I might not be using the right terms exactly, but hopefully this makes sense.
This is only my second time DMing and this is with a group of newish players. I'm running an adventure out of a book which is fairly linear, since during our session 0, the players communicated that they would prefer following a set story rather than freely roaming around. I'm totally ok with that and am trying to accomodate.
The problem I struggle with, is I am utterly failing at presenting the plot points in an interesting way without it feeling lame and forced. For example:
"As you make your way down the path, you see two figures ahead. You recognize them as the odd couple from the tavern. What do you do?"
The answer is sometimes "uh... We ignore them and continue down the trail" which is frustrating when they are major characters for the story. The players sometimes get so focused on advancing the plot that they just skip past it all.
However it's almost worse then their answer is "well I guess we're supposed to talk to them. So... I do that." I feel that awkwardness, because if I were in their shoes, it would feel just as forced to me.
But... It's in the adventure book! They need to meet these guys or the next section kind of doesnt make sense. I have tried having the NPCs directly approach the player characters, but even that tends to feel like the players are just going through the motions. They know this must be important so they play along but I feel like it just turns into me giving info dump after info dump as each NPC appears, and it feels so contrived.
So, yes, I have talked to the players, and they are trying their best to engage. This is now me asking how I can be a better DM and present plot points in a natural, interesting way that doesn't just feel like a queue of NPCs lining up for their turn to "stare menacingly at the PCs" so they can stumble through another stilted conversation.
This is particularly difficult for "random encounters" that are meant to flesh out the world and give the players a chance to roleplay. "You come across a goblin next to an elaborate painting on the side of a large oak tree. 'my brushes! My brushes are missing!'" If I were a player, I would have no reason to engage with this. It might be a fun little interaction but would our group of adventurers really stop and talk to every random person they see? Help every cat out of a tree? I want to make the world feel full and exciting and fun to play inside but instesd I feel like I'm just presenting my players a series of chores.
This is some solid advice, thank you!
If single-point-of-engagement is a sign of a badly-written adventure, do you have any suggestions on how you might rework some of these encounters if you were writing your own adventure?
One helpful starting point for me is often: What is it the bad guys want to do? Whatever they want to do usually causes problems for good and normal people. So you look for intersections between what the players do/plan/like experiencing and what the bad things the bad people have done are.
When you write your adventure like that a single point of engagement situation happens only under one of 2 circumstances:
If it's (1) your bad guys are not very evil and the PCs time is probably better spent thwarting some other bad guys (i.e. you need to make your bad guys more bad).
If it's (2) your bad guys are too competent and will likely only be stoppable by Batman (who is the world's greatest detective). I.e. make your bad guys (or at least some of their minions) more incompetent.
You can also analyze prewritten material from the perspective of the bad guys. Often you will find that what is written as a single point of engagement thing actually lends itself to a multitude of hooks that you can find by looking at the plans of the bad guys.
There is one type of adventure that can't be dealt with like this: environmental adventures. Stuff that relies on players being in a specific place/situation (like a classic dungeon crawl) and that doesn't have a bad guy per se. But those are the easiest to deal with with my methods 2 (make them justify being in that place/situation) and 3 (give them a quest to be there) from above ("I have heard there is a cursed ruin in these woods, can you check so I know wether it's worth buying the land?")
This is really helpful! Thank you so much for your time writing this all out!