I have GOT to find a new gaming group now… My yen to do some dice slinging was bad BEFORE. Yikes!
I’ve never heard of outright telling players this is the adventure hook. To my mind, you might as well just read them an introduction leading into the first encounter.*
Don’t they feel led? Do they ever rebel and set off in a different direction?
- ETA, Not there’s necessarily anything wrong with doing that, if you goal is, say, to get a complete concise adventure into one session, or something.
I just described a scenario where one of my players served another player with fava beans and a nice chianti, and you have to ask if they ever go off in directions I don’t expect?
I’m betting Miller knows his group well enough to know whether they’ll take that as a metajoke or something more patronizing.
I mean, I’d laugh, personally, but I do dislike GMs that just expect me to find my own hooks and refuse to point me at them.
On a related note, I sometimes misuse the words “player” and “character,” but never quite so memorably.
I couldn’t tell. The whole tone of that was pretty different.
Interesting. The players from my best game told me that the thing that made it their best game was the sense that the game wasn’t about their characters, that things were happening here and there for their own reasons, and they could get involved or be swept aside. There might be times when the PCs were “expected” to do things, by NPCs, for in-game reasons, but I would never suggest to them what I expected, if anything. My typical preparation involved having some roughly plotted adventures they could pursue, “hooked” on some character in town or some bit of information, but many of those weren’t picked up (though what prep work had been done was useful in fleshing out the world). And they weren’t necessarily tailored to the PCs’ present abilities either; more than once they did take a hook for something they weren’t ready for, and the main challenge became getting out alive. Sometimes these were returned to, sometimes they were simply folded into the ongoing narrative of the world. Often the characters’ personas generated the adventure starters without any set-up necessary, beyond having the game world itself roughly laid out–a thief scouts for something to burgle, a mage pursues components for spells and potions, whatever.
I’m sorry, Peremensoe, I must be particularly dopey today, because I’m not sure what you’re objecting to in the description of the adventure I ran. Is it the inclusion of an obvious adventure hook for the next session, or just the fact that I called it an adventure hook while talking about it with my players?
Well, generally speaking I look at RPGs like this: the GM provides the story, I determine how that story gets told via the personality and goals of my character. I don’t expect to be led around by the nose, but I think a GM who waits for the players to come up with something to do, particularly in a custom setting, isn’t doing their job.
Mind, I write my characters with major hooks and motivations, typically well enough that the GM winds up basing at least the first part of the plot on them. It’s not like I’m sitting around waiting to be told which monsters to kill (though my last game I played a half-orc Fighter who was just happy to smash shit and act dumber than he really was, which was fun). But it’s the GM’s job to come up with the story, rather than let the players make up their own from the start or cast about until they find one of the hidden plot hooks the GM neglected to hint at.
Basically I want at least a framework on which to hang my character, not a freeform sandbox. I can’t do anything with that.
I have to agree with this myself.
The freeform sandbox can work if you have a particularly imaginative GM who work off the cuff. Not everyone can do that.
I recall one particularly memorable session of Vampire going on 10 years or so ago where the whole night was spent at an in game gathering interacting with the various NPC’s. This was in the middle of a campaign and the various supporting cast were well known and well defined by this point which made the unplanned characterizations easier. Our group had a well known antagonist at this point and we had basically decided as a team that we had him in front of some of the more influential kindred in the city and we were going to force him into tipping his hand RIGHT NOW. The GM wasn’t planning for this yet, but he rolled with it. Through a combination of simple conversation and some skill checks we baited him into raging in front of a few of the clan leaders. We wound up wrapping early that night so the GM could regroup, but it wound up being more of a “sped up timeline” than completely re-writing the plot.
I’ve also had sessions of other games though where the GM had no idea what was going on, and those wound up… unproductive. Lots of BS’ing and drinking but not much going on gamewise. We also would invariably lose some players to videogames or card games under those circumstances. (Nothing is annoying so much as a player shouting his characters actions over his shoulder while playing Call of Duty or M:TG.) Not that there wasn’t fun to be had under those circumstances, but a GM who shows up to the table relying on his players creativity is just asking for chaos.
Adventure hooks, blatant or otherwise, don’t equate to railroading, they’re just good planning.
I’m sorry. Your game, you do what’s fun for your group. I understand that my group’s style isn’t for everyone.
But for me, yeah, calling it an adventure hook would sort of take me out of the game. It’s saying that there is an adventure here, all set up for you guys, X characters of Y level. Even without an out-of-game announcement, I wouldn’t like a setting in which players learn that every time there’s an unusual event, it must be the next red carpet rolling out for them. That broadcasts the fact that it’s all invented for the sake of the game, and for these particular characters.
I guess I’d put it this way. My world was full of stories. Almost any way the characters chose to turn and look, there was something going on. Some of these stories were dormant until the characters looked that way. Others began as pure improvisation when the players looked in an unexpected direction. But the idea was that it should never seem that way to the characters or to the players.
The characters all had a sketchy starting personal history in the world: a place they were from, a cultural background, a story for how they came to their first-level starting point, some in-game knowledge that fit in with all the above, sometimes NPC acquaintances. There was plenty of framework, to my way of thinking–plenty of story wheels in motion.
I suppose if you like you could think of it as multiple simultaneous hooks leading off in many directions, but the characters had to figure out, in the game, which leads to pursue. Some would be less than they appeared, others more.
Some of the big stories did progress on their own regardless of whether the players got involved or not; if the characters brushed up against these stories at different times, circumstances would be different. For example, I wanted to introduce some seaborne stuff. When they first got to the coastal city, there were clues to several potential adventures around–rumors of a mysterious island, a sea monster; they didn’t take up any of these right away and some of them never panned out. For one adventure they took passage on a merchant ship to get down the coast. Later piracy became a greater and greater problem, with various side effects on land. Eventually a couple of the more roguish characters ended up pressed into the crew of a pirate-hunting warship. But I didn’t just make that happen; that was because they got themselves into trouble in a city which, as they knew, was increasingly desperate about how to respond.
Anyway, that campaign ran for what must have been around 200 sessions and everyone involved said it was the best game they’d ever played. 
:modest:
My favorite DM from my teen years would smile evilly when a player became disengaged like that. Invariably something would soon happen to that player’s character because the player wasn’t paying quite enough attention…
Which is fine. Rumors are little plot hooks, and it’s a great GMing style to sprinkle them liberally throughout the world.
But an enormous, unexplained fireball over part of the city? That’s not in the same league as a rumor.
A fantastic GM once advised me that, if a game offers the flaws “reckless” or “curious,” take them. Those “flaws” could be renamed, “grabs the plot hook,” and almost always lead to more interesting characters. The worst players are those who play cautiously, who decide that instead of investigating the disappearances down at the mine, they’ll keep working their day job at the saloon. And if a player ignored the ginormous explosion for any reason, I’d think them a pretty incompetent player (or else they were trying to play a very different game from the one I was trying to run).
Look at it this way. A cop who fails to follow up on a rumor of a new smuggling operation isn’t necessarily falling down on the job. A cop who watches the Twin Towers falling and continues booking the shoplifting suspect? That’s no good. The latter is more the kind of thing Miller is talking about.
I agree.
I just wouldn’t like a game in which players knew that that enormous fireball must be their cue, leading neatly into a plotted adventure just for them. It sure ought to inspire them to do something, no doubt! Of course my crew wouldn’t have ignored such a thing.
But they’d have had a certain measure of caution going in because, as in the real world, they wouldn’t know what they were getting themselves into. It might be something totally out of their league. There was no built-in guarantee that they would be the central figures in that particular story.
One point to keep in mind is that he said it was a pre-made module. Some DMs absolutely thrive on improvisation, but those are generally the ones who don’t buy modules. With a pre-made module, you have to railroad the players to at least some degree, lest they wander off the edges of the map. Because the maps for pre-made modules do have edges.
Heh. As a beginning DM, I solved the wandering party problem pretty easily. One of my players asked about he lands beyond the edge of the map (outdoor dungeon, and I hadn’t fleshed out the world beyond the area I was using at that point). I replied “Tiamat lives there.” They decided to stay on the map.
Oh man, yes. I used to, and sometimes still do, play extremely sensible characters. The stoic Paladin or Monk who always keeps a level head, is always observant, and just generally does the wise, sensible thing.
Reckless is so much more fun.
This thread is starting to give me Unforgotten Realms flashbacks, where the plot goes so hilariously off the rails it actually settles into one of the best, yet still absolutely silliest, RPG plots ever.
It can be fun to have one complainer in a party, so long as the complaints are always in-character. (As a GM, when I have a character like that, he ends up having REASON to complain, as the universe gains a new chew toy. It either inures them to things so they stop bitching, or it provides entertainment for everyone with the ‘how will he take it to the teeth this week?’ Generally try to keep it on the good side of the line between ‘cruel to the character’ and ‘cruel to the player’, of course.)
Of course, the characters that I play tend to be easy to hook…
A sampling…
A bard who’s got a thing about destiny, and is usually the one pushing the rest of the party to grab the damned hook.
A teenaged Halfling who doesn’t much care what the party does, as long as there’s excitement involved, and she gets money and/or sweets out of it.
A half-orcish mob enforcer who’s used to taking orders, and enjoys nothing more than throwing himself into battle, with little heed on who’s on the other side.
A scientist/engineer/medic who grabs every plot hook thrown his way because they offer opportunities for research/tinkering/collecting material and samples.
A comic book fangirl who’s been thrown into a world of superheroes and goes with every adventure, because it’s ‘cool’.
They’ve all got things they won’t do, and objections they might raise to a given hook, but they’re all easy to motivate.
Actually, the worst players are those who create antisocial characters, with flaws like “loner” or who deliberately choose backgrounds that allow them to say “well, why would I do adventure with the rest of the group ? I don’t care about that”.
I ran a Vamp campaign once (my first Vamp campaign, actually) with a group of 4 complete strangers I’d met via the interwebs, so I didn’t know exactly what they wanted or expected of me, but since I’d met them via a Vamp-related site I figured they were after typical Vampire fares - intrigues, backstabbing, power mongering, exploiting ridiculous Disciplines for fun and profit. One of them decided to play a Gangrel somewhat based on a rebellious, loner character from a manga (Sanosuke from Rurouni Kenshin, if you have to know).
The scenario featured a whole lot of intrigue, in fact it was a typical Vamp player’s wet dream: the Prince of Paris just “died” in front of their eyes (in reality he faked his own death with the help of a friend), and in order to avoid deleterious power struggles in dangerous times the powers that be decide that until the matter of the assassination is resolved, this little bunch of new vampires who don’t know anything about anything are going to be temporary Princes of the city. I repeat: 12th generation mongrels, with no allies or experience whatsoever, given absolute power in Paris to do whatever they want, rule however they wish, with the backing of characters immensely more powerful than themselves. A certain kind of player would kill to play this.
But not this guy. This guy spent the whole scenario basically saying “yeah, well, I’m a Gangrel, I hate cities, I don’t give a shit. I’m going hunting in the nearest forest”.
Now, I don’t know what he expected of me or of the game, but despite trying multiple times to give him something to rope him into the plot or have him join the rest of the players who were having a ball dispensing high and low JUSTICE!, he never quite clicked with the rest of the group (and this despite the fact that another player at the table was his best friend IRL). I gave him exclusive clues into the murder that the other players didn’t know about, figuring he’d at least try and tell them what he knew - he never did. I let him know that there was a plot against his mates (of course there was a plot against the neonate Princes, come on !) and that they were all in danger of getting ganked - zero action. Not interested, don’t give a shit, not my problem. Forest. Hunt.
I never quite grokked that guy, and we stopped playing together soon after that.
The first rule of successful roleplaying: “I am a supporting character.”