Saying no to a PC, in game
So a PC wants to do something you’re not sure is being suggested by the player in good faith. For example, they want to kidnap a friendly NPC and perhaps the player has been distracted and seems a little off today. You don’t know whether you’re just tired and aren’t thinking creatively how their idea will help the game. You want to say yes as much as possible, but you suspect this player’s provocative suggestion might even annoy the other players. You instinctively want to extinguish this request by giving it as little air as possible without provoking stronger, weirder requests that would suck fun out of the game — at least your own fun.
Pretend we inserted a sidebar about player agency and sharing narrative control, and perhaps there’d be a good argument for being open-minded. But in this moment, you trust your gut that you shouldn’t defer to every player request and that your own judgment is valid. (Story for another time — I recently had an experience where I let players define a fair amount of the narrative in a trad game, and I proceeded to create a Frankenstein arguably unrecognizable and unwelcome to the players.) Perhaps you believe a rubric exists somewhere that you’re making a good call by refusing the request though you’re concerned about how to do it.
Recently this happened to me — and during the game, I felt obliged to come up with a softball response to deflect a “gentle kidnapping” request, and was pleased with how things turned around.
The NPC in question was a Pixie, so I quickly reviewed the background description, which suggested they might throw a feast for heroes who’d done them a solid. In response to being asked to accompany them on the rest of their journey, she instead invited the PCs to discuss it over dinner. She sat them down for tasty dishes at miniature tables, which appeared to slowly refocus the players’ attention (and mine) on roleplaying with the NPC during a mundane situation rather than trying to convince her to do something I was feeling she wouldn’t want to do. Scanning the description further revealed that Pixies abhor violence, which suddenly was the answer I’d been looking for. This Pixie began telling stories about disliking bloodshed, suggesting she wouldn’t want to travel on a perilous adventure with them. In fact, the carnage the heroes had left near her home (while rescuing her) was disturbing. The PCs apologized and cleaned up the dead bodies.
Still, the interaction was not over, so the Pixie generously asked the PCs whether they’d like a Sleep spell as they all went to bed, because it was getting late. The PCs got the message, politely refusing and quietly exiting as the Pixies blinked away, invisible, safely returning home.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that the right way to play an NPC is to truly consider how they’d react. That said, as a DM who was distracted by what seemed like strange player behavior, playing a D&D game full of many characters whose motivations were perhaps spread more thin in the rulebook, and given my own self-conscious pressure to say yes to PCs, I should have had the confidence and reassurance that those fundamentals don’t change. The best route when faced with an unusual meta-game experience is to look even harder at characters’ motivations and let that do the work for me. Then there isn’t a “no” - there’s just what’s appropriate.
