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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ExploderWizard" data-source="post: 5321377" data-attributes="member: 66434">Why have a game environment? Why bother mentioning the furnishings of a room or describing contents of anything?  DM: " You find a small room. In the room is a....." Rogue: "Yeah yeah yeah, whatever. I search the place top to bottom....I got a 35! " DM: " you found a ring worth 1500 gp"  Rogue: " Sweet. I take it and leave."  DM: " No problem".   .............sometime a short while later.............. DM: " the guards pass by the dark alcove you hid in but a frantic search is underway." Rogue: " How did they find out there was an intruder so fast?"  DM: " The ring was sewn inside a pillow. Your search was so good it was childs play cutting it open to find the ring. The torn open pillow was kind of a dead giveaway." Rogue: " What pillow? " DM:" The one on the bed belonging to the captain of the guard, hand stitched by his now deceased wife." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" />   *** As you can see, just throwing out a DC to speed things up without so much environmental interaction can lead to all kinds of assumptions. What does finding a well hidden object mean? How much impact does finding it have on the rest of the game?  The skill of the character to find almost anything can cause issues if the specifics are glossed over. Telling the player to roll then  informing him/her of success tells us nothing.  Having a player describe actions in more detail doesn't have to mean the skills of the character are ignored. What if the difficulty of finding something depended on a combination of player effort and character skill?  Lets say the DC for a general " I search" was 25 but actually mentioning examining the pillow (which had a detailed description) lowered the DC to 20 or even 15 which would reveal that there was something small and not too fluffy inside. The player then decides what becomes of the pillow.  Note that saying " I check out that fancy pillow" in no way requires the player to be an expert rogue IRL but it does require him/her to actually pay attention to the in-game surroundings and deal with them. If the players don't care about the game environment or find it boring we can skip to the fast forward gloss over version outlined above.</blockquote>

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