markusdark said:
But if you don't inform plot about what you would enjoy doing, I would say the onus is more on the player than on plot. Submit a background, inform them between games what you'd like to do. If after some time they're still not producing anything you are enjoying, then I'd say let them know via your entrance fee.
I think what I meant to say was that the player gave no sort of inclination to plot about what she would like to do at the game nor really researched what was happening in the game to find a hook.
Oddly enough, even that's not always the case.
I've had characters run along for years at LARPs that didn't have so much of a fragment of their plot history touched by the people running the game. I still had plenty of fun- but because I played the character.
What I find is the folks that don't have fun not only don't inform Plot of what they want- they don't inform themselves, either. They come in with no real character, only the most vague combination of stats/race and expect everything to fall together from there like magic.
Heck, my first character was like that- I wanted to see what boffer fighting was like, my weapon failed and I ended up making a complete throwaway character. I was on the verge of calling it a day and going back to college when I tried something exceptionally stupid and adventure-friendly and thanks to a LOT of luck the throwaway suddenly ended up with a very good reason to come back again and again, I wrote up a history, and I ended up perming 8+ years later. If I literally hadn't stumbled into and become an accidental Plot "hook", I'd probably be playing at a Darkon game in DC somewhere and never have bothered with a LARP again.
It actually takes two failures to really hose a player at a game.
1) They put hooks in for Plot to work with to have fun, and Plot drops the ball, AND
2) They put nothing into their character that lets them find something to hook themselves into the game.
