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I am currently running a D&D 4e campaign. Every time my players defeat/subdue the monsters in a room, they decide to search the room. However, I never have anything interesting for them to find. I realize that sometimes the answer is just, "You find nothing," but I don't think that that should always be the answer.
How can I avoid disappointing my players when they search a room and there is nothing to find?
After each of the baseline 10 fights to level? Sure. All gathered up in the end boss's treasure room so they can open the door and act like a rich duck? That might leave them a little short on consumables for a bit, but that works too.
Some of them pooled together in notable caches, and others broken up into tinier pieces and spread out to be found or looted after combat since your party's looking to find and loot things after combat? Especially if your party is aggressively interested in looting the room, you can even "break up" single magic items into components they can find and put together. There are a couple other little considerations:
There are notable things about "the room", right? Or complex of tinier rooms, or wherever it is you fought? Big central altar? Secret compartment or a pattern in the runes. Weird cutoff corner? Hidden wall. Overlooking balcony? Sounds like a nice place for a stash. Abundant plantlife? What could be in the roots?
You can and should also flavor the smidgen of treasure they find in keeping with the larger dungeon aesthetic. 4E is extremely friendly to reskins, and there's no reason "a vial of alchemist's fire" can't be a weird flower bud or a sealed heart fragment of a fire archon or a fragile portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire.
Nothing on the level of a skill challenge, really; just a single roll to find something or disarm or manipulate something small and notable. The treasure's there because it's a fair amount of treasure to have, so don't "hide it behind" a skill roll they have to pass or lose it.
Either they avoid a small amount of additional on-tier damage, or you can give them a little something extra to find. Nothing huge, just an on-tier consumable or rough cash equivalent.
Don't pull a roll out all the time; only when you feel like you can make some tension out of it. There's nothing wrong with just letting people find the treasure that's there to find, even if it's not in plain view but might be uncovered by the normal process of searching.
* Depending on your player count and other optional features like inherent bonuses, this number may change, but it will always be greater than 0.
Michael Shea describes a technique that works very well for this in his book Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master (he also occasionally talks about it on his blog).
When prepping for your session, take the time to write down ten secrets or clues relevant to the world or the current adventure. These secrets can be critical to the plot, be hints at future plots, or simply be interesting bits of world building.
When they get a success on a search check, pick a secret or clue from your list and theme it to whatever they were searching.
At the end of the night, any secret that the players have found is true for your campaign. Anything that never came to light gets thrown out and ceases to exist. This is so you don't write yourself into a corner with clues that the players aren't even aware of yet.
Naturally if you liked one of the clues you threw out, you can include it again in a later session. The point is that your old, undiscovered secrets aren't canon until they're discovered.
For example, if your secret is: "The Mayor of Havorford meets with a foreign agent every night" this can be revealed in a variety of ways:
A note tucked in among paperwork for basically anyone in town.
Observing the mayor sneaking out of town while tailing him.
Signs of a meeting if searching a wilderness location.
Gossip and rumors about the mayor leaving.
The same works for more fantastic secrets. The secret "Pelor's Hammer is hidden in the Tomb of Darkness" could show up in several different ways:
A fragmentary account or inscription in a dungeon.
A prophetic vision or dream.
A rumor in a tavern.
Signs of a rival adventuring group or evil organization going after the hammer.
An account in a book in a library.
Etc.
Knickknacks and trinkets are often overlooked and underused, while giving a cue to your players that:
Examples would include:
Come up with a few of these dead ends to add flavor and signal that their search has been completed, there is nothing else to find here.
I have players like this. If I feel there should be stuff in said location, I either use it to give hints or I roll for random detritus.
I keep a few random mundane object lists around. One is reserved for the most useful mundane objects for exceptional rolls, another is personal effects (aka pocket/bedroll contents), and another is just random mundane stuff. My players may forget a lesser villain, but they have never forgotten the dead minion that had erotic elven playing cards and a stuffed mouse in his pockets.
I have had several side adventures created by random stuff. Once, my players found a dented dwarven helm in a dead ooze, and they spent much of a session locating the next of kin. The dwarf was so thankful to finally know what happened to his brother that they ended up with a master blacksmith (another random roll) as a associate who literally would not let them pay for anything.
The players do like finding uses for things; often mundane objects are just as important as magical ones. A half-used jar of itch cream, some sticks of charcoal, a pile of wine corks, a leather bucket; each of these has been instrumental in something the players did, and they got them from random rolls for rooms or dead minions.
But even better, this is a great way to give hints. For instance, I once told my players: "You find a badly damaged sword. (Roll Insight.) It looks like it has been partially eaten away, as if badly etched by a powerful acid." The players started watching the ceiling and avoiding puddles based on a belief that there was an ooze around. Or: "You find soot next to a torch bracket; when you touch it, the wall is ever so slightly warm. It looks like these tunnels are not as abandoned as you were told." Animal hair, shed scales, food scraps, excrement; these are all small hints that nevertheless reward inquisitiveness.
Declaring to search every room, is slowing down the game and isn't realistic behaviour either: Unless you are a homeless person looking for empty bottles or food leftovers, you probably don't spend time randomly searching every place you are in. Especially not if you are in a dungeon full a hostile creatures.
Don't reward this behaviour by giving in and let them find things you didn't plan on giving the players. Instead try to understand what causes them to search every room, which might be a mixture of the following two:
Reason #1 can be addressed by letting the players now, by promising them that you wouldn't just randomly hide an essential item without dropping a hint, or making it clear from the situation that a search would be useful. Make sure to keep that promise. Never stall the game because the players didn't search the right room.
For #2 and #3, make sure not to just automatically grant a roll every time someone says she is searching the room. Instead ask how she is searching and how much time she is going to spend.
You can play with this: Lead your players in a big hall that contains 99 crates. Every crate is full of sand. 21 of the crates have red markings on them, but none of the players can read them.
P: "I am going to search the room."
GM: "How?"
P: "I am looking in the boxes."
GM: "All the boxes?"
P: "Yes."
GM: "The first box is full of sand. Do you want to dig into the sand?"
P: "Yes."
GM: "For how long do you want to dig?"
P: "As long as takes."
GM: "It takes about 20 minutes to move all of the sand."
P: "Ok."
GM: "Roll."
Player rolls a 7.
GM: "You find nothing. Do you want to search again, or open the second crate?"
...
GM: "After crate number 17 you get thirsty, but you ran out of water already..."
...
GM: "You resupplied and worked your way through 20 more crates, you still didn't find anything. Do you want to continue with crate 38?"
P: "Yes."
GM: "Another party of adventures enters the cave you are in and tells you that they are on their way out. They killed the lich lord while you were counting sand."
The solution depends on your goal as a group.
When I'm running a campaign, I keep in mind what moves the story forward and try to cut out things that do not. With this mindset, I would not want my players searching every room thoroughly. It's a lot of boring rolls with no narrative payoff. So, in this example, searching every room is a behavior I'd like to discourage. One way is to have them be surprised by a roaming hostile creature whilst they search. Another would be to put them in a situation that is time sensitive. Do they really have time to check every drawer if some wizard is on the verge of casting a nasty curse?
If your game is more of a dungeon crawl, searching every room could be a fun part of the game. In this case you want to reward the behavior, but probably want to make the rolls more exciting. You can secretly set a DC for the rooms and, if they pass that, roll on a minor loot table to give them something. You should probably also include a counterbalance so your group doesn't just sit around rolling over and over on every room, so maybe something negative can happen when they fail a roll:
In my games, I try to make sure every roll has a purpose or, at the very least, some heft behind it. If it's unimportant, I don't think it's worth rolling for. If the players want to roll anyway, you can try to make it have a consequence (though not always in a way they'd like!!)
