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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riastlin" data-source="post: 5378029" data-attributes="member: 94022">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.</blockquote>

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