Many of the posts on the thread make me wish I could understand Blades In The Dark. I read it through a couple of times but it still makes me go, huh?
Many of the posts on the thread make me wish I could understand Blades In The Dark. I read it through a couple of times but it still makes me go, huh?
You seem to be tripping up on semantics again. 'Plot hook' definitely is just an interesting thing that potentially directs towards more interesting things. In your example the mention of the Rufus' master is a clear plot hook for investigating who this master is and what they want. By your definition a GM who improvises could never use 'plot hooks' and that definitely is not the case.
(I still don't actually know anything about Traveller. Space something probably...) First of, existence of general type of a person or good and existence of an unique specific thing you made up are rather drastically different things. Furthermore, in most games in these sort of "I see if I can find any guns/drugs/etc" situations the Gm is perfectly within their rights to just say "no, this is not sort of place they can be found at." I.e. the GM actually determines whether the thing is present, the player determines whether their character manages to find it.
You have some sort of weird category error going on here. These are completely different sort of things. If your character decides to attack the orc, you don't get to decide what the orc does, the GM decides that. And whether that orcs attempts to defend (assuming that the GM decides that this is what they do) is represented via some passive number such as in D&D or via some active roll like in many other games really does not affect that. That is completely different than narrative level ability to summon towers into being! Can you really not tell the difference between deciding the actions of your character and deciding things about the world, external to your character? Damn, this is a bizarre conversation...
Right. the demon encounter is a clear plot hook towards Evard then.
Encounters can still be 'random' in a sense that they're just standalone things and not really connected to anything. I meanly meant it like that.
Yes, there can be many different kinds of plot hooks. I already know that...
That is absolutely not my understanding of what a "plot hook" is. Plot hooks are things that try to engage the players in the GM's plot, which often take the shape of things that interest the players. But an interesting thing isn't a plot hook if there's no plot there. I mean, it's right there in the term -- plot hook.
Yeah, @prabe, the very play of the game is wholly rooted in the fiction, so a given action has clear results that flow directly from the fiction -- there's plenty of handles. If you mean the rules don't state explicitly what given actions do -- yeah, they don't at all. If you're just reading the rules and trying to figure out what a Hunt action results in, I cannot tell you without a game context to place it into, only say it likely involves you trying to shoot or track or hunt something or someone.
It definitely needs to potentially go somewhere. But it doesn't mean that 'somewhere' needs to be clearly defined that the moment of planting the hook. Pretty common in more improvisational style. Plant some interesting things with a vague idea of which sort of direction they might lead and then actually elaborate if the players bite.
No, how people take things is not all that matters here. Here we're having a discussion about WHY people take it that way, so asserting that there's no discussion to be had because people don't like something is not terribly helpful. I'm very curious as to why people don't like success with complication because, to me, D&D is pretty much full of it. In D&D, though, it manifests because the GM gets a "turn" which can be used to act against whatever you're trying to do as a player with your PC -- the orc fights back, the merchant haggles, the noble condescends, etc. Here, sure, you roll a check and get the success or failure, but what happens next is usually that the GM uses their turn to introduce a complication. Success with complications, in games that feature them, do not have GM turns, so it's wrapped up into a single mechanic -- you roll, and the situation reacts accordingly. I'm curious why it's okay that someone else (the GM) can just make up complications, but so long as it's not directly tied to a roll it's just fine if the GM makes up whatever, even if you succeeded. I mean, I've run D&D for decades, I know how this works.
