iserith
Magic Wordsmith
My “what do you do about” phrasing is designed to be a nice, pithy soundbite, rather than to comprehensively encapsulate best practice. My point in it is that it’s important in your description of the environment to include details for the players to interact with. “What do you do about” doesn’t necessarily have to be about one specific thing (though there are times where that’s appropriate). It can also mean what do you do about this scenario you’re in with several points of interest. It’s just a note-to-self I use to remind myself to focus my description on providing the players with interesting things to interact with, rather than merely stating what is present like a lot of the boxed text in published adventures does.
Sure, but leading questions like this are also big in other games and it does push play in specific directions which may not be a thing one wants to do in D&D. It's worth examining if that's desirable before committing to it. I do it sometimes myself, especially if the scene was already set previously and conflict is escalating. I would characterize it as a thing to use after the players have pushed things in a given direction already.