Another angle to address is to find out what sorts of things do players want out of the dungeon experience (assuming they’re not totally new or unaware). One can use that knowledge as a base and build up from there with the details.

Dan, there was something you say all the time that I’m really surprised didn’t come out for this episode. You frequently talk about CS Lewis and how he would use the reader’s imagination to fill in details (the Christmas feast with “everything you’d expect” at the table). It’s something I use quite frequently for “dungeons”; it saves me a lot of work when planning for my sessions and probably makes the scene a bit more vivid in the player’s mind because it’s his details being filled in.

For example, we’re currently playing a Dresden Files game. If my players are breaking into an office complex, I’m not going to describe every floor and every room in detail. Even for the “important” rooms, I’m not going to provide a detailed explanation for the location of every desk, the contents of said desks, etc. But I will do something like this: “You come into another office. There’s a reception desk right as you enter, and stretching out behind it is the rest of the office. There are photocopiers, fax machines, and several other desks in various states of organization. Odds and ends litter a break area off to the right. You can see doors at the end of the room that probably belong to managers.”

If a player asks for something specific, that detail gets filled in. Or I let the player fill it in. But it makes my life a lot easier to keep things simple and let the players’ imaginations do the heavy lifting.

Otherwise, I think one of the major solutions to issues discussed in the episode is communication of tone and intent. If the players are walking down a hallway filled with identical bedrooms, you need to express something to them that says, “You don’t need to search each of these rooms individually, or stop outside each one to check for traps and ambushes.” Or, rather drag out the mechanics, and have them roll a search check (or some equivalency thereof) to go through the hallway as a whole rather than each portion individually.

I realize my solutions are shortcuts, when the point of the episode was making settings more vibrant and accessible, but balance is necessary. Nobody wants to leave their session having made it through only one floor of a castle because the GM spent 45 minutes describing the nature of the stains in the walls and floors of the watercloset.

Concerning the comedic character, our groups has a character that excels in this area. We used to have problems with it, but here are the things that we have found that help us in play. I will preface that we are playing a cinematic game with a tone like that of Fringe.

1. Like Wayne said, don’t hog the spotlight. If a character can add in a bit of flavor in a scene, that is good, but don’t take away from another character’s scene, especially if it is just for. ‘flavor’ funny.

2. Use the passing of time as a cinematic tool. One of the characters in a campaign we played was a talkaholic. He could go on about science experiments he conducted ad nauseum. What I did as a GM, is let the character start the conversation. As soon as I saw other players start to zone out, I signaled the player to pause. The ‘mind’s eye camera’ panned to the clock, which flew in fast forward to some point in the future, then the clock goes back to normal, the camera pans back to the characters, and the supertalker got to say one line to finish ( while showing the other characters bored out of the minds ).

3. Don’t give full time to the same shtick lines or actions every time. The same character is obsessed with keeping his shoes clean. First session or so, he would take time to point out that he was shining his shoes. After that, it was an assumed action that didn’t need to be referenced directly.

To sum up, we found that by limiting the shtick stuff, it left a lot more room for other character spotlight time, and also allowed for more time for fresh comedy instead of stale shtick filling in the spaces.

There is a second kender archetype. Cheerful murderous sociopath. The first book with Tasselhoff has him gleefully murdering people and giggling.