterminating both not the correct choice?

Video game logic

Stop playing with children that just want to win and start playing with people who want to hear and tell stories

>start playing with people who want to hear and tell stories
I do, but I don't come to the table to talk at my players about all the background stuff going on in my setting, I come to the table to see how their characters react to interesting situations.

>interesting situations.
"lol guys look, here are some monsters, but they're actually really cool ppl :DDDDD"
rly intersting

Please refrain from posting ever again

Well then you done fucked up. Why did you make them if the party is powerful enough to just "blow through them all"? Why didn't you make the monsters stronger so that kill them all wasn't an option?

In all honesty, if you just try to get through said mountain range or don't stick around the designateed area for long, you're almost never bound to start creating an alliance with monsterraces. If you want to move through, you try to avoid them or kill your way through them as fast as possible, if you need something from them you talk to that one specific group, at which point you may or may not get told that those orcs over there are assholes and the hobgoblins are our bros. But at that point, you're shouting it at them.

Unless you try to make your players find allies, they will rarely try to make allies with monsters/evil races.

>Why did you make them if the party is powerful enough to just "blow through them all"?

I didn't mean it in the sense of how powerful they are, but rather how they don't even try to look for other solutions. Usually the fights are tougher than they could be as a result.

Did you make these factions and alliances clear to the party? Did you make it clear that any of these factions would be willing to work with the party against other factions? Did you ever stress the danger of certain factions (the bugbears hold the mountain pass, and there are too many of them for you to fight!) and hint that the goblins would be willing to help the party fight them? Did you ever think about including some 'friendly' races among the factions like elves so that the party knew that some of them could be friendly? Did you beat your party over the head with the idea so that it didn't just fly over their heads?

They have to know a story is there. It's no good lamenting that the Orc King has a long and tragic tale if you only ever present to the players as Yet Another Orc In The Way. You have to put some effort in, use some narrative devices to draw their attention. It's no different to creating a puzzle encounter that has no clues them complaining that your players couldn't figure it out.

>I didn't mean it in the sense of how powerful they are, but rather how they don't even try to look for other solutions. Usually the fights are tougher than they could be as a result.
You're missing the fucking point. Players are like most people, they're intellectually lazy. They will tend towards the simplest solution that offers a probability of success. If they can beat all the monsters without any alliances, that's what they'll do, even if the fights are tougher than they would have been if they played some off against each other.

You want to make the players step more cautiously, try to pit some enemies against each other? Make them (and make it very obvious) that either faction is WAY TOO FUCKING TOUGH to take on alone, and that attempting to do so suicide. Then you'll see wheeling and dealing.

>I'm a troll

You should be my GM, I'm lfg

>if you want to have fun you are a children
If you enjoy killing fictional monsters in a battle tabletop game what's the problem?

No clearly he'd expect them to read his mind or think that you shouldn't need player race factions to hammer it in because "That's not interesting".

>Stop playing with children that just want to win and start playing with people who want to hear and tell stories

Every single player, unless he's clearly sabotaging the group for lulz, wants to win. Some just lie about it because a lot of GM will chimp out upon hearing such intent professed openly.

I feel fairly against trying to hammer these things in because I don't want to be un-subtle or railroady.

You just can't win, can you?

Of course you can win. You just need to not suck at DMing and have a decent handle on how your players are likely to react to obvious stimuli.

Your players know absolutely nothing about the setting and local challenges that doesn't ultimately come from you, the DM. A lot of the local context we use to figure things out in normal, 21st century human interaction simply do not apply."Subtlety" is not something you usually want, unless you want the players to miss something and then see it later in hindsight, say if you're setting up an NPC to betray them. When you're trying to make something out to be dangerous, it's quite honestly a bad idea to make the hint subtle, as that will very possibly be missed, leading to you either having to

>Smash the party with something that they could have avoided
>Retcon whatever it was into something that won't butcher the party in seconds.

Both of which are generally bad. Git gud.

If you really want to contrast the everyday lives of the antagonists, you can take a page from the playbook of the light novel author, and have (at the beginning, probably, but possibly at the end or at a good breaking point) a little monologue from the perspective of some NPC. To keep players giving a fuck, keep it to 90 seconds or less (and make sure that those 90 seconds are tight but engaging) or add an interactive component to it.

You are new to this DM-ing thing aren't you?

It's difficult to be unsubtle and not railroady, but sometimes even the best players won't understand or get it unless you're upfront with them. You should at least give them a sense of what you want the campaign to be like, so they know what they should expect to be doing.

Not really, user.
I, for instance, am trying to make dark souls bosses, not win, lose, or tell good stories.

>>When you construct all these factions and alliances between the various monster bands in the area and the party just blows through all of them without even noticing

Then reuse the set-up and place it in another area.

If your players don't bother to do anything other than Kill-Kill-Kill with the situations you present them, you're a shitty DM. Plain and simple.

As another user correctly pointed out, everything they know about the setting comes from you, everyone they meet in the setting is you, every time they look at anything in the setting it is through your eyes.

They're not interested because you're not interesting. You suck as a DM. Get better or quit whining.

I've made it clear previously that there are factions among the monsters, and in the latter encounter it was even more clear to them what faction the creatures belonged to and how to make the party themselves seem like they belonged to it as well. They know it well enough. Does it make me a shitty DM if they still don't care?

>Does it make me a shitty DM if they still don't care?

Yes, because you're unable to make caring about the situation worthwhile to the players.

If all they care to do is Kill-Kill-Kill then you set up a situation in which doing nothing but Kill-Kill-Kill HURTS THEM BADLY. There are dozens of ways to do and there are dozens of books discussing how to be a better DM and engage your players.

Your players behave they way they do because YOU LET THEM. You're a shitty DM, so you have shitty players. It's that simple.