Where are the other monsters?
During our last D&D session, the PCs were going to face a group of 3 demons. I asked the player who handles the miniatures to give me 6 minis but placed only 3 on the map!
They didn’t say anything until after the game but they spent the whole encounter expecting and being paranoid about enemy backup!
Do you ever meta-mess with your players too?
6 Comments
4:05 am on December 7th, 2007
Ha HA! That was freaking brilliant!
You are an Evil DM!
4:43 am on December 7th, 2007
Of course! Sometimes it’s fun just to suddenly stand up and get all excited because they choose to go left in the dungeon, or to say back to them really slowly, “so you want to go left, then? Are you sure?”, or to use a Vincent Price voice, “Left?” and then monotone, “or right?” All for no reason - left or right doesn’t matter, the dungeon corridor loops back on itself anyway…
4:58 am on December 7th, 2007
Absolutely and all over the place. Asking for spot rolls when there’s nothing to be seen, rolling random dice behind the screen and saying “carry on”. I’ve done the reverse of your trick and stashed minis “up my sleeve”.
Even the best players are going to subconsciously meta-game from time to time; keeping them honest helps keep the atmosphere of the game.
6:30 am on December 7th, 2007
Nah. I don’t want to kill the useful metagaming that happens all the time.
11:45 am on December 7th, 2007
I use a similar escamotage when I want to inspire them “uneasiness” in a place.
Imagine the party is exploring an evil temple. A place so evil you feel it in your bones. I add a bit of stress asking, at random moments, a saving throw. I set the DC so that about 50% of the party fails it. To all the players that failed, I ask to place an “x” on the character sheet. The “x” means nothing :)
hey rapidly get mad. They start to cast detecting spells to investigate, finding nothing… An often after 2 or 3 “x”s, they leave the temple without exploring and searching everything…because the place “seems dangerous”.
1:24 pm on September 26th, 2008
Oh, I got a fun little tale to tell. If you thought he was evil, let me expose the sadistic nature of me being a dm. At one of our sessions, I had the party (total of about 8 or 9 characters, one of which was level 7 and the others were level 5 at the time and one level 1 of course lol) encounter a shadow walker. Is this the sadistic part? No! Well, after the party manages to defeat it, even after the “tank” of the party was sprawled out on the ground bleeding half to death, they were feeling really bad ass. They healed up their tank, did a little victory dance, cut off the head (as to why, know only that one of my players had a character who followed Erythnul and wanted to take home a trophy to use as an offering… don’t ask…). So, anyway, they were feeling (most of them at least, but only three were not) pretty untouchable at that point. We ended this session after that and most of them were still acting cocky. So, I got to work right away making the next adventure.
Out of spite for their heads being so far up their rectums about having beaten a shadowwalker, I decided to really bring the evil in me out. I had them go on a quest to steal a relic from a temple of Kord. Little did they know what I had in store for them. It was effortlessly done until they had to fight off a level 15 monk. After the party beat it, only because one of the party members is a psion shaper and crystal sharded the bastard, and eventually death urged him. After that, one of the more powerful characters ( a high level merc that a player from a previous campaign hired long ago when I brought him into the campaign with the new people I played with) slaughtered the peons in the mean time. All in all, it went well, the party’s thief almost died in the traps to get the damn thing, but succeeded in the end. Anyway, the explination is necessary because now you figure they feel untouchable again, except three of them (one being the guy who’s played through a lot of my campaigns in the past), and are getting very very VERY cocky. So, they emerge from the temple and here a heavy knock on the doors. They decide to run away because they were almost dead. Once they escaped out the back way and into the woods, a loud explosion goes off and they start hauling ass! Suddenly beams of disintegration fly by them. They are being chased by none other than a party of avatars who just so happen to be on the opposite side. Therefore, they now have avatars chasing them to kill them. To make things worse, the avatars are faster than they are and the party is panicking and going ape shit trying to find a way to get the hell outta there. In the end I let them escape, but it was so fun having all of them shitting bricks and mortar. I am sure they also were shitting boulders and mountains, but I will not hold it against them because who can blaime them?