Shitty Hooks

What do you do when your GM gives the whole group a shitty story hook like "Why don't you go down this hole that people have died in?", and the half the group realises it's a shitty hook, and says no, and the other half says "Yeah!" and calls the other half of the group cowards for not taking the shitty plot hook?

>down this hole that people have died in

Sounds like a dungeon to me.

But nothing has been explained about it. We're on a quest to retreive something we know isn't down the hole.

Talk to the other players. Some people will jump at the chance to explore some random place for no good reason. This sounds like something that you, as a player, don't want to do. It's everyone's responsibility that everyone at the table is having fun.

Or if the problem is that your GM is shit, then.. quit, maybe?

Knowing my DM, his content is good but he has trouble with beginnings so I'd go for it

I feel part of the players' job is to find their own motivations.
Yeah, it might be a shitty plothook, but if the alternative is to dig your heels in and refuse to engage with the GM's pre-planned session, its not much of an alternative.
Roleplaying isn't a passive past-time getting spoonfed, someimes you have to work to engage and be engaged with the other people at the table.

You go down the hole of course, that's where the plot is.

Are you suggesting it's a plot hole?

I guess you have to prove your knowledge that it isn't in there by going into the hole and showing them the ample evidence they need to know themselves that it isn't in this fucking hole.

>Are you suggesting it's a plot hole?

Might not want to mistake that for a suggestion, user.

Just fucking do it. What do you have to gain by not doing it? Prolonging the boring, monotonous lives of your make-believe characters?

Does it make your GM a shitty GM if he makes you do shit that makes no sense? Yeah. Are you a shitty player for not just running with it, especially at the outset? Yeah.

You roleplay out the argument with other party members and decide whether or not your characters want to take the hook based on their personalities.

What's the issue?

>Are you a shitty player for not just running with it
No.

You play the game you set aside at least several hours a week for, you fucking moron.

Back in the old days people just went in dangerous holes. Because its them is treasure. Its DUNGEONS and Dragons. Yeah its not the most amazing plot hook in the world but some of the best D&D adventures are predicated on that same concept. (keep on the borderlands, TI village of hommlet, horror on the hill ect ect)

Well fuck, son, are you playing a role-playing game or some kind of narrative story-wank?

The point of a role-playing game is to explore every last nook, cranny, and crevasse in the referee's world in search of that sweet, sweet treasure—because it's worth XP, and you need that shit to level up.

On the other hand, maybe you're just riding the rails and waiting for your frustrated-novelist of a GM to hand you a cookie every so often for being a good li'l sport and playing along with his "plot".

So what you're saying is that you occasionally like to decide that the GM's hook isn't good enough for you so you don't want to do it.
Why even be in the fucking campaign?

I got a story for this.
NWoD, Hunter the Vigil game, and you have to understand our storyteller, she was our usual GM's girlfriend who after being dragged along as a bard in Pathfinder decides she wants to run something herself.
So she decides on Hunter, and says she wants it to be realistic at least at the start and sort of an origin story so we've all had brushes with supernatural shenanigans but none of us are actual hunters yet.
We come with a businessman/sport hunter (resources/sorta sniper) a computer tech/hacker (tech guy obviously) a burnt out collage professor (lore man) a hitman (gun/underworld, was the storytellers boyfriend) and *sigh* that guy as a crazy ex-doctor turned hobo who sells meth (medical/i have no fucking idea)

Now the game starts with none of us knowing each other, no connections, and none of us knowing the supernatural exists.
"Oh well you go to the professor to get that book your grandfather left you in your backstory translated!"
"Um why would i go to a professor of folklore and mythology to get a book that's in German translated?"

Then later we're all told that there have been reports of strange things happening at an old abandoned hospital and people have gone missing. Now remember at this point we're NOT hunters, just five random assholes
"So what do you do?"
"um.. stay the fuck away from the old hospital? Why would i go there, i'm just some guy in a suit?"
Then after we all go because railroad we find.. nothing, just some crazy junkies babbling about some weird shit, we thought they were ghouls but nope, just methheads

Then later again we all get letters to meet up at an old mansion outside town at midnight.
"WHY would i do that? I'm a fucking financier!"
There we meet a woman who claims to be a vampire
"prove it!" *she shows us she has fangs* "um hell no, my goth niece has those."
she offers us a lot of money if we go and kill a bunch of people in a warehouse

"I'm. a. BUSINESSMAN! He's a tech support guy! He's a collage teacher!" Hitman guy was all for it and crazy hobo was just... crazy hobo but apparently the rest of us were supposed to just go fight a bunch of random fuckers, turned out to be drug dealers who were bleeding a vampire to make something out of it's blood, because a lady we all thought was nuts was going to pay us, in my case who was pretty well off, because "im a vampire"

Seriously i think she was too used to Pathfinder's style of "oh some strange fuckery is going on, better check it out"

Sounds to me like you are just a bitch.
If my DM gives me a plot hole, I jump in.
What else are you going to do? Head back to town until your DM comes up with something different?

>Agree to play monopoly with my friends
>Bill starts explaining the rules
>"The point of the game is to travel around the board and amass property and wealth until you win"
>wait, wait, wait
>I ask "why? my character wouldn't do that. I'm a monk who is seeking eternal happiness from within."
>sit smugly in the corner on my phone while everyone else has fun playing a game
if they can't give me a good plot hook then what am I to do? Bunch of idiots.

Why make characters with no willingness to do things?

I don't mind it that much and just sort of go with it. If it doesn't make much sense I try to figure out a way to make it make sense to work with the GM. It's about imagination. Sometimes I can't save a hook no matter what though.

Also the duggler is my spirit animal.

I've been that GM and gotten so caught up in the minutia of writing a whole fucking dungeon that I forgot to give the players a reason to go in there.

I think the best thing you can do as a player is go with it, justify it in-character somehow, and ask the GM about it later.

Even if half the party doesn't want to jump in, you should just jump in anyway and see if they follow you.

Improvisation/roleplay is all about accepting the offer. When you block, story grinds to a halt. I don't care if the offer is shitty, it's your job to accept and make a new offer that improves the whole scene.

oh we were willing, but we were told explicitly that we were to start off as normal everyday guys living in New York and we were trying to play that

Thing about plot hooks, is if the cake is good, they're just icing. Icing on a turd is still a turd, and I've had some damn good cakes without any icing.

If you're playing D&D, the incentive is already there: dungeons are where the gold is. Gold is worth XP. Players who don't go searching for gold don't get XP and never level up.

If you're not playing D&D, maybe dungeons aren't a great idea.

And if you're playing some bastardized later edition of D&D where you get XP for winning fights but not for finding gold (2nd edition or later), you're not actually playing D&D; and so, again, maybe dungeons aren't a great idea.

>The point of the roleplaying game isn't roleplaying
Why not just play video games at that point? They're objectively better in every way if you don't care about characters or plot

>2nd edition
Has gold = XP.

>Muh improvisational acting

Regardless of whether you call the kind of game in question a "role-playing game", "fantasy role-play", or even the original subtitle to OD&D, "fantastic medieval wargames playable with paper and pencil and miniature figures", the "role-playing" facet of RPGs refers to players making decisions from the perspective of an assumed character.

Not funny voices and stupid accents and playing a part some kind of """story""". If you've got a story arc, you've done gone missed the point. If the ref has a plot, flee, find something better to do with your time.

>Semantic bullshit
>Opinions stated as facts
>Sweeping generalizations
And not a single word that addressed my point

Not by default. The last paragraph of the main section on XP in the 2e DMG was a bit of a throwaway reference to 1e's method, but discouraged it as causing "a tendency to give out too much treasure"; and the class-based individual awards (including thieves getting 2 XP per GP found/stolen) are likewise merely optional.

Because your point was self-evidently moronic. Video games are in no way "objectively better" than a human referee.

>The last paragraph of the main section on XP in the 2e DMG was a bit of a throwaway reference to 1e's method,
It originally had its own blue box, making it more obvious, but they dumped it in the revised DMG.

>D&D with rules I don't like don't count as D&D because I say so
I agree 1st and 2nd ed are the best but please dude don't be this autistic

But they are. You can at least as much mechanical depth as the crunchiest of systems while still being lighter and simpler (from the player's perspective) than any P&P could ever be.

I'd argue that, while the ref shouldn't have a predetermined plot, a number of "story arcs" will emerge naturally as a result of any group of player characters pursuing their personal goals for long enough within an adequately reactive world.

The wizard's drive to unearth lost secrets of his people, or the Barbarian's desire to kill some fabled quarry will eventually lead them into conflict with other groups and people that will play out over the course of several sessions, which will eventually lead to narrative all on its own.

>"Um why would i go to a professor of folklore and mythology to get a book that's in German translated?"
Honestly you're over selling the Book. That plot point wasn't THAT much of a stretch, and you're over selling it because of later content

But I feel like a small amount of restructuring of the presented plot. Like invested assets. Family history. Shared backstories would have helped a long way.

yeah it sounds goofy and dumb, but hey at least she tried

Well your choices are

1) Take the shitty plot hook which will at least get you some combat and treasure and shit

2) Do fucking nothing because if he's spoonfeeding you shitty plot hooks then he's not good enough to make up something else on the fly

I'd rather play than not play

My favorite was for a cyberpunk game. I hadn't met any of the other PCs yet and the GM started me off driving down the road. An ambulance passed me going the other way with it's sirens on. I dashed his clever plan to get us together when I failed to turn my car around and follow the ambulance to see where it was going. Literally the only hook was the casual mention of the ambulance passing by. He didn't even emphasize it or anything. So we had to end that session early.

Another instance under the same GM... My character started off in a restaurant and was randomly attacked by gunmen he didn't know. He managed to fight them off, but they escaped. The next day, the guys who had attacked me pulled up beside me in the car and said something along the lines of "get in; we need your help." And realizing this was the best hook I was going to get, I inwardly sighed and said that my character got into the car.

I would ask the GM to pause the game so I could discuss the situation with him. I would say that I didn't want to derail the adventure by not biting on the obvious hook but that I couldn't think of a good reason why my character would go down some random death-hole. I'd ask them to either tweak things a bit to accommodate my character's personality or to help me rationalize why my character would proceed. If all of this came to naught, I'd shake my head unhappily but have my character take the shitty plot hook so that the adventure could continue.

This. Going through the adventure solely because I as the player am supposed to do it makes it a chore. I'd like the plot hook to be relevant at least in some way to my character and his ambitions.

Not him, but yeah you are.

>chore
Cause lord knows producing hours of free entertainment is not a chore at all

>"I don't know what improvisational acting actually is": The Post

Depends on the GM. Is this a GM that doesn't lose his stride if you don't go down the hole, or is this a GM that has to end the session if you don't go down the hole? i.e. is this an optional or mandatory objective?

If the only way to have a game is to go down the plot hole, go down with whatever flimsy justification you have. Your character is curious. Your character is reluctant but agrees to humour the more willing partymembers. Your character decides against all reason to go down the hole giving you a chance to explore why they'd suddenly do that (possibly introducing new backstory), etc.
Hell, if your GM is the type to incorporate player input into the story, make up a justification on the spot. "I've read about this stuff during my travels. It might be the murderhole of Funkmenistan which according to legend is said to hold the body of the dead sage Abbadah. We could cast speak with dead on his corpse and ask about our current objective if we find it!"

After the session you give the GM feedback on said plot hole, explainin that he might want to work on presenting clearer incentives and motivations that appeal to the players and/or characters. Easiest one is rumours of treasure.

Suspend your disbelief and work with the GM, not against him.

This is pretty easy, would your character do it?

1: Yes: go down the hole

2a: no: don't
b: no, but only way to get any plot: go down the hole, but stay a nice safe distance behind the idiots so willing to walk into a trap, ready to flee if things start going bad.

>everyone else has fun playing a game
Wait, I thought you said they were playing Monopoly.

>I'm unhappy with the particulars of this plot hook
>the entire game must stop so that I can discuss my sour grapes with the DM, despite the fact that nothing can really be done at this point to alter the situation significantly
The correct response is to go along with it and then voice your issues with the DM after the game.

Drop a nuclear bomb down the hole to blow it up and destroy what ever is inside that hole

You give the GM the benefit of the doubt. If there is a plot hook, you try to find an excuse for your character to bite on it. But when the hook is terrible, or just completely inappropriate for your character, it's perfectly legit to have a quick meta-discussion about it.

This.