I was playing a cleric of a trickster type god, and our party was in serious need of some gold. We had recovered a few nearly worthless art objects (i.e. worth less that 10-50 gp each), including a landscape painting of a mountain cave. We were in a town where the nobles tended to try to keep up with the joneses and outdo each other. We used the last of our funds to rent a luxury suite at the most sumptuous inn in the city, where the lesser nobles with high aspirations congregated. My cleric (with maxed out bluff, 18 CHA, and skill focus bluff) passed himself off as a dealer of rarities and antiquities, and the other partymembers posed as my retinue. I made a big show of loudly asking the innkeper about the security of his establishment to ensure the safety of the priceless objets "d'art" in the collection I had just acquired from a late noble in a nearby city who had been an adventurer in his youth. A few good bluff checks, and I piqued the interest of a few nobles in the inn, who inquired about acquiring said items, and as soon as 1 inquired, another tried to snipe him to outdo him. Soon many were clamoring to buy them, so I announced I would hold an auction at the inn the next evening where everything would be available to the highest bidder. THe next day came and the various and sundry objects were selling for anywhere form 3 to 10 x their value as I bluffed my way through the auction, and nobles bid against each other to outdo each other on diplays of extravagence. Then came the landscape painting of the mountain cave. I wove a story telling how the painting was commisioned by an adventurer to provide clues to the location of a dragon's lair that the adventurer had not been able to conquer, but wanted to return to someday to claim the rich horde. The adventurer had been planning a final expedition when he died, and had heard the dragon had been slain but it's lair and hoard never found. Unfortunatley the key to the clues did with the adventurer, but someone with intelligence and resources could decipher the painting and find a vast fortune. So the DM calls or a bluff check since it's such a big lie. Now he uses the open ended rolls option form the DM Guide optional rules for skill checks, so on a nat 20 you roll again and add the second result, well first roll nat 20, second roll another nat 20 and third roll is a 17, plus all my bonuses wound up with a bluff check in the high 60's. The sense motive rolls for the nobles were crap, and the two richest nobles in attendance get into a bidding war for the worthless painting that ends up selling for more than 10,000 gp. Needless to say, we took our score and slipped out under cover of the night, using the money to buy a rare manuscript with a map indicating the location of a lost city we were seeking to find the key to topping a mad demon's schemes.
A second story was pulled by my players when I was DMing. The party was travelling through the mountian and had to go through a pass guarded by a frost giant. My wife was playing a gnomish bard, nd there was alao a wizard and a druid among the rest of the party. The druid scouted the pass using wild shape and spotted the giant and his herd of livestock.
As they approached the pass, the giant emerged and threatened the party. The gnome and the wizard used ghost sound to create the sounds of livestock panicking and the sound of other angry giants. The gnome bard them tells the giant they saw a raiding party of hill giants earlier who bragged how they would steal the sheep of the frost giant. A good bluff and a bad sense motive by the frost giant, and he left to go check on his herd (and food supply) thinking the other giants were a bigger threat than the party, and the party hurried through the pass bypassing the giant without a fight, which they desparately needed to do because they were still in pretty bad shape from the previous encounter.
-M
