1. Paint it Black
2. Enforce encumberance rules.
4. Ask them what they are doing with their horses out in the wilderness as they go down a dungeon for a week.
6. Make sure PCs have correct trail rations and water supplies (including a water skin to hold the water). Also include deterioration of supplies. Add dietary requirements.
9. Make sure every monster (which comes in hordes) uses the grappling rules and uncommon combat options. Grapplings, overruns, and so on. Have mages use black tentacles, preferably several of them. Give every monster combat reflexes to ensure the attack of opportunity rules get used well. And all this, do it in difficult terrain.
10. Enforce mapping after your verbal descriptions, and only allow exact measurements of the walls if the PCs take time to do the actual measurements.
11. Have much water in every dungeon. Make sure the PCs have to explain how they try to keep things like scrolls, spellbooks, clothes, and so on, dry. Enforce swimming/encumbrance effects.
12. Use aerial combat whenever possible. Showing battles in three dimension and flying turn rates is So. Much. Fun.
13. Don't tell them what magic items are. They have to use magic to understand the items. Every little wand naturally has a command word they have to do research to find.
14. If they go into the sewers, or fight otyughs, the smell gets into their clothes. Unless they use magic to fix it, using those clothes again means they get a reaction penalty because they stink.
15. Use the spell Guards and Wards. Seriously.
16. If a wizard ever researches a spell, have them find that spell mere hours after he's finished.
17. Enforce the alignment rules. Any chaotic person obeying a policeman, no matter what it's about, instantly becomes lawful. Any evil person using a cure spell on someone else becomes good. BWAHAHAHAH!!!
Oh, yeah...
18. Devise a dementedly complex game that's played where your PCs happen to be passing through, something á la football or somesuch. Make up leagues, teams, traditions, and everything else you can think of around the game. Then make sure their next adventure requires not only understanding the game, but excelling at it. As a final step, make the game not very exciting. =)
19. Tell them "That's not what your character would do."
20. Charm person/dominate.
30. When they search for traps, smile and say "You don't see any."
31. Smile...then look at a mini.
32. Put a mini on the table of their most hated enemy and ask it for advise. Then Smile and nod knowingly. Nothings scarier thatn a crazy DM.
10. Sphere's of Annihalation, not endagering the PC's, but put around every corner and at the bottom of every pit.
11.Never let them retire a character, or re-use one that died very quickly.
12. Puzzles that the players must solve. Especially difficult ones like a giant Sudoku puzzle. ;) (I did this one. My players, via death threats, extracted a promise never to repeat.)
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6. Make sure PCs have correct trail rations and water supplies (including a water skin to hold the water). Also include deterioration of supplies. Add dietary requirements.
Holy crap, this could totally work with the product in this link, or at least I hope so, lol.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamingpaper/gaming-paper-adventures?ref =search
ive pledged, so as long as it reaches the goal, Im getting it. Looks like it could end up taking characters several days to finish it, and if say, there were enemy archers in there who specifically targeted their water skins, or a caster who could decay food or something like that...it would make this thing all the more annoying, lol.
13. have a rat eat the players food while they are sleeping.
14. have a rat nibble on the player's food while they are sleeping. Next day, have them save for filth fever.
15. Give the player a love intrest for the entire campaign. In downtime before the final session, have her commit suicide (GM did this to me).
40. When the party leaves a dungeon to rest, pack up your books and tell them to have new 1st level characters for next game. The BBEG succeeded in his diabolical plan and the world is destroyed.
42. Make every shop owner and barkeep in the entire campaign be a high level former adventurer. Have them constantly talk down to the party like they're children. "Aw, is this your first +1 sword? That's so cute! I remember my first magic sword. Of course, I was about 5 years younger than you are..."
44. Tell the players that as of this game, all the characters have to be converted to 4.0. Then yell "April Fools!" after they start ranting.
45. Use rust monsters against the party. Excessively. Have them used as mounts by the bad guys (kobolds work well). Arm the riders with (wooden) lances and give them spirited charge.
48. After every fight with a BBEG, tell the group "It was all a dream..." Tell them they wake up without any levels or loot they have accumulated throughout the campaign.
49. Devote yourself to designing hundreds and hundreds of NPCs. Avoid giving them a personality or other distinguishing marks. Tie solving mysteries and adventures to knowing which NPC is which, and who was who's aunt. Give no tables or remembering aids. Play rarely, no more than once every month. Make sure that it's the earlier and smaller NPCs they need to know about. Have everyone take offense if not greeted by the correct titles, if the PCs ask about things they should know.
47. Send hordes of creatures who are just low enough CR so the PCs don't get XP for killing them, but are dangerous enough that they have to take the threat seriously. Keep doing this until the PCs are out of Fireball/Lightning Bolt/Flame Strike/whatever. Then throw the level appropriate enemies at them before they have had time to rest and regain spells.
Creatures with SoD gazes work best for this, stuff like bodaks and medusas. Because if they roll a one on a save they're done.
55. Always let them fight creatures that are too small or too large for their equipment to be useful.
56. Hand out tons of drow equipment that dissolves in sunlight and regularly send them into the desert.
57. Use allips liberally. There is just something about saving once per allip per round that warms a sadistic DM's heart.
58. Enforce the appraise rules, including tracking what different people evaluate things to be worth, before selling them, and so on.
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64. Abolish dice. Anytime a die roll would normally be called for, require them to either role-play (for social situations, like Diplomacy or Intimidate) or physically act out their actions (for attacks, saves, and the like). Success or failure is solely up to how impressed the GM is.
That actually sounds like a lot of fun. At least until the DM declared me dead, lol.
64. Abolish dice. Anytime a die roll would normally be called for, require them to either role-play (for social situations, like Diplomacy or Intimidate) or physically act out their actions (for attacks, saves, and the like). Success or failure is solely up to how impressed the GM is.That actually sounds like a lot of fun. At least until the DM declared me dead, lol.
This already happens on a fairly regular basis. It is called LARP :(
64. Abolish dice. Anytime a die roll would normally be called for, require them to either role-play (for social situations, like Diplomacy or Intimidate) or physically act out their actions (for attacks, saves, and the like). Success or failure is solely up to how impressed the GM is.That actually sounds like a lot of fun. At least until the DM declared me dead, lol.
I'm actually doing this in place of Diplomacy rolls in Serpent's Skull. Because the PCs don't have diplomacy and/or have a charisma of 7. It's working out amazingly well in that everyone's happy with the results, it doesn't bog down the game that much, and it lets the players get around one of the glaring deficiencies that comes with having only two PCs.
65. Have them meet wizards/sorcerers who know Evan's Spiked Tentacles of Forced Intrusion.
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80. Use appropriate tactics for the bad guys
81. Concentrate attacks on one PC at a time
82. Give the bad guys a controller "god" wizard
83. Give the bad guys high crit-range weapons
84. Have really long pitched battles in five foot wide corridors
85. Use totally inappropriate minis that break the mood
86. Get your cat to walk across the battle mat regularly
87. Play inappropriate background music
88. Use sunder as a standard tactic
89. Play light source and vision rules properly
90. Target light sources as a standard tactic
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91. Use spells that make those that fail their saves sit around twiddling their thumbs or running away while the rest of the party have fun. eg Color spray, sleep, fear, create pit series, stinking cloud,
92. Over-egg the challenge rating so that you TPK on a regular basis. Never let them through an entire campaign from end to end with one character.
93. Set a body count target of at least one PC a month.
41. Track bowstrings.
Wow, we're actually doing that in our game. Never seen in it done before, but our Archer rolls so many natural 1's and our DM doesn't have the heart to have her accidentally shoot someone, so he just has her bowstring snap. She's literally carrying around at least 10 bowstrings.
Wow, we're actually doing that in our game. Never seen in it done before, but our Archer rolls so many natural 1's and our DM doesn't have the heart to have her accidentally shoot someone, so he just has her bowstring snap. She's literally carrying around at least 10 bowstrings.
We had that happen to one player until he forked over the cash for mithril bowstrings. Now they don't snap nearly as often, plus he used one to garrote a werewolf.