Oh hello. I didn't see you come in.

You know, while we're here together in my creepy study full of dusty books and gargoyles, I may as well tell you how much I love being a Dungeon Master. In our games we get to craft all kinds of unusual lore, we get to birth monsters that will lurk in the shadows of your players' dreams, and sometimes your players actually discover some of it that stuff! 

That's right, I love to build my own intricately textured adventures in the hopes of entertaining my friends in a way that only I know how. But let's be honest, we all know where the real storytelling meat is for us Dungeon Masters: the describing of harmless mundane things that players choose to investigate relentlessly for difficult to discern reasons. Oh yes. All you have to do is freak them out once, and they'll ride that suspicion train until the end of days. 

So, because I am a kind and gentle sort of Dungeon Master, I like to both remind my group that I recognize their concern, but also I like to have a little bit of fun with it. Because come on, you can't hit them with a nightmarish trap every time they get complacent. Sometimes you have to let them live, and all you can do is slowly soak them in their dread. So here are a few mundane objects that many players tend to overthink, but rarely actually require the worry. I'll even include what you, the Dungeon Master, can say to them as absolutely nothing unfolds in incredible detail. Because it can be even more nerve-wracking if they're expecting doom but all they get is silliness.

Doors

Ah, the notorious door. Sometimes they lead to hell, sometimes they just have a trap built in that slowly fills the room with poison gas, and if you're lucky it's just a fake door and you just got Wile E. Coyote'd.

But sometimes it is only a door, a door that may lead to utter eldritch horror, sure, but in the meantime your players want to spend hours rolling Investigation checks until they get their 20. 

You could make them wait for the magic number to arrive, but why not tell them it was a DC 1 check, and provide them with this little description? Here we see a wooden door...

Many moons ago, an acorn fell from its branch. For months this acorn gazed upon its fallen brethren with terror, as they were gnawed upon by squirrels, their ravaged corpses then buried in shallow graves with all the dignity of a court witness to a mafia crime. But finally, after what seemed like endless squirrel-on-acorn horror, this acorn managed to nestle itself in the supple soil of the forest floor, tiny roots finding purchase amongst the moss, fungi, and of course the naked molerats. 

Through snow, rain, hail, some mild smog from when the local blacksmith got drunk and accidentally burned some popcorn, and a little bit of tasteful sleet, the acorn slowly grew into a mighty tree.

And one day, that tree was felled by a lumberjack named Terry. Terry sold that tree to a woodworker named Bob. Bob then ran up some gambling debts and resold the tree to another woodworker named Jocelyn. And from this tree's wood, a mighty door was hewn. And that door was polished, perfected, and fit into this very doorway. You are looking at it really closely. It smells of rosemary and lavender. Great job looking at this door.

But why should wooden doors have all the fun? Sometimes, doors are stone. Here's something you can read when they check out that stone door you put in the temple or cave, and really thought they'd just kinda walk through it.

You investigate and delve into the deep mysteries of this door, and have an epiphany. Deep within the earth's core lay stone as old as this plane itself. Birthed from the magma and then ground by tectonic plates with the minerals of the heavens, this particular slab of stone found its birth on the 19th of the month of Eleasis, centuries before you yourself were born onto this plane.

Tectonic plates continued to shift until this slab slid out of its bed of granite and into a prominent place in a ditch just outside some woods.

A stone cutter named Cleave saw the slab and was like, oh right, I have to make a door. That looks like decent granite, he thought. And so he hired some mules to drag it back to his shop. The first mule he hired died for unrelated reasons. You can read up on it if you are suspicious, but basically the mule was old and it was time. The granite slab had nothing to do with it. Or did it? No, it didn't. All local journalists agreed that the slab of granite that was carved into this door did not injure the mule or cause its death.

If you push this door, it will open.

Treasure Chest

This one is tricky. Sure all kinds of traps can lurk inside of a treasure chest, but there is one in particular, that accursed mimic. So let's lean into that a little bit.

You carefully examine the treasure chest very, very, very carefully. You steel your mind and do a complete inventory.

No, the hinges on the back of the chest are not the vertebrae of a mimic.

No, the wooden bars are not the cheekbones of a mimic.

No, the brass plating along the edges of the lid are not mimic gums.

The lock is not a mimic tooth.

The treasure inside is not a mimic uvula.

It is a treasure chest and it's already open and everything.

Chair

For some reason people love to examine these, so we'll make this our final example.

Examining this chair to the finest grain of detail, you determine: there's no invisible person sitting in this chair. There's just four legs. It's a chair.

Wait, no, you find underneath the seat an elaborate map to the tomb of a dead god!

Just kidding, you find some gross old gum.

It's just a chair. 

 Hope you find these useful, and I pray we never need a second installment of this article. Just kidding, I've already written twelve installments for my own personal use! 

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Dan Telfer is the Dungeons Humorist aka Comedy Archmage for D&D Beyond (a fun way they are letting him say "writer"), dungeon master for the Nerd Poker podcast, a stand-up comedian, a TV writer who also helped win some Emmys over at Comedy Central, and a former editor of MAD Magazine and The Onion. He can be found riding his bike around Los Angeles from gig to gig to gaming store, though the best way to find out what he's up to is to follow him on Twitter via @dantelfer.