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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 3918995" data-attributes="member: 1757">One example of an RB trick that you can use for someone who stuffs everything magical in his pocket is to have the magical thing be a polymorphed creature. Cheap trick, but effective. If you want to give the players a clue, use a related object (figurine of a monster, piece of monster skin, etc.). Party hits a dispel magic trap or zone at some point (often a useful encounter trap) and suddenly there's an enraged fiendish girallon barbarian tearing its way out of the kender's pack. Also, IMO, it's hard to be an RBDM when you already have players in SWAT mode. IMO, pulling rat bastard tricks isn't really going to be fun if the players are *already* on edge. You want to get them relaxed or distracted in some way (overconfident, tempted by something, following a "hot trail" down the completely wrong path, etc.) and then spring stuff on them. Although...My favorite RBDM trick is the red herring. It is very easy to get overenthusiastic or paranoid players to suspect a completely innocent person, institution, or whatever. All they need is an equivocal clue or to overlook a critical link in the chain; a true RBDM ensures that the clues are equivocal and especially that critical links in a chain of inference can be missed by players with erroneous assumptions (this is an especially nasty and fun trick to pull on metagamers). They then run around in circles dealing with the false clue. To be truly RBDM about this, the PC's enemies (or the *real* culprit, if there is one) can then nudge them into taking action against an innocent party or just frame them for it. This is especially fun when diplomacy or great powers of some kind are involved, but it can also be fun in the dungeon. One possible red herring to use in the dungeon is to show the players an easy path that isn't really there, or a treasure that requires them to take a circuitous and resource-intensive trip in the wrong direction. They could, for example, find a body on the ground, horribly mangled by a trap. The body is pointed toward the PCs, showing that it was coming from the direction to which the PCs are traveling. Body has a journal, in which is a roughly-sketched map. Map and journal show that past this point lies little of value, only a gauntlet of deadly traps, including an impassable stone block that body and friends triggered to safeguard their escape.If the PCs are smart enough to search past body, they'll find that no one's traveled in that direction in quite a while, certainly not body and his friends. In fact, that *is* the correct direction to go. If PCs follow body's journal outline of an alternate route, they run into some very tough encounters... perhaps straight into the toughest monster's lair. This is because body is a doppelganger, who will follow the PCs and then either scavenge them or take their identities.</blockquote>

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