How many times do you put in little details that mean nothing? e.g. A dog there just for petting, it won't result in an NPC interaction, just petting the dog a normal flower, not for decoration, or beauty, just a flower.
It depends on how detailed your descriptions are. If they're sparse, only hitting the significant points, then throwing in extraneous details is going to flag them as important to the players.
The more detail you generally go into, the more you're going to be putting irrelevant stuff into the descriptions, and the less players will expect all the stuff you mention to be important.
If the players go shopping in town, players will react differently to your attempt at an Avatar: the Last Airbender reference depending on how you frame it:
"You go to the market square. There's a weapon store, a potion shop, and a tavern. The cabbage vendor seems to be watching you suspiciously."
"It's market day. The town square is bustling with people doing their shopping. There are multiple food vendors, a bakery, a tavern, a blacksmith with a small display of weapons, a herbalist with a variety of cures. A bard is playing in the middle of the square. An old man with a vegetable cart sees you and hunches protectively over his cabbages."
"It's grey and a bit chilly, but that hasn't stopped what seems like everyone in town turning out for market day. You're barely in the square before you smell fresh bread from the bakery, and the exotic spices being sold by an old woman with a parrot perched on her shoulder. There's raucous laughter from inside the tavern, and right next door an apothecary offers a different kind of potions. The blacksmith sees you, and loudly offers his services to maintain your weapons and armor. The fruit and vegetable sellers are mostly loudly hawking their wares, but one old man with a cart full of cabbages looks you over and immediately begins packing up. Over it all, you can hear a bard playing for his supper. Badly."
Now, unless the town is going to be a major location for a while, #3 is probably overkill. But you can see how the unimportant detail becomes less prominent the more texture you're putting in to descriptions.
I do that all the time because I love adding the little details. Most of it goes right past the players, but that's okay, because I don't really do it just for them. I do it for me. I have a bad habit of over-preparing for sessions, so sprinkling in meaningless little details is how I keep it fun for myself. Plus, whenever I'm planning sessions, I can't help but think of the long list of meaningless questions that I would ask if I were my own player.
So the party walks into a tavern, and there's a black cat with white feet laying on the bar. So of course his name is Boots, and no, he won't respond to your attempts to get his attention.
I made up a bunch of homebrew spells for my campaign world, one of which is "Summon Kobolds". It summons three random kobolds from somewhere in the world. They have no idea how or why they appeared here, and if they survive ten full minutes they return to where they came from. So of course one of my players cast it in the middle of a big battle to try to cause a distraction. I had full backstories written for those three kobolds. The party only got to interact with one of them, and only for a few rounds. But all three are from other campaign areas in my campaign world. So someday in the future we'll be playing a new campaign in a different part of the world and the party will encounter some kobolds, and one of them will just suddenly vanish.
The party was guarding a caravan through a mountainous area called The Spinal Hills. Along the journey they stopped at a tavern - a tap house - in the hills. So of course it was called The Spinal Tap. The band playing inside had four members: Marty D., Dave Hubbins, Tuff Nigel, and Little Derek. The party never spoke to the band. I didn't care. I got my chuckle.
It depends on how detailed your descriptions are. If they're sparse, only hitting the significant points, then throwing in extraneous details is going to flag them as important to the players.
The more detail you generally go into, the more you're going to be putting irrelevant stuff into the descriptions, and the less players will expect all the stuff you mention to be important.
If the players go shopping in town, players will react differently to your attempt at an Avatar: the Last Airbender reference depending on how you frame it:
"You go to the market square. There's a weapon store, a potion shop, and a tavern. The cabbage vendor seems to be watching you suspiciously."
"It's market day. The town square is bustling with people doing their shopping. There are multiple food vendors, a bakery, a tavern, a blacksmith with a small display of weapons, a herbalist with a variety of cures. A bard is playing in the middle of the square. An old man with a vegetable cart sees you and hunches protectively over his cabbages."
"It's grey and a bit chilly, but that hasn't stopped what seems like everyone in town turning out for market day. You're barely in the square before you smell fresh bread from the bakery, and the exotic spices being sold by an old woman with a parrot perched on her shoulder. There's raucous laughter from inside the tavern, and right next door an apothecary offers a different kind of potions. The blacksmith sees you, and loudly offers his services to maintain your weapons and armor. The fruit and vegetable sellers are mostly loudly hawking their wares, but one old man with a cart full of cabbages looks you over and immediately begins packing up. Over it all, you can hear a bard playing for his supper. Badly."
Now, unless the town is going to be a major location for a while, #3 is probably overkill. But you can see how the unimportant detail becomes less prominent the more texture you're putting in to descriptions.
There’s a quite famous example in Critical Role of this, Matt Mercer described a room as being totally trashed apart from one chair that remained unbroken. He meant it just to be flavour but the players totally ignored the plot hook (the fact the room was trashed) and spent almost twenty minutes obsessing over why this chair was unbroken
There’s a quite famous example in Critical Role of this, Matt Mercer described a room as being totally trashed apart from one chair that remained unbroken. He meant it just to be flavour but the players totally ignored the plot hook (the fact the room was trashed) and spent almost twenty minutes obsessing over why this chair was unbroken
It's good to know that players, even in wildly successful streaming shows, still remain players.
Dimension 20 had an example as well in Fantasy High: Freshman Year, where the map maker put a vulture on a piece of set decoration and the players started obsessing over it.
The lesson learned is that if players start obsessing over an unimportant detail, it's not wrong to 'fess up and outright say above the table that it's an unimportant detail.
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Hey!
How many times do you put in little details that mean nothing? e.g. A dog there just for petting, it won't result in an NPC interaction, just petting the dog a normal flower, not for decoration, or beauty, just a flower.
It depends on how detailed your descriptions are. If they're sparse, only hitting the significant points, then throwing in extraneous details is going to flag them as important to the players.
The more detail you generally go into, the more you're going to be putting irrelevant stuff into the descriptions, and the less players will expect all the stuff you mention to be important.
If the players go shopping in town, players will react differently to your attempt at an Avatar: the Last Airbender reference depending on how you frame it:
"You go to the market square. There's a weapon store, a potion shop, and a tavern. The cabbage vendor seems to be watching you suspiciously."
"It's market day. The town square is bustling with people doing their shopping. There are multiple food vendors, a bakery, a tavern, a blacksmith with a small display of weapons, a herbalist with a variety of cures. A bard is playing in the middle of the square. An old man with a vegetable cart sees you and hunches protectively over his cabbages."
"It's grey and a bit chilly, but that hasn't stopped what seems like everyone in town turning out for market day. You're barely in the square before you smell fresh bread from the bakery, and the exotic spices being sold by an old woman with a parrot perched on her shoulder. There's raucous laughter from inside the tavern, and right next door an apothecary offers a different kind of potions. The blacksmith sees you, and loudly offers his services to maintain your weapons and armor. The fruit and vegetable sellers are mostly loudly hawking their wares, but one old man with a cart full of cabbages looks you over and immediately begins packing up. Over it all, you can hear a bard playing for his supper. Badly."
Now, unless the town is going to be a major location for a while, #3 is probably overkill. But you can see how the unimportant detail becomes less prominent the more texture you're putting in to descriptions.
I do that all the time because I love adding the little details. Most of it goes right past the players, but that's okay, because I don't really do it just for them. I do it for me. I have a bad habit of over-preparing for sessions, so sprinkling in meaningless little details is how I keep it fun for myself. Plus, whenever I'm planning sessions, I can't help but think of the long list of meaningless questions that I would ask if I were my own player.
So the party walks into a tavern, and there's a black cat with white feet laying on the bar. So of course his name is Boots, and no, he won't respond to your attempts to get his attention.
I made up a bunch of homebrew spells for my campaign world, one of which is "Summon Kobolds". It summons three random kobolds from somewhere in the world. They have no idea how or why they appeared here, and if they survive ten full minutes they return to where they came from. So of course one of my players cast it in the middle of a big battle to try to cause a distraction. I had full backstories written for those three kobolds. The party only got to interact with one of them, and only for a few rounds. But all three are from other campaign areas in my campaign world. So someday in the future we'll be playing a new campaign in a different part of the world and the party will encounter some kobolds, and one of them will just suddenly vanish.
The party was guarding a caravan through a mountainous area called The Spinal Hills. Along the journey they stopped at a tavern - a tap house - in the hills. So of course it was called The Spinal Tap. The band playing inside had four members: Marty D., Dave Hubbins, Tuff Nigel, and Little Derek. The party never spoke to the band. I didn't care. I got my chuckle.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
There’s a quite famous example in Critical Role of this, Matt Mercer described a room as being totally trashed apart from one chair that remained unbroken. He meant it just to be flavour but the players totally ignored the plot hook (the fact the room was trashed) and spent almost twenty minutes obsessing over why this chair was unbroken
It's good to know that players, even in wildly successful streaming shows, still remain players.
Dimension 20 had an example as well in Fantasy High: Freshman Year, where the map maker put a vulture on a piece of set decoration and the players started obsessing over it.
The lesson learned is that if players start obsessing over an unimportant detail, it's not wrong to 'fess up and outright say above the table that it's an unimportant detail.