One of the things I love about your work is that you very clearly think through concepts that I have partially viewed through a deep fog. You have a gift for bringing things into clear focus, as well as presenting new concepts altogether.
One memorable scenario hook I encountered was a village in a post-apocalyptic setting suddenly had their drinking water contaminated. Large silvery masses (in reality a "grey goo" of nanomachines) started appearing in the local river. This had happened a generation ago and the water made everyone who drank it sick. The villagers themselves offered that last time, a group from their village went to try and stop the grey goo. They succeeded but never came back. This scenario hook let's the players know that it probably can be stopped if they find the source. But the memorable hook to me was the river itself. Due to the nature of a river, we figured out that if we just followed the river upstream, we would find the source. So just good to keep in mind hooks that aren't always intentionally presented by an NPC
I don't know what's more fascinating, whether the content itself or the fact that every video seems to be a one take wonder. Regardless great video as always!
I noticed that myself. Each video, there's an intro, then the splash page, and then.. yep, one take. Teleprompter? Regardless, good work! Dense concise interesting info.
Another well made video. Thank you. I think there's another kind of hook worth calling out independently: the rumor of treasure. Somehow, the PCs stumble upon information that something desirable is at a location. Technically, this is a type of offer. Which is fine. It gave me an excuse to comment and feed the RU-vid algorithm.
Well said! There's probably some good mileage to get out of looking at each broad type of scenario hook and looking at different specific methods that can be used to package up scenario hooks.
Excellent! I always advise that material like this is a great place to start; to practice getting your GM head in the game, which is more valuable in the long term. That whole "...teach a man to fish..." metaphor applies. Ultimately, you want to be in a place where you can conceive and craft material that is bespoke to your exact player group. Alternately, forms and techniques such as this, particularly if is presented in a professional and concise manner as is done here, is valuable as-is for use in public or short-run games, when the GM lacks the time or opportunity to learn the player group.
Great advice as always, but I think there is two things to be careful of. 1) Misleading hooks shouldn't undermine player agency. If players pick their hook because it's something they're excited about, but then you use it to throw something completely different at them, it could cause disappointment. 2) I think lying to players should be done very sparingly. It can cause confusion and frustration. I found my first playthough of FFVII to be confusing because characters lie and repeat misinformation. It's our natural inclination to trust people, and it can be even worse in roleplaying games where we are missing a lot of our normal social cues. And on the flip side, if your players decide they can't trust anyone it can become a nightmare.
Don't know about that, I don't think that affects agency. The point is not to get too predictable, it's okay for the players to get a little frustrated with the lack of information. I think it's part of how you give character to your world... If you are in a Dark Fantasy Setting, probably only the PCs know about the Facts, the NPCs would fumble into what they think it's true. If you are in a Cyberpunk setting, you shouldn't trust everything the guy that is about to hire you is telling you, you are kind of a disposable work force.
I can't stress how a good hook makes an adventure so much better. If you do something like "here is the adventure" it's going to land completly flat. But if you start from a subtle mistery... the players are going to get so much more engaged.
Some of my favorite scenario hooks I've given were presented as tantalizing mysteries to the players. Every time one of the players did something, I included in the narration a detail about a purple star. No explanation. I did this for weeks. She did a ton of in game research to try and figure out what was up with this star. It eventually lead to a location that unlocked the warlock multiclass that she'd mentioned wanting. Another one was an old lady who hired the woodworker PC to sharpen her chisels. He did such a good job she carved a flawless mini bust of him right there on the spot and then left.
Good video! Personally, I've found that creating a sort of a map of relationships and key actors when designing a module tends to provide a whole bunch of natural hooks.
This is something I need to work on for my open table. I have a ton of rumors and parcel them out each week to the players but I recently was told that they feel that many aren't worth looking into or will probably be resolved before they can play again that weekend. We haven't wanted for reasons to play but having thrown 12-15 rumors at them so far, they have only been interested in 2 to date. I need to sharpen my hooks and switch my bait...
As you learn what they like, you can improve your targeting. You might also make sure your players know there's an opportunity cost - if we follow up on A, B might not be available when we're done. This has done wonders for ratcheting up the sense of tension in my games.
You could connect your scenarios to your world's/location's factions/powers, or a player's bonds, or even a city's resources, then maybe you could make the advancing progress of those elements visible to the players when time passes. I recommend stealing the Clocks from Blades in the Dark to showcase this progress to the players (Foundry VTT has a module to add this to any game). Having visible and clear consequences and using time as an advancing variable means that they will see this as a quandary and a choice. The exploration pillar isn't just about interacting with the world, but about making choices that matter, and presenting how they matter is a great way to make the world feel living and worth exploring. I think you could make those multiple rumors be different hooks for the same scenarios viewed from different angles or focusing on different elements rather than all of them being different scenarios. If you do it this way you prepare less scenarios and are instead presenting different ways to approach a few scenarios, giving the players more agency, saving you prep time. You can also reveal hints that the other hooks are related to the one they picked, to give them an understanding of the connections in your story for those that wish to explore those hints. For example, a scenario about a noble family of Necromancers reassembling an undead army in the sewers to start an uprising under the city could lead to the following scenario hooks: * Crops go bad - The necromantic energies has blighted the nearby soil, the markets are getting more expensive and costumers disatisfied. * Gravediggers - They are stealing the corpses from the local graveyard for their project, the figures which have been briefly spotted. * Plumbing Problems - Sewer rats are escaping, water flow is clogged, and altered corpses are washing off by the river. In truth, you don't have to actually list the specific type of presentation, as the same hook can be presented in multiple ways. Just as a scenario can be presented multiple ways, so can a hook. You can improvise those by thinking logically as to how the scenario hook affects other parts in your world. With the caveat of combat confrontations requiring preparation if you don't have a statblock at the ready, but you want to use those for sidequests more sparringly. When the session feels slow, they don't know what to do, they are lost, you can pull a confrontational hook. If they seem interested start presenting the scenario by making people they talk to and places they frequent into patrons. If they don't care much and want to do other things, present it as an offer but don't force it. But if you need to fill a rollable rumor/city encounter table for an adventure or location prep, you may want to define those presentations. If so, this means that by sticking to the three clue rule you can get 9 possible rumors and hooks out of a single scenario (3 different hooks, presented as 3 types) that you can have as ambience or something more proactive depending on the player's mood.
Content is fantastic, as usual. Thank you! I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the fact that the intro music is not "high pitched" (for lack of a better word), short, and happening after an initial cold open. Some RU-vidrs put long intros or music that is, to my ears at least, very distracting by virtue of being too different from the regular sound of a human voice. I like yours.
Comprehensive, thorough, and extremely thoughtful. Your advice is not only insightful but absolutely necessary for the advanced GM. I also appreciate how you don't take too much time covering the basics and only briefly touch on them as necessary, making these videos a lot easier to watch amongst the plethora of emerging D&D blogs. Thank you so much!
This is something I really struggle with, thank you so much for making a video on it! You really lay it out in a clear and understandable way, most people leave it far too nebulous for my taste.
Great video. I like that you are not just talking about a subject but you are giving actionable advice - awesome! I'd love to hear your thoughts about actionable steps we can take in our preparation (e.g. when structuring scenarios) so that our players are volitionally engaged.
As usual, great content and great production value. Scenario hooks are always tricky, and the advice to have multiple, different hooks for the same scenario is definitely something that I'm going to use for my own campaigns.
Excellent material, sir. I am still trying to identify/locate your peculiar accent or method of speech, but your delivery is outstanding, regardless. Whatever form of training you used is paying off. This is not as easy as you make it look.
This is so well thought out and such good advice. I wish everyone could see this! In my view, you should be much more prominent and popular than the matt collvile / matt mercer types of people, because your advice makes GMing so much easier, more creative, and more fun.
@@TheAlexandrian fooled me. Perfect pacing without the jump cuts common to these type of videos. Kinda shows how tight is the script. Im liking a lot these videos revisiting your essays. Thanks and keep em coming plz!
I like the text! It certainly helps clarify some aspects of your talk. Additionally, pre-writing the captions for the videos also helps immensely. Thank you for that.
One of my favorites is just making the players the victim. They're traveling down a road, perhaps in between adventures, when BLAM! they get blindsided by highwaymen(or something). Something or someone important is stolen from them. The robbers get what they want and make off. Obviously they leave a trail and no adventuring party is going to let this stand. Instantly everyone in the party shares the same motivation and same direction. Revenge.
These are great (as are the posts on The Alexandrian website). The music, on the other hand, makes me think I'm going to hear, "What are you doing step-bro?"
The confusion of the scenario hook and the scenario concept is something I see a lot, usually you only get one or the other which always feels horribly incomplete to me.
Patronage is when your boss orders you to track down the killer. Offer is when someone walks into your office to hire you to track down a killer. Confrontation is when someone tries to shoot you to prevent you from tracking down the killer. Bait is when you trip over a dead body just as the cops show up, so you have to run from them while tracking down the real killer.
I like this a lot. Would you consider bait another form of confrontation? I see bait as confrontation driven by misunderstanding while confrontation is driven by the intent to stop the PCs. So in your example, the cops want to stop the PCs because they incorrectly believe the PCs are the killer. BTW this may be useless semantics, I really like the examples and categories you gave.
Actually, your first two examples would both qualify as patronage according to his definition: "An NPC is requesting that something specific be done." An offer would be when you read in the newspaper about a series of murders occurring in your neighborhood. "The GM is simply offering information and it's up to the PCs to determine what they want to do with that information, if anything." Bait doesn't require any misunderstanding on the part of NPCs, it's when the *players* think the scenario is about one thing and it turns out to be about something else entirely. Like Hitchcock's "Psycho" or Robert Rodriguez's "From Dusk Till Dawn".
Found you by looking for help running Decent Into Avernus and really love how you structured _everything_, also love the addition of youtube videos as these allow me to listening to them while doing something else but in the end I'm a sucker for written stuff, since it's easier for me to go forth and back between your talking points to better memorize/interalize them while trying to adapt them to my playing/DMing. Is there the possibility that these videos get accompanied by a short abstract on your blog for easier reference ?
Could you please make videos about the concept behind your remix editions of different modules, so that more people learn about them and because I do find them fascinating, I'm currently planning on DMing your remix version of Waterdeep Dragon heist to my family, if I'm ever able to convince them that D&D is a cool game for anyone and not only for "nerds" that is.
Thanks for the heads up. I keep forgetting that pasting plain text makes RU-vid lose its mind. (I have to manually type in those links for every single video!)
I took part of a Good vs Evil war campaign. It consisted of 3 good-aligned characters pitted against 3 evil-aligned characters. Originally, it was going to a DM for each of the 6 groups but because DMs can be hard to find, I ended up DM'ing 5 of them (2 good and 3 evil) and played in the 6th (good). I wanted to keep it simple for myself, so I put the 5 I ran in Neverwinter (the DM for the 6th didn't want to complicate things, so he place his in Neverwinter as well). I had each side start with the same objective (evil helps the BBEG with finding herbs for poisons in order poison the city of Neverwinter - and the good side looking into the disappearance of some soldiers that were actually used as garden beds for the poisons). The BBEG was a halfling chef/baker. The adventure eventually led up to the city getting poisoned and killed, when the BBEG was discovered. Then there was a race to thwart or ensure that the death of the city - which was actually the beginning of a ritual that would summon Orcus. My character died and quickly too (he was a healer with no one to heal). In the end; however, the good guys thwarted the ritual be barely. There was two spots of interests for the parties to go and not everyone was able to make it to the final event.
So, since you've requested questions, here's mine: How do you recover from DM fatigue or a confidence crisis? I hard-stopped my last campaign because of a crisis of confidence, and I haven't gotten back on track yet.
