I have a problem.... [DMing]

[Ydars]

If you look carefully at what your player is saying, he is basically telling you that you need small, bite-sized mini-plots that get resolved in two sessions rather than an over-arching 3 year campaign where the PCs don't actually achieve anything for months.

This is purely a structural issue with your DMing; you are getting so carried away with the big stuff you are forgetting the small episodic micro-story.

Try this; take an item that the PCs buy every week and add something to the item (say they buy an oil-skin; when the PCs use the oliskin, they find it has a note, map or other item hidden in the bottom).

Then watch the PCs stratch their heads wondering what it is and who put it there. Voila; you have a microstory. Just fill in the blanks and you can direct the PCs to your next adventure site (where your over-arching plot may be advanced) or just a time-out dungeon bash to let the players feel they have achieved something.

Remember; players like closure. They like to feel they have finished/achieved something. Create small stories, hang them for a session or two and if they don't bite, have them see the consequences (someone else finds the gold, rescues the slaves, etc). Just END the microstory. Players like tying up loose ends of small stories.

 

[Festivus]

One of the things I am trying with my online 4E campaign is Johnn Four's Five Room Dungeon model.

http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=372

Only difference is that it will be a 5 encounter dungeon for 4E, so some of the "rooms" could be skill challenges.

While I will still have the overarching storyline, they will be stitched together with these mini adventures, each leaving them with a feeling of completed something by the end of every other session (our sessions are only 3 hours per week).

 

[Treebore]

I find that by just making the NPC's "come alive" by giving them their own motivations (often very minor) and personality it helps my players immerse.

One that seems to work most often is the bakery shop. Everyone loves something that is fresh baked. So they go there and I have a plump motherly looking type behind the counter, the "beer gut" husband in back switching out the current pies with the "need to be baked" pies. I also describe the great smells of cherries, cinnamon, all spice, apples, etc...

I'll then tell them about the 8 year old boy sweeping the floor, the older kids rolling out dough and placing them into the pie tins in the back, etc...

I tell them how the "mother" has a warm welcoming voice as she says, "Hello, what may we make for you today?"

The players typically ask what they offer. As she goes through the list I tell my players that the little boy sweeping the floor pipes up in a Tiny Tim like voice saying, " I love my mums apple pie! She puts lots of cinnamon in it!"

Then I have one of the kids doing the dough, usually a sister, say something like, "You like so much cinnamon Timmy that anyone else would gag on how much mum puts in it for you!"

Etc...

Then, once I got comfortable with creating this scene and developing the characters it became easier for me to do it with other aspects of the game. Which helped my players become immersed.

Maybe that si what your player is looking for.

Many of my players will go back to a specific vendor, even if they are days/weeks away, just because they liked them.

Which I feed when they return.

"I would normally charge 25 gold for this sword, but since your a good customer and I like you and all, I can afford to cut you some slack and only charge you 21 gold for it."

Believe me, a lot of players tend to really like this stuff. Plus you can use these people to really immerse your players.

Like one time I had a farm family that had an great apple and peach orchard get kidnapped by slavers. The slavers burned the home which got out of control and burned the nearby barn and even managed to spread to nearby orchard trees.

The players became very focused, even intense. Blood was wanted! The players were like a guided missile! Since they showed no mercy no prisoners were taken. So as the family was tearfully thanking them for being such great friends for saving them etc... I had the father tell the party how they heard the slavers talking and...

So you can draw in/immerse your players and still give them plot hooks. Plus when I introduce them this way they have never been ignored. Mess with good friends of an adventurer you may as well count your self dead.

 

[kigmatzomat]

So, I've been mulling and thinking and maybe what I need to do is start off small; organic. Get my players for make some level 1s and go "play in the dirt" a bit around a small town, and not even worry about an over-arching plots.

You just described my last campaign and, like you, I did it on purpose. I'd tried a major plot and managed to wind up with a railroad-y fiasco. I salvaged the campaign to some extent but it definitely left me aware of my own weaknesses as a DM.

So my next campaign started in a thorp, where an extended adventurering party (maybe 4th level) settled down a couple of decades back and their kids are now getting the bug. Their first real adventure was to make it to the nearest town on the other side of the mountain. Wild dogs, a storm, with flash floods and mudslides along with general mountain travel provided their 1st level worth of challenges.

I had an overarching plot but it was ...vague. Maybe half a typed page with a couple of key events listed and the player actions that would trigger them. That was the key; the players had to do something that would cause the event sequence.

I leaned heavily on the AEG "Adventure" series of mini-modules at the beginning so I didn't need to worry about wasting prep. It took minimal effort to work them into my setting and it gave me a working rogue's gallery. One of which, Tamarat Once Elven, became a recurring villain and another, Kuroshin, wound up as a deity.

The trick is to not worry about hitting your plot points. Matter of fact, I came to relish the times the players missed them. Fail to pursue the BBEG to the Temple of Dread Ha'amm? 'Kay. Six game-months later and a horde of fiendish pot bellied pigs demolishes the countryside. Okay, it wasn't that cartoony but the idea was if the PCs didn't completely finish stuff, they knew it would eventually show up again.

And sometimes those fiendish pigs would appear when the heroes were already occupied elsewhere. Nothing like coming home and finding the entire town has been raised by the Unkosher. It was a great way to winnow out those followers from Leadership or that magic-item making cohort. You turn their village into a hell-sty and they'll start keeping a list of their enemies and unresolved plots.

Edit:
I just remembered something else: I stole heavy from the Babylon 5/Buffy approach for designing plots. In those shows you have a per episode arc that represents the "adventure" as well as arcs that cover the entire season. Many times you have several layers of arcs (episode, minor season arc, major season arc, multi-season arc). Around 25% of the episodes are stand-alone, but with some minor tidbits that advance the major arc a tick. Roughly 25% are the minor season arcs, with the remainder either directly or indirectly tied to the major arc. Some minor season arcs and most major season arcs contribute to the multi-season arc.

I generally had each "season" last a game year, with my game ultimately lasting about 7 game years. For the first half of the "season" or so, the players probably won't be able to tell what the season arc is. It wasn't until the second or third season that they realized what the over all campaign plot was.

And by then my campaign plot was tailored to their play style, characters, and the NPCs they bonded with. I couldn't get them to stop playing the game unless I threatened them with a firearm.

 

[taliesin15]

You've already got some great suggestions here like the use of flowcharts, fleshing out NPCs, and so on...one thing you'll want to try is to have very alternative sorts of scenarios, like once you have a cast of NPCs fleshed out, create a scenario where the clues are kind of enigmatic, and it becomes obvious that the PCs have to interact with a number of NPCs that don't amount to standard swords and sorcery and thievery.
Another idea is to lay down clues in innocent seeming ways--only the observant player might notice how odd it is that there are merchants suddenly selling parrots in the outdoor market, and the milieu is a cold or temperate (not tropical) one.
I've been on both sides of this, and as a player, I've had situations where the adventures seemed very static--I had to push the DM in subtle ways...

 

[Rel]

If I'm understanding the problem correctly, it sounds to me like you just need to dangle more plot threads, be a bit flexible, and don't plan too far in advance.

The last campaign I ran started with no "big grand plot" whatsoever. I had an idea for the setting (a sort of fantasy Pirates of the Caribbean) and how to get the PC's together (all pressed into service aboard the same ship) and started things off. Pretty soon afterwards I did get a very loose idea for the big, grand plot but nothing extremely concrete. More just a list of possible clues that the PC's could pick up on as to what was going on.

So they set off to the port of Tortuga (my version of it anyway) where a whole lot of stuff was going on:

The BBEG was plotting away in his BBE-Tower from whence he'd establish rule over the city...

And he was also fighting off a basement full of Ratmen who had tunneled in there to try and get at the Warpstone he was stocking up for his Evil Plot...

And he was feeding the defeated Ratmen to his Army of Ghouls that he was slowly putting aside for a rainy day...

And was also maintaining a small group of skeletons to keep people away from the Old Abandoned Graveyard that was the secret back entrance to his lair.

Note: Those four plotlines are all connected to the BBE-Plot although none of that is obvious to the PC's at first glance. They instead might get these obscure references to "trouble in the old graveyard!" or "evil things lurking in the sewers!" and go to check things out. Any of these that they picked up would tie them into the main plotline in some fashion only they wouldn't know that's what they were doing. But that's not ALL that was afoot in Tortuga...

Meanwhile there was a famous privateer captain using Tortuga as a base from which to raid enemy shipping.

There was a dockside gang that was engaged in a gang-war with another gang...

Who were a group of Slavers who were kidnapping drunks out of the basement of a local bar...

Where there was a spy operating for the nation the PC's home country was at war with...

Who was trying to encourage a peasant rebellion led by a local zealot.


My point here is that I designed a place where you couldn't walk ten feet without tripping over about three plotlines, many of which were tied to others. And only a few of those were tied to the main plotline. It was entirely possible that the PC's could latch onto some of this other stuff and end up ignoring what I'd come to thing of as the "big grand plot". And it was fine with me if that happened. Because I wasn't planning for anything that they hadn't sunk their teeth into.

That lesson, more than any other, was one that I took to heart for that campaign. See, I'd given these yahoos a SHIP. They could sail away in literally any new direction they felt like at any given time, often for the most capricious seeming reasons. And it reinforced something that I already knew but seems germaine to your situation: The game should really be about whatever interests the PC's the most at any given time. So don't get too heavily invested in any one thing until the PC's have flat out said, "We are going to put an end to this Evil Plot if it's the last thing we do!" (And even then, I try to take that with a grain of salt.)

One wonderful tool that we the GM's have at our disposal is the ability to rewrite history. Nothing is "written" until the PC's have absolute proof of it. And many, many times events will unfold such that plot linkages will suddenly seem to be there that you had never actually planned for. Sometimes all you have to do is listen to the players talk at the table when there's a lull in the action:

"It all fits together now! The Sorceress suckered us into going after the Dragon so that we'd be gone from town while the Goblins sacked it! I'll bet she's been in cahoots with the Lich King the whole time!!"

So what you do is steal that idea because you maybe haven't established anything that suggests that it isn't true. Suddenly you look like an evil genius! (Much of my considerable reputation as a RBDM is based on exactly this kind of stuff)

So again, what I'm saying is not that you entirely ditch the big, grand plot. You are good at that part so you want to keep it. What I'm saying is to keep a looser grip on the reins. Don't plan it out too far in advance. Throw TONS of plot hooks at them. Sometimes another, better big, grand plot will emerge. Sometimes stuff that had nothing to do with it to begin with will suddenly fall into place. And sometimes the players will just go off on a side adventure that really does have nothing to do with any grand design but was fun and interesting for them anyway.

If you do it right it'll all be great fun anyway.

 

[Paka]

One thing you might want to consider is how you set up your campaign.

Rather than set up a plot with a beginning, middle and an end, I like to set up situations, as in something is going on and the players have to deal with it. It can be beneficial to have them make up their characters specifically to deal with the situation at hand.

For example:

Orcus is trying to solidify his hold on this realm and making it his main holding on the prime material plane, go make PC's who are out to deal with this. He got a foothold here due to a brutal plague that is taking its toll on the lands.

When players are trying to deal with a problem that they have made characters specifically to deal with and are invested in, rather than find their way into your plot, things flow a little bit more organically.

Hope that helps. Good luck.

 

[roguerouge]

Ask yourself: what plot threads are not about advancing conflict, but are about the characters becoming happy. Answer questions like: Where's the funny? Where's the food? Where's the friendships? Where's the huge tracks of land? Where's the strong, sweaty and shirtless men? Where's the barn dance at the end of the adventure? Where's the joy of honest labor?

Set plot hooks to accomplish such "quality of life" missions. Set plots that make the characters better friends.