Showing posts with label Advice/Tools. Show all posts

Every good adventure usually involves a dungeon crawl of some sort. But it doesn't necessarily need to be in a stone-and-mortar "dungeon". Here are some ideas for interesting locales for your group to "Crawl" through.

• Tunnel Creature Chase - It's a play on an old favorite, where the heroes bravely jump on horses or a cart and chase down the bad guys. Only this time, it's in a dungeon - a dungeon created by the creature being chased! Bear down on the tunneling purple wyrm as he grinds his way through the earth, fighting him in an epic climax when he reaches his den. But once the creature is dead, the way back to the surface collapses... leaving only the mysterious cave the wyrm fled to, and a winding passageway up.
• Creature Cavern - This time, the dungeon isn't just chasing a massive creature. It IS the creature. Inspiration can come from a variety of different sources (see Gears of War 2 for a great example), but almost any sort of challenge can be invented as hostile antibodies or digestive organs. Perhaps the party seeks a mythical alchemical ingredient, or the creature has swallowed something essential. Getting through, though, might just be the easy part. How do they get out?
• Supermagnet Fortress - Since when could the party walk on walls? Well, that full plate certainly might help if the walls of this fortress are made of magic lodestones! Adding a dizzying third dimension to dungeon crawls can spruce up an otherwise snore-worthy delve into yet-another-castle, and opens up truly memorable combat sequences.

Every one of you GMs has experienced this in the past - when you designed a super awesome big-bad, set up the story perfectly, and the final confrontation awaits. Booming his opening monologue, he sets upon the party...only to get facerolled without so much as a sweat from the party.

For the record, I am very hungover right now, and I was just pondering to myself how I definitely was suffering penalties for the condition. (author's note: I wrote this first sentence and then literally just did nothing for an hour). My gift to you today is something we all need; more rules bloat! Yaaaaaay!

Hangover Rules
A character can drink several drinks before the dreaded hangover kicks in, but the exact amount varies from person to person and the situation. Typically, a character can drink up to twice their constitution modifier (minimum 2) in drinks before having to worry about ever having a hangover. After that, each drink consumed forces a Constitution check (DC=10+amount of drinks consumed). Any bonuses to saves against poisons may be added to this check, and immunity to poison ensures one never gets a hangover (and, indeed, can never get drunk!). The amount of times this check is failed determines how the character will feel in the morning.

• 1-2 failed saves: The thirsty condition. A thirsty character takes a -2 penalty on skill and ability checks. This condition lasts until the character drinks one good glass of water, or until they have been awake for at least an hour.
• 2-4 failed saves: The hungover condition. A hungover character takes a -2 penalty on all skill and ability checks, a -4 penalty on Perception checks, can neither run nor charge and takes a –2 penalty to Strength and Dexterity. This condition lasts 1d3 hours after the character drinks two good glasses of water, or until they have been awake for at least 1d6+1 hours.
• 5+ failed saves: The urrgh-what-the-hell condition. A urrgh-what-the-hell character takes a -4 penalty to all skill and ability checks, a -8 penalty on perception and concentration checks, and is considered nauseated and exhausted. This condition lasts for 2d6 hours, but if a the afflicted character consumes a gallon of water it is reduced to the hungover condition. 

I'm feeling better already!

Story-driven games are the heart of what makes gaming so appealing to me. The narrative that is co-authored by the GM and the player naturally unfolds into something unique and awesome, but I've noticed over the years that one aspect of the narritive - that is, character development - usually lacks the dynamic of the rest of the story. As characters are played they are often fleshed out as the player explores their nuances, but rarely do characters undergo meaningful and interesting changes that aren't forced upon them. Worse, sometimes characters' alignments arbitrarily change suddenly as an attempt to inject character growth by a player or DM that isn't very good at structuring narratives. (continued after the jump)

Having been playing Tabletop RPGs for many years now, the one thing I have seen an excessive amount of is combat scenarios. The vast, vast majority of our statistics are centered around quantifying our character's combat prowess (or lack thereof), and the vast resources available to us allow us to make an almost limitless amount of unique and exciting characters.

So where is the variety in our combat scenarios? (continued after the jump)

When I first started getting into computer programming (I very briefly almost learned basic C++), I decided my very first project would be RPG-related. After all, I'd used a variety of very excellent tools in the past (shout out to DMGenie for helping me make it through early high school as DM) and couldn't think of a better practical application for barely functional programming skills. What came to mind first, you ask? Why, an initiative tracker, that's what! Needless to say it never really materialized. I have a habit of getting excited about things and never finishing them.

I bring it up because I've been experimenting with a new initiative system these last few months, and I'd like to share my results with you, dear readers. As someone who often runs games for large parties, I have dealt with the crippling slowdown that can occur as initiative drags painstakingly from player to player. People who complete their turns can sometimes have as much as 20 minutes in worst case scenarios to wait for their next turn. People occasionally have a hard time staying focused, especially if there are forms of entertainment about, or something else preoccupying them (March madness, anyone?). (continued after the jump)

Do you ever get the feeling that your monsters, or the monsters that you face off against just aren't really that scary? As a player, I've been noticing a recent trend with the enemies I face - that is to say, I confidently stride forward and engage them with the same gusto I would an enemy warrior. I don't know whether it's a fault with my own stubborn confidence, a lack of truly intimidating DM descriptions, or my DMs trying to appease what they perceive as my quest to be an unshakeable badass, but I haven't thought of a monster as truly monstrous in quite some time.

 I recently picked up a copy of Fallout: New Vegas, and I was impressed at how aggressive and terrifying the harder enemies can be. In particular, I was wandering a stretch of the Colorado river when I came across a tucked-away little cliff entrance that beckoned towards me. My character (a heavily armored, short hispanic man wielding a rebar club) confidently charged up this hill, ready to violate the skeletal structure of whatever lay beyond - as he had done to many bandits and mutated bugs before. What he found next he was absolutely not prepared for. (continued after the jump)

Monte Cook recently posted in the Dungeons and Dragons blog about the lethality of our genre, and asked his readers to vote on how they perceived death and how often they felt it should affect the PCs. While there is no clear consensus in his poll, I did notice that a mere 5% of those polled responded favorable to one of the "death shouldn't really happen" options. Everyone seems to more or less agree that they welcome the possibility of death with open arms as a risk of their "trade", so to speak, and eagerly delves dungeons knowing each step could be their last.

That is, until their character dies. (continued after the jump)

I've been DMing a campaign in my Ralsenna setting, the first session of which took part in the process of travelling from city to city. Since the tech level in Ralsenna is higher than in the traditional D&D/Pathfinder setting, this necessitated a bit of research on my part, presented here for your benefit.

Steam Era Transportation
Service	Speed	Cost
Steam ship's passage	5 mph	15 cp per mile
Train ride, fast	70 mph	25 cp per mile
Train ride, slow	50 mph	2 sp per mile
Trolly	—	1 cp per ride

Steam ships: Steam ships are essential keelboats with steam engines, allowing them to travel at about 5 miles per hour.

Trains: Average trains can travel anywhere between 35 and 80 miles per hour between stops, moving along a fixed track. Depending on how many cars are in the train, the vehicle can be a hundred feet long or more. A passenger car can usually hold 24 to 30 passengers, and a freight car can hold about 25 tons of cargo.

Trolly: Larger cities may have trolly systems in place, wherein an electric system of train cars travels a set track around the city at regular intervals. In a larger city, where coach cabs are in high demand, sometimes the trolly is the only way to get where you need to go.

A few random DMing tips I've been mulling over:

• Use Voices: Using unique voices almost never hurts. Make up a goblin voice, a kobold voice, and orc voice, etc. They'll be silly and inconsistent at first, but eventually they'll be at least consistent, and you won't have to tell your players the voices sound like those of orcs.
• Use Lingo: Not all the time, and don't use it ambiguously. But if you've got an encounter with orcs, make up one orcish synonym for "weakling" and have them shout it in reference to the PCs. Or have a gnome merchant call longswords something other than longswords. Like I said, not too often, just a light sprinkling.
• Customize Magic Items: Does that amulet of natural armor cause the wearer to grow tufts of fur or scales? It matters. The little things are where the game comes alive or falls flat.
• Gloss Over Boring Stuff: Have a huge long political intrigue encounter prepared but the players are bored with it? Suck it up and move on. Convey the necessary information and get them to something they find interesting.
• Dwell on Interesting Stuff: The players having way too much fun talking to some random-ass nameless NPC about the booming rainbow trout industry? Whatever, go with it, they're having fun, and more likely than not you can make that random NPC important later. Just don't forget the details you made up on the spot.

When constructing encounters, one of the easiest ways to add interest (and one of the easiest things to gloss over) is the terrain. There's only so far monsters and NPCs alone can get you, especially if your players have been around long enough to know the Monster Manual backwards and forwards. Beyond the standard (and therefore rather boring) difficult terrain, there are a number of simple terrain features you can use to spice up nearly any encounter.

Adding levels to any terrain is easy and forces the players to think in more than two dimensions, and, if done well, can lead to the party becoming split, which is often dangerous and, thus, fun. There are many ways to manage this this: Put snipers in trees in a forest, have ninjas jump in from the second story of an adjacent building, have trolls attack from beneath a bridge, whatever your imagination conjures forth.

There are several ways to go beyond the simple addition of levels, however. After all, levels are little more than a simple barrier if the PC aren't forced to interact with them. Pit traps are an easy way to force this interaction. In one dungeon I designed many years ago, there was a tomb with an aging stone floor that had a chance of collapsing under their weight, dropping the PC in question into the carrion crawler-infested area beneath.

More than just traps can force the PCs' hands though. Simple placing the PCs' goal on a different level than they begin on is more than enough. In one adventure Michael DMed, the PCs had to scale a mile-tall tower to its apex, the last stretch of which was a narrow walkway that spiraled around the outside of this tower. And we had to do it while a flying ooze attacked us.

One 'level' that is nearly always available is the space above the ground. Of course, only creatures capable of flight are capable of reaching this space normally, and as most PCs won't have this capability, be careful how you use this space. Try to add additional terrain features (trees, easily-climbed cliff faces, etc.) that allow the PCs to join flying foes in this area. The flyers will still have the upper hand, but it'll avoid leaving the players feeling useless.

I'm sure I'm not the only one with harrowing tales of multi-tiered battle, so let's hear your war stories in the comments.

Goblins breed with notorious speed, and their industriousness in this occupation, aside from providing numerous warriors to replenish the ranks, results in a rather high frequency of physical mutations. Aside from the usual bugbear and hobgoblin, there are a variety of other goblin mutations:

Caveling (CR +0): These goblins hail from the deeper parts of the world. They gain darkvision 60 feet, light blindness, two claw attacks that deal 1d3 damage, and a climb speed of 20 feet.

Gibberling (CR +1): These goblins have been touched by aberrant influence. They gain light sensitivity and the gibbering ability (see gibbering mouther) which can be activated as a move action with a range of 30 feet.

Hellion (CR +1): These goblins are born of dark energies, and are immediately identifiable by the flames that dance in their mouths. They are immune to fire and gain a bite attack that deals 1d4 damage plus 1d6 fire damage.

Lasher (CR +1): This type of goblin has an unusually long tongue. As a standard action, they can use their tongues to perform disarm or trip attempts against targets within 10 feet with a +2 racial bonus and without provoking attacks of opportunity.

Thorn (CR +1): Some goblins are born covered in soft thorns that grow rigid as they mature. These goblins gain a slam attack that deals 1d3 damage plus grab. In addition, a creature in a grapple with the thorn takes 1d3 damage at the beginning of the thorn's turn, and any an attacker who successfully strikes the thorn with an unarmed attack or natural weapon take 1d3 damage.

Over the past few weeks, I've been teaching a group of D&D newbies the ropes, playing through the Rise of the Runelords Pathfinder adventure path (modified to run on the Pathfinder RPG ruleset). This isn't my first time teaching the game, but I've encountered an anomaly I wasn't prepared for.

The heroes are cowards.

That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. The last combat encounter we ran was against eight goblin warriors, and the five PCs nearly ran. Granted, the goblins surprised the party, but they had things under control. And yet, nearly all of them contemplated fleeing when it came to their turn, and only remained because of my gentle encouragements.

The oddest part of this is that, if you'd asked me only a month or so ago, I'd have given anything to have more cautious PCs. PCs willing to run when outmatched, willing to fight defensively, or even spend a round moving into a defensible position rather than attacking. The enigmatic co-author of this blog, Michael, is infamous in our gaming group for charging anything that moves, and this is the style of play I'd become used to. There's nothing wrong with it, I just thought I'd like a little variety. I may have been wrong.

The thing is, it's not entirely that my newbies are playing defensively. They're playing scared. Their defensive posturing isn't done to gain a legitimate tactical advantage, it's to avoid all foreseeable danger. I suspect this is a side effect of being new to the game, and not knowing what situations actually provide dire threat and which are simply challenging.

My solution to breaking them of their fear? Push them.

• No Escape: I'll start off by creating a situation from which there is no real escape for one or two PCs. That's the most important part: The other PCs will be able to escape no problem, most likely unscathed. They'll have to make the choice to stay, or leave their former allies to die. Victory (the likely outcome) will provide a positive incentive for their choice.
• No Hope: Finally, I want to set the PCs up in at least one situation that seems impossible to survive, provide odds that seem insurmountable... Only to have them persevere. Only when they go through a trial by fire and come out the other end alive will they have the hardened confidence my more experienced players exhibit.
• No Fear: At various points in their adventures, townsfolk NPCs will ask them to recount their exploits, reinforcing the myth of their power. Though they may meet the precipice of death many times, and in fact be very near to tumbling off, these experiences will work to bolster their faith in themselves.

Oh, and by the way: The PCs defeated the eight goblins. Maybe they'll remember that when I've got them surrounded by twelve.

Has anyone else had this problem before?

I have recently started up a new game, in the last month or so, where I am GMing a d20 Future ruleset in a world that is basically a sort of Firefly / Eve Online hybrid. After the first few sessions, they became official bounty hunters for the government, and set off trying to make a fortune for themselves.

What I did next was far more effective than I ever imagined.

Collecting their names, I created gmail accounts for each of their characters and then gave the players the name and password and instructed them the account was to be used in-character only. Then, I set about making a massive array of NPC e-mail addresses (so far there's about 30 I've made and 100 on a list to do) that the PCs could interact with. After having a nice collection, I slowly started to send the players e-mails from various NPCs they had interacted with.



It was subtle at first, but I noticed it kept the players in the game even throughout the downtime during the week. By sending an e-mail once every day or so, I could constantly keep them in character and in the game for a little bit each day while introducing flavor and information to the world. By the time the next session rolled around, everyone had a plot hook to discuss and the first half hour was filled with nothing but enthusiastic roleplaying from my combat-hungry players.

As we played through the session, I kept small notes on their interactions throughout the game and marked which NPCs the PCs had left an impression on. Then, when the session was done, I followed up with those NPCs, and the chain had started again.

It's amazing what a little effort towards immersion can do for your game. Here I provide some screenshots for your viewing pleasure.




How do you keep your players intrigued week in and week out? Have you ever used technology to improve your pen and paper gaming? Sound off!

Most of the time, world building is accomplished in large part by adding character options. To create the 'arcanepunk' feel of Eberron, the warforged race and the artificer and magewright classes were added, and it's unusual for a published campaign setting not to include a slew of new feats, items, prestige classes, and often spells as well. While this is a totally legitimate way of expanding on a campaign setting and drawing player interest in the lore of the setting, it's important to realize that it's not the only way to build your world.

Published settings are at somewhat of a disadvantage in that there is great pressure to preserve all the core rules to maintain a common base of character option. However, in your homebrew campaign setting, no such pressure exists. Therefore, you may find that removing certain options provides a more effective means of conveying the look and feel of your setting than adding new elements alone.

For example, I've made the following exclusions from my Ralsenna setting:

• Bards: I'm not a fan of the bard class. In my many years of playing D&D I have yet to be able to imagine a bard in a way that isn't silly. There are still bards in Ralsenna, but they merely rogues or experts with ranks in various Knowledge and Perform skills.
• Clerics: Unlike bards, I've got nothing against clerics, but they don't fit nicely with the setting as I've established it. After all, the gods are distant entities (if they still exist at all) which are not terribly interested in diverting power away from their struggle and into the hands of petty mortals. Instead, the oracle class is available, representing those randomly imbued with divine power.
• Wizards: Magic, especially arcane magic, is nigh impossible for mortals to control. Druids channel the latent magic inherent in Ralsenna, oracles suffer grievous curses for their trouble, and sorcerers manage only by the graces of their powerful ancestors. Instead of wizards, the alchemist class is available, representing the height of learned arcane magic.

But those are just examples. Have a setting whose defining feature is its inhospitability? Remove the druid and ranger classes to represent the disconnect between the races and the land. Want a noirish setting where gray areas abound? Remove paladins. And so on.

Has any of you tried this in your campaigns? Tell us about it in the comments.

When I first started my gaming career oh-so-many years ago, I had a particularly notorious DM who explained to me that it was his job to try and kill me, and it was my job to survive. This statement is a little wonky, and I thought so at the time as well, but it wasn't until I became the primary DM of my little group that I realized exactly why this philosophy was borked.

The first answer is obvious; the DM is not constrained by the rules and can "win" whenever he feels like it. This is neither hard nor challenging. An expanded version of my DM's thought process, I feel, was that his image of DMing is defeating the players while constraining to the proper rules of encounter building. This sort of campaign can be fun, but I feel like the focus of gaming—and roleplaying, in general—is lost. You might as well just be playing a video game with a level designer.

When we devolve into battle mode, sometimes DMs and Players alike forget that we are still constrained by what our characters know, not what we know. I wrote an article on the subject a while ago, but I'd like to delve more into how the DM can make this sort of mistake rather than the players.

Very recently I have served as a player under a new DM, who has taken it upon himself to run the Pathfinder premade Council of Thieves campaign path, and we were tasked to ambush a prisoner carriage. As first level characters, we had little in the way of tactical options at our fingertips, so I invested a third of my gold at the time into a thunderstone (an alchemical item that causes deafness when struck or thrown).

As the carriage drew itself across the ambush point, I struck. Throwing the thunderstone, I managed to hit all the soldiers in its radius and most of them failed their saves, including the commander. With that, the battle was on, and the soldiers all wordlessly engaged us. It didn't matter that most of the enemy was suddenly deaf and surprised. The commander never issued any orders to the green troops because they were all telepathically receiving orders from the DM (obviously) and my clever plan was worthless.

The problem, I think, was that when the DM thought about how the deaf soldiers would react, he could see no reason why they would act any differently. Their order of battle was not primarily complicated. One guy grabbed the small Ballista on top of the carriage - the rest fanned out while the commander shot me with a crossbow while backpedaling away from the carriage.

The problem inherently was that when you think about how low-level guards would react when random "bandits" suddenly assault them with a deafening bang. Guards would look to their commander for information. People would be confused, disoriented, and would have no direction. But instead, the guardsmen slid along like the nameless statistic blocks they were.

Part of the immersion is lost in moments like this, where the congruency between penalties and hard, cold statistics breaks. Sometimes, as a DM, it's important to just let the PCs gain an unfair advantage because they thought outside of the box. I find that this problem most often occurs in new DMs, or (more importantly) DMs who feel as if the party is too strong already, and are having a hard time dealing with them as-is.

Just like there are times where winning the fight against the PCs is useful, there is also a time where letting your NPCs get massacred is the more correct option for the fun of the campaign—especially when the encounter does not contain any plot-centric enemies. After all, my DM when I was younger was absolutely wrong about DMing—it's not about beating the players, it's about making sure they're having a blast.

And nothing is quite as fun as watching a clever plan set you up for a beautiful tactical advantage.

Last week I spent several afternoons playing Space Hulk and Gears of War 2. Both games feature very linear story lines which are organized into a series of objectives which your characters must carry out successfully to move the narrative (i.e., the game) forward. In both instances, the characters are members of a small, elite military squad, and, naturally, this reminded me of the advice in the old Heroes of Battle on running a military campaign.

Of course, being a board game and a video game respectively, Space Hulk and Gears of War 2 have a far different structure than what a paper & pencil RPG would, by necessity, have. On the other hand, they provide a good contrast by which to better understand how a military-style campaign should best be organized.

The main difference between other types of games and roleplaying games is that there's no redo or save point in a roleplaying game. In Space Hulk, if you fail a mission, you can just do it again, and you can always start again from the last checkpoint in Gears of War 2. In D&D, however, it's assumed that you don't have those same safeguards. At the same time, it's not as though the PCs never fail. Thus, whereas most game designers have the luxury of assuming success on the part of the player, you, the DM, do not. Thus, look at each mission objective as a T-intersection of possible outcomes for your objective-based adventure: One leading from success and the other from failure.

Really, this "failure is always an option" school of adventure design of course applies to non-military-style campaigns, but whereas in other types of campaigns failure might mean retreating from the dungeon for a day, a failed objective may not provide an opportunity to retry. While planning for each contingency means a bit more work for the DM, the occasional failure makes success all the sweeter, in addition to showing the players that they are not invincible.

In many ways, the environments in both Space Hulk and Gears of War 2 embody the potentially sprawling nature of the possible outcomes of such an adventure; they are generally large areas, and even the dungeons of Space Hulk are meandering affairs. In a lot of ways, this is a much more organic way of constructing adventures and encounters, allowing events to grow in any number of interesting ways. And really, doesn't everyone want their adventures to be interesting?

Just like anything else, coming back to blogging break isn't easy. I stopped because of a glut of midterm work and just got out of my usual rhythm of posts, and I'm just now getting back into the groove. Blogging isn't the only thing I've lost my groove with; it's been too long since I've DMed, and while I've been meaning to start up a new game, there are, of course, an endless stream of excuses that have stopped me from following through.

Now, I'm sure the DMs out there realize that DMing is a fairly hefty time and energy investment no matter which way you slice it. I've managed to slim down my prep time over the years but it still takes a few hours or prep each week to conceptualize adventures, draw up important maps, and stat monsters and NPCs. But, the thing is, like all good DMs, these are some of my favorite parts of the game.

As an exercise to get me motivated to game again, here are my main excuses and their counterpoints. Let's see if we can't get me playing again.

• Few Experienced Players
  I have several potential newbie players lined up, but I've become spoiled by having many experienced players in the past. The additional work required when walking newbies through the game adds to the daunting task of DMing. But, on the other hand, without my usual squad of power gamers, DMing should really just be that much easier. And, is there anything better in life than spreading the love of gaming? (Well, maybe a few things, but you get the idea.)
• Fewer Ideas
  This might seem weird since I pump out adventure hooks (almost) every Sunday, but the conceptual side of things is much easier for me. Execution is more difficult. Making a good idea into a good game takes work, and I am always hesitant of taking on more work. Of course, the times that I've actually come through with this sort of thing, making my ideas come to life in an involving game, have been some of the most memorable and exiting gaming (hell, even non-gaming) experiences I've had.
• No Time
  This seems like a pretty legitimate concern, but in all honesty, all I'd have to do to compensate for this is cut back on a small percentage of my YouTube viewing. And, you know, be proactive with my responsibilities. And stuff.

Alright, I'm feeling better now. Let us game.

Recently I participated in CivFanatics.com forum's Night of the Werewolf XXXI, a variant of the popular Mafia party game. In this variant, the players were members of a secret council devoted to an evil religion, each of us belonging to a secret sub-faction vying for power. Needless to say, things got lethal fast.

Despite having a good run, I was killed evening five, and immediately put my DM mind to work figuring out how to recreate the sense of paranoia and intrigue inherent in Mafia games in a game of D&D. After all, paranoia is its own adventure hook; if the players pick out their own enemies, targets, and goals, the DM doesn't have to do it for them. And that's a good thing.

Here are my ideas on how to create an atmosphere of paranoia:

• Give each PC his or her own secret goal
  And don't necessarily make all of them complementary to each other. This gives each PC a reason to question each others' motives as well as keep certain facts to themselves if it furthers their own ends.
• Give the PCs no clear-cut allies
  Sure, there will be NPCs who help them, but they each have their own motives, just like the PCs, and it's clear that they'd turn on the PCs in an instant if it got them closer to their goal.
• Force the PCs to depend on each other and the NPCs
  Despite their mistrust, the PCs, for whatever reason, must work alongside each other and the other NPCs to achieve their goals. As powerful, dangerous individuals, the PCs do have to have a strong reason not to just kill everyone and be done with it.
• There are the bad guys, and then their are the bad guys
  In this midst of this mess of paranoia and deception, there's an individual (or group) who's even worse than the rest, and is probably slowly killing off everyone else. Obviously, they must be stopped if the PCs are to reach their goals.
• Remember to have something for the meatshields to do
  Keep in mind that, except in rare cases, not everyone in the party will have the skills to participate fully in the lies and deceptions of an intrigue-based adventure. Make sure their are ample skulls to bash for those in the party who only get to fully participate in combat.

Do the DMs among you have any other tips for successfully adding an element of intrigue to your games? And players, any memorable cloak and dagger operations you care to recount?