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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 25710" data-attributes="member: 812">I don't really have much more to say than, "Me, too!" to the whole mystery spin.Psion is absolutely right -- keep the math out of it. I have one player who is ALWAYS trying to calculate the math of everything -- he figures out what the AC of an NPC is and then tries to figure out what feats the guy must have, what his Dex must be, blah blah blah.So I keep everything locked down -- the players know NOTHING about their foes. It helps that I have a number of non-standard magic systems so they can't predict an NPC's capabilities.Very effective is the "off-stage horror" trick. Have your villain do something incredibly nasty while the players are elsewhere -- when they stumble across the evidence, their imaginations will kick into overdrive.Having super-nasty suddenly appear in the midst of your PCs is also very effective -- but then you have to come up with a reasonable excuse as to why she doesn't just slaughter them all right there. That's one reason I love "civilised" bad guys -- sometimes they just show up to chat with their goody-goody opponents. That can actually frighten your players even more as it demonstrates total contempt for their abilities -- the bad guy considers them no threat at all. A little chat, a little bad guy gloating and they're off.Don't overuse that trick, of course -- familiarity and contempt and all that.The great thing about civilised bad guys is that you can suddenly have them do something totally savage and ruthless -- just when the party is thinking "Oh, hey, she's not so bad," she turns someone inside out and starts eating their heart. THAT always gets my gang panicking.</blockquote>

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