Players have no sense for drama

>DMing a medium/high fantasy arc I made for a homebrew group
>Alchemist/Wizard has been kidnapping people and turning them into monstrosities
>Players seem invested
>They investigate and finally find his underground lair/laboratory
>Eventually come to a door that obviously leads to the Alchemist/Wizard
Think they'll walk in and trash talk him. Maybe tell him how badly they are going to kill him, justice yada yada, righteous fury etc. Maybe the boss can throw in some good insults before the fight begins as well, perhaps some interesting and fun RP.
>"I open the door and cast Fireball!"
>..."Alright, roll initiative


How does one avoid this?

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>wizard isn't there
>set fire to a bunch of his shit and set off a chain of alchemical explosions
>party takes damage from inescapable fire storm they set off
>wizard teleports in a few minutes later with some of his creatures and is pissed to find his lab on fire

There. That took me like 30 seconds to think up. Gotta work on the fly OP

I mean, I could have done that, or had innocent captives be in the room with him and get cooked by the fire. I can think on the fly pretty well, but it just seems cheap to instantaneously change the world to thwart whatever specific plan the players come up with at any given time.

And your scenario still doesn't work; they still would not talk to the bad guy. They would still just attack him on sight. "I shoot him in the face while he's talking!" etc.

What I'm asking is, how can I structure things so that the players WANT to talk to the bad guy before they start killing him.

By making him an engaging character.
If the players have no reason to or are uninterested in engaging with him then in their minds they're going to fight a dangerous guy on his home turf who they don't have any pressing need to talk to before they kill him.
Why on earth would you talk to a known dangerous criminal without pressing need (personal or otherwise) when you'd literally be giving him the opportunity to do to your party what they just did to your villain.

1. make the villain a naked female
2. make the villain set a trap that the party couldn't get out of without talking
3. disguise the villain as a friendly NPC
4. lead the players into talking to the villain, make the villain unclear
5. set a penalty when they attack the villain
6. actually spend a lot, a fuckton, of effort into making an interesting villain rather than just some lowly wizard kidnapper hobo

That's not clever. Clever is have someone open the door for me so i can throw the fireball through at the first possible moment, instead of having to do the whole incantation face to face to the boss.

You punish them for not being clever.

>it just seems cheap to instantaneously change the world to thwart whatever specific plan the players come up with at any given time.
Their plan was to kill everything inside the room. You didn't thwart anything, you simply changed the circumstances of the situation. If I was in that group and there were test subjects inside that room that we ended up killing, I would appreciate the fact that there were consequences for our "Shoot first talk later" approach. They knew he was kidnapping people and experimenting on them. It was as much a hostage situation as it was an assassination.

Also every time I have been in a game where the PC's have to storm an alchemist or mad scientist's lair, the one rule we follow is don't fucking break anything.

The funny thing is that I actually did try to make him interesting and engaging. He wasn't just some "lowly wizard kidnapper hobo". He was a well loved professor of alchemy in the city. He was noted by all of his students and colleagues as being curious and kind, as well as leading archaeological expeditions to discover ancient alchemical knowledge. In fact, when the disappearances started happening, the townsfolk believed he was one of the first ones to be kidnapped.

The party actually started the investigations by trying to find him, as they believed he was a victim. They searched his office and his home, finding his journal along with various clues that suggested he had recently found an important alchemical site rumored only to exist in legends. Once they found the lair, the players actually debated whether or not he was a villain or a victim in all of this, thinking some other person or force may be behind everything. Despite all of this, they walked right up and started blasting him.

I do like these suggestions though. Maybe making the PCs have some sort of personal connection to the villain might help, maybe a traitorous friend or relative.

You should realize that ideally, the players will be trying to roleplay realistic peronalities. They aren't going to act like some TV character who does things counter to their own interest just to let the author give some exposition to the audience, just like how you don't let a guy monologue about his outlook on life when he breaks into your house and threatens to kill you. The sooner you abandon shitty tropes that bad writers use as a crutch, the sooner you'll be able to communicate the story to the players more effectively. Show, don't tell.

The intent is there but what I hear you saying is you created a backstory for a character the players were never actually connected to.
He was "well loved" and "curious and kind" as well as "a scholarly professor" but did he ever demonstrate this to the players?
Did they ever get to know anything about him firsthand or talk to the guy before you set him up for this dramatic character twist?

It also sounds like when they shot the fireball they didn't yet know if he was the villain, in which case is right on the mark that they should have had consequences for shooting first and talking later. Weren't they supposed to be on a rescue mission, and they lead the fight by using a big, powerful AoE? That should absolutely have consequences, whether or not you thought far enough ahead to put them in the fight before they got there.
If you're currently between sessions in such a way that they have checked the room yet you can even sneakily retcon it in, like finding burned bodies all over the edges of the room.

>maybe a traitorous friend or relative
When my group started playing our DM (who was new since we had all just started) made everyone write a backstory and then took elements of it he thought we cared about the most and did horrible things with them in the name of the plot.
It's not fun for the players. Don't do that kind of stuff without discussing it explicitly with the people in question.

blah blah he was nice and kind and all, but no one would really care if they don't get anything good out of talking to that professor
if talking to the professor will give them a permanent increase in stats then maybe they would be more interested

the professor sounded mediocre as fuck, why would they care about helping the professor's personal interests when they can get more killing him/her and then move on to a more interesting/powerful villain
the professor sounded more like just your average uninteresting villager living on with their life, but then starting doing bad deeds, so then they must be killed
if that professor was the best of the best of their class, maybe it would've taken a different turn
no one cares which uninteresting villager loves another uninteresting villager

Jesus Christ you are a negative one aren't you? This guy was one of the best alchemists around (founded influential theories). They found this out by talking to his students while they were investigating. What's more is that they knew he had discovered some lost trove of knowledge (when they found his journal). What makes it even more annoying is that two of the PCs were actively researching alchemy in order to learn how to make potions.

They didn't care that this guy could teach them things. They also didn't even look for the long lost formulas that the villain had found after they killed him.

And the kicker, is that the PC who had been studying alchemy the longest (even discussing with me the potions he was trying to perfect during his downtime) is the one who cast fireball.

It's not even clear what the players intended. If they believed he was a threat, then obviously they're not going to make small talk and try to learn from him, they're going to try to kill him. And if they don't believe he was a threat, why did they instantly try to kill him? The story makes no sense. I think you're looking at this with the assumption that the players DIDN'T want to kill him, and acted stupidly, when everything they've done so far points to wanting to kill him.

Yeah, I've basically done this. Villain is monologuing his evil plan to us while setting up explosives right in front of so that he can trap us in a cave (he actually explained that he was going to do this during his monologue), so I just ran up and caved his fucking skull in with my warhammer. It was a tough fight, as he had about a dozen lackeys right behind him, but he died and we didn't get trapped. The DM actually explained afterwards that he had expected us to let him trap us and how some NPCs would've come along and saved us.

What possible reason would my character have not to just attack him though? The odds weren't in the party's favor in a straight up fight, but we had no reason to believe that back-up was on the way or that the cave-in wouldn't just kill us.

My point is that your players need a good reason to believe that:
A) It isn't going to be kill on sight when they meet the villain.
B) They actually have something to be gained from talking with the villain.

Alternatively just tell them it isn't necessarily going to always be realistic and that you want them to talk to the villains. Nothing wrong with just telling your players OOC what you want them to do every once and a while.

what value do you think the PCs think of the professor? the thing is that, it sounds pointless when it doesn't sound very rewarding, other than that, maybe the PCs had another plan in mind and you failed to see that, either way there's a clear disconnect between you and the players, either because of how you relayed the story or you didn't fill the missing gaps or you didn't make things clear or simply you didn't make it interesting, there is always something that leads players into doing what they do, and they do it based on their expectations

always remember that the players usually think of the best possible way to handle the situation, and whatever you wanted the players to accomplish, you failed to lead them into that because you don't measure what's important and what's not properly

You and your players want different things from the game.
Why do you hate fun?

I don't hate fun. I had a lot of things in the investigating and dungeon crawling that worked perfectly. Also the final fight was fun as well. Everyone got a chance to shine. They talking to the boss would have just been a cherry on top.

Also "talk to the boss" and "fight the boss" are not mutually exclusive. Some would even say that shittalking the boss before killing him is technically more fun than just jumping into combat.

If my players aren't the kind to do that, then that's fine. However, that won't stop me from trying to steer them in that direction with a light hand.

if they never met the guy before he went bad/disappeared, they're not going to care

also talking is a free fucking action, just have him start yakking at them during the fight

>How does one avoid this?
Like this.

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>Throw in some aesthetic things to make the dungeon a little more unique, like a bunch of old carvings or a torn tapestry
>players act like this stuff is serious business and spend twenty plus minutes investigating the fluff, trying to get something out of nothing
>meanwhile stuff from the actual plot (i.e. the reason they're in the dungeon in the first place) gets like two minutes of notice
Fucking why, I try to spice up the dungeon by making it something other than a bunch of blank rooms with monsters in them, and it ends up slowing the whole fucking session down to a crawl every goddamn time.

>to instantaneously change the world to thwart whatever specific plan the players come up with
You're doing it to make the game more interesting for them and for you. There's a difference between occasionally doing something like that and being a retard that makes every single plan they come up with fail just for the sake of it.

I once had a goblin with a small golden idol of a frog and the party spent twenty minutes trying to figure out what was special about it.
From then on I only ever gave the party coinage as treasure.

Seems like you guys just need to add fluff that's relevant to the plot or a side plot. Fluff for the sake of having it is pointless and annoying.

Make them read a lot of fiction.
Like, A LOT. From MANY different authors.
You have to reach that point when they've read enough different high quality stuff that they don't just attach themselves to something specific. A good bead on this is how long it takes them to say who is their favourite science fiction author: if they answer in less than a minute, they need to read more.
The result is A) your players will understand the importance of character depth and dramatics, and B) they won't develop retarded trope fixations as a side effect.
They may end up genre savvy though, so this will only work if you're not lazy to step up your game as a DM. If you are, maybe lifeless dregs as a player group is what you deserve?

You can't do anything about your players, especially since this isn't a "wrong" way to play the game. Just encourage banter during combat rounds.

Most of the potential pitfalls you suggest would be avoided by asking players to read literature instead of genre fiction.

How should you differentiate between the two?

>if they answer in less than a minute, they need to read more
Can't say I agree with this. I've read a metric shit-tonne of fantasy, but if you asked me who my favourite was I'd be able to answer in seconds.

Idk man, I find it interesting. to be done consistently, that's the key. If there's no fluff for five sessions, and then a random goblin has a statue in his pocket I'll assume its important. If every goblin has personal posessions, I might be more lax on the matter.