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="Lanefan" data-source="post: 6205915" data-attributes="member: 29398">Ah, but once your players catch on that nothing you run is ever filler you'll never be able to have a supposedly-nothing encounter become relevant a long time later due to something overlooked (or thought of as irrelevant filler) at the time, because they'll know everything is important.As both player and DM I love those moments when we realize that some little thing from some quasi-random encounter was actually a Big Deal, even if we totally missed it. (an example from an old game: our party cast Monster Summoning and got some Hobgoblins; we let them die for us as usual and moved on, and years later we found out they were in the neighbourhood (and thus able to be summoned) because they were scouts/spies for what would become an invasion force - it never occurred to us to ask why we got Hobs where no Hobs should be, or to question them once summoned)In my current campaign I've been for years dropping occasional hints into otherwise-random bits of adventuring about Important Things yet to come up.  I think they've all been ignored, but that's OK - in theory they'll be able to connect the breadcrumb trails later once more info arrives.  That said, however, one of my groups considers "information gathering" to be nothing more than a pair of four-letter words, which means I could leave breadcrumbs the size of boulders and they'd still go unnoticed. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  And if we never get to the stories those breadcrumbs lead to that's OK too, they just become random bits of irrelevant fluff left in the past.Of course if your players are writing the story it's mighty hard to do this as DM with any hope of it becomeing meaningful later.Er...I don't get this.  You say you want every encounter to matter then proceed to give an example of one that really doesn't.  I mean yes, 4e seems great for the set-piece battle and dramatic scene, but without more info or context that Beholder battle sounds like nothing more than a jumped-up wandering monster encounter - in other words, the very filler you claim to so dislike.Everything that happens in the game matters to someone, somehow.  Meeting a few random stray goblins on a forest trail might not matter a whit, except one of them gets lucky and inflicts a long-term wound on the party's main Thief which means it suddenly matters a lot at least to the Thief.  And before anyone says "well that encounter shouldn't have even been there" I'll say yes it should; if there's monsters living in the forest then realistically there's a chance you're going to meet some of 'em if you go trucking through it.  That's what dice are for. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Lan-"if you go down to the woods today you're in for a big surprise"-efan</blockquote>

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