If you want to get me mad about something, take away agency from the players in a situation where they believe they have it.

Yeah, it’s the Quantum Ogre.

What’s a Quantum Ogre? It’s an ogre encounter that appears regardless of the choices of the party. You ask them, “Left or Right” when they come to an intersection, but both paths lead to the ogre. Different locations, same ogre.

As a DMing technique, it has its advantages, especially when you’re short of time. But presenting the players with the illusion of a meaningful choice is likely to be a break in the social contract. For many players, when they’re given a choice, they expect it to be a real one.

I have the same feeling about Quantum Clues. Yes, it doesn’t matter which encounter the players went to, they learn the same information!

The difference between Quantum Ogres and Quantum Clues is an interesting one: A Quantum Clue isn’t when it is the logical result of their actions. You might have a clue “the barber lives above the pieshop” and assign it to a young boy who visits all the local bakeries. If the party meet the boy, they learn the clue. However, there’s nothing about that clue that says that the young boy is the only one who knows it. Perhaps the party decide to visit the local priest, who has a good knowledge of the area. Is that a clue you’ll deny from the players when it makes logical sense that the priest would know it and their unexpected actions would reveal it? I’d say not.

A Quantum Clue would be a note from the barber asking a meeting with the judge in his establishment above the pieshop, and then instead of putting that note in one particular location, have it appear wherever the players go.

In an investigation, it helps when you understand the situation, and so the players can find clues where they would logically appear, even if the adventure text doesn’t have them there. I once ran an adventure where the dogs of a certain district were being killed by cultists. The author of the adventure didn’t account for players casting speak with animals on the dogs of a different district and asking about the situation, but because there was enough information about the situation, I was able to improvise an answer – which helped the players get where they needed to go.

Justin Alexander suggests having three set locations or ways of discovering each clue in the adventure plan/text. This is good advice – but you don’t have to limit yourself to only those locations, if it makes sense that the players could discover information in a different way.

Of course, this still requires the players to take actions that would find them clues. Going drinking in the Noble Quarter isn’t going to find many answers to what happened in the Poor Quarter.

You want to be the players’ biggest fan, rewarding their actions – but you don’t have to reward stuff that involves no thought on their part.

It’s funny: the question “Left or Right” in a dungeon often ends up with the players knowing little about the situation in either direction. They alter the course of the entire game with their choice, but it could be an uninformed choice.

If they go left, there’s a dangerous fight with an ogre. If they go right, they meet a sage with knowledge of a dangerous trap. Blind choice is still agency, and it means that the designer can’t predict exactly what will happen. But it’s nice occasionally not having blind choice.

It’s one reason why listening at doors is such a strong tool. Even without key indicators at the intersection, players can still discover some clues to what is ahead.

I must admit that providing clues to what lies ahead is often something I do badly at. It’s why I need to concentrate more on environmental details. It doesn’t help that many of my dungeons are “dead” places – that is, ruins where there are lots of clues as to what they were used for, but not much for what they’re used for now. Honestly? Concentrate more on the present.

If a dungeon does have lots of details on what it was once used for, is there a reason for that? Is it just environmental storytelling, or do those details matter to one or more encounters later on? If you’re in a temple that was once dedicated to fiend-summoning, then it makes sense that you’d find a fiend trapped in a secret or locked room. At that point, the environment becomes something the players could take clues from.

I was feeling that with the trapped chain devil and yochlol in The Shattered Obelisk. They make sense, but the yochlol feels far more out of place than the chain devil. By the time the players reach the chain devil, they’ve seen the various cages the duergar made in several places, and to find a chain devil with complete cages (which look very much like items of torture) makes perfect sense. The yochlol – well, it’s in a drow area. There aren’t good clues as to why it is there, either.

In that section of The Shattered Obelisk, the players had a choice of left or right (several, in fact). As a result, they discovered the ropers before the book about ropers. But if they’d chose the opposite direction, it’d be the book first and they may have used it to gain an advantage in the fight. They discovered the chain devil before the cages, but they could have done it in the opposite order.

You could quantum ogre it – the cages always appear before the chain devil. But you lose the emergent play of the players going their own way. If you have to have one occur between the other, don’t have a choice. Put a single path through that section of the dungeon.