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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 4490441" data-attributes="member: 41584">One thing I've noticed is that many DMs 'telegraph' what is important to the story. They'll never describe what you eat or drink, unless it's poisoned. Every other meal you'll have in your life will be described as 'you eat.' They'll never describe a door, unless it's trapped. The non-trapped doors will be described briefly, at best. They'll never mention any real detail about an NPC, unless he's the one that's going to betray you or has some important plot information that you have to wheedle out of him, in which case he's suddenly got an accent, a colorful scarf and a mole on his cheek, unlike the other twenty-seven NPCs you encountered in town, all of which are faceless blobs. As a result, I'm rarely paranoid, since anyone or anything that hasn't been deemed worthy of a description, I'm conditioned to ignore. On the other hand, like all humans, my brain is a pattern-recognition engine, and I sometimes see patterns when there aren't any. Completely random crap that happens to be identical will trigger my 'A-ha!' reflex and I'll begin trying to figure out the connection between these items, only to discover that the writer of the module had a thing for people with tattoos that look like eagles, and these two NPCs didn't have a damn thing to do with each other, and certainly aren't part of some secret society of people with eagle tattoos... I am the guy who will sit at the end of the 100 ft. long corridor that ends in a blank wall and say, 'Well, there's gotta be something here! Surely the Dwarves didn't spend *years* tunneling this out only to get bored and leave! What was this, the final practical exam for Tunneling 101? If so, I'm giving it an 'F,' because a tunnel that doesn't go anywhere isn't a tunnel, it's a hole that goes sideways!' I don't see this as 'paranoia' so much as a pig-headed insistence that things have to make sense, and that encounters or bits of scenery have some logical reason to be there, and, too often, they don't, because they were just randomly thrown in there and the writer themself didn't have any explanation for why this 100 ft. corridor went nowhere.</blockquote>

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