Plot Hook Problems?

[Incendax]

I'm having a horrible chain reaction in my group where I put a talking portrait in front of the players and they just stuffed it into their bag of holding the moment it started talking to them. To make up for that I set up an interesting plot piece where a naga was imprisoned by narcotic mushrooms, and the party opted to avoid the danger the mushrooms represented instead of interrogating the naga for information. To make up for that I had the party encounter a group of foes that were going to sacrifice the previous naga whom the party defeated. They recovered ancient documents written in a foreign language (and reminded the group that the wizard had comprehend languages) but even days after getting the papers they still never bothered to use the ritual on them. When they tried to leave the location of the plot I even heinously railroaded them with a huge and obviously impossible to beat monster to try and scare them back to the plot point. Instead they spent a half hour coming up with a way to escape the monster.

So I said screw it and let them escape. The party proceeded to muck around and do a few other things, but at the end of the game half the group told me they felt like there really wasn't much of a plot. I explained to them all the ways they had blatantly avoided any plot, and they countered by saying that I should have used more relevant plot hooks.

So, at what point does it cease to become the responsibility of the storyteller to introduce new plot hooks and it becomes the responsibility of the players to bite at the existing plot hooks?

 

[fba827]

joint effort but, really, at the end of the day, you (as the DM) just got to keep trying. This could be in the form of a meta conversation or via in-game methods.

As an aside (and I don't know how it actually came across, so I'm not saying you did or didn't do this) but don't confront the players with the waysthat they missed things. You'll just provoke defensive responses depending on the personalities of the players involved. You might be better off more along the lines of "I was trying X, Y, and Z. But it didn't seem to work well. I'll have to try it a different way next time ...", it's less confrontational (and might make them feel guilty in the process if you say it with enough sad face and defeated tones ).

 

[Chzbro]

So, at what point does it cease to become the responsibility of the storyteller to introduce new plot hooks and it becomes the responsibility of the players to bite at the existing plot hooks?

I realize that this response won't be popular with everyone, but I would say the answer to that question is: Never.

(Of course, that assumes the players aren't willfully and actively trying to ignore your plot hooks just to get your goat, but it doesn't sound like that's the case here.)

Some DMs love to be subtle and give the players lots of freedom. They never want to railroad and might even think of anyone who would stoop to railroading with disdain. That's all well and good, but if that's the case you must always, always, be willing to scrap your "plans" and wing it if the players don't cooperate.

Personally, I'm not willing to do this because I don't improvise that well or that quickly. So I will try to give the illusion of choice with my plot hooks. If, for example, the PCs hadn't investigated the mysterious papers, I'd have had some bad guys come and demand those papers or the words start to smolder with arcane fire inside the bag or maybe I'd have had the character holding the papers have some sort of fit where he began babbling the words from them in that language. Whatever. Just keep bringing the attention of the characters back to the device you've created.

Many DMs who claim they never railroad are actually just very lucky to have players who always pick up on/go along with their plot hooks. Bully for them, but most of us don't have that luxury.

Here's the thing: You can't be rigid in your thinking with your plot hooks. You must ask yourself, "What happens if they don't translate this thing?" You, as the DM, can't allow yourself not to know the answer to that...and the answer probably shouldn't be "nothing."

Having said that, it's crazy to me that your group didn't listen to a talking painting or bite on mysterious papers in a mysterious language. Would it have totally offended your sensibilities to remind the player he had the Comprehend Languages ritual? I can see that being a less than ideal solution, but between that and a session where neither the DM nor the players had a great time, I'll take the clumsy deus ex machina.

Speaking only for myself.

 

[OnlineDM]

It might be in how you present things to the players afterward. When they say, "We didn't know what was going on; there was no plot," you could phrase your response as, "Ah, but had you considered talking to the portrait? That could provide some clues." Or, "The imprisoned naga might have been interesting to talk to if you had fought through the mushrooms."

In other words, point out the choices that they made and how things could have gone differently, thus encouraging them to LOOK for these hooks in the future. I'm assuming here that they just missed the hooks rather than seeing them and deciding that they weren't interested in them.

My players and I will often chat about the session and alternate paths they could have taken when we're doing our post-game cleanup. "What would have happened if we had decided to just assault the front gate rather than searching around until we found the hidden entrance?" "Well, as you expected, the gate was guarded..."

Phrase these post-game conversations as, "Here are some alternate paths you could have taken," rather than, "You guys kept doing the wrong thing!" and it might help them to start looking for plot hooks, now that they understand the form that your hooks tend to take.

Don't give up on them - you should keep dangling plot hooks. It's now just a question of teaching your players how to recognize them.

That's my two cents worth.

 

[KidSnide]

Well, it looks like you don't have a match between the types of hooks you're trying to dangle and the motivations of your PCs. My preference is to get the players to create characters who will be interested in the type of game I want to run. If you don't do that, you're going to have to run the type of game that your PCs will be interested in.

That suggests one of two choices. Either (a) you need to ask your players what their characters are looking for and write your plot around that, or (b) you need to create a plot that's sufficiently compelling that they won't ignore it. If you go down the (a) route, just take your current plot/villain ideas and give them a scheme which connects to what your PCs are going after. If you go down the (b) route, then you need to cut back on take-it-or-leave-it plot hooks and replace it with direct threats to something the PC's care about (relatives and home villages work well if you don't have a more clever idea).

-KS

 

[Piratecat]

Any time there's a clue, I always give three different ways to find it out. Saves time.

I'm also not opposed to "floating encounters," where if the PCs avoid one cool fight, I later rework it into the game elsewhere. As you can tell, I'm a lousy sandbox DM!

 

[NJC207]

Player's perspective

I would like to point out that (from a player's perspective) there was only one problem with the plot hooks. (I was a part of the game in question.) The DM asked us to create, not heros, but villins. He then asked for our motivations towards evil and our connections to the group (so we didn't stab each other in our sleep). The primary goals of our group were: Money. Murder. Kidnapping Dragonborn. With that in mind, we took a job that, through a series of events and some magic, landed us in the far north, literally freezing to death far from civilization.

That robbed us of every character hook we had. At that point, we had one goal: survive long enough to make it back down south to civilization, so we can take another job and continue with life.

The first plot hook we bypassed was a talking portrait. Having just been teleported to the ends of the earth by magic items against our will, we were not wanting to let it talk.

When we made it to the temple of the naga, the players, out of character, told the DM that we had no motivation to go inside, but we would SIMPLY BECAUSE HE WANTED US TO. We shamelessly metagamed to keep the plot rolling.

Once inside the underground temple, we find the prisoner who begs for help (to bad we are villins, not heros) and the NPC fails a bluff check to lie about the treasure in the cavern. We kill a group of nagas only to discover that their version of "money" are worthless peices of ceramic. So we leave.

We fight even more naga, and then, have just decided to stay and investigate now that the threat is gone, when the earth begins to shake. Since we are underground in an earthquake, we of course leave immediately.

Outside waits a purple worm. We are preparing to kill it when an npc tells us that it is unkillable. So we run away. (You have to understand, NOT running from impossible fights has been a problem with our group in the past.) We manage to escape, and, inadvertently, escape from the entire plot as we do so. We make it back down south, and the game ended due to no further DM plot.

So, that's it from our perspective.

 

[Rune]

I'm having a horrible chain reaction in my group where I put a talking portrait in front of the players and they just stuffed it into their bag of holding the moment it started talking to them. To make up for that I set up an interesting plot piece where a naga was imprisoned by narcotic mushrooms, and the party opted to avoid the danger the mushrooms represented instead of interrogating the naga for information. To make up for that I had the party encounter a group of foes that were going to sacrifice the previous naga whom the party defeated. They recovered ancient documents written in a foreign language (and reminded the group that the wizard had comprehend languages) but even days after getting the papers they still never bothered to use the ritual on them

I feel your pain to some extent. Sometimes, early in a campaign, it can be difficult to get the PCs to bite. Two suggestions should help.

First, more hooks. Lots of them. Keep track of them, even the ones they don't bite on, because...second, consequences. Whenever you need a new hook, if you have no idea for one, off hand, go back to an old hook and look at what consequences may have come to pass as a result of the PCs failure to bite and how they might now be relevant. This will help save you effort in the long run, and help establish a sense of depth to your campaign.

Later, through the PC's own (mis)adventures, they will likely create their own hooks more often than not, but you should still occasionally (or often) pull up something old to haunt them.

When they tried to leave the location of the plot I even heinously railroaded them with a huge and obviously impossible to beat monster to try and scare them back to the plot point. Instead they spent a half hour coming up with a way to escape the monster.

Well, no wonder. All you did was provide motivation not to do what you wanted them to do. If you want them to have fun with the game you have prepped, don't shut off their options and don't get frustrated; fold their actions into the game.

So I said screw it and let them escape.

Or, at least, they think they did.

The party proceeded to muck around and do a few other things, but at the end of the game half the group told me they felt like there really wasn't much of a plot. I explained to them all the ways they had blatantly avoided any plot, and they countered by saying that I should have used more relevant plot hooks.

Again, save them for later and give them a chance to become relevant. In the meantime, listen to the players table-talk while you're pretending to do DM stuff behind the screen and figure out what their motivations are. Take notes. Feed them more hooks. Tasty, tasty hooks.

So, at what point does it cease to become the responsibility of the storyteller to introduce new plot hooks and it becomes the responsibility of the players to bite at the existing plot hooks?

Creating hooks is not a responsibility; it is the way to integrate the PCs (and players) into the setting (your character) that you are playing. If your setting is interesting, allow the hooks to communicate it to the players.

It is not the players' responsibility to bite just for the sake of following the DM's story. It is, after all, their story to tell, as well.

 

[Maccwar]

Reminds me of an adventure I ran where I expected to be able to role play a captured bandit through several encounters in the second half of an adventure. Instead the party tied him up and gagged him leaving me with a rather dull series of encounters to run through.

What I had hoped would be a defining moment for one of the campaign's NPCs ended up as the NPC just being baggage for the party to carry. It was a shame as its not always easy to find ways of working in the campaign back story in ways that the players will take on board.

Still, it can't have been all bad as one of my players tells me that it was one of his favourite adventures of the heroic part of the campaign.

 

[Riastlin]

Well, first and foremost, I think the most important thing to do here is to simply sit down as a group and talk about the situation. I certainly believe its a salvageable problem and one that will likely be easily fixed.

As for how to avoid the situation in the first place, as Kidsnide suggests, you need to look at the backgrounds and motivations of your PCs. While rescuing the King's daughter might ordinarily be enough to motivate a party, it might not if they are all anarchists who have sworn to overthrow the King and his entire family. I do find it a bit odd that the party chose not to try to decipher the mysterious writing, but that could have been as simple a matter as having a collective brain freeze. The portrait, I would likely have anticipated the party wanting to talk to it, but its not entirely unrealistic for them to think "cool, we can sell this!" and stuff it away. Perhaps you could have then had the painting continue to try to talk, only now its a bit muffled, etc. Finally, with regard to the Naga, I'm not even sure that a good aligned party would care about the naga and an evil party is even less likely too without some pretty good reason.

As an aside, I do find that this is one of the problems you often encounter with running an evil campaign. It becomes far too easy for a player's motivations to become "Money, murder, kidnapping" etc. This is not meant as a knock on the players either. The problem with this is that while its not unexpected that these would be their motivations, it doesn't leave you with much to work with as a DM. Basically, all your plot hooks are likely to devolve into "Ted is willing to pay you X gold to retrieve his stolen property. He doesn't care how you go about recovering the item so feel free to kill anyone you meet. By the way, its believed that some of the guards among the thieves are dragonborn." Certainly, this will hook in each of the PCs, but it doesn't make for a particularly interesting campaign. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced that "murder" is a realistic motivation -- even serial killers are often motivated by sexual desires or feelings of injustices done to them -- but the other two motivations provided are not overly unexpected.

Obviously, quests should start with a certain anticipated financial gain for the party. Next, given one player's hatred of dragonborn, I think it makes sense to set up dragonborn as major players in your campaign. Maybe Arkhosia never fell. Maybe, the dragonborn are known for taking slaves from their enemies -- this might even explain the PC's desire to kidnap dragonborn, he's getting revenge for what was done to him and/or his family/friends. Now, with the dragonborn in place in your campaign, you can start to build a plot that focuses on the dragonborn and start to tie your adventures together such that even if an adventure isn't directly about fighting dragonborn, it represents another step along the path toward the fall of Arkhosia.

Odds are, all three motivations will take this nouget and run with it. Money will because its a paying gig. Murder will so long as there are no restrictions on killing their enemies. Finally, the dragonborn kidnapper will no doubt have fun with this.

In answer to the question, I do think that there is some responsibility for the players not to just completely ignore obvious plot hooks; however, the DM needs to provide plot hooks that make sense for those characters. A priestess of Tiamat will not care about the temple of Bahamut that is in trouble for instance. Once your players have given you motivations, its up to you, as the DM to offer up hooks related to those motivations.