GameBanshee Forums

Through out my expeirence as a DM a problem has always crossed my path. What is neccasary, and what goes to far. To simple it down, how much information do you need for an adventure? In all of the campains I have created, I make npc and many designated battles. It gets even worse when I go to make a town, you see, I end up writing about half a page for evey single shop. I even make several side quests avaible at some shops.

I can live with it...

So.... Is this neccasary, or way to far.

Like everything in this world, it's better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.

I'd say 50% of DM fun is preparing the adventure before-hand (though this can be hard work). It's nice to go through your mind the evil ways in which you plan to torture the players throughout the course of adventure, hehe. Thus, if you have fun preparing for an adventure, the more preparation, the more fun. It's up to you.
I've had a few successful adventures where I've gone in-depth over every situation and room the players could possible stumble in, providing descriptions and references to monster statistics amongst other things.
Then, I've had a few good ones also where I just basically winged it, and made everything up as I went along, sticking to a basic storyline.

Yeah, preparation is fun. I'd also venture to say that the same goes for players, in the sense that creating a character or choosing new skills/spells, rolling hit die at level up is like 50% of player fun too.

IMO if you make one place or area more descriptive than others (like one shop /w a half page of information vs. a sentence of information for the other), then it might give away that this more descriptive area or shop is more important than the others. In short...if you make one long, then you gotta make 'em all long and same thing if you make one short.

I think some things are important to prepare.

When you have a shop, have a shopkeeper prepared, same goes for a inn keeper and all other NPC's. This gives the players more of a feel for the town they are in. Naturally, players will always find an NPC you didn't prepare.

It's all about atmosfear, and NPC's are a big part of it.

At the least, have short descriptions of locations that you can read out to the players. Players can tell when you're winging description and it makes it easy for them to tell when they should be searching in the pile of rubbish and when they shouldn't. The old DMG had lots of tables of stuff you could just bung in to dress up dungeons.

When you're writing these, try to think about what the players might do, and write a second description of things that won't be obvious to them but they might find on further investigation.

I've found it useful to prepare pre-rolled lists of wandering monsters, a couple of NPC parties, etc, to use as needed.