Do you prefer your character to be connected or unconnected to the adventure hook?

I love to have my characters hooked into an adventure, both as a player and as a DM.

Here's what I do as a DM:

When the characters are ready to approach a new place / adventure / dungeon, I write down what motivates each character. What are their goals, or what do they like to do to express themselves as characters? Here's what I would put for my current campaign:

Bard: son taken by evil guards long ago, wants to know more about powerful hag, restoring religion of her people...
Barbarian: hunting & fighting powerful foes
Warlock: killing undead, finding loot
Cleric: defeating the BBEG

Just last session they arrived in a new town outside a new dungeon. I added or adjusted NPCs, monsters, and so on so that it matched the characters' motivations, and still led them towards the dungeon:

Bard: recognizes the man who took her son, finds out her (now grown) son might be in the swamp dungeon!
Barbarian: rival hunters want to hunt an Alpha Grick in the dungeon
Warlock: the entrance to the dungeon is through a cursed and haunted graveyard
Cleric: the BBEG of the dungeon, a powerful hag, hates the campaign's BBEG and might know her secrets!

Now there are tons of things for the characters to do and interact with that match their motivations and "hook" them into the adventure.

And if a player doesn't show up, or they don't interact with the right NPC, there are tons of hooks there for them to wander into!

hawkeyefan said:

Okay, gotcha. I have done the same, and sometimes I still do. I let the character kind of emerge through play and see how it goes rather than committing to a specific idea ahead of time. But other times, I do have a specific idea ahead of time, and I go into the game with that in mind. It will still change or shift a bit depending on how things go in play. I usually try to have some kind of goal in mind, either an initial goal or a long term or both, and perhaps some kind of area of focus for the character.

Do you find you still have some variety among your characters? Or do you rely on class and race to kind of differentiate one from the other?

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Sure, I don't play them all the same, alignment, race, class, all impact that and of course variation within that. I guess for me the fun of D&D is the adventure itself, I like the locals, the dungeons, delving into some ancient lost temple, the exploration. Making up a deep PC is secondary to that. I suppose its the same in how I like the fantastic fiction, I'm much more into plot and ideas than into necessarily characterizations. A sci-fi novel with a great plot and cool ideas being explored is much more interesting to me than one that is focuses on snappy dialog.

Flexor the Mighty! said:

A sci-fi novel with a great plot and cool ideas being explored...

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I betcha, if one digs into "cool ideas" I expect that what looks like someone with a different playstyle focus can turn into someone with a different thought on what constitutes a "cool idea".