Would love some ideas! We play online and it can be a challenge to keep my PCs engaged (1-2 especially love to tab out), and for the homebrew campaign they're in there's more than a couple "go find this terrible beast and slay it" or the equivalent kind of activities.
I can run the encounters just fine, but it's the rest of it that I worry might. be less than engaging. "Make a survival roll, you found the tracks, they lead you to the monster" doesn't build story or tension I think, and it'd maybe be more immersive and engaging if the players if they had that (and good for me to have more options in my back pocket!).
I use GMBuilder materials to make chance encounters with things in the world, and would welcome some ideas from folks' games.
Hard to say much with the level of information here. How much meaning do these tasks have? Why are they doing them? There's big differences between "somebody hires you to go and kill a thing", "you're hunting down a monster that ran off with the cute kid from the village you live in", and "you're hunting down the monster that's been making hit-and-run attacks on you for several sessions, and now it ran off with one PCs little brother".
Isolated encounters with no real connection to the PCs are unengaging. Connecting the encounters to the PCs increases engagement. Connecting the encounters with other things in the game increases engagement. (If I say "increases engagement" much more, I'm going to turn into a web marketing person.)
It also sounds like you're making things too simple. Always complicate the situation. There's environmental hazards, time pressure, other monsters, other hunters with conflicting desires...
And, of course, there's always the option of talking to your players. You're allowed to ask them how you're doing, what sorts of things in the game they've been into, which things not so much.
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Would love some ideas! We play online and it can be a challenge to keep my PCs engaged (1-2 especially love to tab out), and for the homebrew campaign they're in there's more than a couple "go find this terrible beast and slay it" or the equivalent kind of activities.
I can run the encounters just fine, but it's the rest of it that I worry might. be less than engaging. "Make a survival roll, you found the tracks, they lead you to the monster" doesn't build story or tension I think, and it'd maybe be more immersive and engaging if the players if they had that (and good for me to have more options in my back pocket!).
I use GMBuilder materials to make chance encounters with things in the world, and would welcome some ideas from folks' games.
Hard to say much with the level of information here. How much meaning do these tasks have? Why are they doing them? There's big differences between "somebody hires you to go and kill a thing", "you're hunting down a monster that ran off with the cute kid from the village you live in", and "you're hunting down the monster that's been making hit-and-run attacks on you for several sessions, and now it ran off with one PCs little brother".
Isolated encounters with no real connection to the PCs are unengaging. Connecting the encounters to the PCs increases engagement. Connecting the encounters with other things in the game increases engagement. (If I say "increases engagement" much more, I'm going to turn into a web marketing person.)
It also sounds like you're making things too simple. Always complicate the situation. There's environmental hazards, time pressure, other monsters, other hunters with conflicting desires...
And, of course, there's always the option of talking to your players. You're allowed to ask them how you're doing, what sorts of things in the game they've been into, which things not so much.