GMing?

[Courage75]

So, there's this rabbit. You capture him, giving him purpose in life: "Escape!"  Then you bring in three animals to bust him out. The rabbit's problem was created and solved by you. Now he has no purpose. No goal. And because you can't come up with one for him, the session fizzles.

What did the player do during this session? What does the rabbit want?

With the benefit of hindsight, I'd say a better way to set up this problem is to give the player the opportunity to allow his rabbit character to escape through a mechanical challenge of some sort. If he succeeds, he escapes and perhaps meets with the three other animals who teach him about high technology in the next scene. If he fails, then things get worse for the rabbit - perhaps he sees another animal get put down and suffers psychological trauma.

But yeah, I wouldn't set up a trap for a PC and then let NPCs spring him out of it. It removes player agency. If you want the PC to meet the NPCs so he can learn tech, I'd not bother with the capture scene at all - go straight to the "learning tech" scene and then tilt it with a bang - perhaps the Pet Catcher bursts in and tries to capture all the pets. The rabbit they needs to apply his newly-learned tech to help his saviours get away - or they get captured and now the rabbit has to bust them out.