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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8697051" data-attributes="member: 42582">This isn't true at all.When I GM, I surprise my players all the time. It doesn't require any hiding or deceiving. When I play, I find myself being surprised by my GM. Again, this doesn't require him hiding or deceiving.For instance, the last time that I ran a session of my group's Traveller campaign, there was a surprise: one of the NPCs who travels with the PCs on their starship had been performing experiments, implanting Alien (TM) material into a NPC in the sick bay. The player of the relevant PC knew that this NPC was a medical scientist with an interest in bioweapons research; and knew that the other NPC was in the sick bay; and knew that the PCs had been encountering Aliens. Nevertheless, when an Alien started running amok in the starship, the player was caught by surprise!No deception, no hiding, just framing.Another example, this one from Burning Wheel: a PC's backstory included that he had trained as a sorcerer with his brother, in their tower in the Abor-Alz, before the tower had been sacked by Orcs and his brother possessed by a Balrog. In play, the PC returned to the tower for the first time since then. The player declared that his PC searched the ruins looking for a half-completed magic item his PC had been working on as an apprentice. The Scavenging check failed, and so the PC didn't find what he was looking for; rather, in the ruins of what had been his brother's private workroom, he found a stand of elf-slaying Black Arrows. This was a surprise to the player - and it hinted that perhaps his brother had succumbed to evil before he was possessed by the Balrog. But maybe someone else - perhaps an Orc - had created the arrows? So the player declared an Aura Reading check, to determine who created the arrows. The check failed, and so the PC didn't learn what he had hoped to - rather, the Aura Reading confirmed that it was indeed his brother who had crafted the arrows.In this example of play, as in the first one, there is no deception and no hiding. There's just the narration of consequences of failed checks, where the stakes are transparent, being implicit in the situation as informed by the PC's backstory and goals.D&D can be run in the same sort of fashion as I've described in this post: clear framing, clear stakes, clear consequences. And surprise is amply possible.</blockquote>

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