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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6700602" data-attributes="member: 4937">I would put that as a particular case of the general category. I'll admit that in earlier periods I was prone to similar problems, particularly the leaving it up to the players to find the content through some natural process of discovery, while not actually putting enough landmarks out there to make that process likely.  I've created some of these rowboat worlds of my own with islands of content lost among the vast wastes of empty hexes or meaningless NPCs.   It wasn't as bad as it could have been, because I usually start with a quest and a hook to at least get a group moving, but I do know that at least one very promising campaign I started fizzled because the players felt lost in a rowboat and never realized what was out there.  From that, I learned that first hooks of a campaign are like first pages of a novel.In truth though, I'm find that even though I'm running something of an adventure path now (by request), I'm still having the same weaknesses.  My desire to have the clues be natural artifacts that are believable in context and not clearly gamist constructs to keep the plot moving, is running into challenges in that my heroes don't always find it obvious what I find to be obvious.  I'm usually pretty good at guessing the plot of movies or mysteries, and I'm finding that I'm leaving out the blatant expository scene that lays it out while thinking that I've made it obvious - when really I've made it obvious only to Hercule Poirot or Columbo.  Yes, it's great to give the player's a chance to solve the mystery and feel like a detective character from a mystery novel.   But if they don't, you don't want them to feel stupid either.   Regardless of how obvious you make it, I think they'll eventually enjoy and be satisfied with the discovery.  Something to work on.But that isn't the only good intention that can go astray.  Although it's played for laughs, Kraag Wurld - Nitro Ferguson's homebrew setting in Knights of the Dinner Table - is apparently a row boat world where Nitro has deliberately taken down all the signs that point to the content so as to not deprive himself and his player's of the 'joy of discovery'.  Kraag Wurld shows a lot of creativity and even the capacity for depth, but the players are utterly lost in it because all the setting exposition occurs in play through "gotchas" that happen because the players lack any knowledge of the setting and the DM communicates no facts about it to the supposed inhabitants of that setting.  I hear of and have occasionally experienced this before.  Instead of saying, "You see a group of elves, which fills you with fear, as everyone knows that elves are cruel cannibals.", the PC's are only informed of that all elves are cannibals when they approach the elves on friendly terms and the elves attack them.  "Gotcha.  You should have known this fact that only existed in my head.  Why aren't you a mind reader?"  I sympathize with Nitro, but also try not to be Nitro.  Lessons learned from 30 years of gaming.Basically, if you theoretically allow the players to do anything, but you deprive them of sufficient information to make informed choices, it's a rowboat world.</blockquote>

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