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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imperialus" data-source="post: 2966510" data-attributes="member: 893">why not woosh the two characters wandering aimlessly through the forest into the dungon that you had prepared instead of into a forest where they had nothing to do but continue to wander until killed by a wandering monster?There are better ways to get a party back on track than to have a hill giant start killing them off at first level.  Perhaps encountering a band of much more experianced adventures who are obviously the worse for wear.  Said adventurers could look at them incredulously and say something like:Sir Railwaystation the Fighter: "What do you think you are doing here?  You're lucky that that (insert nasty beasty here) hasn't found you.  We almost lost Bob our cleric yesterday and are heading back to town.  You better come with us unless you want to be (nasty beasty) dinner."*edit* and if the wilderness is supposed to be so nasty and dangerous for first level characters why are you setting the campaign there at 1st level?  Is it concentric rings of progressively nastier badguys the further you get from town?  Is it supposed to be a city adventure?  How have you introduced plot hooks to keep your players from wandering off into the wilderness?  Chances are the PC's left town thinking they were following a plot hook or perhaps in search of one.  In my experiance at least, players tend to pick up on plot hooks without too much goading.  They are (or at least should be) comeing to play an adventure you've prepared.  If they wanted to get lost in the wilderness they could just drive to the edge of town and start walking away from the road.  If the players are purposely ignoring your plot hooks perhaps you need to have an OOC conversation with everyone about what their goals are for the game.Personally I find that introducing hooks that are a happy medium between painfully obvious (like two NPC's named Plot and Hook press ganging the party into service) and too obscure is one of the most difficult things for me to do well as a DM.  After all no matter how obvious a plot hook is to you your players may not recognize it as such.  This can easally lead to frustration on my part since it pretty much forces me to ad-lib (which I hate) or get mad at my players and "punish" them.  It seems like you are doing the latter, severly outclassing your PC's because they didn't follow the plot that you wanted.What I found worked best for me, was to at the outset of one campaign shotgun as many plot hooks as possible at the players and then after the session ask them how many of them they recognized as plot hooks.  This gave me an idea of A) what interested them and B) how obvious my hooks needed to be to get recognized.</blockquote>

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