Does your party ever ignore quest hooks?

That doesn't seem like a reason to avoid it. I mean, in the end, SOMETHING's going to have to lead to trouble, because trouble is the fun part of the game.

>Be me
>2nd DnD session ever
>Little girl has us kill some bandits at her house
>Turns out to be undead, no biggie
>Clear out the house, doin good
>Cult ceremony going on in the woods behind the house
>They want the little girl for some reason
>They start a summoning ritual and a spirit starts appearing
>"You guys have 10 seconds to influence the scenario"
>What am I supposed to influence?
>"I throw the little girl at the spirit"

The guy got bigger and there was some BS boss fight where the DM said something like
>"Its a ghost, your weapons don't effect it. You need something holy that can"
>Its a one off session
>Haven't gotten any loot all session, started with basic level1 items
Fun/frustrating night

Of course I would!

I really, really hated the character design in this show.

>For example, if an innocent girl asked you for help finding the next village, would you?
Considering the summoner in my group would lose a serious amount synchronization with the being she incarnates if she ever, and I quote, "refuse to help a woman", that particular avenue remains viable, always and forever, because she just threatens to slap the shit out of the other party member with her big goddamned hammer if he disagrees.
Even though experience tells them there's a 50-50 chance that they're going to get screwed because of it.

>For example, if an innocent girl asked you for help finding the next village, would you?

That depends 100% on what kind of character I'm playing and more importantly how the GM presents it.

The problem with scenarios like this is GM's have an idea for an endearing or charismatic character who requests help from the party. But the NPC just comes off as demanding, cowardly, unlikable, or even flat-out suspicious. As a rule I take all NPCs at face-value. If that little girl seems like she's not on the up-and-up, then I'm gonna be reluctant to go along with this unless the GM is particularly good at baiting his plot hooks.

This isn't meta-gaming. If anything it's the opposite. I shouldn't have to read between the lines and go along with whatever bullshit crosses my path just because I as a player know the GM wants me to.

>Does your party ever ignore quest hooks?
>For example, if an innocent girl asked you for help finding the next village, would you?
Yes, we would. Because fuck that girl and fuck that DM.

I'm lucky if I can convince my party to stop trying to kill each other for more than 15 minutes, let alone get them to bite onto a plot hook

You need new players.

It actually works out okay, the one who is getting buttfucked the most tends to try to advance the plot so they can find some new macguffin that gives them the edge in trying to kill the others.

user that's not a healthy group dynamic.

>detect evil
>destroy evil
>laugh

Perhaps, but at the end of the night everyone is laughing and goes home happy. That's all that really matters.

I'm just sad they can't seem to get into Paranoia, since the game is explicitly designed for what they want to do.

No. A group of people level 3+ are strong enough to kill an entire village. Why would we waste our time on ferrying an obvious fetish bait from one town to the other?

If a GM is the kind of guy who'd throw an Evil little girl at the party then that little girl is not going to actually ping Evil.

>good girl
More like a hypocrite and a monster.
>"It's A-okay from our moral standpoint for us to eat humans, even though they often die for real, but it's not okay for the very same humans to hunt us back, even though the reasoning I use is that we need to eat them to survive!"
No, fuck you. You hunt your prey and expect it to just turn over and die? Well, too fucking bad.

And the faggot monk was no better, he betrayed his race simply because of his self-worth issues.
>"Waah, waah, no one understands me except this vampire girl who literally just told me a couple of kind words once and nothing more, might as well betray my entire fucking village and enable vampires to go on a murder spree!"

FUCK. THEM.
Ozaki was both right and morally just.

Please try and play Black Crusade with those people. If you want to pdfs there is a link in the 40k rpg general. A bunch of evil devil worshipers and heretics having to "work together" to do things, and often stepping on each other's toes. Or shooting each other.

My Half-Orc isn't exactly trusting and quite cynical. A random little girl in the middle of a forest wouldn't have survived long enough for them to find her. If she isn't bawling her eyes out or obviously very distressed, then that's even more reason to be suspicious. Either way, if it's not exactly a magic forest, he'll be checking for traps, enemies hiding in the foliage, or weapons on the girl before he comes close. If it is a magical forest, superstition kicks in and he's not going to be the one to risk going anywhere near her.

I'll check it out. Thanks for the suggestion!

There's ways it can work. Take Newt from Aliens. She survived alone in a monster-infested facility for two months before the party finds her. And while she does put some extra responsibility on the survivors, she never comes off as dead weight and does a good job staying out of their way. She doesn't cry or beg or plead; she's just squirrelly.

You also don't have any real reason to be suspicious of her.

>would you?

>"I throw the little girl at the spirit"

Everything bad that happens from this point on is your failt

that depends on if the GM has an elaborate scenario prepared or not. if so, ignoring the quest hook is a complete douchebag move. such players should be flayed, then quartered. however, if the GM plays sandbox-style, then it depends on my character and circumstances.

>sandbox games
>i.e. "guys, the new Diablo/Fallout/Borderlands/Whatever was real fun, so I'm going to pull locations off google maps and put random loot everywhere. This is going to be so much fun!"

>Sprite, Fanta, and Coke

>implying it's not 7up, Crush, and Pepsi

Have some imagination, chummer.

No, they have a sense of ettiquette.

They know the DM took time from his week to prepare an adventure, so they don't just go "hey, we know you spent 4 hours designing a dungeon, but we feel like being dicks, so let's just wander around aimlessly all session since you don't have anything else prepared."

>we should pay lip service to the GM's shitty railroad attempts just to be nice

There's a give and take, user. A good GM comes prepared to change and improvise because no session notes survive contact with the players. He should understand what he thinks is a good encounter/plot/NPC is not necessarily what the players will think.

By the same token, players should be willing to answer the question "Do you want to play D&D or not?".

It's not the fun kind of trouble. It's the pain in the ass kind of trouble. I mean, say you find out a dragon's attacking a village. You know what you're getting there. Wings, fangs, claws, deadly breath, etc. It's the kind of trouble you can account for. That "innocent" little girl? She can be any number of things, none of them very good. Vampire, demon, omnipotent abomination, illusion, witch, or a plain annoying kid. Sometimes it's more than one. It's just not worth dealing with all of those contingencies.

Take my advice and spare yourself the headache. Always avoid the little girl.

I ran a game where, no matter what I did, my players seemed to go out of their way to avoid plot hooks. The entire country got destroyed because the players refused to get involved with anything that wasn't looting a dungeon, leaving the BBEG to his own devices.

This. I don't mind shit going south. But I do mind when I get bushwhacked by something way out of my league because the GM thinks he's clever

1. The party I'm the GM for absolutely never ignores a plot hook.
I have to say it's a little bit my own fault, because they're the first party I've ever GM'd, and in the beginning I did a lot of railroading.
Right now I'm using that against them though by giving them quest hooks that don't lead anywhere (they just haven't figured out that last part yet :p)
2. The party I'm playing in: yes for several reasons:
-The GM likes to give us several plot hooks at the same time, so we only take one and ignore the others
-We've already been heavily fucked with in the past, so we're very wary of traps
-The party leader is neutral neutral, so if he doesn't feel like doing something, he just won't do it, then I'll protest for a while, and eventually we won't do it.

>For example, if an innocent girl asked you for help finding the next village, would you?
I would agree.

I would then clearly state to the GM out-of-character that if the little girl turns out to be a demon/vampire/dangerous opponent, I will be leaving the game, because that shit's overdone like an Irishman in a tenement fire.

I have a 'little girl is secretly a powerful evil' going on in my setting, but she's being raised and protected as a VIP by the party's enemies, rather than being a thing into herself. After all, the evil sorceress had to be raised by someone.

>Crush
>not Mirinda
One job, user.

>For example, if an innocent girl asked you for help finding the next village, would you?
We crush capitalist pig with machines of labour!

Is the evil sorceress unaware she's actually evil?

Because that's the only way I can really get at all interested in that trope by this point.

Something I get really hung up on, for the better I think, is what happens if the party ignores a quest hook. I like doing Sandbox style GMing and giving the party a lot of options and freedom. As a result I spend a bit of extra time making sure the world is organic. If the party is a low level band of adventurers and they get a quest hook to retake a mine from a troup of goblins and ignore it then I'll think of what happens to that mine. Maybe another band of adventurers takes the job, or maybe the Goblins aren't dealt with and thus establish the mine as a base of operations and use it for raids on the local ranches.

Ignored quest hooks shouldn't result in automatic bad things for the world. Sometimes ignored quest hooks could mean a town is destroyed, but most of the time, it means that the quest hook is changed/solved via other means.

Frankly, with the way PCs work the world is probably better off without them getting involved.

In my experience players rarely ever "succeed". They just kind of fail forward.

Ain't that the truth. The last time a quest had the party defending some town, they accidentally burned a bunch of the town. The Gobos and Orcs never made it over the wall, but some poorly thought out plans still ruined a lot of the place.
Although they did make lemonade out of lemons and convinced the town that the gobos somehow started the fire. They also managed to get the town to hire them to find a contractor to rebuild the ruined parts. The party took the downpayment and tried to increase it at the tavern in the next city over via gambling so they could take some extra money and ensure that the town was rebuilt real nice but they lost all of it.

I've heard of it happening.

I'd give her what she deserves and put a stake in her.
>people defend the bloodsuckers

desu that's an even worse questhook than old man entering the inn grasping a parchment during a dark and stormy night, falling down with an arrow sticking out of his back.

0/10 try again DM

wink wink nudge nudge

Quest hooks should be interesting OP.

>players rarely ever "succeed". They just kind of fail forward.
wisdom

>That pic
>Those trips
user confirmed for the Prime Evil.

I'm not the "Prime Evil" you twerp. Besides Diablo's dead and there's no way I could get out of that stupid rock anyway.

We do the exact fucking opposite because we're a bunch of stupid cunts.

Quest hook after quest hook gets snapped up like a sliver of meat thrown to a pack of wild starving dogs. We have a backlist of some ten fucking missions 3 of which are full-on arcs. Sure we've learned to hire people and delegate tasks and we've gotten efficient at lining up quests so we can have something that takes a while cooking on the backburner while doing quick'n'easies right off but it's never enough and every time we go somewhere or do something or see something we might scratch one off the list but collect two or three more to replace it.

And then the fucking party crafter has the gall to complain about being overworked and wanting a change of pace when they're exactly as guilty of this as the rest of us.

Good man.

I generally have a rule of following plot hook regardless of personality, and retroactively justifying it. The GM (hopefully) has prepared this for us, and if we just throw it away without even a single glance then it just results in less entertainment for both parties.

However, once we've started a quest, the GM should be prepared for all possibilities. Pity be he who has planned the entire campaign from the start.

The doctor and vampire were both wrong but justifiable.

Sunako did nothing wrong and is cute!

My party doesn't so much ignore them as falling into bickering whenever one presents itself.

In this case, my two good party members would jump at the opportunity for some more adventure and be in favor of it, the true neutral one would either refuse because he's paranoid about being led into traps or would hold off on taking the hook until he could wrangle some pre-arranged payment, in an exact GP figure, and the CN one will refuse on principle until said GP is a certainty.

I hate my neutral party members.

>if an innocent girl asked you for help finding the next village, would you?
Fuck no. On principal, innocent little girls can go get fucked proportionally to how innocent and adorable they are.

They're the laziest, easiest way to get the party to hop on the rails. Which i'm perfectly fine with, but the GM needs to learn to come up with more creative or lucrative ways to do that without lazily pushing the "elf slave needs help" button.

That or they're evil. Like all the way evil. And if not directly evil, will cause evil shit.

Either way, bugger off back to your orphanage filled with three legged puppies. The skeleton of last guy that went looking for your stuffed rabbit still screams every night from the forest.

We'll put her through our standard battery of tests.

First we poke her with a needle. Many dangerous, supernatural creatures have damage resistance. If she doesn't take damage, we'll know she's just faking it.

Then the Paladin will use "Smite Evil" in conjunction with a sap to deal non-lethal damage (sometimes enemies can use spells to avoid Detect Evil). If the girl suffers from Smite damage we know she's evil.

Finally we'll have the Cleric cast a geas on her preventing her from being allowed to travel with us. If she's not willing to swear that she won't murder us in our sleep, she gets to stay on the side of the road.

There are a few other tests our group puts NPCs through before letting them come with us, but those are the three big ones we subject everybody to.

If she's a level 1 commoner, won't that much nonlethal damage instantly kill her anyway?

>After doing this a dozen times, the party is left wondering why NPCs steer clear of them at all times.

Only if the smite goes off.

The Paladin will probably do about 6 nonlethal damage with a sap if she's not evil, but that will knock her unconcious. But if she's evil the smite will add an extra 12+ damage which will probably kill her. Of course, in that case she was an evil little girl so the world is a safer place.

And if she's still conscious after that, we know some shit is seriously wrong and swap to lethal damage.