The problem was simple: nobody was having fun. We were going through the motions, having a dungeon crawl, and nobody really wanted to do it because there was no reason to do it. I was baffled at how nobody could be excited while playing an awesome game involving magic swords and mystical sorcery.
Of course, I refused to give up. I learned from my mistakes, and in the past few years I have run some very enjoyable games where everybody had fun. I have found that there is really only one key thing that needs to be incorporated into a game to keep everything on-track and help the players want to play, and that is "Saving The X".
Save the princess, save the town, save the world. Seems clichéd, right? Well, yeah, it is. They come up in nearly every single fantasy story, movie, and video game. It even extends to action genres. But you should not think that using the trope makes for an unoriginal or un-fun story. Gritty, hardened antiheroes are fine (and increasingly popular these days,) but if they have nothing to fight for, then what's the point?
Chrono Trigger is a prime example of this. No matter what time period you found yourself in, you were rescuing princesses, helping post-apocalyptic survivors find food, or protecting cavemen from dinosaurs. (And, as pictured here, having to save the hero himself.) The plot focused on individual characters and their relatively complex motivations (or, in several cases, monsters and their motivations,) but the driving force for the player at every turn was, "oh, we've gotta go help those people." This is something that I have found the majority of players and player characters respond very well to in D&D games.
This is why I cringe whenever I hear a D&D game start with, "you're all in a bar." And then something bad happens that forces the players to react to it. It's pathetic, really. Blame Tolkien, the only reason the Bree chapter in Lord of the Rings was any good was because of Strider, and you're probably not going to have a Strider in your game.
Characters are the stars of a role-playing story, they're supposed to be effecting change upon the world, not reacting. They have their own motivations and goals (even if they are very vaguely defined in the players' minds.) You can take five minutes of planning and discussion to figure out who the players' characters are, and then simply assign them a mission. If a cleric or paladin is in the party, just use that organization for convenience. "Okay, your superiors have notified you that peasants in the mining town of Eastweld have gone missing and have asked for assistance. The rest of the party members are either acquaintances or mercenaries you have asked to protect you during the long journey." Then ask the group what preparations they will be making for the trip (buying horses, food, researching the region, maybe hiring a few extra mercenaries just in case.) You don't have to start with an ambush on the road, let them get some control over the situation before it even happens.
If you have a group of players who can tolerate role-playing and NPC interaction, you may say, "all right, most of you have grown up in this village, and are friends with [INSERT QUICK DESCRIPTIONS OF KEY NPCS HERE]. Last week, [FRIEND OR FAMILY OF A PC] crawled out of the mines half-dead and claimed that he had been attacked by lots of small, vicious creatures, and now everyone is too afraid to work in the mines." Without even asking, they're likely going to mull it over in their minds for a minute, look at their character sheets, and then say, "I think we're strong enough to deal with this." This also gives the players a lovely sense of dread of the unknown which you can play with even before they set foot inside a dungeon.
Unless you have players who are willing to have psychopathic characters, they will always respond positively to these plot hooks. Drawing up a dungeon from there is trivial (though I tend to cheat with some tools I'll be posting in future blogs,) because the players will have decided to motivate themselves to have an adventure and save the world (or kingdom, or town, as the case may be.) If you are a GM who is having problem getting players motivated, drop a few indications that there are people who have problems, or people who need help, and watch how the party reacts.
