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Nov. 17th, 2016 08:30 amI'm running a D&D game at Philcon this coming weekend and I'm really excited. I drew my map last week and wrote up most of the encounters over the weekend (Most, because there's lots of ways this could go, and there is the strong possibility I'll have to make up a new encounter on the fly).
One thing I'm thinking about is that the adventure takes place in a forest. My map has a series of paths through the forest, so it's possible for the adventure to run like a theme park forest, don't venture off the path. If that happens, the forest will effectively work like a dungeon, with various forking paths to explore. That would be fine with me- the paths are sufficiently Jacquayed, and the encounters are sufficiently dynamic that there's plenty of room for interesting exploration even while staying on the path. But since it's a forest, the 'walls' of the paths CAN actually be broken through. Players will take movement penalties and be at risk of getting lost if they go off into the woods, but there are substantial potential benefits. With the right jaunt into the woods, the players could skip about two thirds of the adventure.
I'm uncertain how to communicate that to players. I think it is possible for me to inadvertently steer players away from considering the off-road routes with the way I describe the scene, if I focus too much on the path. "You are on a forest path. It heads out straight in front of you, curving slightly to the right, and there is a split in the path in two hundred feet with one prong continuing straight and the other making a hard right." If I talk like that, I'd imagine most players wouldn't realize that actually at any time they could just go left into the woods, because the descriptive language only acknowledges the path forks as choices . But I definitely don't want to signpost it too obviously because I want it to be a realization on the players part. If I say, like "On your right side is forest, in front of you is a path, and on the left side is forest, which way do you go?" then either the players think I'm being obnoxiously patronizing or they realize that I am explicitly giving them the option of going into the forest, which I don't think is what I want either.
I think the middle ground is to feed subtler reminders of the forest into my descriptions. "As you walk along the path, slowly curving rightward, you notice that the trees on the left side of the path are getting thicker and more gnarled." Give the players reason to be curious about the forest, if they want to be, rather than directly inviting them to explore it, and do it using descriptions where if they're not interested, it just comes off as flavor. I also suspect a mechanical cue will help- if the first time they consider investigating some of the trees, I say "Okay, traveling in the woods will be at a movement penalty," I'll be giving them the information about traveling off-path at their instigation, rather than at my own. There are also a few places on the map marked where an interaction between on-path and off is cued- as the players pass a certain spot, they'll hear the rustling of deer in the woods, for example.
One thing I'm thinking about is that the adventure takes place in a forest. My map has a series of paths through the forest, so it's possible for the adventure to run like a theme park forest, don't venture off the path. If that happens, the forest will effectively work like a dungeon, with various forking paths to explore. That would be fine with me- the paths are sufficiently Jacquayed, and the encounters are sufficiently dynamic that there's plenty of room for interesting exploration even while staying on the path. But since it's a forest, the 'walls' of the paths CAN actually be broken through. Players will take movement penalties and be at risk of getting lost if they go off into the woods, but there are substantial potential benefits. With the right jaunt into the woods, the players could skip about two thirds of the adventure.
I'm uncertain how to communicate that to players. I think it is possible for me to inadvertently steer players away from considering the off-road routes with the way I describe the scene, if I focus too much on the path. "You are on a forest path. It heads out straight in front of you, curving slightly to the right, and there is a split in the path in two hundred feet with one prong continuing straight and the other making a hard right." If I talk like that, I'd imagine most players wouldn't realize that actually at any time they could just go left into the woods, because the descriptive language only acknowledges the path forks as choices . But I definitely don't want to signpost it too obviously because I want it to be a realization on the players part. If I say, like "On your right side is forest, in front of you is a path, and on the left side is forest, which way do you go?" then either the players think I'm being obnoxiously patronizing or they realize that I am explicitly giving them the option of going into the forest, which I don't think is what I want either.
I think the middle ground is to feed subtler reminders of the forest into my descriptions. "As you walk along the path, slowly curving rightward, you notice that the trees on the left side of the path are getting thicker and more gnarled." Give the players reason to be curious about the forest, if they want to be, rather than directly inviting them to explore it, and do it using descriptions where if they're not interested, it just comes off as flavor. I also suspect a mechanical cue will help- if the first time they consider investigating some of the trees, I say "Okay, traveling in the woods will be at a movement penalty," I'll be giving them the information about traveling off-path at their instigation, rather than at my own. There are also a few places on the map marked where an interaction between on-path and off is cued- as the players pass a certain spot, they'll hear the rustling of deer in the woods, for example.