Comment on “Five Dungeon Starts”

I think these are good examples. I think the reason for the success is because of their naturalistic feel. A spooked horse, needing to pee, getting help to move something or straining one's back: these are all perfectly ordinary circumstances in the real world. They don't stand out like a neon DUNGEON THIS WAY sign to the players because they are fairly ordinary; for the game purposes, however, they lead somewhere fantastic. I think this fits in with the idea that the game world should be consistent with the real world: not in the sense that combat is "realistic" or that armor is historically accurate or whatever, but rather, in the sense that gravity points toward Earth, certain trees lose their leaves in fall, and so on. In effect, there is no "hook" : there's just some everyday stuff happening, but because it's fantasy there is more than meets the eye.

I think that when we lose the natural feel, we get the old-school traditional random encounter table, AKA meaningless encounter table. There's no sense that "1d12 owlbears" has anything to do with what's going on with the players, or with the NPCs, or with the overall coherence of the world that is being run.

What do you think? Is it the believability which makes this kind of hook work for you?