What can I do to instill some "daily life" into my games and keep my players from being murderhobos going from one epic and abnormal adventure to the next?
Assume for the sake of argument (because it's more or less true) that my players are astute but limp-wristed children of the modern age, and can be nudged along any narrative path I set out for them, but are unlikely to take initiative on their own.
>>46427353
Describe things as they are waking up. If they are in a city, they smell the bread freshly baked by the bakers. They hear a distant rooster waking up their owners, and a kettle whistling for morning tea. The warmth of the covers as they get out of bed calls to their still awakening body.
If they are camping out, have the nip of the cold morning air felt on their nose, and the feel of morning dew on their hands as they brush some grass by sitting up. The smell of damp wood. The chirping of sparrows as they too wake.
>>46427353
ask them a few questions about the world at the start of each session like what their home town is like, what their favourite food is, who was their child hood friend, stuff like that. Just a question every time can build a lot of smaller world immersion.
>>46427353
Pass a link to Dungeon Meshi out to everyone between sessions.
>>46427353
If you don't want them to be murderhobos, give them places and people they can invest in and care about. If the only way they ever impact the the world is by doing violence and murder, that's going to be the only way they interact with it. And if the only possessions they can reliably own and benefit from are their carried equipment, and there are no direct advantages to having a home, they'll have no incentives to tying themselves down to any one place.
>>46427639
>give them places and people they can invest in and care about
Like what, though?
Tell them to each come up with a personal goal for their characters.
>hurr muh hipster slice of life
Just let them enjoy some fucking D&D.
>>46428714
>hurr muh fake troll post to bump my thread
I invented this technique, get off my lawn.
>>46429311
Nobody invented it. It's one of those things that has always been.
>>46427667
If you as a GM have nothing you care about in your game, how can you expect your players to care?
>>46427353
You can try to structure moments of downtime. Rather than simply "you sleep at the inn for the night", play out the whole sequence - let them arrive in town, etc.
If you are using any sort of travel, I sincerely recommend taking a page out of traditional hexcrawls and prepping an actual hexmap. If you don't want to mess with real distances the hexes can measure abstract things like travel time. This allows you to have an actual wilderness adventure where the players pass landmarks, encounters, and different biomes - all easily mundane stuff that gives the feel of actually traveling, rather than "it takes you nine days to get to your destination".
On the other hand, no amount of nudging by you is going to change what your players want to do. Maybe they *want* to be murderhobos going from one epic and abnormal adventure to the next. The only solution here is to put on the big-boy pants and have the dreaded "game expectations" talk.
The solution, is as always, to put on the big-boy pants and have a talk with your group about the tone and content of the campaign.
