Delivering encounters that empower player decisions, Pt 1

Players want to engage with your encounters (read: the game) to accomplish some goal, be it one you've given them or they came up with themselves. That's D&D in a nutshell. The problem: DMs often fail to give their players enough information to permit that engagement.

To make meaningful decisions towards a goal, players need to exercise agency. As any number of fantastic essays will tell you (http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/ is a pro at this), information is the key to player agency. If the players don't have information to power their decisions, then they're like fish flopping on the ground. They might go in a particular direction, but they don't know (or probably care) why they went there. Or they may do nothing at all. So, when building and delivering an encounter, how do you make sure to communicate the necessary information to the players to enable them to make meaningful decisions?

The first thing I like to do is make sure the player's have a clear goal available. This might be part of the encounter itself (get the dragon's treasure or save the ogre's captives), or it might come from the PC's (we want to get past this room without waking up the goblins sleeping here). Either way, make sure you're either giving the PC's a clear goal(s) with the encounter, or that you know what types of things they might want to get out of it.

This is important because your map and encounter set up need to convey the information necessary for the PC's to achieve their goal, and everything else is fluff. Fluff is good and all, but by definition unnecessary. If you're giving your players great descriptions of the dragon's lustrous scales, but fail to sufficiently describe the open pit trap in front of its hoard, your players will be pissed.

Second, make clear whatever info the PC's need in your map (if you're using one. personally, I like to just write on the grid things like "15 ft fall, steep climb up"), or in your area description.  Do not wait until a player specifically asks about the floor to mention that it's covered in slime and difficult terrain. Give the players all the info they need up front to understand the encounter area and how to do whatever it is they want to do. Players will appreciate a "Gotcha" moment when it is part of a game mechanic (your friend the NPC was really a polymorphed succubus all along!), but will get furious when that moment is about information you could've conveyed but didn't (you try to walk over to that ogre but fail to reach him because there's a pit in front of him).

Now you may be asking, but what about hiding certain information from the players? What if I want them to fiddle with something, or they need more exploration to get the information they need? Those are totally reasonable things to wonder about. In part 2 of this short series, I'll cover managing player assumptions, which I think addresses this topic.