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Video Preview: Tell, Don't Show – Tell Players What's Going On. (Patreon)

Published:
2022-06-29 16:00:01
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Here's a sneak preview of an upcoming YouTube tip video on telling players what's going on in your game.

If the video is marked "private", that means I've queued it up for general release. It'll be back up soon.

Files

Tell, Don't Show – Tell Players What's Going On #dnd #lazydm

We DMs build rich worlds in our heads. We think through complex situations. We imagine NPCs living their lives, villains moving through their plots, vast dungeons buried beneath ancient mountains, and monsters lurking in the depths. We do our best to describe these worlds and situations and adjudicate the results of the actions of the characters to our players. We love to imagine that the world we've built in our heads is the same one living in the heads of our players. It's not. In this video Mike talks about the importance of telling players what's going on. Don't hold your information close – tell players what's going on. Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter https://slyflourish.com/subscribe/ Support Sly Flourish on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/slyflourish Buy Sly Flourish Books: https://shop.slyflourish.com/ Curse of Knowledge and Elizabeth Newton's Song Tapping Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Comments

Gustavo Campanelli

This gave me a great idea I'll implement in my next campaign. Its an accord from all the gods in the world, so that whenever a character is offered a quest a prompt describing the quest would form. And this is even for small things, like a child fetching twigs and small branches for her mother. so it would be common knowledge for all people. I always wanted to do something like this, but sadly never had a great way to implement it.

Monsaemon

Man, this was a lesson I learned the hard way. Sessions upon sessions of wondering what I could do better to make the players understand me better. Just to find out the simplest method is the best way to go. Thanks for the awesome information!

Rick

Can't agree more. I tell, tell, tell. Tell them what I'm going to tell them. Then tell them. Then tell them what I just told them. :)

James RePass

The joke of DM's looking up puzzles for kindergartners is pretty close to realiy

Alex Gombach

This might be some of the best DM advice I’ve ever heard. There’s a a modern era obsession with “meta gaming” in which you can’t call a kobold a kobold when players meet it. This challenges those assumptions and I think makes for a better game. Thank you! My dming has two distinct eras- BSF (Before Sly Flourish) and ASF (After Sly Flourish).