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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 8245900" data-attributes="member: 22424">Some thoughts.Firstly, don't gate any must-find areas behind secret doors. Everything that follows rather depends on that...The key, I think, is to put in place a tension behind risk and reward - the PCs naturally want to find all the treasures in the place, but they should also be wary of the various dangers and want to avoid those. So set up a system where to spending lots of time searching also increases the danger...One of the things I do is have a fairly aggressive clock for random encounters. Additionally, random encounters never carry treasure, and don't grant XP. So they're very strictly a bad thing to be avoided where possible. Simply having that in place discourages the "go over every inch" problem.Additionally, I set the DCs for finding secret doors simply for being in the area, extremely high (traps too, BTW). So to find them, you're going to have to be more specific - being in the room won't do it, but checking out the bookcase, or statue, or whatever might.On the flip side, I make sure to seed the area with clues for the locations and types of secret doors. For instance, I theme my dungeons - a lost dwarven mine will have secret doors of this type, while a goblin city will have secret doors of that type (and not the other). So clever players can figure out what to look for.Additionally, I try always to place a 'broken' secret door early in the dungeon to deliberately give away some of these clues.The upshot of all of this is that secret doors become nice-to-have/Easter Eggs for the players to find (if they're interested), but there're never necessary to finish the adventure. They're findable, but savvy players will have a much easier time of it. And exhaustive searches, while effective, quickly become discouraged, because they just take up too much time (and soak resources for no reward).</blockquote>

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