Ask Angry is a biweekly advice column in which I — The Angry GM — dole out advice and abuse in equal measure to those hapless readers foolish enough to send me a question. Are you a hapless reader? Are you foolish enough to seek my help? Email your question to ask.angry@angry.games. Tell me — clearly, explicitly, and unambiguously — what to call you, and keep it short, sweet, and simple.

DM Dad asks…

If you were going to use notes or audio logs to help tell a story in a dungeon, would you have each one the party found be the “next” one in order or allow them to be picked up out of order based on how the party explored?

Good ole random documents and audio logs. I love ‘em.

No, seriously. I f$&%ing love ‘em. They’re a great way to reward exploration with information. Nice and direct. I used a bunch of RD&AL in my introductory module, The Fall of Silverpine Watch. They provided the players the clues they needed to solve the adventure’s central mystery.

First, for those of you who have no clue what I’m talking about, random documents and audio logs — or RD&AL — are common in video games. Basically, they’re little nuggets of information the player can find hidden throughout the game environment. They come in all sorts of forms. Notes written by game characters, letters sent from one character to another, journals and diaries kept by characters, random words scrawled on walls by mad characters, video logs and audio notes recorded by characters, and other crap like that.

Basically, they’re information dressed up in an in-world costume.

In Fall of Silverpine Watch, the party might discover a half-written letter explaining the circumstances of a soldier’s death to his next of kin, a priest’s journal, and a note from a blacksmith to “whoever finds this” explaining why he was fleeing his post.

In TTRPGS — as DM Dad notes — there’s several ways to handle this s$&%. After you’ve actually written or recorded your RD&AL, that is.. There’s several ways to place them in your adventure. First, you can put specific documents in specific places. That’s what I did. The priest’s journal was found on the desk in Room C12: Brother Wulfram’s Study. When the heroes visited Room C12 and checked out the desk, I handed them the cool journal excerpts I’d prepared.

Second, you can stack up the documents in the proper order, whatever the f$&% that means. Like, if they’re torn out pages from a journal, you stack them in page order. Then, you make notes in your adventure where journal pages can be found. And whenever the party visits one of those locations, they find whichever journal page is next. In other words, you just note where the party can find any RD&AL and give the players whichever RD&AL is next in sequence when they find one.

How should you handle it? Well, just ask yourself one question: do you also wipe your players’ a$&es for them when they go to the bathroom? Because that’s the difference between the Purposely Placed Page Approach and the Next Page in the Pile Approach.

Does your game need an Easy Mode?

Okay, okay…</sarcasm>

Really, it’s down to whether you want the RD&AL thing to add an element of challenge or not. But the answer might not be as simple as you think. Let me explain.

Finding s$&% out of order and making sense of it? That’s a challenge. Make no mistake about it. How much of a challenge it is depends on the specifics of the out-of-order documents in question. You can make it easy or you can make it hard. But even if it’s easy, it’s still a thing that takes some brainpower. Thus, it’s a great way to add an element of mystery or puzzle-solving to an adventure. Even if it’s not the main focus of the adventure. Even a dungeon-crawly, murderhobo fun adventure can benefit from a minor brain challenge to break up the action.

But this ain’t just about a brain challenge. Because revealing s$&% out of order — making a challenge of it — tends to entice the players to engage with your journal entries and video logs. Even if the players claim to hate puzzles.

Remember, by the way, that most players who claim to hate puzzles actually hate putting their Dungeons & Dragons game on pause to play Minesweeper or solve a Sudoku or some s$&% like that. Which is what most GMs think are puzzles.

Remember also, that there’s a difference between not actively participating — or not showing Kermit-flail levels of enthusiasm — and actually hating this s$&%. When lots of GMs see two players out of five engaging with a puzzle while the rest sit quietly and watch and listen, they assume the three other players hate puzzles. They don’t. Probably. Players are naturally curious even if they don’t engage directly with mysteries. They’re perfectly happy to let others work out a story and then reveal it to them. Unless your players actually roll their eyes and say, “not this s$&% again” whenever something requiring some brain juice comes up, they’re probably having an okay time with puzzles even if they’re not active participants.

Besides, sometimes, it’s okay for some of the players to do something they enjoy for a few minutes while the others wait their turn. That’s how group activities work.

But I digress…

I was saying that turning your RD&AL into a puzzle — even a simple one — by revealing them out of order can entice the players to engage with them. It’s like this: when the party finds an RD&AL that makes perfect sense, they read it once and then shove it in a folder and forget about it. When they find the next one, they do the same thing. That s$&% goes through their eyes, into their brain, and then into a memory hole.

But, when they find an RD&AL that’s clearly missing some information or context — something out of sequence — that tends to pique their curiosity. And most players are naturally curious. Even if mysteries ain’t their thing. When they find a second random RD&AL, they tend to put it next to the first one and think about both in the context of the other. In other words, they’re constantly re-examining that s$&%. Recontextualizing. Instead of just sliding out of the players’ brains, the RD&AL tend to stay in working memory. The story holds their interest.

And even if the story’s a simple one — easy to piece together once the pieces are all there — it still feels to the players like they’re solving a puzzle. Figuring s$%& out. And that makes them feel good.

Nonsequential RD&AL also suggest to the players that the game’s not linear. That their exploration choices matter. If they’d gone left instead of right, maybe they’d have found everything in the proper order. I know it doesn’t actually work like that, but brains are weird. They’re easily tricked. Even if it would never be possible to find that s$&% in order — even if the dungeon’s basically a linear gauntlet — nonsequential RD&AL still f$&% with the players’ unconscious brains. It makes them think they’re deliberately exploring out of order. Even if they’re not.

That said, there’s downsides to the Purposely Placed Page Approach.

First, if the players miss a piece of the puzzle, they might never know it. And, in terms of making sense of s$&%, some RD&AL are more important than others. So the players could miss all the crucial doculogs and find only the filler crap.

Second, even if they find all — or most — of the infodrops, the players might not put them together correctly. They might just fail to figure s$&% out. It happens.

Third, some players’ curiosity wanes quickly when s$&% requires any effort at all. Sad by true. I don’t know why those players even play RPGs, but they do. And since any kind of player quality standards are decried as gatekeeping, you’re legally required to let those players play at your table. Even if you didn’t invite them. Point is, the minute they pick up a document that doesn’t make perfect sense, some players will toss that s$&% aside and forget about it.

Personally, those downsides don’t sway me. First, I run games, not activities. I’m okay with the idea that the players can fail. Especially when it comes to brain challenges. Brain challenges — challenges in which the players have to put information together and draw a conclusion — are among the purest and truest challenges RPGs can present. There’s no random chance and no dice. Everything’s on the players.

Second, with a little planning — and some practice — you can mitigate the downsides with good design and proper infonugget placement. Hell, it ain’t actually that hard. Make the most crucial infobits hard to miss and build some repetition into your RD&AL. Of course, that s$%& can vary depending on how difficult you want your puzzle to be. See, there ain’t one answer to this s$&%. GMs forget that too. They’ll say, “this is the one and only proper way to hand out information.” But varying this s$&% is how GMs set the difficulty slider on their puzzles.

Anyway…

All of that said, there’s times when the Next Page in the Pile Approach works just fine. If you don’t want your story to be a puzzle, it’s the way to go. Especially when the story — whatever it is — just ain’t that important. For instance, when the story’s just dungeon backstory fluff.

Thing is, when you use the Purposely Placed Page Approach, you’re all but guaranteeing this s$&%’s going to eat up some table time. Every time a new RD&AL pops up, the party’s going to stop and try to piece the story together. That’s generally okay. Most tables will tolerate that even if there’s only a few true puzzle-solvers there. But if you’ve got a bunch of impatient dungeon-crawly murderhobos who won’t tolerate that s$&%, just hand the players the next page every time they find one and let them skim and forget that s$&%.

The Next Page in the Pile Approach also works well if you want to create a collect the tokens challenge. Like, say, the story’s not important, but you want the players to deliberately seek out all the pages. To complete the collection. Whatever. In that case, each page feels like a piece of progress. Like gaining some XP or finding one of the Triforce pieces. Sequential discovery just makes sense there.

Just know that if you do that s$&%, most of the players will care more about completing the sidequest than learning the story. Which might just be the best fit for your table.

In the end, I personally like the Purposely Placed Page Approach. I like engaging my players’ brainmeats. I like it when they care about this s$&%. And I like to make them feel like they get to explore on their own terms. Even if they’re exploring a linear-as-hell dungeon gauntlet. But that ain’t the only way. And since you only asked me what I would do — since you didn’t ask what you should do and you didn’t ask for a detailed analysis — feel free to ignore the 2000 words of extraneous crap above. There’s your answer.