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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8081660" data-attributes="member: 18">Is that a problem?Surely that's a problem solver?Personally I think the reason this thread exists is because most D&D groups don't operate that way. It's a major issue. I'd say easily 95% of the pre-written D&D adventures I've seen which have any element of "finding stuff out" rely, essentially, on telling the PCs. [USER=6879661]@TheSword[/USER] outlines the vast majority of them. In almost no cases is any actual effort required from the PCs beyond them bothering to read a letter shoved in their face, or actually question a prisoner.This has real impacts on how people play, too, and it's not how other non-fantasy RPGs operate, typically. I know this from personal experience. The first time I played Shadowrun properly, the DM (who wasn't my usual DM) did the basic setup for the adventure, and we got to a certain point and we were like "Now what?!" and he was like "Now you have to do some legwork" and we were like "What the hell does that mean?" and he's like "You know, go and talk to people, find stuff out, research things, hack things, follow people, all that stuff", and were like "Bwuuhh?!". We'd played tons of AD&D 2E and a bit of other fantasy RPGs, but it was genuinely difficult for us to understand, initially, that instead of simply obtaining the information and moving on to the next bit of the adventure, we'd have to actually make a pro-active effort to find out what was going on, and an effort beyond questioning people at a bar we'd been lead to or whatever.If you have PCs who do that, and have a realistic approach to how much secrecy an organisation can have (i.e. not that much unless it's like, less than ten people total, involved even tangentially), then they should be able to advance the plot simply by talking to people and finding leads, rather than finding guidance as solid as letters/journals/prisoners/etc. in the course of normal adventuring.I've not done a monologue recently myself, but rather than simply going full-fiat and ruling I can monologue as much as I want, damn the consequences, I was thinking that if I wanted to monologue, then a better way to do it would be to reward the players for having their PCs stay "in-genre" and listen - i.e. they might all get a bonus Inspiration point or the like if they do, just as I might award Inspiration for a particularly good speech from a player. You could also use XP or other extrinsic rewards if suitable for your game.That also prevents it being a one-sided equation. Players don't typically have the information and thus opportunity to prepare "heroic monologues", so it's not really right to be surprised that they don't, or act like they could do it if they wanted to.</blockquote>

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