Making It Personal (LM Help)

[shipwreck]

Friends, it's been a minute! My DOM campaign got back on its feet last year and things are going well; we're playing about twice a month now and we love the DOM book.

Here's my trouble: I'm finding it hard to rope the characters into things personally. There are family member NPCs who have been in peril, holdings under threat, and so on, but it still follows the go X to solve problem Y format. I mean to make things more personal, to put the characters into real moral/ethical pickles, to give them some tough choices, while looping it in with the DOM material.

I'd like to hear from you more experienced Loremasters, some ways you've pushed your PCs between rocks and hard places and really made them think things through.

Part of me believe I'm overthinking this -- my group is very low-key and seems to be content to just have the adventure of the week -- but I'd like to at least try some heavier, personal challenges. I'm just not quite sure how to do it!

Thoughts?

[Wbweather]

It helped when a couple of players retired their characters. Now I have some NPC's that are more personal to the players and they have become the key players in a lot of the more recent adventures. Also, once the players had established some holdings, I often made those the places where attacks would come and dangers threatened.

[atgxtg]

They way to make things "more personal" to the PCs is to watch them in play and see what things they take an interest in. That will show you what things you are use to build adventures around. You also have to show them that the choices they make during play can have an impact of how things work out.

What often happens to players who play in linear adventures (GO to A, fight B, get C, go to D, etc.) is that the course of the advnture seems predetermined (it is) so they feel tht what happens is what is supposed to happen, and fell like they are just cogs in a machine and what they decide to do doesn't have any impact on the outcome.

For instance, if the adventure is about killing a Dragon, players might just look at the adventure as having one outcome (success), or maybe two (success/failure). What you need to do is show them that the outcome can vary based on their actions (for instance the dragon could survive but be driven off, or maybe just who get the treasure in the hoard could different, and have an effect of later adventure (especially if there was a powerful item like a rig of power in the hoard). To show thing you have to show them how thier actions are altering the end results.

If you want to get out of the " go X to solve problem Y format" then you need to come up with problems that have more than one solution- or more than one way to achieve the solution. For instance, let's say someone (maybe even one of the heroes) gets poisoned or ill and the group needs to find something to help them recover. Instead of just giving them one medical substance to look for, you could give them a choice of two or three-each available in a different area. You could also do something like make one more common that the others but less effective, and/or one that is more effective than the others, but less common, more remote, in a more dangerous area, is harder to prepare, or takes longer to prepare.

Now which solution the group decides to pursue will affect where they go, how they act, and the general course of the adventure. Put two or three more possible choices along the adventure and you get something that appears to give the players more freedom and a bigger impact on the course of the adventure.

One nice benefit of that approach is that if the players start to see their choices affecting the outcome of the adventures, they will be more likely to take things more personally.

[atgxtg]

Here's another example of what I'm talking about.

Let''s assume the heroes are on some task for Gandalf, and are traveling to meet up with him. Along the way they discover than an unsuspecting village is about to be attacked by orcs. Now the heroes must make a decision. Do they continue on to meet up with Gandalf, or do they divert off to help the village? Now the course of the adventure can change depending on what the heroes do:

If they go right to Gandalf the village could be wiped out (or just loose a lot of people, or even be saved by some mysterious stranger, foreshadowing his appearance in this or a latter adventure).

If they go save the village, then they might miss Gandalf and have to follow him to try and catch up later. You could have it that when they do find him, he is injured (maybe a bandage wrapped around his arm), and maybe he even lost something important that the heroes must now go back and recover before they continue on with the rest of the adventure.

Again the idea is to present the adventure in such a way that they players have to make choices, and those chose have a noticeable effect on how the adventure plays out.

[shipwreck]

Thanks!

[Stormcrow]

Trying to entice independently made characters into adventures they otherwise don't want to go on is difficult and often unsatisfying.

I find the solution is usually much simpler: just ask the player to come up with some hooks for his character that he wants to be caught up in. No enticement necessary! The player wants to be caught up in an adventure, so ask him to think up the elements he'd like to get him caught up in one.

[Glorelendil]

Trying to entice independently made characters into adventures they otherwise don't want to go on is difficult and often unsatisfying.

I find the solution is usually much simpler: just ask the player to come up with some hooks for his character that he wants to be caught up in. No enticement necessary! The player wants to be caught up in an adventure, so ask him to think up the elements he'd like to get him caught up in one.

I've never done this, but I love it.

[atgxtg]

Trying to entice independently made characters into adventures they otherwise don't want to go on is difficult and often unsatisfying.

That's why you watch the players and see what they take an interest in. The idea is to feed into the things they want to do. Much like when writing adventures I will look at the characters to see what skills and other things that the players has worked on to improve. They things they imrpoved a lot are probably the things they would like to do a lot of, and so that helps with generating adventures and story hooks.

I find the solution is usually much simpler: just ask the player to come up with some hooks for his character that he wants to be caught up in. No enticement necessary! The player wants to be caught up in an adventure, so ask him to think up the elements he'd like to get him caught up in one.

I've had mixed results with this, it mostly doesn't work-especially for D&Ders. Usually the players will give you a blank stare and an "Idunno". Other times you will get grandiose dreams. If you got a group that is heavy into roleplaying or come from something other than a hack & slash background, it just works, no problems.

[Stormcrow]

Usually the players will give you a blank stare and an "Idunno".

Then you work with the players until they do know. Players in The One Ring have more responsibility for making "story decisions" than in other games, like deciding whether other players' trait invocations are acceptable and what their characters get up to during the fellowship phase. Players aren't passive participants in this game. This kind of participation is built into the rules.

Cubicle 7's Doctor Who game also emphasizes players' goals: during character creation, each player chooses a personal goal. Whenever you accomplish something related to your personal goal, you get story points (immensely important in the game) and the opportunity to improve your character at the end of the game. You can skip coming up with a personal goal at first, and think of one later, but until you do your character is somewhat crippled, mechanically. You also have to come up with a background for the character, and you can't skip this, because while two characters may have the same Transport skill, a taxi-driver from 20th century Earth is not going to be able to apply that skill to the same set of vehicles as a Time Agent from 51st century Planet X.

The Doctor Who game puts into practice my earlier advice: the player, not the GM, is deciding what motivates the character. The One Ring also asks you to work out a character's background, and this includes their motivations and family and whatever other hooks lead you to adventure. Players are expected to actively participate in the creation of the narrative.

[Rue]

Following on stormcrow's post above, if you aren't sure your players are ready to leap into producing hooks you could tie it to their callings, giving them a place to start. "Okay, you're a treasure hunter... but Why, and What Sort?" etc. Or if you want to surprise them you could base some guesses for hooks off their calling and the skills they chose to improve (as suggested above).