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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6182933" data-attributes="member: 42582">The approach I took at the start of my 4e game was a bit different from what S'mon suggests here, but not completely different. I told each player that their PC (i) must have a loyalty to something/someone, and (ii) must have a reason to be ready to fight goblins.The point of (i) was to get them focusing on locating their PCs within the 4e gameworld, and to tell me about that. The point of (ii) was to get them in the right sort of frame for the first adventure I was planning to run (a 4e adaptation of the B/X module Night's Dark Terror). What I found was that this was (mostly) enough to generate initial momentum, and then subsequent momentum was somewhat self-generating - I would toss in things based on their loyalties, or something that had come out in play based on their dealings with the goblins, and they would respond to that, and the game would build its own direction and momentum. (The reason I say "mostly" is because on a couple of occasions - say once every 10 or so sessions, especially earlier in the campaign - I had to deliberately think about how to kick-start things after a bit of a lull in the drama, and so would go back to a core PC loyalty, or something that had come up earlier in the campaign, like an old villain, and build that into a new encounter that would grab the players.)What I see as a difference between my (ii) and S'mon's default motivation is that it is much more local to a particular adventure, so it kicks things off while leaving development open-ended. But I agree that there should be choices in play. My emphasis is less on "procedural" choices (do we take the left door or the right door) and more on "dramatic/thematic" choices (do we help this person or that person), and I use the stuff about loyalties, plus developments that have come out of it in play, to shape those dramatic choices. I tend to find that, provided I've correctly worked out what the players care about (and getting them to state that loyalty helped early on) then generally they will respond to those dramatic choices themselves without me need to do anything extra to encourage them.</blockquote>

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