Sometimes when I’m preparing for a D&D game, I’ll throw in something crazy and mysterious: an immense stone foot protruding from a cliffside, or a glass mountain with a tiny bird imprisoned inside, or something. I think, “this’ll show ’em the mysterious wonder of a fantasy world! Who knows why this is here? Certainly not me!”
Then, on further consideration, I usually attach a backstory that can be discovered, or a magic power, or something. Because in my heart, I know how things will go down if I don’t.
Here’s how it WON’T happen:
ME: There’s a immense stone foot protruding from the cliffside!
PLAYERS: Wow! minds blown! I guess we’ll never truly understand the mysteries of this ancient land. Oh well, let’s continue north.
Here’s the two possible ways it COULD happen.
ME: There’s an immense stone foot protruding from the cliffside!
PLAYERS: (decent pause to show that they heard me) We continue north.
Or
ME: There’s an immense stone foot protruding from the cliffside!
PLAYERS: Wow, that’s interesting! Is there a giant trapped here? Will it be grateful if I free it? Are there circumstances in which the wall becomes permeable? What spells can I cast on the foot? Let’s do half an hour of magical experiments!
In the latter case, rather than admitting that the stone foot was just a pointless piece of window dressing, I’ll probably on-the-spot invent some payoff for the characters’ investigation: they save a giant; eternal friends with the Flintheart tribe; find the evil oni who imprisoned the giant; etc.
If I went to the trouble to prepare the stone foot in advance, why didn’t I figure out what it was attached to? Why do preparation at all if I’m leaving the hard part for the game, when I’m juggling a million things at once?
This is a design antipattern that I frequently fall prey to, and I see it a lot in published RPG materials too. A suggestive detail is proposed, but there’s no payoff. There’s a stone foot? Why should my players care?
Here are some reasons why I think the “so what” pattern is so common.
The tables also include entries for what the Dungeon Master’s Guide calls “encounters of a less monstrous nature.” Many of these results cry out to be customized or detailed, which offers you an opportunity to connect them to the story of your campaign. And in so doing, you’ve taken a step toward making your own personalized encounter table. Now, keep going!
Such “less monstrous” encounters include entries like the following:
Those are cool encounters! But imagine this. My players have wandered off the rails of the adventure. I roll on the random encounter table… I look up from Xanathar’s Guide and tell my players that a howl echoes over the land for 2 minutes. I’m going to immediately have to start brainstorming reasons for the howl, because the players are going to feel cheated if they can’t track it down. I wish the encounter table would go on to say, “it’s a hill giant who lost his cat” or “Count Rugen turned the machine up to 50” or something.
These evocative encounters must help some DMs: those who aren’t good at coming up with setups for mysteries, but are good at coming up with their solutions. This may serve some audience, though not me. Personally, I’m better at coming up with a mystery premise (there’s a dead guy inside a room, and it’s locked from the inside!) than a mystery solution (the murderer was there the whole time, disguised as… a locked door? See, I’m terrible at this.)
it’s a trap!
Maybe every mystery doesn’t need a solution. Maybe you don’t need to come up with a rushed explanation for every random stone foot or unearthly howl. Maybe some things are best left as mysteries.
The problem with providing players a mystery without a solution is that it violates their expectations.
Most players feel that they have an obligation to the DM: if the DM prepared something, they should dutifully check it out. That’s why players often follow the thin adventure hooks provided in many modules. The hook doesn’t actually have to be strong enough to entice a character or its player: it just has to be visible enough to plead, “The DM prepared this adventure for you. Please check it out!”
Evocative but unexplained details look just like adventure hooks, but aren’t. Players have no way of telling the difference. They dutifully investigate out of a desire to do what the DM wants, and as a reward, they get a shaggy dog story with no payoff. The more the players are trained to follow the DM’s lead, the more of everyone’s time they will waste investigating. Without more work from the DM, a random encounter like a two-minute howl is literally sound and fury, signifying nothing.
a hook should come with a handle
My general rule for game prep is: when I come up with a cool detail, I also come up with a way to interact with it or investigate it: a handle for the players. The handle can be anything, but it has to signal to players, “oh, that is what this thing is about. Now we can go on with our lives.”
Or, put more simply: every element of the game should give the players something to do.
Here are some possible ways to develop the image I proposed at the beginning of this article: the immense stone foot jutting out of a cliffside.
Do you have any tips for a first-time DM?
Good stuff Paul!
I love that as a DM sometimes the players will think up something so cool that it override whatever I’ve already written with what they did, or I incorporate part of what they’ve speculated about into my design—that improv aspect of the game is worth building upon and encouraging, and these seem like a great set of tools to do so.
WRT dungeon dressing, I have generally lumped encounter types into four groups/categories of detail:
1. Empty: literally nothing to see here (that meets the first-glancing eye, anyway)
2. Dungeon Dressing: spot-color to add some interesting bits as you wander through
3. Encounters: your standard blend of monsters, treasures, traps, hazards, riddles, puzzles, tricks, enigmas, etc.
4. Centerpieces: the unique encounters that define the dungeon, that you always want the PCs to find—B1’s Room of Pools, WG5’s Terrible Iron Golem, G1’s great feast hall, etc.
For some more thoughts on that structure, see https://grodog.blogspot.com/2017/05/dungeon-strangitude-variations-on.html but my point in bringing it up is that you’re giving an added dimension here to any encounter, through the give-and-take of DM-player interaction and improv. Maybe that spot-color becomes a whole new sub-level, or maybe it stays as a three-word-annotation if the players don’t engage it….
Allan.
I think this is a good point. I’ve seen a few good dungeons that have what are supposed to be “dungeon dressing tables” that end up feeling more like “red herring tables.”
If you’re including entries that amount to “there is a mysterious object here, but try as you might, you cannot remove it or learn anything else about it or how it came to be here,” you’re basically just building needless frustration into your game.
Another technique I sometimes use is to involve the players in the fluff-fiction creation.
DM: “As you round round the escarpment you notice ….”
DM: (points to player) “.. name a body part, an extremity ..”
Player: “A foot?”
DM: “As you round round the escarpment you notice a huge foot sticking out of the cliff.”
This only works if you’ve explained you’ll do this occasionally and explained the basic mechanics (“It’s like madlibs, I’ll ask you for a body part, or a colour, or a farm animal, and then I’ll slot that into the description. This by the way is a farkin big fat clue that the specific detail is not something with a huge backstory. Got it?”
Another time I seeded a number of “weird sights” by simply having a local guide mention them while giving directions to the other side of the forest (“Head north on this path until you see a tree stump with hundreds of pennies – just a bit further north is a path north-east, take that. Keep going until you see a couple of rocks that look like squatting frogs – you’re half way there then. Towards the end you’ll see an old standing stone from the ancients – go off the path and cut due east and you’ll soon pop out of the woods. Savvy?”
This isn’t exactly related to the post, but it’s an idea you might like. I’ve been wondering if there were any dragon color morphs. So, for example, two red dragons could have a kid with purple scales. The purple dragon has the stats of a red dragon, though. The only difference is color. A gold “green” dragon could use this to lure in unwary adventurers, or the adventurers might mistake a “silver” dragon for a blue one because of its scale color.
My feeling is that not everything in a dungeon or adventure should have a meaning or be explainable. That is what makes the dungeon such a mysterious place. Most of my adventurers would spend quite a long time trying to figure out the stone foot coming out of the cliff as you described. And that is ok. The more time they spend trying to figure things like this out the better. It adds to the idea that the players do not know everything. And if they do not come up with a reason or solution it will lead them to believe that they have left things unfinished in the adventure. This is not a bad thing.
Thanks for writing this! This really gave me clarity on why some random table results, or certain published adventure details, don’t work for me. “Hooks without handles” has become my label for this!