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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="Henry" data-source="post: 1464095" data-attributes="member: 158">first of all, an apology to Psion for editing his quote by accident, and having to restore it - I fat-fingered the edit button instead of reply by mistake. He just says too many things I agree with! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Ditto, with an addendum. In my experience, to plan out every little nuance, every NPC, every plot, every why and wherefore, like I was writing a module - that way leads madness.The fact is, I run sessions to be as fast and exciting and descriptive as I can make them, and if I focus so hard on situations and NPC's that my DM'ing is wrote and mechanical, then I've failed. I short-hand the NPC's, I put in plot elements without explaining all the why's, etc. In real life, we'll never know all the specifics of the St. Valentine's day massacre - were there 4 accomplices, or 6? We may never know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. We have murderers whom eve modern science can't find all the evidence for; we have back-door deals by politicians that we'll never have the answers to. That sense of "incomplete mystery" can also work in games. You don't NEED to justify every mystery and every reason for something to your players - because sometimes, there is no satisfactory explanation, and your players already know this (or they should).Case in point: The Castellan calls in the adventurers to solve the murder of his nephew before inspecting the evidence himself. Why? Because he HATES the smell of blood. Or, because he really loved his nephew and it freaks him out to see the body. Or, he's secretly involved, and didn't MEAN for the adventurers to be called so soon, and an overeager scribe sent out the message, leaving the castellan to play it cool like he sent them in the first place, but he secretly is trying to bungle the evidence.So not every inexplicable needs explanation.</blockquote>

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