While planning an adventure, I think it's common design to throw in events which foreshadow the plot in some way. I think players get wise to this and inspect every little thing as a possible clue. Maybe this is desirable... but I wonder whether any DM throws in superfluous events, things that have no connection to the overall campaign, just to curb the players desire to play sherlock with every little thing. And, I am curious, at what point would this tactic likely backfire and cause players to just ignore everything that's meant as a foreshadow..
"Everything is connected" and it seems to me, a good part of the fun is trying to figure out how.
While planning an adventure, I think it's common design to throw in events which foreshadow the plot in some way. I think players get wise to this and inspect every little thing as a possible clue. Maybe this is desirable... but I wonder whether any DM throws in superfluous events, things that have no connection to the overall campaign, just to curb the players desire to play sherlock with every little thing. And, I am curious, at what point would this tactic likely backfire and cause players to just ignore everything that's meant as a foreshadow..
"Everything is connected" and it seems to me, a good part of the fun is trying to figure out how.
Anyone ever experiment with superfluous events?
i dont often run larger adventures though here my writing background helps.In general you only use a red herring when the readers or players are getting too smart to your moves otherwise use them sparringly because too many breaks foreshadowing and plot.
The trick is that while everything is connected, not everything has to be connected to the big bad evil guy or the current quest in a way that moves the players closer to their goal. Sometimes an encounter can explain more about the villain's motivations, and other times it just allows players to learn more about the world. As long they still feel like their curiosity is being rewarded instead of leading to dead ends, they'll likely enjoy it.
I remember an incident from a stream where the DM dropped just a little bit of flavor and the players ended up with two of them on a boat to parts unknown when they were actually supposed to head into town.
The player who discovered the little bit of flavor completely misinterpreted a closed bill of sale as a notification of immanent delivery and took the party to the docks to intercept a delivery that wasn't happening. Without going meta, the DM tried to impress upon them that they were wrong about the details, which resulted in two of the characters almost exported to some distant land before the DM gave up and flat out told the first player that a closed bill of sale means the goods were already delivered.
In a behind-the-screen episode, he said that he learned to gauge the players' intelligence and halve that.🤣
So, be careful. Even directly related but not really necessary things can end up in a wild goose chase.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
In my opinion, the single biggest obstacle to telling a story set in a rich complex world is - Chekhov's Gun.
Russian playwright Anton Chekhov claimed that, "If in Act 1 you have a pistol hanging on the wall, it must be fired in the final Act." And when you're writing a play that makes total sense. In a play you have a limited amount of space on stage, you have a limited amount of time to tell a story, and you have an audience who may or may not be following along. So the concept of Chekhov's Gun is an exercise in streamlining your story-telling down to the bare essentials.
But in a D&D campaign, none of those limitations apply. Space? The stage is inside our imaginations! We literally have infinite space! Time? We usually play for several hours at a time with dozens if not hundreds of sessions per campaign. Attention? Well, sure, this may be an issue sometimes. But in a play, the actors and the audience are different people, so the actors have to hold the audience's attention. In D&D the actors and the audience are the same people!
As a DM you want to provide your players with an immersive experience, which means describing the settings as thoroughly as possible. The problem is, a lifetime of experiencing Chekhov's Gun in every other form of media has trained your players to assume that everything you describe is being described because it is directly relevant and intrinsic to the plot. We must all go through a process of "deprogramming" to rid ourselves of Chekhov.
Explain during your session zero that not everything you describe will be plot-relevant. I know, the first thing your players will ask is, "Well, how the heck are we to know what IS relevant???" Tell them the truth - You Won't! You're going on an adventure, not reading a novel. There will be things they miss. If they miss an important clue that is plot-relevant, just re-input that clue further down the road. Improvise, adapt, overcome.
You can also use small vignettes to gradually deprogram your players. For example: the team is at a fairgrounds. They see a small simple tent with an elderly woman sitting alone at a small table selling just one thing - a single shiny red apple for one gold piece. They will assume something's up. An entire gold piece for one apple??? And it's an old lady. They'll remember Snow White. They will be drawn in to investigate. If they confront her, be sure that they fail their Perception checks. If they snoop and follow the woman at closing time - let them see the old woman removing her makeup and wig, and reveal to them that it was just a young half-elven woman with really good disguise skills making big money off gullible chumps.
It's fun and easy to write a handful of little scenes like that that can help your players see that sometimes the "mysteries" they see around them are just people trying to make a buck and not always some sinister cabal trying to conquer the world.
Anyhow. Where was I going with this? I forgot. I hope this helps.
A couple weeks ago I decided to throw a curveball at my players by having a completely ordinary miner show up, lost and afraid, in the monster-filled dale they were exploring. Having the guy turn out to be a shapeshifting monster and attack at the right moment is an obvious trope (and one that happened once in that campaign), so I wondered how the players would react. They were very suspicious of the guy and considered leaving him to fend for himself or even killing him, but in the end agreed to let him travel with them, and were ultimately surprised to find he was exactly what he seemed to be. Protecting a commoner also added an interesting dimension of challenge to combats that would otherwise have been trivial at their level!
there's something called random encounters engrained in the game, can't get more superfluous than that. of course, I"m the sort of DM who doesn't mind the game going in a different direction in light of such an event
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
A fun thing to do is to have very mini short stories that the party can stumble on and follow. a "superfluous" event can provide clues that lead the party to a small side quest, one that has nothing to do with the main quest. Maybe there's a hobgoblin encampment encroaching on a town, and some clues lead the party there. It's basically just a story seed for something else
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I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
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While planning an adventure, I think it's common design to throw in events which foreshadow the plot in some way. I think players get wise to this and inspect every little thing as a possible clue. Maybe this is desirable... but I wonder whether any DM throws in superfluous events, things that have no connection to the overall campaign, just to curb the players desire to play sherlock with every little thing. And, I am curious, at what point would this tactic likely backfire and cause players to just ignore everything that's meant as a foreshadow..
"Everything is connected" and it seems to me, a good part of the fun is trying to figure out how.
Anyone ever experiment with superfluous events?
i dont often run larger adventures though here my writing background helps.In general you only use a red herring when the readers or players are getting too smart to your moves otherwise use them sparringly because too many breaks foreshadowing and plot.
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The trick is that while everything is connected, not everything has to be connected to the big bad evil guy or the current quest in a way that moves the players closer to their goal. Sometimes an encounter can explain more about the villain's motivations, and other times it just allows players to learn more about the world. As long they still feel like their curiosity is being rewarded instead of leading to dead ends, they'll likely enjoy it.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
I remember an incident from a stream where the DM dropped just a little bit of flavor and the players ended up with two of them on a boat to parts unknown when they were actually supposed to head into town.
The player who discovered the little bit of flavor completely misinterpreted a closed bill of sale as a notification of immanent delivery and took the party to the docks to intercept a delivery that wasn't happening. Without going meta, the DM tried to impress upon them that they were wrong about the details, which resulted in two of the characters almost exported to some distant land before the DM gave up and flat out told the first player that a closed bill of sale means the goods were already delivered.
In a behind-the-screen episode, he said that he learned to gauge the players' intelligence and halve that.🤣
So, be careful. Even directly related but not really necessary things can end up in a wild goose chase.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
In my opinion, the single biggest obstacle to telling a story set in a rich complex world is - Chekhov's Gun.
Russian playwright Anton Chekhov claimed that, "If in Act 1 you have a pistol hanging on the wall, it must be fired in the final Act." And when you're writing a play that makes total sense. In a play you have a limited amount of space on stage, you have a limited amount of time to tell a story, and you have an audience who may or may not be following along. So the concept of Chekhov's Gun is an exercise in streamlining your story-telling down to the bare essentials.
But in a D&D campaign, none of those limitations apply. Space? The stage is inside our imaginations! We literally have infinite space! Time? We usually play for several hours at a time with dozens if not hundreds of sessions per campaign. Attention? Well, sure, this may be an issue sometimes. But in a play, the actors and the audience are different people, so the actors have to hold the audience's attention. In D&D the actors and the audience are the same people!
As a DM you want to provide your players with an immersive experience, which means describing the settings as thoroughly as possible. The problem is, a lifetime of experiencing Chekhov's Gun in every other form of media has trained your players to assume that everything you describe is being described because it is directly relevant and intrinsic to the plot. We must all go through a process of "deprogramming" to rid ourselves of Chekhov.
Explain during your session zero that not everything you describe will be plot-relevant. I know, the first thing your players will ask is, "Well, how the heck are we to know what IS relevant???" Tell them the truth - You Won't! You're going on an adventure, not reading a novel. There will be things they miss. If they miss an important clue that is plot-relevant, just re-input that clue further down the road. Improvise, adapt, overcome.
You can also use small vignettes to gradually deprogram your players. For example: the team is at a fairgrounds. They see a small simple tent with an elderly woman sitting alone at a small table selling just one thing - a single shiny red apple for one gold piece. They will assume something's up. An entire gold piece for one apple??? And it's an old lady. They'll remember Snow White. They will be drawn in to investigate. If they confront her, be sure that they fail their Perception checks. If they snoop and follow the woman at closing time - let them see the old woman removing her makeup and wig, and reveal to them that it was just a young half-elven woman with really good disguise skills making big money off gullible chumps.
It's fun and easy to write a handful of little scenes like that that can help your players see that sometimes the "mysteries" they see around them are just people trying to make a buck and not always some sinister cabal trying to conquer the world.
Anyhow. Where was I going with this? I forgot. I hope this helps.
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.
A couple weeks ago I decided to throw a curveball at my players by having a completely ordinary miner show up, lost and afraid, in the monster-filled dale they were exploring. Having the guy turn out to be a shapeshifting monster and attack at the right moment is an obvious trope (and one that happened once in that campaign), so I wondered how the players would react. They were very suspicious of the guy and considered leaving him to fend for himself or even killing him, but in the end agreed to let him travel with them, and were ultimately surprised to find he was exactly what he seemed to be. Protecting a commoner also added an interesting dimension of challenge to combats that would otherwise have been trivial at their level!
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
there's something called random encounters engrained in the game, can't get more superfluous than that. of course, I"m the sort of DM who doesn't mind the game going in a different direction in light of such an event
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
A fun thing to do is to have very mini short stories that the party can stumble on and follow. a "superfluous" event can provide clues that lead the party to a small side quest, one that has nothing to do with the main quest. Maybe there's a hobgoblin encampment encroaching on a town, and some clues lead the party there. It's basically just a story seed for something else
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?