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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riley37" data-source="post: 7424693" data-attributes="member: 6786839">Ah, so it's enough for a pretext, but not enough for deeper satisfaction as a storyteller?Whoah. You went deep. Is Joseph Campbell one of the players at your table? I see a parallel between the tiers, and Maslov's hierarchy of needs, more or less, in your explanation.One of the better sources of plausibility, in my experience, is the team sponsor. Charlie's Angels don't have to stumble across every story prompt; the A-plots can come directly from Charlie, while the B-plots emerge from backgrounds, bonds, flaws, etc. The Ghostbusters don't have a consistent sponsor, but their phone line will point them at trouble and they might not know which jobs will go beyond the routine. Gilligan's Island also doesn't have an external sponsor, but the PCs have, at the start of every session, an overall interest in changing their situation, so they'll grasp at whatever straw floats along. (Not that Gilligan's Island is always the paragon of plausible heroics.) Mixed in with "here's the job parameters" can be stories with larger stakes; perhaps the sponsor merely asks them to recover a briefcase, but in the process, the PCs learn what's inside the briefcase, and it's so important that they're not willing to look the other way. In "Shadowrun", it is common for PCs to have mercenary motives, and *also* have other motives. "Firefly" (the TV show) is a story about mercenary opportunists and missions with complications, plus stumbling into other stories along the way. Just as long as they don't ALL play Jayne Cobb.I am working on a campaign in which the PCs start as a hired team, working for a library, which sends them whenever a particularly valuable or magical book doesn't come back. As with the Jedi Archives and their records about the planet Kamino, sometimes who has what information, will involve higher stakes than *just* turning in a recovered book and calling it a completed mission.</blockquote>

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