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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agemegos" data-source="post: 1515142" data-attributes="member: 18377">Usually, I make up an adventure about the things that they do. This still leaves me with a problem when the player characters won't do anything at all. This problem comes up most often if I let the characters get into a comfortable and secure position. Keep them hungry, keep them under threat, and they'll keep wriggling.The way I make this easy to deal with is always to think of the characters as being bound into conflict with an antagonist. A dramatic situation always consists of two opposiing forces: conflict with an antagonist and a motivation that drives teh protagonist on despite the conflict. If the situation changes so as to diminish the conflict, I introduce a development to keep it advancing to the crisis. If a character does something to weaken or loosen the bond that prevents them from simply wandering away, I do something to maintain or tighten the bond.But of course this advice is only useful if you design adventures in terms of a developing dramatic situation. It is not useful if you design adventures in terms of a network of places with monsters, traps, and treasure in them. There is a third way to design adventures (apart from any I don't know of), essentially as a flowchart of character actions. I find tht approach hardes, and for that matter don't do it very well.I do that (insofar as I do achieve it) by bearing in mind that NPCs are always doing something, and doing it for their own reasons, and that they don't see interacting with the PCs, and especially don't see laying down their lives to use up 25% of the PCs' combat resources, as their reason for being. Whenever I introduce an NPC, I ask myself "What is this guy doing, and why?". And I try to avoid using stock answers. Whenever I introduce a structure or complex of structures, I ask "Who built this, and what for?", and lay it out accordingly: but in this case I do use stock answers, and it impresses and convinces the players as they learn that one of my settings has an architectural and engiineering tradition, with things tending to be done a certain way for a certain purpose, so that they can take account of these regularities in their planning. Consistency is convincing.My secret hint for young GMs is that it is much, much easier to produce and maintain a world that seems real if the world is real, so it is much easier to GM (especially when you are cutting your teeth) in contemporary, very-near-future, and recent past genres than it is in fantasy, parallel-universe, and far future SF settings, or even a galaxy far away a long, long time ago.In this area the very best asset you can have is that the PCs should be understood as doing some particular thing together for a common purpose. For example, if it is understood that the players will be a team of 'dungeon-delvers' who raid gilded holes to murder and rob monsters, all you have to do is place a hole that looks suitably gilded and not too infested, and down they go. The problem is that dungeon-crawling may get tired after a while. One of my favourite stock situations is the team of PCs who are a criminal investigation team for some sort of law-enforcement agency (usually in a modern or SF setting): a crime is discovered, one of them catches the call, and they go investigate as a matter of course. A team of agents in a romanticised intelligence agency gives you the same automatic quality. So does a small firm of private investigations: the femmme fatale comes to their office and gives them a job, a wire from New York offers them a job, and they do the job.These stock situations also give the players strong hints about the sorts of things their characters ought to do to get and keep things going.If you don't have a stock situation that drives the PCs as a team automatically into the adventures, the best thing you can have is a firm understanding of what the character's motivations are. Knowing what a character wants to do, what goals he or she strives for and what evils he or she would prevent, is much more important for designing an adventure than knowing what his or her class and level are. You can adjust for the class and level by changing the difficulties of encounters, but the whole adventure structure depends on the former. The thing here is that the charcter-players often don't think of their characters in dramatic terms (in terms of core motivation, defining characteristic, physical, psychological, and social dimensions) unless you suggest it to them an encourage them. And you can know the motivations if there are no motivations. So give your players a little prod. And while you are about it, make sure that they design charcters to be bound together with some sort of bbond, so that motivating one will drag them all along. It is much harder and less reliable if you try to take a group of PCs who are unconnected strangers and tie them together with circumstance.That is the distillation of my experience GMing since March 1981, in just about every genre including romance, and under more than a dozen game systems. Other people have had different experiences, and so have learned different lessons. You may be more like them than you are like me. So don't dismiss what I say out of hand, but don't take this as gospel either. The best thing you can do is start, and learn your own lessons from your own experience.</blockquote>

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