The Granularity of PC Actions

If you ever walk away from a session of D&D thinking not much happened, your game may be too granular. This is D&D, the game where a three month journey takes three seconds and a three minute combat takes three hours.

The trick is twofold: conveying to the players the granularity at which you would like them to state their actions, and cutting to the next scene when the tension is resolved and a decision is made.

For the players, the granularity depends on the fictional situation, but mostly it depends on the DM. You don't ask the PCs to narrate step-by-step going down to the bar for an ale. So don't ask them to navigate street by street to go to Gilmore's Glorious Goods.

If your game isn't a hex crawl, or is in no way about resource management and long-distance travel, let your players say "We go to Waterdeep". Encourage them to say that if it's what they want. Charge them some gold for food and transportation and say "you arrive 2 weeks later". If they must run into the Waterdevian army on the march or some other key encounter, only then interrupt the journey.

If your game isn't a dungeon crawl that involves careful mapping, managing light food and water, or the possibility of getting lost, don't narrate every twist and turn or provide cardinal directions and exact dimensions of every corridor and room. Ask for some sort of exploration check if you must and tell them the options that they find.

You might think this eliminates the possibility of traps but you'd be wrong. Part of the exploration check can include spotting signs of a hidden trap. If they fail to spot it, triggering the trap starts an encounter which should be dynamic and interesting, not just a hit point tax or instant death. Even better, make traps obvious but navigating past them the real challenge.

You might think this eliminates the possibility of getting lost but you'd be wrong. Part of the exploration check can be keeping a rough idea of where the PCs are. Failure on the exploration check might bring the PCs back to a place that they've already been, or bring them to a place they were not intending to go and suffer another potentially dangerous encounter. This is especially effective if they're trying to get back out of the dungeon or wilderness.

This game is about making interesting choices in tough situations. Let's leave the "crawl" to the dungeon and hex crawls, and the high percentage of empty rooms and hexes with them. You don't raise the tension by carefully exploring 4 empty rooms before the action happens in the 5th. You keep the tension high by narrating them right to the 5th room, and the 5th room after that, and the 3rd one after that, so that when your players leave the table they're gasping for breath in awe of all the fantastic adventuring they got done.