5 January 2006
Paranoia is a good thing
Keeping your players off guard is helpful in building suspense and also keeps them guessing as to what’s coming next. The most common ploy to do this is to simply roll a die or two behind your screen and smile at the players, but why not take it up a notch.
Pick a player at the table and have them roll a die, the result selects someone else at the table. In my case I have four players so I’ll have someone roll a four-sider the result is the second player. Once your second player is selected have them roll a d20 and then smile. The trick here is to actually have something happen with respect to the result - not everytime and not always bad, just often enough so they don’t know what’s coming.
[...] The nice thing is that you can use a wolf as an encounter in just about any role-playing setting and can be used for both good or evil so take advantage of this when laying out the encounter. Most players make assumptions as to what they are going up against and if you’ve been playing with your group for a while you’ll know their tendencies, of course if you create a lot of paranoia at the table it helps too. (See Paranoia Is a Good Thing for a suggestion on how to do that.) [...]
[...] those can be handled by a simple GM decision but I like to roll the die anyway as it helps with the paranoia at the [...]