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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8245138" data-attributes="member: 6779196">T E L E G R A P H I N GWhen there’s a secret door to be found, hint to its presence in your description of the environment. A draft is a heavy-handed way to telegraph the presence of a secret door, but it cuts the mustard. Likewise a conspicuous lack of dust in an arc in front of where the secret door sings.For more subtle clues, use context to imply the presence of a room that there’s no apparent door to. There’s the classic “there’s this weird room-shaped empty space in the map” but that only works if your players are mapping the dungeon as they go, and doing so accurately and precisely. Another option that’s less reliant on mapping but more reliant on level design is to have some visual cue that always goes along with secret doors. Maybe there are tapestries throughout the dungeon, and rooms with secret doors (and only rooms with secret doors) feature dragons on the tapestries.A lot of DMs are hesitant to do this kind of thing because it can feel like giving too much away. But if the goal is to get players to pay attention to and interact with the environment, there is no surer way to achieve that than to indicate with your environmental description that there is something to be interacted with. And, while telegraphs may seem obvious to you, never underestimate the obliviousness of players. They will regularly miss things you think are painfully obvious. And when they do catch on to things, they’ll feel like they’re clever for doing so, which is exactly what you want.</blockquote>

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