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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 7859731" data-attributes="member: 53980">A character trained in Medicine presumably has that training. Or at least a close enough approximation thereof. In the real world I write software and have no medical background unless you want to count high school bio. But if you show me a body that's been stabbed in the chest, I can hazard a reasonable guess as to why the person died, even if I can't provide a textbook medical examiner's answer. Unless something weird happened, like the person was stabbed, but that didn't kill him so his assailant drowned him, I'm probably going to be correct.Having 20 to 30 clues locked behind checks, many of which are redundant, isn't a terrible way to go. Odds are that the players will be able to succeed at 30-50% of the checks just based on the die roll alone (unless the DCs are really high). However, you're still locking all the passages in the dungeon and requiring the rogue to pick them so that the party can proceed. There are lots of potential routes but if the party runs a streak of bad luck and flubs all of the doors that they need to proceed, then the dungeon is done. I run a sandbox, as I've said, but even so I don't like it when my players are frustrated because they can't get any traction nor am I a fan of when my work gets wasted (although that's not as big an issue, since most anything that isn't used can always be recycled down the line). Especially when it's simply a bad streak of luck because no one is able to roll above a dang 5 (which has happened on multiple occasions) rather than any fault of the players.In my current campaign, which is presently nearing its end, I started using handouts for the first time. On these handouts, I added rumors that the characters would hear around town in between sessions. Early on in the campaign, I decided that a barghest would be preying upon the goblinoids living in the town's ghetto. So I seeded a rumor about it into the handout, with the idea that the players would ignore it for now and be super impressed with my use of foreshadowing, once it built to an issue and NPCs asked them to get involved. Well, of course, they latched on to that. However, they hadn't made the NPC connections they really needed to figure out what was going on (akin to going to a dungeon they weren't appropriately leveled for). It wasn't impossible for them per se, but in this case it was improbable as it would have required a few blind leaps of intuition. As I said, I hadn't anticipated them going after this job at such a low level, without even any impetus of reward. To their credit they did their best, talking to NPCs and such, but were largely spinning their wheels, despite picking up a few decent clues, whose veracity they were unable to verify. Through sheer random chance, they decided to stake out the local tavern on a day when the payment to the local crime Lord was due. And ended up haring off on a totally different adventure that I also hadn't prepped, wherein they busted a pair of guards who were on the take and had a "friendly" chat with the local crime lord (who genuinely had nothing to do with the murders, though they only pretended to believe him). Later, when the NPCs asked the party to investigate the murders, they were convinced it was their frenemy the crime lord, so they decided to do other stuff instead, and eventually the barghest returned to hell and the situation resolved itself without their intervention, though there were a lot of unhappy goblins in the ghetto. (The characters eventually did sort of make it up to the goblins by donating a lot of gold to fix up the ghetto and make it a genuinely nice place to live.)The point being was that I really lucked out. It was a fun session in which my players ended up thinking me a genius with deeply entangled plot threads, when in fact it was two loosely outlined NPCs and they managed to jump from one thread to the other without even realizing it, assuming connections that didn't exist. That's a beauty in emergent gameplay, but it could have very easily been a terrible session where the players spun their wheels the entire time and couldn't make any headway. That's how I see it anyway.</blockquote>

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