Hinting of Secrets and Enticing Players to Explore

To the DMs out there - are your players the sort to wonder where a particular alley goes? Will they examine a wall covered in ivy to the ceiling - climbing it to see where it leads?

To players - do you look for the out-of-place items in a dungeon room? Have you ever sought out the crazy old man whose make-shift hut clings to the side of a steep precipice?

Now... have you ever done any of the above without the DM first calling out the items of "significance"?

I'm the sort of DM who loves placing interesting bits in all my villages, dungeons, ruined castles, and forlorn woods, but I always have a heck of a time getting my players to notice any of them, without waving a great big clue-bat at/for them.

I think it is likely obvious that the easiest way to hint at such secrets is to include some mention in the, for lack of a better phrase, read-aloud text for a scene - in a room with ivy clinging to a wall, particularly if no ivy has been encountered already, a mention of a slightly cool breeze in the corner of the room hints that maybe a secret passage exists there. But this can often run into the problem of requiring a lot of read-aloud text for every room so that the real clues don't stand out like neon signs.

If you'll forgive the reference, consider a video game like the Legend of Zelda - every map has tons of window dressing, little nooks that might have nothing more than a small treasure, or a secret shop, or some such. And the only way they'll be found is if you take the time to look behind you occasionally, dig behind the last tree on the left, or dive into that forest pond - no NPC elsewhere mentions that hidden goodie, although you may have learned of it through a walkthrough somewhere.

I know some older TSR products included pictures intended for player viewing (Tomb of Horrors for one, the original Dark Sun boxed set for another). Hasn't anyone has success using such things instead of describing scenes? Even using a rough sketch of the view from a given dungeon room's entrance, or a bird's-eye view map of the village - at least for a smaller village, or even using zoomed-in views of the main map of the kingdom, so that it can become very obvious to players that there's more along the road between King's Shire and Cottonford than just the open plains.

Perhaps this is just me wanting a bit more sandbox in my games, but I haven't yet found good ways to present such options to my players without explicitly spelling them out.

Thoughts?

The secret is to train your players to look.

You have to use a few subtle tools for reinforcement.

If the players ever look at anything, offer a small reward that appeals to the player -- a few minutes of focus time, an inconsequential treasure, a clue at a unsolved puzzle, something that foreshadows future events, etc.

Place a set of secondary items and a unknown plot in an locale that the players are bound to explore. If the players pick on on the clues, great! They get an action reward for poking around; you get to enjoy their perceptiveness. If they don't pick up on the clues, have a second group go through the locale after the fact find the clues and reap the reward. The players can discover what they missed amid the victory celebrations. This is a great way to establish a 'friendly' rivalry while offering a lesson that the DM will not advertise all plot-critical elements and the players need to look around.

That said, you need to be careful with what you wish for. Players constantly pokng around and examing every possible item can kill huge amounts of session time and lead to unpleasant group dynamic as part of the group just wants to get going to the action and the rest is convinced they've discovered a telling secret in an truly innocent pool of water and won't move on until they find the secret they are certain is there. Unlike a single player video game, wasting time affects others' enjoyment.

My group is going through Thunderspire at the moment. I had a beholder appear from tunnels below the chamber of eyes in an encounter I altered; I had these tunnels chocked with arcane treasure, but they were vertical shafts.

One of the players suggested they explore the tunnels and there might be treasure down there, but it was shot down by another, saying he didn't want to explore "smelly old beholder tunnels". Hmmm.

I will use your suggestion above - another party will find all the goodies and crow about it at the Halfmoon inn very soon.

Based on experience with multiple groups in the last years, it comes down to training and expectation.
Most games I´ve been in have been rather plot heavy and players were more intersted in advancing the storys than looking for hidden goodies.
You can, as a dm, train your group to look for that stuff, but what´s the point actually?

This is a playstyle preference so not all DMs/players will share it.

The reasons come from the difference in play.

• It moves the game away from "complete the mission" towards "exploration and exploitation".
• It can be a step towards successful sandbox play by helping the players increase their proactive choices.
• The players get "Aha!" moments when their hunches pay off or they stumble onto a hidden cache.
• It moves to game closer to the roots of the hobby as it was a base expactation in 1E play.

Nagol said:

The secret is to train your players to look.

You have to use a few subtle tools for reinforcement.

If the players ever look at anything, offer a small reward that appeals to the player -- a few minutes of focus time, an inconsequential treasure, a clue at a unsolved puzzle, something that foreshadows future events, etc.

Click to expand...

I agree, and think this is a key idea.

If you only reward players with a 'find' when you already know what is there (basically only when it matters for plot advancement) there are going to be a lot of "nothing there" moments. It won't take many of these for players to simply stop trying. Even the most simple (worthless) items can activate that rewarding feel, whether it's a piece of chalk or a scrap of clothing, it wasn't "nothing", and that's something, hehe

Also as Nagol mentioned, it can be over done. What I do is simply state (when I want to move things along) "after a thorough search, there does not appear to be anything here at all worth mentioning" etc. I sum it all up as searched. So, if they want to check behind the bookshelf... okay, nothing there I say... then they want to check under the bed... I know this is going to continue piece by piece so I say, "you check under the bed, and I assume under, behind and on top of everything else, but aside from dust and webs you find nothing".

This works for me because I can tell when they are about to simply check everything anyway. Sometimes I will ask, "you check the bed and find nothing... do you continue this search throughout the room or head out", "search the rest", "ok, there is nothing of interest after further exploration".

Nagol said:

If the players ever look at anything, offer a small reward that appeals to the player -- a few minutes of focus time, an inconsequential treasure, a clue at a unsolved puzzle, something that foreshadows future events, etc.

Click to expand...

This. I don't place things pre-game so much as I have things that I place as soon as the PCs look. "Oh, that demonic fountain? Why yes it does conceal a secret ..."

Here is an article relevant to the topic at hand:

» Do You Throw Rocks in Your PC’s Puddle?

Cor Azer said:

If you'll forgive the reference, consider a video game like the Legend of Zelda - every map has tons of window dressing, little nooks that might have nothing more than a small treasure, or a secret shop, or some such. And the only way they'll be found is if you take the time to look behind you occasionally, dig behind the last tree on the left, or dive into that forest pond - no NPC elsewhere mentions that hidden goodie, although you may have learned of it through a walkthrough somewhere.

Click to expand...

One of the frustrating things about the original Legend of Zelda that the new Zeldas have learned is that secrets in that game are a little too secret. Randomly burning bushes is no fun.

On the other hand, let's take an example from the newest one, Spirit Tracks: At a certain point in the game, you learn an ability called the Song of Discovery, which causes hidden things to appear. You then, later on, encounter the following rock formation:

HTML:

 o 
o o
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Which just begs for something to be in the middle, but there appears not to be anything -- until you play the Song of Discovery.

The takeaway from this, I think, is that video game designers have learned that secrets that you want players to actually find should "beg" to be found. What this means to GMs, I suspect, is that we need to narrate the difference between window dressing and hints enough for players to think: "Huh, something weird is going on here." Being too subtle just trains your players to either push every wall to find a hidden corridor, or else just focus on getting to the next room/plot point.

Nagol said:

That said, you need to be careful with what you wish for. Players constantly pokng around and examing every possible item can kill huge amounts of session time and lead to unpleasant group dynamic as part of the group just wants to get going to the action and the rest is convinced they've discovered a telling secret in an truly innocent pool of water and won't move on until they find the secret they are certain is there. Unlike a single player video game, wasting time affects others' enjoyment.

Click to expand...

This, this and THIS! I've seen entire campains ruined this way.