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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1362767" data-attributes="member: 99">Good grief, man.  It's the FIRST adventure he is running for a player playing for the FIRST time.  He is permitted to give certain aspects of the game short shrift while he works on basics.Moreover, there is no good reason in the world why the PC wouldn't want to embark upon this quest.  His fellow monks are missing!  People who he's spent the past several years in relative solitude with.  They are his family!  Of course he's going to go looking for them.  The GM here has undoubtedly worked with the player on making his character and I'll assume he knows more about what motivates this PC than we do.  There is NO NEED for the plot to be more open than this at the moment.While we're slingin' the platitudes from our high perch atop the Mountain of Wisdom, here's one:I posit that a GM who lets a newbie player make his character and then says, "What do you want to do?" will, in a large number of cases, reduce the chance that a player will want to play the game again.Think about it.  You've just created your very first character, a Monk.  You've spent the hours or days previous to this poring over the PHB.  How will you assign your stats, what skills did you buy, what feats did you take, what equipment did you spend your paltry sum of gold on, what is your character's name going to be?  Nothing but choices.  Now you're finally ready to play for the very first time.  You sit down at the table, look at the GM and he says..."What do you want to do?"What do I want to do?!  I want to play my character!  I want to go somewhere and do the stuff he's good at kick some butt and get some treasure to replace the life savings that I just spent on rope and 10' poles!  I want to find a dungeon and fight a dragon!  Isn't that what this game is supposed to be about?!I believe that the notion that offering a clear path to a starting player will reduce their fun is complete bunk.  Yes the game is more open ended than a computer game and that is a great thing about it.  Yes there should be points where there are choices about where the PC can go and what parts of the world he can explore.  But that sort of stuff can be worked out later when this guy is not putting together his VERY FIRST ADVENTURE.When he is good at whipping up good, balanced encounters on the fly then he can run a more open, free form game.  Right now he's trying to get the hang of running the game.  He's put together a pretty solid series of encounters tied together with a darn good plotline that has potential for expansion.  All he needs now is to get the PC to the adventure and let the fun begin.  The faster that happens the better as far as I'm concerned.</blockquote>

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