NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8560398" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I am super self-conscious about anything in this direction. Sometimes, the players want to know things, and I need to set the scene--e.g., when they first entered the ancient, abandoned genie city of Al-Shafadir, they pretty obviously wanted to know everything they were seeing and experiencing. Or when they got a tradition-spirit friend of theirs to translate a book written in Old High Jinnistani (though I guess technically this would be the precursor to that, technically something like "Ancient Rajahric" or something like that since it's the original language used by the Genie-Rajahs thousands of years ago), they wanted to know as much as possible about its contents. In such situations I try to give comprehensive answers while still aiming to be concise--but that can still mean a decent span of time with me simply narrating.I do try to avoid having large numbers of important NPCs all present at the same time though. Usually it's just one, perhaps with a minor NPC flunkie. Sometimes two, e.g. when the party visits their friend and ally Hafsa, she often has her fiance Shen present; or many meetings with the Sultana of their home city will have Court Vizier Zaid al-Ansari present too, since "Court Vizier" is effectively Prime Minister+Chief of Staff+Secretary of State all in one. And even if there are multiple NPCs, they don't tend to talk to one another too much, or if they do, I gloss over it (e.g. "While you guys talk amongst yourselves about your next move, Shen and Hafsa have a quiet side-conversation of their own. The sort of things you'd expect two lovers to discuss over dinner, at least, when one is an ancient dragon and the other is a talented wizard!"). Failing that, I try to keep it relatively short and sweet, e.g.:That's about 40 sec of me talking at a normal pace. (Purely invented, but completely plausible for the campaign.) My players don't seem to mind my...garrulous nature most times, thankfully, but I still worry I'm Doing It Wrong by talking too much.Agreed. For my part, this drives me to always do three things:1. Any mystery worth knowing about has at least two (and preferably more) prompts pointing to the truth.2. No mystery that needs to be solved has the chance of failing to be solved so long as the party is trying.3. Any mystery that doesn't need to be solved is allowed to go unsolved if that's how things end up.E.g. when I ran a murder mystery, I made sure to put down like six different clues that could all point to the real culprit, some of them hidden behind false leads intentionally planted by the murderer. (Many culprits manufacture their own demise in trying to forestall it, after all.) The party uncovered all the clues, but it was one of the initial non-hidden clues that really drew their attention (the culprit used her illusion magic to change the color of her dress for the masquerade ball, which made the party Bard realize that she could have disguised herself to look like someone else--explaining why the body had been dead several hours before the victim was last seen!)Sometimes these things combine--again, going off that murder mystery, I actually left it completely open to the possibility that they didn't solve the crime at all, or that they confidently "solved" it by blaming the wrong person. Each of these results would have had meaningful negative consequences. Fortunately, they solved it with aplomb, even reviving the victim. (Due to Jinnistani law, he still had to forfeit his position in the court, but it turned out he was cool with that.) Had they simply failed, a massive diplomatic incident would have occurred in Jinnistan, greatly destabilizing politics there and potentially leading to proxy wars, which could then spill over into the mortal world. Had they blamed a (different) wrong person, less bad consequences would have occurred, but they would have missed the true mastermind and permitted them to gain a stronger political foothold (albeit not as strong as if the intended innocent party had received the blame). By correctly solving the mystery, they significantly increased the diplomatic prestige of Al-Rakkah, secured a secret partnership with a Jinnistani city-state, and foiled the plans of one of their antagonists--all around a very successful effort.</blockquote>

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