Over on Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Mr. Raggi wrote a really good piece on Toybox Style Play.
Check it out.
Basically, he’s talking about a principle of design in which you include elements which (a) aren’t designed to be interacted with mechanically and (b) don’t actually have any pre-designed purpose (or, at least, no “meaningful” one).
In other words, make it a point to include randomly cool shit in your adventures.
I really couldn’t agree more strongly with this. My 101 Curious Items are an example of this. Similarly, whenever I’m keying a room, I’ll try to make it a point to include at least one detail that is interesting-but-irrelevant. These aren’t always things that the PCs can interact with, but they frequently are. (For example, in one “empty” room I littered the floor with shards of shattered pottery… which could be reassembled with a mend spell to reveal several crude busts. In another case I put “age-old scratches” on a door. )
If you’ve been reading the Alexandrian for awhile, you know that I make it a very specific point to design scenarios in which I really have no idea what the outcome will be. I want to be surprised by the actions of my players and to be just as surprised by what happens in play as they are. Stuff like Don’t Prep Plots and Node-Based Scenario Design describe some of the ways I achieve that at a macro-level. But this “toybox” design is one of the ways I exercise the same principle on the micro-scale: If you include enough randomly cool shit, eventually the players are going to grab onto it and do something ridiculously cool with it.
The first two links are identical incorrectly link to this page instead of the off-site target.
I’ve started doing a similar thing. I began to do it when I realized that my friends super-realist attitudes toward gaming (And where are you going to put that potion on your person? I know you don’t have any belt pouches empty!) the group I ran with didn’t get to do any of the over the top stuff or the fun cliches. So now I’m a little more eager to fill places with magical statues with rubies for eyes, tiles with mystic runes etched in silver, and all that wonderful stuff. They are suckers for those things! I’ve based entire adventures off of exactly that principle. They pick up on something I didn’t expect and just run with it.
Here’s a functional link to the article:
http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2011/10/toybox-style-play.html?zx=59580382ce34b52c
Links are fixed. (Stupid website… grumble, grumble, grumble….)
We once found a potion of “Makes the user hallucinate nice smells.” Not really useful, but interactable. We spent like 15 minutes trying to come up with practical uses for it (with the winning entry being “If we ever meet troglodytes…”). It was really quite neat, and something I’d like to see more of. So agreed.
Although I’m not an OSR fan myself, I do like a lot of what the movement has achieved. I do have to smile, however, whenever one of the stalwarts posts something as if it’s a previously unknown idea – that I’ve been doing for years as a story-telling ref.
You do have to be careful though: I once ran a game with some extraneous detail (a scratched out rune on the wall – the idea was that it was ancient graffiti), then spent an hour answering highly detailed questions from one of the players as to what happened when he did x, y, z… I think it was a hangover from text-based computer adventuring: if it’s described, it’s important!