GM Reflections - Asking what the players want to prepare
When players are heading into a new area, I ask if there’s anything in town they would like to buy or prepare and then am met with a brief silence before they ask for health potions. I would get frustrated because I describe the destination as caves and then tap my foot and nudge them to buy climbing gear and rope but nope! healing potion.
Then I got to experience it as a player in a new game that is starting up. We had our destination and asked what we would prepare and without much information (and little gold as new characters), we defaulted to…healing potions….
The Problem
Giving the players a blank slate isn’t going to lead to the player driven action that you hope for. This has been discussed with rumor-less sandboxes (”you can do anything, so what do you want to do?”) and the same applies here. There is also a complicating factor in that my players generally come from a D&D 5e background so have been trained to rely on their character sheet for solutions instead of problem solving within the fiction.
The Solution
Just tell the players what the obstacles will be. You don’t tell them the solution but you give them enough information to make a meaningful (see Chris McDowall’s article on Information - Choice - Impact). I would treat this as free rumors the characters learn through a “preparation montage” with people that are knowledgeable about the area.
- “We have only ever explored the top level because there’s a pretty steep drop a few meters in”
- “Only the royal guards take that road on account of the swamp witch that ruins rations”
- “Finn went there once but said it was darker than a moonless night and that the torch he brought didn’t help at all”
Each of these are tied to an obstacle the party may face and some fiction to flavor it. The rumors don’t even have to be true (”there isn’t a swamp witch, it’s just mushroom spores that get everywhere and quickly spoil food”), but prompts the players to come up with solutions. In the case of the swamp witch again, they decide to bring extra rations to compensate for losses.
Their solution may not be perfect and only address the symptoms instead of the root cause but that’s ok as long as you can show the impact of their choice. The PCs should benefit in some form from their preparations; this is the important part about rewarding the behavior you want to see. If they get to the dungeon and are in the same position if they didn’t prepare at all, they will be less likely to worry about rumors in the future. It’s fine to use the occasional red herring (and I acknowledge the many opinions on false rumors) but if the begin viewing these rumors as a game of Guess What the GM is Thinking, then you’re back to where you started.
Limitations
This works for certain game styles but is not as good a fit for others. If your wish is for PCs to return several times to the same locations, like a Westmarches style game, then uncovering the mystery is an objective of the first delve and then they are better prepared for future excursions. I find my players are more interested in seeing breadth and not the depth of the world, so “wasting” one of our few sessions together on a fact-finding mission for every location doesn’t fit with our style.
I also think that this should only apply to the opening obstacles, ones that people in town would know about. You are already stretching verisimilitude by just telling the players about obstacles so there’s a limit to what you can reveal, plus you want to leave something for the discovery/exploration pillar. I think it’s one thing to play through a session and get to the final room only to be thwarted by an obstacle and have to turn back. It’s another thing to be thwarted by an obstacle in the second room and by the time you have returned to town and made preparations, the session is over and you have to wait a few weeks to come back.
Last Thoughts
This can tie heavily into the Rumor system you are using. I’m planning on detailing locations with both an adventure hook rumor (why would you go there) and an obstacle rumor (why no one else has gone there yet). Increasing the rumors (and information) available to players can also be used to great effect in the opposite direction. Imagine a region where someone knows at least a little a bit about the interesting locations except for The Dark Castle. No one knows anything about it other than the front door is solid stone and impenetrable, so don’t bother. That will stick out to players.