"Cool setting, bro. But what's the hook for the PCs?"

[nevin]

I'm a little confused here. No matter what setting, lore etc that I use, it's my job as the DM to come up with the Adventure Hooks. First thing I work with players and make sure I understand who the players are in game an what they want. Then it's easy to come up hooks. Some games that a little harder some it's just they are greedy, or glory seeking adventurers. The hook can just be they are broke and can't even afford a room at the inn. Go get a job. They could play a card game and walk off with an artifact that's been lost for a century. Or the game could start right after they were ambushed and their party "leader" an NPC was killed, que the quest for revenge. If you get stuck there are tons of ideas all over the internet. I've started games with low level PC's escorting farmers to the big city to sell the years crops.

The other option is drop em in a sandbox and let em explore and find something to do on thier own, but that can be very frustrating for DM and players. It helps if Players know the setting fairly well, the DM needs to be very good at ad libbing and PC's need to be flexible , otherwise you can end up with games where nothing happens because both sides are waiting on the other to give them something to work with.

 

[Ace]

1. Blades in the Dark is a terrible example to use for a D&D campaign. If you attempted to sell that idea to most D&D players, you would immediately be met with howls. “But I don’t wanna stay in Duskvol.” “I don’t want more territory.” “Why do I have to do a heist - I have a better idea.” And then, of course, the inevitable cries of railroading and player agency. A game designed for a purpose will always be better at that purpose than D&D, but it also will be best for that purpose, and not for D&D.

2. The reason most campaign worlds don’t work today, IMO, is because they follow the modern FR example. By that, I mean that they are scripted and lore-heavy. They are written, because the person who writes them finds the world interesting. The best campaign worlds IME are the early ones - gray box FR, 83 greyhawk, early Known World, City State ..... that provided an outline with a world full of mysteries and hooks, not lore. They were not meant to be read, they were meant to be played.

Two things.

You really have to know your players. I've run two campaigns that might as well be Blades in the Dark (2e and PF Epic 6 if it matters) and the players ate it up. They made their own trouble, engaged with side plots , smuggled, stole and did tons of other things. They never left town either. However they knew up front that what was being offered and decided to engage with it . If you players won't, you must find things that they will engage with. This also may come down to disinviting a player or in a big group even two who won't get with the game. Nobody wants to do this but good gaming requires the players and GM be on the same page.

I rather agree with you second point. In my experience unless they've been gaming with the same group for many years or are again all into that setting, no one much cares about deep lore. Attention spans and time are both limited. I think i ts best to limit lore to a paragraph maybe two at first and add bits as needed. Do this right and the players will add bits too. My last group essentially renamed the city and helped me to create a rival faction struggling for control!

 

[Lanefan]

Sure, just like Ferrari designs cars with the broadest appeal for all to increase its sales, right?

If ability-to-purchase was equal (i.e. everyone could afford a Ferrari) then this is exactly what they'd do if their intent was to sell more Ferraris.

Ferrari, however, can and does take great advantage of the fact that ability-to-purchase is not equal, and thus the appeal in part becomes the cachet and exclusivity of owning one regardless of whether the actual design of the thing is any good at all.

Ability-to-purchase is not, I hope, nearly as much of an issue when comparing RPGs.

 

[darkbard]

If ability-to-purchase was equal (i.e. everyone could afford a Ferrari) then this is exactly what they'd do if their intent was to sell more Ferraris.

Ferrari, however, can and does take great advantage of the fact that ability-to-purchase is not equal, and thus the appeal in part becomes the cachet and exclusivity of owning one regardless of whether the actual design of the thing is any good at all.

Ability-to-purchase is not, I hope, nearly as much of an issue when comparing RPGs.

No, my point is that all games are not designed to sell as many products as possible through the broadest appeal. Many games (especially what we often term "indie" games) deliberately cater to niche audiences rather than to broad appeal in the same way that Ferrari does.

 

[MGibster]

I'm a little confused here. No matter what setting, lore etc that I use, it's my job as the DM to come up with the Adventure Hooks.

Sure. But we're talking about games with settings designed specifically for PCs to do something in and those designed with no clear focus. Here are some examples of popular games with a built-in focus for PCs.

Shadowrun: Your characters are runners (criminals) in a setting that is the unholy bastard child of Tolkien and Gibson who engage in acts of thefts sabotage, kidnappings, murder (?), and other forms of skullduggery against and on behalf of corporations.

Call of Cthulhu: Your characters are investigators uncovering mysterious that involve the Cthulhu mythos.

Paranoia: You're a troubleshooter for friend Computer. Please assist friend Computer will all tasks it assigns to you. Failure to assist friend Computer is treason.

Now in Call of Cthulhu there's some variation. The default setting is the 1920s but 1890 and modern are also popular. But no matter which era, you know what you're doing in that game.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

* - if my intent in creating said setting or game is to sell it to anyone other than myself, it's obviously in my interests to make it as flexible as possible so as to appeal to the greatest potential market...right?

Only if you intend to make a generic toolkit right from the word go (FATE Core, Genesys, Savage Worlds, Cortex Prime, etc.).

If that isn't what you're doing - if your game comes with a setting attached - then what I've observed of the current design zeitgeist is that people are aiming to make their games as distinctive as possible, focused around a well-defined concept, both in mechanics and in fluff. Rather than trying to make a game in which the players can be anything and do anything, the pathos they're appealing to is "this character and these adventures can only exist in our game." This holds true even with games that use similar mechanical resolution systems - the huge family of PbtA games comes to mind, and is probably the exemplar of this design approach.

This ties into another design philosophy shift:

Having it be by campaign isn't a feature or bug, it's a requirement for a system designed to be run multiple times for the same group.

Having a set hook for a setting can give you a wonderfully tight mesh of setting, theme and rule support for it's premise. They can be fantastic. But for a system explicitly designed to be run again and again it is inherently, unavoidably, too limiting.

Game creators nowadays, especially smaller studios, aren't designing games with the expectation that their game will be the only game that a particular group ever runs, or that said game system will be used to run campaigns over and over again in succession, or for super long periods of time. One shots and super short campaigns are huge these days.

Off the top of my head, I'd guess that designers are anticipating their games being used by an average group maybe for about a year or two at most, before the group moves onto something else, usually of a different genre than what they were playing before. Keeping this in mind, the contemporary designer finds a niche and corners it, and accepts that players who don't fit the niche they're designing for will be better off going elsewhere, and that the industry as a whole will be better off for it. Rising tide lifts all boats.

 

[Argyle King]

I

This reminds me of an article I read by Monte Cook years and years ago about the "default story" of a D&D setting. At that time in 3rd Edition, Cook argued (if I recall correctly) that the default story was:

• Explore a dungeon, fight baddies
• Get loot
• Go back to town and sell loot
• Buy better equipment
• Return to dungeon / go to new dungeon

Cook said that no matter what other bells and whistles a D&D campaign had, the players could expect the rules to allow them to play out that default story- even if that was not the story the campaign was telling.

I feel as though I want to argue against this being true; however, I think it is somewhat true.

It may be a product of linear level advancement. Ultimately, the game expects that I go from 1-20, with each level meaning another +N and cooler loot.

That interacts with lore and worldbuilding in a way which may make hooks difficult to design because breadth of play and (what I would call) horizontal advancement is (to some extent) at odds with the design expectations of the underlying game.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

Someone posted something on Twitter recently, wherein the person argued that D&D originally had a "win state" - i.e., acquiring strongholds and followers - but that people ignored it or treated it as orthogonal to play, in part, due to the higher lethality of 1e/2e D&D, meaning few characters reached at least that point.

I think I found the Twitter thread in question:

Funny, I actually replied to that thread last night asking for some thoughts on whether other games might have this problem of "implied but ignored win state that got carried over to later editions".

 

[Umbran]

Neat. Definitely sounds like Monte Cook. Someone posted something on Twitter recently, wherein the person argued that D&D originally had a "win state" - i.e., acquiring strongholds and followers - but that people ignored it or treated it as orthogonal to play, in part, due to the higher lethality of 1e/2e D&D, meaning few characters reached at least that point.

I would say the greater parts to folks ignoring that win state was that it 1) came theoretically halfway through the game, 2) was orthogonal to the thing that got them to play in the first place - adventuring, 3) the rules for the new game you get to access for "winning" were not solidly implemented.

 

[Jd Smith1]

No, my point is that all games are not designed to sell as many products as possible through the broadest appeal. Many games (especially what we often term "indie" games) deliberately cater to niche audiences rather than to broad appeal in the same way that Ferrari does.

An excellent comparison.

What creativity you see in the RPG business tends to be concentrated in the indie end of the business, where designers actually create new settings and systems, the Ferrari's of the industry, while the larger percentage of designers simply hope to make a quick buck off WOTC coat-tails.