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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chzbro" data-source="post: 5378298" data-attributes="member: 83964">This reminds me a bit of one of the LFR adventures presented at GenCon this year.The characters are on a ship that is attacked by pirates (so far so good). We beat the pirates and find a captured nobleman, who we save. He has lots of (boring) background information and we're told that he seems like a good guy. He invites us to his estate for dinner when we land. Instead, he's arrested for murder immediately upon docking. "I'm innocent!" he  yells to us. "Help!" (I'm obviously paraphrasing).Well, we do end up investigating and finding the real killers, but (and I can't emphasize this enough) ONLY because we knew that if we didn't the adventure was basically over. The players at the table were asking themselves, "Why do we care about this guy? What are we getting out of this, dinner? I can buy my own dinner. You sure he's not guilty? He sure seems guilty based on all this overwhelming evidence."I assure you that plot hook would have never flown in our home game. Honestly, it didn't even fly in the LFR game for me. The forced contrivance of it sucked a lot of the fun out of the game (the rest was sucked out by the paragraphs-long boxed text full of FR politics that bored me to near-tears).This example is not intended as a slight upon the OP. It's an example of why there have to be multiple ways to "bite the hook."If you've ever fished, you know many lures feature hooks with 3 prongs. That's a good metaphor for what I'm suggesting. You don't need to make 3 different hooks; you need 1 hook with multiple ways to "land" the party.The talking painting is 1 hook: either they listen and the plot progresses or they don't and it doesn't. Fine for a sandbox, but if you actually have a plot, not acceptable. The talking painting needs multiple hooks: either they listen and the plot progresses or they don't and one PC hears the thing whispering to him in his dreams or it starts screaming about being afraid of the dark (while in the bag) so loudly that the PCs can't walk around with it in there without alerting the whole place. The point is, the DM has to know what happens if the characters (to go back to the LFR example) don't care anything about getting dinner from a nobleman they just met who might be a murderer. How does the plot progress if they don't? And the answer can't be, "It doesn't."I also want to ask the OP directly: If you were getting frustrated (and the players were too), why wouldn't you just give them an "out of character" nudge in the right direction? Why opt to have a bad session instead of just saying, "Look, guys, things aren't going the way I thought they would. It would help me out a lot if one of you would just translate those papers." You're all playing a game together; they'll help you out of a tight spot in order to get things going. Won't they?</blockquote>

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