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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5606137" data-attributes="member: 54877">We long ago had a rule about treasure, adopted from my parents' rule at Christmas when I was growing up: If you knew about it before you opened it, you didn't get it. This was to stop snooping. I felt the same way about treasure, but I haven't invoked that in years. I haven't used a screen in a long time, and love rolling out in the open (no fudge). If I need to have a search check or something like it hidden, I just roll the die behind a cupped hand. Works great.  Moreover, I fragantly and repeatedly provide misinformation to the players. NPCs lie, sometimes in subtle ways. Clues are put in to mislead. The agent that hired them has an agenda he doesn't share.  Misinformation is in my notes, and not clearly marked as such.  (I have no trouble keeping it straight, and thus don't need to so mark it.) Then metagaming, I'll casually mention things in passing, often that has nothing to do with the game in progress. Remember that link to the spider-killing spider someone posted a couple of weeks back? I sent that to all my players and said that I'd never troll the internet for new monsters research. (Biggest fears of the table--magical cats, giant spiders, and mind flayers. I never pass on an opportunity to invoke those fears.) There were no spiders in any of the places they could have gone, and I had no intention of adding any. The funny thing is that the players all know that I do this, but it still works. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> So, the upshot is that they do not want to see my notes. I'll leave them out on the table, uncovered, when we take a break. No one even thinks about peaking. Heck, a couple of times a player has covered the notes up because they were afraid to see them. As far as they are concerned, the notes are Scribbles of the Old Ones, and to be avoided at all costs! They would no more look at my notes than make a hastily worded wish or draw from the Deck of Many Things. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/angel.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":angel:" title="Angel    :angel:" data-shortname=":angel:" /></blockquote>

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