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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9560769" data-attributes="member: 29398">With much of this, I actually agree.  That said, IME by far the biggest overall motivator for adventuring is Moar Wealth; sometimes just to have it and watch it accumulate and other times to do something useful with it.  What this means is that as DM often all I have to do is dangle some loot - or the potential of some loot - in front of them and away they go. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />.Corollary motivators can include a sense of responsibility (for some characters), defense of themselves or of people/places they care about, curiosity and-or research, and similar.  In a very few specific cases the pursuit of fame and-or glory is a motivator, but this only usually happens if-when a player has long-term political or monarchic plans for a character (quite rare) and is trying to use its adventuring career to lay the groundwork for such.As far as I reasonably can I try to make the bolded untrue.  Yes, combat is highly abstracted and hit points even more so; these are unfortunate but necessary evils in order to make the game playable.  But where I can, I have a (fantasy-)physics-based underpinning even for things like magic, fantastic creatures, and so on.First off, I'm not all that concerned about breaking these sort of genre conventions, in that I want a flatter power curve anyway such that a "low-level" creature remains a potential threat for longer while at the same time low-level PCs have a slight chance (as opposed to no chance whatsoever) of pulling off an upset victory over something way above their pay grade.Second, if a situation would be approached with caution in reality then I'd also like it - at least to some degree - to be approached that way in the fiction, if only because that's what the characters would do.I can't model the world 100% true but I can always describe it better and stand ready to answer whatever questions the players might have.  That said, if there's a hidden hazard and they don't take precautions I don't see it as my job to tell them about it; and even if they do take precautions there's always a chance those precautions won't be good enough due to the luck of the dice.Yes it was.  Once on the move, for a short time those Ents became the most powerful army in the world; the self-preserving thing for the Hobbits to do was to stay with said army and let that army protect them.Indeed, and that's down to those two having - and sometimes displaying - less than stellar Wisdom.  They both swore alliegiances to monarchs who then called their promises in, and found themselves in the field whether they wanted to be there or not (though in Merry's case he did want to be there - high courage, low Wisdom).I'll concede this one: Bilbo's courage outweighed his self-preservation instinct on numerous occasions.After they stopped in Rivendell they were on something of a time crunch; and their lack of info-gathering about Mirkwood did cause them lots of headaches.</blockquote>

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