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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5587885" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, that's taking things to extremes. Nobody AFAICT has suggested detailing the snacking and garbage disposal habits of random mooks. Nor am I aware of any product which is relevant and has that kind of thing in it.I agree, they should be played, and getting into the story and interacting in potentially complex ways with the NPCs is a rich part of that play. So again, going back to my example of KM #1, the PCs arrive at an outpost, the proprietor and his wife are fairly detailed NPCs. The party will likely interact with them quite a bit over time and their personalities have some bearing on how the next section is handled, where some bandits show up to 'tax' them. Depending on how the players interact with the bandits (a couple of which have a bit of detail beyond stat blocks) will determine whether for instance they might pursue a strategy of infiltration into the bandit group, turn or at least intimidate some of the bandits, wipe them out, etc. Given that the leader of this particular group has a enough detail to define her relationship to the larger bandit group, and several of its members that are detailed, this can lead in several interesting directions. I don't see where any of this is either excess detail or wasted. I could think of a couple ways some of it might actually have been improved and made even more interesting with little extra effort, but it is good solid writing and the adventure has several dimensions added to it. Without any of that it becomes nothing but a hexcrawl and several hack-n-slashes. So, nobody is talking about pickles here. I think you might actually find it well worth reading this adventure in particular. I don't know if there are others that are more effective in this way, but this particular adventure was both pretty classic D&D fare and yet still illustrated nicely what a bit of actual writing could do for a module.</blockquote>

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