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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6550280" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, window dressing itself can have a purpose.  So, for example, the first time the PC's visit a new city, you might want to hit them with a group of NPC's that represent normal ordinary encounters of no special importance, but which serve the purpose of orienting the PC's to important features of the laws and culture of the city.  So you might focus on the difficulty of getting through customs and the tediousness and officiousness of the bureaucrat, to orient them to certain features about the city that the players might not otherwise know and to hint to the players what might be and might not be culturally and legally acceptable.   This serves at a minimum as exposition, but also can serve as engagement by enriching your setting so that every city is represented in the player's minds by something more than a generic tavern.  The longer the player's spend in the city, the less time you'll want to spend on these mundane encounters.  They may be presumed to happen, in the same way players are presumed to use the bathroom or eat three times a day, but unless there is a reason to call them out, you just don't.As far as the cart breaking down being worth investigating, I would say that first, it should always be as interesting as you can reasonably make it, but in the long run the question isn't: "Investigate the Cart: interesting or not?", but "Is investigating the cart worth delaying or replacing other actions I can take?"  Early on in the sandbox, every pirate ship (or random encounter of whatever sort) is worth chasing.  Eventually though, you find you have to prioritize what is important to you.  Chasing down that pirate ship that represents no threat to you, means not chasing after the archmage whose plot may threaten the safety of the whole world.  You don't have to let the pirates go, and fighting pirates might be fun, but doing so has consequences.  Every encounter should justify itself in some way though.  It's either building necessary setting depth (the cabbage seller's troubles tell the players something about the world they are in they didn't know otherwise), or its letting the player explore character depth (am I the sort of person that helps or exploits an unimportant cabbage seller in distress), or its serving to advance some larger plot (the cabbage seller is well known to the castle guards, the same castle the PC's may later want to enter, and can pass through gates without questions) or connect the players to some hitherto unknown plot (the cabbage seller is actually smuggling persecuted individuals to safety).    It probably won't be obvious to the player's why an encounter is important in all cases, but it should be there.</blockquote>

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