Hooking your players

[Calinero]

So, I'm pretty sure everyone here is sick to death of games starting in tavels, hotels, inns, motels, pubs, bars, and any other social drinking establishment you can think of. That being said, what do you typically use to get your players involved?

I run Cthulhu, which has the added disadvantage of the fact that no one wants to get involved with Mythos stuff unless they absolutely have to. I find there are a few challenges in getting them involved:

1. They must all become aware in some way, not just one or a few of them--this means they should either all known the person who feeds them the plot hook, or all have to be there coincidentally when crap goes down.

2. They must have some incentive for continuing, be it personal profit or a fear of something bad happening to them should they not.

3. It must be something that they cannot simply turn over to the police. Typically, this is done by making it something the police would never believe, or isolating them from the police.

A relative or 'old friend' is often good, as it provides emotional incentive to help and remain involved. I try to avoid police involvement by setting up adventures so that by the time they have anything to report, it's too late.

What do you guys use for plot hooks?

[Tempest Kitsune]

When it comes to the games I've participated in, they're mostly Shadowrun, meaning you got a call from a Fixer who thought you'd be a good addition to the team for whatever job needs pulled. Usually something happens that causes the characters to have to stick together, either becasue they like working together, they're all being hunted by the same mega-corp, or something similar.

For example, in the current game we're playing, we were on a simple guard job, which go complicated by a litter of shapeshifter wolf-cubs being stolen and the archeologists we were guarding being suspected by the pack leader. We tracked down most of them, and the very last one was being sold to what amounted to an elf version of Cruella DeVille. Except Cruella was actually Baba Yaga in disguise, and she cleaned our clocks. My guy got hit by the door of her car, after she had a spirit posses it to empower it, and it very nearly knocked me out. For reference sake, I'm currently playing a ork, with an armor-plated cybertorso. The only reason that I survived was because I was able to roll to the other side of a garbage truck we'd just used to t-bone her car, and out of her line of sight. We managed to all survive the encounter, and get back the final wolf pup, (though her dad didn't make it) and instead of taking a sub-orbital jet to get the heck out of Baba Yaga's back yard, we ended up booking passage on a ship, because leaving the earth's atmosphere would have killed the shapeshifter pup.

[Calinero]

Huh. Never played Shadowrun before, but it definitely sounds like an interesting game. Having a feature built into the mechanics that allows for including the players better is a definite bonus.

With Cthulhu (prewrittens, anyway), the standard seems to be either "an old friend/relative calls upon the investigators for help," or "the investigators are sought out to solve a problem, based on their reputation at dealing with such matters.) Not a whole lot to work with for first timers--the whole "friend/relative" thing can get old quite quickly. Of course, there are other things to try--I recently had my three investigators meet by coincidence in a train car that was haunted by the ghost of a murdered teacher. They took the bait well enough, but if they hadn't I would have given them increasingly bad nightmares (sanity loss inducing) until they started trying to finish her unfinished business (her students were kidnapped and still alive, though in the clutches of a Mythos being.)

[Dervon]

((NOTE: A lot of what I wrote below is based on the precept that the players already know each other, either IRL or from frequenting the same sites, thus allowing for the ice to already start broken, to put it in a mildly cliched way. Also, the players should be of the certain mental level that keeps the HERP 'n DERP to a almost non-existing minimal. I know these two conditions don't always occur, but they certainly help when they do.))

If the party is willing to mix backgrounds (or rather, simply everyone contributing to a shared background that accounts for a certain degree of familiarity amongst them, such as growing up in the same village/town, having studied at the same academy/mage college/whathaveyou, living in the same apartment block/complex etc...), the hooks just write themselves.

Taking the "grew up in the same village" idea, you are provided a wealth of hooks related to NPCs (old mentors, childhood friends, potential rivals etc...), the home location itself, etc..., for example.

I certainly will, players willing, try this out when the game I am currently in runs it's course and I find some time to step into the DM's shoes.

...

For something a bit different, and again players willing (since it requires, in the slightest, that you add an element to each character's backstory that they are not aware of) you could make them all quite central to the BBEG's plot. Devil May Cry 3 is a picture-perfect example of this (Spoilers of course, and you'll lack some of the context, but I think the gist of it is here. You make all the PCs little wheels in a Xanatos Roulette, allowing naturally for their eventual triumph over their one-time puppet master. It'll need a bit more refining then the DMC3 way, since a party needs to work together anyway, but you can make it so each member is require for a different phase of the plan, or are simple each a key in his/her own way.

[Calinero]

Yeah, I agree with you--the best time to get involved is during or before the characters' creations, so you can make sure that everything will fit together. One rule I've found to be true is that either everyone should be connected prior to the game, or no one. Nothing is worse than having a few characters know each other and a few who don't--someone always ends up left out. I'd say that having them know each other is definitely for the best. And once you establish that they are all united in some way, it usually isn't too hard to find some sort of common interest to keep them all engaged.

Of course, a certain level of cooperation is to be expected from the players as well, as they should know better than to resist all the plot bait.

[Greybane]

Sorry, it's just how no one in our DnD group knew each other in game ahead of time, except for Dervon and Barbarian. They made one backstory for the two of them!

[Tempest Kitsune]

And yet we still made it work.

[Greybane]

And yet we still made it work.

Very true.

[Calinero]

Do I sense an interesting story here?

[Tempest Kitsune]

Essentially we ended up on the same road in a Dung Ages-type setting, and decided that banding together would prolong our life-spans a bit more than trying to lone wolf it. And two of our number aren't exactly well received by the general populous due to circumstances of birth and trade. Both are magic users (Druid with a wolf and a Sorcerer with a bat familiar) and one is a half-human/half green dragon (he hides it well thanks to cloaks with hoods and hats with large floppy brims), though I think the rest of the party might have noticed he's not exactly "normal" after he melted a group of about 4 or 5 archers' faces off with his breath weapon. That and he uses a mace like a seasoned fighter when the bandits get "too close" to use spells.

[Calinero]

Dung Ages?

If that approach worked out for you, then that's cool. I've had problems before when part of the party knows each other and the rest doesn't...for example, two of my friends have played a brother and sister in several Cthulhu games over the term of a campaign. Last game we tried to introduce my brother as a college roommate of the brother, but it was just hard to get him involved with such a strong bond already existing between the characters. Approaches I'm trying to use now are to give him control of an NPC they are familiar with, or simply let those two have their own game and run a game for them and my brother using a different three characters.

[runsamok]

Hello,

Generally, as a GM, I try to link the characters backgrounds so that they have already met before the game starts. This is usually part of the character building process. If there aren't enough "hooks" in the character background, I'll start quizzing the players about their characters backgrounds until hooks appear. Having an overall theme (or several) for the game as a whole also helps.

The best way to hook the players? Figure out what their hot buttons are in real life. What drives them up the wall and into furious rants? Find a way to incorporate a similiar situation into the game.
:onfire:

If you know one of your players hates seeing little kids getting hurt, (for example) introduce a villain that kidnaps kids, warps their little minds, and uses them to build an army of psycho assassins. Then send the psycho kids after the characters. It will be a challenge to stop the assassins, and the player will drag the party in the direction of the villain to stop the bad guy from continuing that process.


If you know one of your players thinks of themselves as a "ladies man", design NPCs that the character can't resist.
:eyesonfire

Then have a case of mistaken identity occur and the trouble begins.
:po:
Jealous significant others ... random kids that are the character's spitting image... with several different mothers/fathers.


The player is suddenly famous / infamous for something they didn't do.. etc.

[viridian]

Another advantage GM's have that writers don't: If you keep the plot moving along rapidly, the player's won't have time to over-analyze things, so you can get away with more cliches, tropes, and general shortcuts.

The ship the shadowrun crew was on ran aground on an uncharted island. I just started making very veiled references to Cthulhu mythos stuff and poor Tempest went into a terror-induced meltdown. (Rightly so, but it was still fun to watch.) His terror promptly jumped to the other players and no one had time to realize that I was pulling a lot of stuff out of my rear end. (The scheduled GM had to work extra and didn't get his normal prep time. I was feeling ballsy so I volunteered to improv that night's adventure. Nice to see I still got it!)

You know the game is going well when the half-naked gun bunny accidentally detonating a Fuel Air Explosive bomb with a flare gun is NOT the highlight of the night.

When in doubt, blow something up. If you can't blow something up, do something to terrorize your players. If you can't terrorize your players, do something that will get them pissed off (preferably at an NPC and not you personally). If you can't tick them off, give them some catharsis. If they are catharsis-ed out, send them to Big Rhino for ribs and beer, because it's definitely Miller Time.

[Calinero]

Heh. I've never had much luck with improv game-running, but then again, I so far have exclusively run Call of Cthulhu...the games are typically more mystery based, so the details need to be a bit more set beforehand. I eagerly look forward to the day that I have mastered the atmosphere of Cthulhu sufficiently that even the mention of it will send players into hysterics.

Of course, it was the first system I ever ran, so my players have kind of gotten used to a softer version of play. I intend to finish up their current campaign, then hit them with some nastier one shots to get them accustomed to how Cthulhu is probably more intended to be.

[viridian]

The key is to run EVERYTHING like it's a Call of Cthulhu / Paranoia game.

Make them fear for their characters' lives. Nothing focuses their attention like imminent horrible death.

Just ask Tempest, Forbin, Runsamok, or Bibliophile about "The Redmond Slasher" and watch them twitch.
One time when I had to fill in as temp GM in the Shadowrun campaign, I dusted off an old concept of mine. "NPC finds an old obsidian dagger made during the 4th World that, when used to sacrifice someone in the correct manner, gives the wielder karma points (experience points) equal to the victim's lowest stat." I had the dagger fall into the hands of a rogue Aztechnology Expediter/Hit-Mage named Darke, then imagined what he would do with all the karma points 'earned' by slaughtering scores of squatters in the Redmond Barrens...

For a hook I used an NPC runner team from an previous game session, "Karen's Kommandoes" that they'd helped bail out of nasty situation with an insect spirit hive. This time they got there a little late and all but one of them had been slaughtered in fairly horrific fashions. When the players were inefficient in the searching, more people died as Darke slowly went out of control. When they finally cornered him, I played him as out for blood. Everyone had to empty out their Edge pools to survive the first round. Someone got in a crippling blow in the second initiative pass, 2 ticks before his next spell would have outright killed over half of the combined party.

For the follow-up, my own character tried to perform an Astral Quest to destroy the magic around the otherwise-indestructible dagger... and failed. The players just know that he went to Japan for a while and I started playing an alternate character. Two or three weekends later, I'm running again and Meisu has started picking off his old friends.

This was scary on two levels: One, in-game, the guy after them knows all about them and their safehouses, and he has been using the dagger for several weeks to power himself up.

Two, out-of-game, I did this to my own character because he had some bad dice rolls. When they realized that, the players knew that NO ONE had plot immunity.

Likewise, when Runsamok runs, she will let the most horrible things happen to her character - if it make sense within the context of the game - and she's actually killed off more player characters than I have, at last count.

The assurance that NO ONE is safe keeps everyone on edge. In one game, I violated one of the biggest tropes in adventure gaming. I'm going to spoiler it, just to be safe:

Spoiler: show

The players visited the apothecary in the village they'd just arrived at, only to find a 9 year old girl running the shop. (The dwarf next door was keeping an eye on the shop too.) She asked them if they'd seen her father when they were out in the woods... to make a long story short, they ended up agreeing to go out and search for her missing father. They found him up a tree and he explained that he'd been chased there by some minor demons in a nearby clearing. After escorting him home, the PC's when to investigate the clearing. Well, the clearing was full of demons, some of which could fly, and killing them all took a long time. It was evening by the time they got back, so they decided to head to the inn for a late dinner and some rest. (Most of the casters were low on spells.)

Well, there were a couple of inconsistencies in the father's story - the biggest of which was how he evaded flying demons by climbing a tree! No one picked up on it though, probably due to a combination of fatigue and a 'sudden attack of brain-dead' as Torbin described it. Well, when they did stop by the apothecary, it wasn't open. Getting suspicious, they broke in. The dwarf neighbor was behind the counter, dead of stab wound. The found the father's clothes and empty skin on the ground. That poor little girl was found in pieces spread all around the bedroom. It was pretty clear from the description of the scene in the bedroom that she had died in pretty much the worst way possible, all at the hands of a demon wearing her father's skin.

Okay, bad things are NOT supposed to happen to precocious little girls that make the players go "Awww!" with the cuteness. My players were pretty much traumatized by that. But it could easily have been prevented. If they'd gone straight to the apothecary when they got back in town, they would easily have been in time to save the little girl, and even the dwarf-next-door. But they didn't. And what the heck else did I think a demon would do to a little girl under those circumstances?

After that little escapade, no one ever assumed that success was automatic in one of my games. It's something you have to work for, and if you aren't paying attention, or screw up, I will be ruthlessly accurate in describing the consequences of that failure.

I used to call this policy "The die don't lie", meaning that I wouldn't fudge things so a player character is guaranteed survival. I think a more succinct version is "Actions have Consequences".

On the plus side, when they DO succeed, the players know that they EARNED the victory, and that it wasn't just handed to them on a silver platter. That makes up for all the prior stress.

[Calinero]

Yeah, the temptation to fudge dice rolls in order to have the story end 'the right way' is always there....I'm just going to start bearing down and making my players face the consequences of their actions. On the other hand, that means I have a bit more of a responsibility to make sure that the course of action that lets them survive is there. Should be fun.

[SLAMU]

Duely noted. Players be warned: I won't fudge die rolls anymore. (At least, I'll try not to. The temptation will still be there.)

[Tempest Kitsune]

Ugh, the Redmond Slasher. I'm still not sure how my 'Runner survived that guy (Physical Adept whose schtick was that he was a slightly more sane and moral version of Bullseye. Weapon of choice was screwdrivers). But at least his near-insane paranoia led to him saving Yuki.

[Calinero]

Shadowrun sounds like an interesting system...need to see if I can get my hands on a copy. Gonna be moving off to college soon, going to need to find some more people to play with anyway. Might as well have a new system to try out too.

[viridian]

Ugh, the Redmond Slasher. I'm still not sure how my 'Runner survived that guy (Physical Adept whose schtick was that he was a slightly more sane and moral version of Bullseye. Weapon of choice was screwdrivers). But at least his near-insane paranoia led to him saving Yuki.

Duly noted as well. There's a reason Swampfox ended up with a permanent little friend after all the crap went down with Meisu. In fact, I think Swampy was the only character to come out of that mess better off than how he started. He even got props from Malcolm for managing to save Yuki when everything went down.

The personnel eval he uploaded to Masaru's server regarding Swampfox: "Not terribly well educated or socialized, but possesses highly developed survival instincts. Consider for possible low-profile bodyguard work."

Hey, for St. John-Smythe, that's pretty glowing...

[Wittgen]

On the other end of the spectrum, the best GM I know views die rolling as a way to distract the players as you let the story unfold. From what I hear, he went an entire campaign without ever figuring the enemy's hp ahead of time. He'd just wait until the players had spent about the amount of resources he expected them to spend on the encounter. Well, sometimes he'd wait for a dramatically satisfying moment.

[Tempest Kitsune]

Sounds kinda iffy to me. Especially if one of your players has a spell or ability that lets them know how injured an opponent is.

[Dervon]

Yes, but do those abilities give him hard numbers or approximate impressions? As far as I know, very few Table-Top systems have a way for a player to learn the actual statistical facts behind an opponent. And if the DM was adapt at the whole winging-it thing, he probably had a good idea of how badly (or not) hurt the enemy was.

[Calinero]

I usually try to have a set HP before the fight begins, but I still have trouble estimating what the proper amount is. That probably has something to do with the fact that fights are supposed to be avoided in Cthulhu anyway...

[Kodra]

The most interesting Hooks for me are the ones that tie your characters deeply into the plot events and unify the party through necessity. In a pretty epic D&D game I was playing, we started without any characters knowing each other, and in the first night, all our characters were killed, and our souls consumed by an artifact. We found ourselves inside the artifact, and able to act before we were snuffed out, and made a daring escape that got us caught up in matters way beyond our scope.

And from that point on, we were more or less a cohesive unit. We had alot of conflicts of personality, but when the world is on your shoulders, you buck up and survive.