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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 6159083" data-attributes="member: 3192">The game element of D&D is continually determining what is going on and acting while accounting for it. If your players stop accounting for the world, then they're likely to starve to death even if they sit around having fun doing their own thing. The latter is great, but the game is meant to challenge the players. Ignore it and it will soon be over.As for focusing on a single element, ask yourself during your adventure design process whether you are leading them down a single path or not. They could be ignoring the door because they've ruled it out regarding "what they're supposed to do" (which often lands under fighting stuff for new players).Other possibilities include either the loss in their memory of other options or the DM not having conveyed clearly enough everything else around them to be engaged with. In either case it is good DMing to reiterate what they sense in their immediate surroundings if a lot of play time has passed. They might have great imaginations, so this might be unnecessary. I would only warn not to use it as a prompt to the players. Otherwise they'll take it as something having changed or you pushing a different direction for them.Another way around this is simply to design (most of) the parts of your world with multiple features to explore. You can search someone, question them, dissect them to see what's inside, hire them to perform actions, become a mentor to them, or let them mentor you training you in, say, spellcasting and receiving the spells they know, hang out with them to see what they do, what they talk about, who they know, what their planning, and so on. There are many things to designing what could be a simple human NPC on the surface description.It's hard putting in elements that are beyond the odds of the players succeeding with them as the Elementals appear to be. It's good to begin very early with this diversity and show them perhaps early other NPCs running and avoiding them just so they get the picture. A lot of tables have taken up the "everything must fall before me" rule of videogames and that just doesn't hold true in D&D.</blockquote>

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