Wanderlust

It's such a waste when nice art like that gets wasted on vanilla cards virtually no one will ever use on a regular basis. Imagine if shit like that had been on a Vampire Nighthawk reprint or something playable instead of a vanilla 2/1.

On your topic, how about the weather? Storms could make it so that travel is so severe that it's unthinkable to go very far at all.

>>52379287
Make them part of the ruling class of a clan/village/town/county/baronny/kingdom/empire. Their responsabilities will force them to come back.

>>52379287
Sounds like the places you've "sculpted" are boring

>>52379287
It sounds like they confused "fleshed out" with "interesting". They don't want to spend time in some boring nowhere town

>>52379287
Which D&D though? 3.pf? 5th? 2nd?

>>52379287
THe Answer took me seven years of constant DMing to reach and develop it: Procedural generation

Don't decide on things until players investigate them. A hole in the ground is a hole in the ground, but if the players go in, it becomes a cave and maybe a dungeon.

A npc has no story. But if he's followed or questioned, he becomes a former adventurer.

>>52379369
It probably got used on a throw-away card like that because it's depicting the Dark Barony in Homelands. I'm not sure why since they're never actually doing another block there.

As for topic at hand OP, speaking from personal experience, just dangle the rewards they want and make dudes they want to interact with. One time I gave all the bandit captains in this organization decks of cards with the head honchos' faces on them so that the lower ranks could identify them and it might give a bit of foreshadowing if they ran into any later as sidequests or random encounters. My players ended up skipping over the main plot of the campaign to collect those fucking decks. If there's something they take a liking to, build around it.

>>52380072
I stopped playing briefly around the time of the Mxx core sets and only came back after Origins, but one of the things I'd forgotten was how a lot of new cards were explicitly referencing past and future planes. If that's the case, then it's a slightly different issue of Wizards choosing to waste flavorful opportunities on weakass cards. It's one thing when it's some of the cards in a whole block, another when it's your sole representation of Ulgrotha in years.

Also, I like >>52379887's answer to this question a lot.

>>52379835
Op here. Not really. It seems to be a group thing if its not one player its another. No matter who DMs it happens

>>52381520
Maybe you're all boring DMs. It's not terribly unlikely

Have you tried talking to the players and explaining your position?

>>52381614
True to an extent. Only 2 gms are good story tellers. However the problem is still consistant

>>52381726
Its been brought up before. But it seems the more attention brought to it makes it occur more

>>52379287
Just like in real life. Sizeable towns are few and far between. The roads are shit, if they exist. The danger of getting lost is very real. Everybody hates drifters and only the shadiest characters will deal with them.

>>52379287
make the down a kind of safe haeven in a relativly safe world with one persistent mega-dungeon that the characters are trying to plunder. make this town grow with their victories and suffer for their defeats.
Basically darkest dungeon