Oblivious
Wow! Those neon signs are working after all these years? And the funereal obelisks of Aqua Vitae are laced with circuitry? That must have been one technologically advanced civilization! Kind of makes you wonder what other Heroes are likely to show up….
Wild and totally-baseless speculation aside, there is a common problem being depicted into today’s Handbook. And it has nothing to do with disruptions caused by cell phones at the table.
When players are obtuse, it can be straight-up obnoxious. There is such a thing as missing the plot hook (the three clue rule exists for a reason). But when players willfully ignore an offer just because they can, it’s poor form. I mean, if I’ve put in the time and effort to build a session around your character arc, deciding to go the other way feels like a slap in the face.
But then again, if you’ve instinctually furrowed your brow and said, “Wait a minute, Claire. You’re throwing a hissy fit because a player dared to exercise their agency?” then congratulations. You’ve made your Intelligence (Investigation) check and discovered the other side of the coin. A plot hook is an invitation. It is not a compulsion effect. And if you’ve got a couple of happy-go-lucky goofballs like Swash and Buckle at your table, you’ve got to expect that they’ll push the boundaries of the narrative and explore off the beaten path.
So for today’s discussion, why don’t we talk about players who refuse plot hooks? Have you ever had to scramble because a player missed out on their own backstory tie-in? What about the time they walked past your dungeon? Did you pick up bits to reuse later, or did you abandon them entirely? And to what extent is it the mark of a “good player” to accept the premise rather than rejecting it? Hit us with all your own inattentive players and oblivious scions-of-lost-civilizations down in the comments!
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There’s dense, and then there’s Swash and Buckle.
Characters I might expect to see include Artificer, Street Samurai… and the vampire twins.
The latter two could have a very awkward family reunion with a certain ditzy dhampir…
Swash and Buckle’s alignment is Chaotic Dense.
And a character you forgot is Van Helscion who’d be going all Belmont on this joint.
True, that!
Who’s it gonna be?
The suspense is killing me!
Roll percentile dice.
HAIKU!
I have something like that, but I was the player. In my backstory I wrote a bit about how my half-orc character’s human father, whom he was named for, loved him and raised him to be a hunter, like him. Knowing that my character was not big enough to be a warrior like the other men of his mother’s tribe my character’s father made sure to secure him a legacy and place of honor as a provider. My GM, after reading everything, decided that he had an NPC he wanted to use and just let me know that my mother had died and my father had left shortly after and that my character had never forgiven him. Okay. Later in the campaign we met a terrible old man who was really confrontational with me for some reason. He had a different name than the one in my backstory so I wasn’t suspicious until he used my mother’s name. Then it clicked, but the antagonism had already been established so my character and the GM were unable to advance the dialogue organically. The other players were not interested in non-mandatory dialogue or role play so this little bit of backstory tie-in died right there and the group moved on.
Oof. There’s not recognizing your backstory, then there’s having your backstory hijacked and transformed into something unrecognizable by an overstepping GM. Sad times.
It feels like there’s a couple of different things going on there.
Do players have an obligation to go on the adventure / bite the plot hook? Was that expectation set up? Does it even matter? I mean, if you think about it, everything the DM describes is a plot hook if the DM links it to the plot. The players can’t see the threads so they won’t know that essentially just setting foot on the island accepted the plot and that stuff will keep happening until they go for it (‘your boat is nowhere to be seen: roll to detect the strange tracks leading back to the city).
Is this a backstory that has been worked out between player and DM? Because, if you’re just throwing “I’m changing who your character is” at me, I might not be up for that. This is my character. I feel very possessive of her. Do I at least get a safeword in case you throw something that’s going to break my fun?
Then you have players’ IRL attitudes to adventures. If the players are looking at the location and trying to figure out which potential adventures will be fun, they might IRL stay away from ones that look like not their kind of fun. You know the ones: underwater adventures, court intrigue when you’re geared up for dungeon delving, dungeon delving when you’re geared up for court intrigue, etc. For these, it could be on the DM to set some expectations out of game so the players have a rough idea what they’re going to set off.
It’s a philosophical conundrum, innit? Is sitting down at the table a tacit agreement to go on the adventure? Are you being uncooperative to refuse the call? Or are you only exerting your agency?
I think that “was this expectation set up” is a case of running out to buy a fire extinguisher when your house is already on fire. I love me some Session Zero, but I don’t know that it’s effective here.
For my money, it’s all about the ongoing dialogue as the game evolves.
My rule as a DM is: I’ll prepare an adventure. If you don’t want to go on the adventure, I expect you to start something instead. Ask around for rumours, research legends, anything I can use to improvise an adventure that you’ll do. But I am not going to throw plot hooks at you until you deign to take a nibble. That’s not how these things work.
Once, when my gamers ignored an obvious plot hook multiple times because they wanted more shipboard fun, I destroyed the campaign world feature (the theoretical result of failure). Their patron deity then stopped responding (as he had been demoted to demi-god status), and they only discovered why the next time they returned to port. The *next* time they got a similar plot hook (the villain was successful once, why not try again?), they immediately took action because they knew it would have consequences.
I recently ran an adventure where the plot hook and exposition was completely skippable (they almost did), but without it the PCs would literally sail directly into a deadly ambush. (Essentially a giant “Beware of Ambush: Free plot details here” sign)
ever noticed how „obvious“ and „oblivious“ are just a few letters apart?
coincidence? I think not.
One of the times I was trying to lure the party into a short story arc I had set up, they did everything in their power to avoid it. They should have known better. As I’ve said before, my story arc components are more than willing to follow the group around until they get the chance to scoop the party up.
So they decide to explore an abandoned dungeon they had run across, get down to the third level and as they reach the middle of the large room at the base of the stairs, the floor literally disappeared. They got dumped (teleported) into the first part of the story :). They still could have worked their way out of the location they were teleported too and continued on their way, but they gave in and went through the arc.
Hubby still tells a story out of that particular story arc, of the group dumping a group of homeless goblins on the local arch-druid for her to take care of. It’s amazing the lengths grateful goblins will take the whole “tidying up” thing when given a chance 🙂
I haven’t actually done this, but on one of my first games (non-dnd, urban fantasy system), we were given a choice whether to answer the mysterious text message that gave us our powers. Naturally, we all said yes, but I was very tempted not to. X D
Later I asked the GM what would have happened if my character had refused and got the answer ‘I’d have been very annoyed’
This might be a hot take, but I ignore plot-hooks about my characters because I hate how backstories are implemented in a lot of campaigns. They get set up by the players before even having their first session and then like the slowest, most boring jack-in-the-box they inevitably pop back up three quarters into the game when the GM realizes that they haven’t done anything with them yet, interrupting the flow of the main story that everyone at the table cares about so that they can go do a side quest that only one person cares about. They exist to pad out an otherwise enjoyable campaign with meaning-impaired, predictable, tension destroying filler that does nothing to progress the plot. Backstories are the opposite of fun, and as a GM I don’t require them.
If you’ve ever been in a game where there is an army preparing to storm the city, or you find signs of a cult preparing a ritual on the next full moon, or a portal to the Abyss has been opened or something similar, but then the next session a party member is asked to go and have dinner with their family and you have to go and solve a murder mystery or whatever you know what I’m talking about. I say it’s best to just let the GM know to not bother using your backstory for anything and enjoy the good parts of the campaign instead.
I can see where you’re coming from, but I think it’s more a GM issue than one inherent to backstories. I’ve found several approaches to backstory sidequests that work really well and reward players for getting invested in the world and their characters without being too much of a distraction.
The first approach is to tie characters’ backstory elements into other quests. Perhaps the current arc’s villain has gotten their hands on a PC’s long-lost family heirloom or recruited their personal nemesis as an ally. Perhaps while searching for an artefact, they run into a PC’s old friend who’s also in the area. This helps those players get more invested in the main story rather than distracting from it.
The second approach is to do them as solo adventures for the player involved. If, say, the rest of the party doesn’t want to go find the rogue’s missing father, she can just handle it herself in a side session while everyone else does other things. It’s easy to do online; in person, it’s more a thing you can do when no one else can make the session for whatever reason, but still an option.
One thing that I’ve found really helps integrate PC backstories naturally is for the PCs to have ties to locations or factions, which can then be weaved into the plot. I once moved the location of an ancient ruin the PCs needed to explore to be near a PC’s hometown, so the party naturally stopped by and saw how things were going. Another PC’s old goth punk friends got accused of causing the undead attacks that the party was investigating, so he felt really motivated to help. A minor villain who was stealing stuff from the party’s allies turned out to be a PC’s childhood friend, which made that PC want to find a solution other than just skewering the thief. (And then when a different PC skewered the thief anyways, there was a whole organic sidequest to secretly revive her.) I find that having backstory elements just be alongside the main plot not only helps pacing, but makes the world feel natural and real.
I ran into this early on as a player. Our GM (he was pretty good, taught me a lot) led us through the introductory chapter of a module, after which we were supposed to report to a guardhouse to get rewarded and become deputized. The reward money was nice, but one by one we all agreed that it didn’t make sense for any of our characters to work with the guards. The GM took it in stride and basically on the spot brewed up not one, but three side missions about rescuing runaway orphans before folding us back into the main plot.
So yeah, rolling with the punches can be done… but at the end of the day, you’re still getting punched. To this day, I don’t know if I would be able to generate a backup plan so effortlessly.
Remember that time i told you that on a Black Crusade game we forgot we were on the middle on launching on towards Terra? 🙂
The will of a DM just like that of the gods is mysterious. Just like that several times Iomedae got angry and i quote: “For F*ck’s sake! Stop going to fund a kingdom on the Stolen Lands and do go close the Wolrdwound at once!”. That said that was a miscommunication with our DM regarding the campaign we were supposed to play. I am still pretty sure that was supposed to be a Hell’s Vengeance campaign 🙂
At the end of this, are they going to have to face an Irony Golem?
Depends. During “Session 1”, players should rush to impale themselves on the plot hook. Session 35…maybe not.
Having said that, my players know some plot hooks get more dangerous as they age, with rust hosting tetanus and the bait acquiring botulism. Necromancer running wild in the orc lands? Best get over your orc-bias before an army of orc zombies show up right before harvest time.
Others evolve up to plot harpoons. Ignore that NPC who actively loathes the party and has sworn vengeance and its possible they might tell that necromancer where an unprotected village full of backstory is located.
And sometimes I have 4 hooks for the same adventure. Sometimes that 4th hook is the first thing the heroes were supposed to stop being allowed to happen, but it still counts.
player ignore their own plot hook?
oh man, this is just my last 2 pathfinder sessions..
So my players, Isekai’ed from our earth – long story.. are human races all. it took them a bit but they have just noticed (after a very long time of playing. they are around level 3-4 by now) that they have yet to meet a single elf in the campaign.
they all have a hovering ‘guide’ that let them learn basic things about the game, basically the core book handed over to them etc, to help assimilate from earth. so they know what elves are and what the guide say they do and act.
they question a very old and helpful reincarnated Druid about why are there no elves about and learn that he elves have turned xenophobic and hostile in the past decades (the guide was written before that).
then later on they meet a gang of thugs who stalk them and apparently want to kidnap on of them as they have a magic dooda that point him out to be an elf.
so said player start going into every possible reason why they would ever mistake him for an elf. took a very long time.
eventually, ooc i had him ‘talk’ to a five year old npc (named Common Sensei) to guide him to the fact that maybe he miss something very basic. he take a 2nd look at his character sheet and finally notice he’s first feat is ‘racial heritage (elf)’ that he took to be able to enter the elven specific archtype of ‘calamity caller’.
as in, his CLASS is restricted to elves only and those who count as one and he’s very first feat was taken to make sure that he does.
and he just glanced over those two on his search for ‘why a magical elf locator would ever think i’m an elf…’
There’s a social contract: GMs will provide plot hooks. Players will either bite plot hooks or provide an alternative framework for what they want to do. If neither side holds up their end, then nothing gets done.
This is why All Roads Go to Rome. And if people keep comically or intentionally choosing to leave that alone, I am not opposed to teleporting Rome to them.
It generally doesn’t come to that outside of one shots where you throw a bunch of weirdos together, but it is an option.