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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6550491" data-attributes="member: 4937">By a plot hook, I mean the DM introducing something to the setting which is meant to inform the player of some potential larger challenge or conflict or point of interest that they can investigate.  A scene which is self-contained and offers up a challenge or conflict that can be resolved within that scene is not a plot hook.  Agreed; not a plot hook.  I don't want to get distracted critiquing styles of DMs that are happy with their campaign, so I'm going to try to avoid responding to your examples in detail.  Instead, I'll just talk about why you'd use the technique of writing plot hooks in the first place.The purpose of plot hooks is to avoid the problem of the PC's being lost in the sandbox and unable to figure out what will be interesting an engaging.  One potential problem that a DM can have in his style is being overly linear, so that player's have no real choice of what to do.  In such a campaign, you can think of this as "Every scene is a plot hook, and in the DM's mind each scene has one and only one plot hook."  Players are expected to bite every plot hook that is offered, and players that grab onto the "wrong" hook must be forcefully put back on the "right" path regardless of how engaged they are.  This is bad railroading and much is written about it.  But the opposite tendency of never offering plot hooks while less common is at least as bad.  This is bad sandboxing.  The DM is convinced that his main job is to offer up a high verisimilitude high fidelity world.  In such a world, the only things that happen to players are the sort of things that are uncoincidental and normal.  Nothing unusual happens to the PC's beyond what would be expected to happen to any ordinary person living in the setting doing the things they are doing.  If adventure is to be had, the players must seek it out themselves, and adventures may in fact be out there, but naturally what they'll realistically most often encounter is more mundane and ordinary affairs.  Almost invariably, this is coupled with a DM that strongly believes in their own powers of improvisation and whose "high fidelity" world is actually always made up on the spot and so rarely has real high fidelity because the things that haven't been made up in those vague and empty spaces never have artifacts that spill out of those spaces.  It's the equivalent of procedurally generating a dungeon one room at a time, so that never can you hear or smell what's going on in a room two rooms over, nor does the inhabitant of the room two rooms over ever come to investigate the noise the PC's are making, nor does any room ever have the artifacts of prior visits by that as yet unconcieved inhabitant.  Each room may be as detailed as you like, but this isn't a high fidelity world.  The actual result of this bad sandboxing is what I call a "rowboat world", in that the typical state of the players is that they are put down in the middle of an empty ocean in a rowboat without a map and told to make their own fun.  It's the opposite problem of a railroad.  Instead of having too few choices to make, the players are given too many potential choices to make and no information that let's them properly select between them.  In the DM's mind there may be all sorts of adventures to be had "out there" in specific places if the players do the right things, and they might even make a few notes ("the is a civil war being fought by supporters of two princely heirs in Overhilldale") and some sketch of a map (if your lucky), but alas they made their bearing 302.7 degrees and so missed the Isle of Loot and Adventure by 15 miles.   Games like this can eventually develop into interesting high fidelity settings, but only after the players engage in a lot of exploration and the act of creation in detail is actually carried out.  So the game is actually waiting on the DM to do the detailing and setting creation that create the plot hooks the PC's will eventually bite, and the game actually gets started - if ever - in relative earnest only after some period of world building as play passes.   Detailing out a setting and brain storming ahead of time and crafting plot hooks to offer to the players will avoid this problem.</blockquote>

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