Adventure motivation

[Stormcrow]

I have to ask, if players need this much motivation to participate in an adventure and their characters have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming WHY are they playing an Adventure role playing game?

You misunderstand me. It is not a question of players needing more motivation; it is a question of finding different motivations than "important person asks party to do something, so they do it, or go home."

For that matter, The Hobbit isn't a treasure hunt from Gandalf's perspective; it's an attempt to deny Sauron a potential ally.

But The Hobbit isn't written from Gandalf's perspective. Tolkien started such a project, and abandoned it. And in The One Ring, Gandalf is never a player character. In any case, Gandalf didn't ask Thorin for help; he went along with Thorin because it coincided with his own ideas. The only person in the story who is hired to do a job is Bilbo, and he never really makes a conscious decision to join the party; he is flummoxed and whisked into it by Gandalf, and he remains because he has personal issues to work out (Baggins versus Took).

[Stormcrow]

I guess related concern of mine here is that everyone on this board seems to be having the same adventures. "Just what do you do in Wilderland?" seems to be a difficult question to answer without following a script.

[Rich H]

I guess related concern of mine here is that everyone on this board seems to be having the same adventures.

Hardly surprising. For older people, which this board appears to be a significant majority, we're invariably short on time so published adventures (official or fan made) are very much the way to go. Add to that that out of a handful of official releases one of them is a set of adventures and the other is a campaign it seems to make sense that we're all using them.

Why not share *your* adventure ideas, we'd all be interested in hearing how great they are and they may get people riffing new ones off them.

[Sprigg]

Why not share *your* adventure ideas, we'd all be interested in hearing how great they are and they may get people riffing new ones off them.

This. I'll be running the marsh bell this weekend, and I've already gotten several ideas for potential plot hooks and possible adventures from lurking threads in which others describe their adventures. A dead dwarf with a Morgul shaft in his back here, an urgent Beorning with a message there, a rumor of great treasures elsewhere... The best way to expand the adventure catalogue is to create our own and bounce ideas off each other.

[Glorelendil]

Here's my latest Adventure Starter:

Gandalf tells the adventurers that 13 Orcs and one Goblin, plus an occasional mysterious horseman, have been spotted with full traveling gear, leaving the Mount Gundabad area and apparently heading west. He asks them to find and pursue this party. Figuring out what they are up to is more important than simply killing them, but whatever their mission is it should be thwarted.

Loremaster: The Orcs are headed to the Blue Mountains to reclaim their ancestral caverns from the dwarves that stole them. The mysterious horseman is a Nazgul who wants them to succeed, and the one goblin is a snaga burglar the Nazgul chose to accompany the orcs. The orcs think the goblin is too soft, but the Nazgul insists, and so they grudgingly take him along.

The goblin, naturally, at some point gets separated from the orcs and finds a powerful artifact that makes him the most important member of the band.