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Message: <blockquote data-quote="swrushing" data-source="post: 1666038" data-attributes="member: 14140"></blockquote>I think the best suggestion in general is to stop spending so much time designing "interesting encounters" and spend more designing "personal encounters." You were relying on a sense of what, boredom?, to drive the PCs into the dangerous life-n-death encounter. Most people when they spot a danger they can avoid, WILL do so.Now, make this personal.the night before...Introduce the PCs to the family of halflings who live down by the lake, who offered them food and a warm dry place to rest on their trek, and who listened wide-eyed and in awe as the heroes recounted their stories, have little Jenna give one of the PCs a drawing of them sitting by the fire so that "when its all cold and you are camping outside you can look at this and remember the warm night you spent with us."Then have them move on the next day, spot the tracks and realize this is a dangerous beast who is expanding his hunting ground for the winter... whose hunting may well range into jenna's family's comfy home... or to the stream where they go and get their water.then see if they pass up the danger and just move on.Do they have any reason to trust the patrol is not going to be a problem? Have you SHOWN THEM in the past these patrols being helpful good guys? Have they, for instance, seen a patroll helping a family whose wagon has gotten mired off road or had the patrols chatting with others about dangers? Have they seen little caution signs posted by the patrols at rest stops about the dangers?if they had seen, had been shown by you before now, that the patrols can be helpful or at least a nice break from the drudgery of travel, would they have hid?What did they have in town that they should have second thoughts about leaving? What made leaving town a "tough choice?" What made staying vs leaving "personal issue"?Well, if they need to keep on their current travel, then obviously they are doing something. Unless they are taksed with policing the streets, why should they stop.Again, make it personal. If the dead people in the caravan were known to them, if say they had hitched on with this caravan as guards or just travelling companions a couple times before, if they knew them, if they flirted with the wagon master's daughter, and maybe even had stood together against raiders once... they would likely have felt more of a desire to hunt down the brigands.You mention how you spent time to make the treasure the bandits had (which the PCs could not know of) "special". if instead you had spent time to make the dead people special to the PCs (after all, they are the trigger to get the PCs to go), you might have gotten a different reaction.As time has gone on and gotten shorter, much like my hair!, i have found i need to focus more in on what matters more. I find having the story be personal, having the players WANT to follow up not because "its what we are here for" or "well they got loot" but because "i want to do this", is far more rewarding for me and them.So i wont expect them to just go "hey, lets follow the monster tracks to room 1" but i sure will expect them to "hey, we better get this thing or at least move it out of the area before it gets to jenna and dali."Don't worry as much about making an adventure, as making something they will be interested in in character.I spend most of my time with the ongoing and interrelatiosn that tie events and decisions to the PCs. i don't care if the bandits have an interesting bauble as much as i care whether going after the bandits will be something the PCs want to do, need to do, wont sleep until they do.if the PCs have strong desire to CHOOSE to pursue the bandits, then catching the bandits and getting revenge/justice becomes "the neato bauble" you were hoping would make them go "oh cool!"So my advice would be to start off with "what will motivate character a" and do lists for each of them. Then start building encounters to make them occur. The best will be ones which take time, like several good caravan runs leading up to an eventual "oh my god, they killed louis" scenario start. heck, have the wagon master's daughter not killed by taken off with the bandits.it looks like too much of your effort is spent on the "once the party is hooked" side and not enough on the "we get the party hooked by..."make it personal![/QUOTE]

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