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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 5296382" data-attributes="member: 463">Well, I think it may well be worth establishing in advance that the PCS are adventurers in a world of monsters and magic, and are thus expected to proactively seek adventure.  When I started with fantasy gaming around 1983-1984, it still told me this on the back (or front) of all the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and later RPG products I purchased.Now, the adventure might well start at the entrance to the dungeon, as in most gamebooks and the advice in eg Moldvay Basic D&D.  But in the latter case this was understood as a learning tool, and what the PCs then did was left up to them, with the understanding that the PCs were adventurers!  Obviously the sane individual would then take a look at the Black Pit, turn around and go back to the village - that's how my wife plays Call of Cthulu, drives me nuts! <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=":)" />  - but the PCs are not sane, they're adventurers!I do think that the shift in published adventures to very linear play resulted in a shift in player expectations towards "wait for the railroad".  And published 4e WoTC modules are the absolute nadir of this, many are just a linear series of fights.  If you think the DM will freak out if you do something unexpected, then you learn to be passive and wait for the rails to appear.  4e's encounter-based design can be very bad this way, if the DM has put a lot of work into encounters he may want to ensure they're all used, and WoTC module writers certainly seem to think that way.  Anyway, yes, there is a social contract issue.  If you're running a "sandbox" game, tell the players and ensure they're aware of their responsibility to be proactive and seek adventures of their choice.  If you're running an Adventure Path, make sure the players know that and that they have the responsibility to engage with the adventures on the Path (of course they can request a deviation or even negotiate an abandonment of the Path, if it sucks).</blockquote>

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