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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 1164103" data-attributes="member: 259">I guess I think one of the central points of being a rat-bastard DM involves getting your players to look at you admiringly and say, "You sonofabitch!" at some unexpected twist in the plot. A rat-bastard player should make their DM do the same thing.  Do something unpredictable, in-character, and cool, something that challenges the DM, and you've achieved it.  It doesn't need to be violent or game-winning. I'm trying to think of some examples from the games I've run.  Let's see: * Recently, my players entered a city that was surrounded by an impoverished refugee camp.  I had this whole political intrigue plot going in the city -- but the players' first act was to go right back outside the city gates and tend to the refugees.  It was a definite challenge to me, and led me to create one of the better monsters I've ever come up with (IMO) in an effort to give meaning and story-goodness to their choices. * Part of the city intrigue, when they finally got to it, was an eight-year-old princeling being kept away from members of the court.  The players saw him playing in a park, and managed to coordinate plans with (and interview and gain information from) the princeling by having a pseudodragon familiar telepathically pretend to be a friendly bunnyrabbit in the park and talk with the child from a distance.  While the princeling's guardians were suspicious, they didn't see the pseudodragon, and figured the PCs were too far away to gather information.  The PCs ended up finding out a lot more than I'd planned, via use of a clever ruse. * One example of my own rat-bastardly playing <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />.  We knew that a certain hag was guarding a bunch of prisoners held in an extradimensional prison, and that a pedestal in her lair, combined with a nearby dial/lever, constituted a portal to the various cells in the prison.  My ninth-level bard singlehandedly defeated this rather tough creature:  he disguised himself as her boss, went into her lair and told her he needed an inventory of prisoners (so he could find out which cells were empty and which were occupied).  He then began using his fascinate ability to tell her the story of Little Scarlet-Cloak, a druidic girl with a who was going to visit her wolf companion in the woods, and how a clever hag ate the wolf companion and took its place in order to ambush the druid girl.  As I went on telling the story about the clever hag, I got the real hag to stand in various places to act out her counterpart in the story (using suggestion); when she finally stood on the pedestal, I flipped the lever, imprisoning her in one of her own cells.  (We later transferred the worst of her prisoners, a starving bloodthirsty troll, into the same cell with her.  After a long, long fight that she couldn't hope to win, she got et.) Throw your DM for a loop, but make it a fun loop, and you're a rat-bastard player. Incidentally, we've been talking about getting some new folks in the Rat Bastard DM forum; would folks be interested in seeing a recruitment drive? Daniel</blockquote>

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