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?
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?