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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LostSoul" data-source="post: 6195971" data-attributes="member: 386">A little from column A, a little from column B?  I'll describe what I've done recently and let you decide.I randomly rolled up a bunch of major magic items.  Then I rolled a die to set the EL for the dungeon where they'd be found.  I then picked the monsters I wanted to use to build a theme around the dungeon.  Then I told the players that these were the major magic items that they'd heard rumours about, where these items were, and what they could expect to face.  I let them make a Knowledge check for more information that the PCs might already have at hand, and told them what they already knew.  Then I let them choose which dungeon they wanted to go into.So they chose to go after a Tome of Understanding +5.  They made a good Knowledge check, so I told them that it was one part of a pair of cursed items - two tomes, one good, one evil, each look and Identify in the exact same way.  These were picked up by a high priest of Boccob, whose temple had disappeared shortly after (this was long ago, at least a hundred years).  Every so often the temple shows back up for a few days to a week, then disappears again.  (That was just to add some time pressure.)Anyway, they go in, see some large-sized footprints in the dust and a trail of slime, follow the trail to a lecture hall packed with students and a professor giving a lecture, so they cast True Seeing and see the Aboleth and some well-outfitted ogres.  They talked a bit about avoid this encounter, taking another path through the dungeon, or fighting them.  They chose to fight.Most encounters are like that, and, since I use reaction rolls, the monsters are very rarely hostile.  After that dungeon I gave them even more choices - fight Iuz's humanoids, free a shrine to Elhonna from wraiths, deal with a thieves' guild, deal with a wizard's guild, fight Iuz's demons, fight some giants, fight some goblins... and whatever else they wanted to do.  I'm sure if they said, "I really want to fight a water weird" they could have found one somewhere out there.Another example: The PCs drew from a Deck of Many Things and one of them pulled the Void.  I decided where her soul went.  Another PC used a Commune algorithm to narrow down her location, but failed a Knowledge check about the place.  Going in dark.  Her soul was in a dungeon, so the PC who went to retrieve it explored it in ghost-form, and figured out which encounters she wanted to face and which she wanted to avoid on her route to her goal.I don't know how you'd classify that, but that's typical play for us.My philosophy is that my biggest duty as DM is to set up the game world in such a way that the players can make meaningful choices within, so it's usually not viable to mislead the players.  I mean, I still want to have NPCs who lie and mislead the players, but it's a tricky thing to do that and still give the players meaningful choices.  At the very least I'll give them the impression that something's out of place.</blockquote>

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