44
It takes some discipline, but develop and use fake profanity, specific to the setting. You have an advantage here, as the GM (which I infer, since this is about an NPC, not a PC) because it is perfectly within your purview to simply say, "These phrases are mild blasphemies, these ones are mid-range vulgarities, and this one here is fightin' words."...
35
Maybe D&D isn't the right game?
You're 5 sessions (2 years) into this, with first time players who agreed to try it on your behalf.
Maybe it just isn't going to work.
You've got some challenges:
Frequency
My observation, D&D doesn't work very well played very infrequently. Sure, it could work well, played infrequently, but it usually doesn't. It's ...
22
A common approach that works in many situations is to use 3rd person narration. Rather than engaging directly in dialogue you can simply state "Throg the sailor then throws around a dozen insults and says something unflattering about the bartender's mother". I have found that many players find this more kind of 3rd person engagement to be more ...
20
There are a few things I have tried that have worked for non-roleplayers.
Put enemies in that emotionally engage them.
A common issue I see for new players is that people put in encounters where the opposition are just bundles of HP and damage. Random goblins. This means they often engage them simply as bundles of HP And damage. Instead, make sure the ...
18
Start the adventure with more characters than players.
This idea draws on the very very early D&D playstyle and the wargaming it originated from. Player characters were practically expected to die and were less super heroes and more just single characters from a company or platoon. So if you expect some 30 to 80% Casualties (Operation Barbarossa and the ...
15
Consider minced oaths.
I concur with other answers that recommend making up setting-specific curses. Doing so will achieve your objective (i.e., in-world vulgarity without real-world profanity) while also making the world feel lived-in. I routinely do this as both player and DM. It takes a bit of forethought to decide what the people of your setting would ...
13
I had similar experiences over the years when teaching new players. A full table of unresponsive players, even though they are liking it, is something I had to deal with last week.
A co-worker asked me to teach him and his sons how to play RPG and I accepted it. We spent a couple hours on character making and proceed for our first session. I asked them when ...
12
I am addressing this from a player perspective. I got back to TTRPGs about a decade ago, and I was a passive and non-descriptive player for the first few years of weekly sessions (and my GMing wasn't much better really). Steadily improving my role playing, but it still took time and so many weekly session. You are playing a few times per year, and after 5 ...
12
Write a novel
It sounds like a fantastic story. You should write a novel about it.
It sounds like a terrible idea for an RPG where the players turn up to be the protagonists of each and every session. The perfect amount of time for a player to be sidelined for a dead character is exactly equal to the amount of time it takes to make a new character. That’s ...
9
An easy approach is to make up profane words. It's a popular workaround in TV shows to let them stay network TV friendly (Examples include "frell" in Farscape, "frak" in Battlestar Galactica, "gorram" in Firefly, "smeg" in Red Dwarf).
Depending on your player's sensibilities, another TV friendly workaround is to use ...
8
Based on the understanding that you want your NPC to be seen as coarse, rude, and unsophisticated as opposed to just swearing a lot, I invite you to observe the axiom "actions speak louder than words".
Now, this is fairly context-dependent, but just think about actions that you would deem not acceptable in polite society (if the context is an ...
7
I don't know how helpful this will be, but I am forever reminder of Terry Pratchett's approach with the character of Mr. Tulip from The Truth, whose dialogue was heavily peppered with the exclamation '—ing'. As in, a glottal stop, followed by the word.
Mr. Tulip: It's not a ——ing harpsichord, it's a ——ing virginal! One ——ing string to a note instead of two! ...
7
What Does It Look Like?
By no means will this solve everything — and it certainly seems like D&D may not be a good fit for this group — but a DM technique that I have found works well with reticent players is to regularly ask a simple question: "What does it look like"
If someone casts a spell, ask them what it looks like when their character ...
6
I have seen this problem so many times before! I think this comes from two main things, firstly is lack of challenge, secondly is lack of drive.
If there's no challenge you don't have to think. Creating challenge is easy. Fundamentally all you need to do is put stuff in the way of your party that could seriously go wrong. 4 goblins vs a group of 5 is not a ...
6
Have the players take over aspects of the weather
I've done this at times, when I have sessions that are about the environment versus men. You work out some of the moves you could make with the weather and give those over to players. Anyone who dies becomes part of the storm, and gets to try to entice other players out of their loneliness into the warm ...
5
In the past, I have GMmed in a few rounds and portrayed several quite rude characters during such. In general, I used two tricks up my sleeve:
I put the expletives into indirect speech and condensed them. This means to phrase the sentence differently to accommodate such. A typical example would be:
The bartender mutters a few expletives about the integrity ...
2
'Feck' notably lacks the sexual connotations that "f-ck" has but can otherwise be used to replace "f-ck" in any other way—this includes terms such as "fecking", "fecked", "feck off", etc.
A poster for Magners cider that featured the words 'Feck off bees' has been cleared by the UK's advertising watchdog. The ...
1
I can give you little to none feedback strictly to your question, but what I can give you is propably better: an Inspiration
Link to the story: here
It is a story about beginning of new campaign for a group of players, and their interactions with a false hydra. It is way too long to post here, so I will only summarize it here, but it does not compare to ...
1
I think you did the right thing! If players aren't exploring enough, it's always good to give them a gentle nudge (or a push, depending on how lost they are) in that direction. Here's some tips to get them to explore more next time:
Include a scared or friendly-sounding voice coming from where you want them to go next
Have a character spot something shiny (...
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