Plot Hooks my Players Have Flatly Ignored

So, I knew when I started that unless I wanted to be the kind of DM that railroads my players[1] I would end up creating a lot of content that never got explored. So far the players have ignored or chosen not to follow-up on....

• The fact that all the dwarves have gone missing in this area
• The inn in Windford that has a spider problem
• The unrest in the southern kingdoms
• That there is a 500GP reward for Hori in the city of Rishaw
• There's a dragon sighting in the mountains
• Alfred's brother is missing at Butterskull Ranch
• Northern Dwarven Monastery problems
• Ensorcerelled Orc Messenger

Now, there are some things that I have that I've simply moved. The tree trap was going to happen to them as soon as they left Startead no matter which direction they went. I wanted them to be able to have a low stakes fight early on and it was a good one (although turned out to be overpowered but I fixed that on the fly.)

Thunderbliss is something that I likely would have used eventually as an idea but it came up now because of them running headlong into danger. 

I have a host of things in the traps folder I can use wherever I need to make some drama. So them ignoring ALL OF THE QUEST HOOKS is.... fine I guess. I should have known better. They managed to chase the person actually responsible for their memory loss which I think was as much dumb luck as anything but was also unexpected. (He was actually going to end up being trapped at the monastery and might end up there anyway at some point if they don't catch him before then.)

There were quest hooks relating to every character that could have been why they lost their memories. They found the actual one which surprised me.

What I'm learning from all of this is that some people will chase shiny things regardless of actual character motivations. And some people will stress a lot about if doing something is what their character would do. And until you know what type of group balance you have it will be a coin toss and you need to be flexible or you're going to have grumpy players.

I thought my group, because of being new, would be easily distractible by shiny things. But the reality is, and I think it's because we're all older (33-50), that the group is very interested in who their characters are as much as the story. So I'm tweaking and re-writing as we go to keep that in mind and knowing that if I need them to do something - like slow down before they get killed by an evil sorceress - I'm going to have to force the issue.

I still don't want to railroad them - for example the group getting stuck in Thunderbliss was a bit of that as I overwhelmed them until one died. Someone was going to died there is I had to comepltely fudge the dice rolls to make it happen. But it is a necessary stop for them. It's a chance to solve a quest, build XP, get to know each other, and have some fun and maybe fight if they want to. Help them bond and develop their group work before tackling a big bad. They need that. They need to get to know their characters and theirselves for a bit.

Also, and I forgot to mention this in the last post - if Voola dies in Thunderbliss she'll wake up in town the next day just like everyone else, but without the sigil. But she also has like 17HP so it's unlikely.




[1] The DM in the game I'm a player in is more like this. It's not the worst thing in the world but it definitely makes for a more story driven game than a character driven one. For example, he dropped a plot hook in the first session about people going missing and possibly being slaughtered way outside of town. My character has never left the city. She does not go outside the walls. She is not an outdoors kind of person.

There is no world in which my character goes to investigate that without some kind of prompting. I didn't get that so didn't volunteer to go along. Instead he had me find a key and while I was trying to return it to the party member I basically got kidnapped. It worked and got me on the quest, don't get me wrong. But there were about seven points in game my character would have turned back. I gave up on it because he skimmed over the time passage where she would have done that. But it's annoying because she would never be on this quest. Never. So I keep having to invent reasons on why she didn't turn back well before now.

Also her name is Mina and she is a prostitute and loves her job and is very trusting of all people (Why don't we just tell the town guards?) but also very very skeptical of anything even slightly scary (There's blood on the floor? Mina immediately leaves and waits outside with the pony).

I love her so much.