5 GM Mind Games - Running RPGs

I love asking oddly specific questions, especially before they open a door or walk into a forest. "Do you have a weapon drawn?" Is a good one. If they don't they always do a few seconds later.

Late to the party Seth, but John Harper’s clocks function very similarly to the threat dice pool (arguably better, because they can change at any moment).

The GM can give as much or as little explanation of what each clock they deploy is (as well as many at the same time as they want), and what is making them fill up as in game and background events rumble on (though fully able to wind them back based on player actions).

I wouldn't just do these things to make the players paranoid. I'd also do them so that, after a few false positives, I don't make them instantly paranoid when I do them while there's a actually a reason to. Sometimes the party is caught by surprise, and it's difficult to do that if anytime you do something out of the ordinary the players decide to sit back to back with weapons drawn, peering intently at every entrance. After the first few times when they do that and they feel silly for getting spooked like that, you can actually have something happen.

Why am I not getting notifications! Oh well it's a bunch of awesome videos I need to catch up on!

This advice, as usual. I like them all except the prop one.

This is all fantastic material. Great video

So these are great ideas and I can't wait to use them! Ironically, my players mind game themselves. They are in a jungle and low on food, rolling the random encounter table they come across a banana tree full of monkeys. Not deadly zombie monkeys, not monkeys with AKs, not even monkeys that could fly, just regular old monkeys. I tell them the tree is full of bananas, and there seems to be enough where the players could take same and not upset the monkeys with an animal handling roll. A couple players decided to take some and rolled well, but half the party was like "No way, those could be poisonous or a giant monkey may attack us! Even after some members took some, they did nothing but think it was a trap.

The rolled perception checks, insight checks, and even used speak with animals at one point to ask a monkey about the bananas. It was very funny and I was cackling the whole time. Even with them rolling hot and hearing "Yeah, you see no issues" or "Yeah, they seem like normal bananas" they wouldn't take em. Only two did and they refused to share since the bananas were "SO SCARY"

Love the brass skull.

Yup just like the X-49 robot in samurai jack and it's pet dog LuLu, sweet thing. Totally protecting that dog.

Where are you standing, love it. Though honestly I like to use minis to avoid needing to do this.

Wonderful advice I have been doing this stuff for years!

I never heard of DM loot, but I think I might give my BBEG something similar.

Playing Curse of Strahd, I'm thinking...

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I'll have Strahd encounter the group fairly early, and charm at least one of them. Then, after they KNOW they have been affected by him, I'll start adding coins to a cup in front of them, and let them guess what it's about.

When enough coins have filled the cup, I will command one of the PCs to DO something they would not ordinarily do. Just to mess with them. And ONLY once Strahd has had the chance to successfully charm them.

One cup for each PC.

I'll treat it as a remote-control Suggest spell, so it has to follow the rules of Suggest. I can't command them to kill themselves or their party, but I CAN suggest that they do something stupid and inconvenient, including giving away a piece of valuable equipment (not the Sunsword or other vital artifact).

After all, they came in at Level 5, and are WAY over-equipped, because this newbie DM had a "Monty Hall" moment, where I allowed them to gamble hit points for spins on a Wheel of Fortune, and they won some really cool gear. I can take some of that away from them, or just command them to annoy someone they were trying to persuade, or who knows what.

And they can watch those coins fill the bowls, and wonder what will happen, and then, what will happen next, once I cash in a few coins.

Love these tips! I have used all of them for years, except the clever brass skull...now grinding through some ideas of what I already own that I can "just have lying about", at an upcoming session. 👹

I used the mystery roles one sparingly in the only 2 sessions I ever GM`d (we only get to play about once a year) and it worked incredibly well. I love the prop one though I may have to do something like that next time.

An old GM of mine had a trick he loved using: When a player rolls a crit fail on a perception/mental check, be completely honest with them and tell them exactly what is going on, what is happening, what an NPCs true devious motivations are, etc. because the players will never believe you or never believe all of what you say as true and will tend to assume the opposite

My variation of watching your phrasing:
Roll perception:
"17"
For as far as you know it's clear

Then one of my players stated that apparently I always say "In that case" before asking for initiative, or at least often enough that it's stuck in his head. So then I started adding it in randomly (Only from time to time, else it loses it's impact) and the player seemed to clench a bit each time I say it

I watched this a few hours before running a session. Not for tips (which were great) or to use them that time, but just so the player I live with could report this in horror to the rest of the group.

These are excellent tips, really good to cement player engagement. I use "something to protect" heavily at the moment in my Symbaroum campaign. Specific questions ...what a great idea.

The phrasing is always a good one. It works equally well whether there is or isn't something to find and how well their dice roll went. "You don't find anything" after a low roll is especially terrifying.

These things definitely have got to be true from time to time - and that would presumably occur quite naturally - the corridor only "seems to be empty" because they failed their perception check or their exact location or where their weapons etc actually is of importance in this instance or those additional rolls are because they failed and you're now determining the consequences of that failure. It shouldn't be hard to find occasions like these.

My players are paranoid, like many players, of every single chest. But I took it a step further and made them afraid of what was inside.

I run a open world DnD 5e game, with heavy opportunity for RP, but when they go into hostile territory there is a LOT of enemies. So they were in a library. The main floor and second floor had guards and cultists all over. There were balconies on the second floor where they could jump over the side and land on the main floor, bookshelves they could walk on top of, and an elevator with no door on the main floor. And the entire place was littered with healing potions. In the attic were giant rats and a wererat, and on the roof there were giant bats and a puzzle that required dishing out different types of damage to shut off energy fields.

Then they went down, to the basement. There were giant centipedes, toppled bookshelves with all manner of hidden tomes, and in the back corner there was a lone chest. They joked about it being a Mimic, but this was the first chest I'd given them. It was a Mimic.

Now, something like a year later, they're in a flooded dungeon, swimming around fighting sunken skeletons and giant schools of jellyfish. They found a room with three chests on the bottom. They took twenty minutes gathering the courage to open any of them, but the chests weren't Mimics. They found some loot inside, good loot mostly, including a map. The map was a Mimic.

I also have a random encounter table for every part of the dungeon, so that's fun. Unfortunately, for the two boss fights I've rolled up, I got my players to roll on the table and I didn't tell them what the result was. Well, they were the same exact result. So now there are two Young Blue Dragons in this flooded dungeon. Blue Dragons. In the water level. I constantly remind them whose fault it is, even when they don't know what is waiting for them. It got their hackles up.

One variation of the hidden rolls I learned from another DM is the call of "High or low?" followed by a percentile roll. I use it sometimes legitimately to answer a yes or no question, but it always sets my players on edge that they just avoided some huge disaster or the like.

Used to do those mystery rolls all the time.

In one campaign, I used notes that I would pass to players if only their character knew the information and they would pass notes back if they were doing or thinking something that the other players shouldn't know. Once in a while, though, the note might be something like, "this is just a note." Players could always share the information, but were under no compulsion to do so.

hehehe...

1. HAHAHAHA!!! I do this all the time, even too my players now that we're running Cypher System/Numenera... They'll be like "Wait, why'd you roll?"
And I'll be like "Oh... nothing. Do you keep going?"
Sometime's I'll even throw in a "You dont see or hear anything that catches your attention, but there's an uneasy feeling." HAHAHA!

2. LOL... see above! HAHAHA!

3. Oh, specific questions are great... I remember one time I asked the Cleric of my group, while they were in this dungeon clearing out Cultists of the Elder Gods, what colour her robe/tunic was, right after everyone made a stealth check. They said, then everyone looked around while I made a note, and then told them to continue... HAHAHA! Fun times.

4. As a player in a 3.5 game, and a DM of a few systems... this is great! In the 3.5 game, Im playing an Artificer who made these "Alchemical" lucky coins, that he uses for Infusions and Spell Completions (aka Scrolls). So iv been taking my Pirate and The Elder Scrolls coins to games, and using them to keep track of what Iv been using and passing around.

5. Love the use of Mando and Grogu... Yeah, I have my players have a few things, but I haven't really used them on the party, yet. Need to get round to that...

6. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand here comes the Cypher System...
Yep, since my first one-shot running Numenera, i have LOVED this system of "GM Intrusions"... I also enjoy that it's counter-balanced with Player Intrusions, but in discourages players to counter the GM Intrusion, because you get XP for it. And XP too, is a currency in the game. But I absolutely love it!

Great video Seth! I have a request though.

My group has been playing Blades in the Dark for a little while now and we’re just starting to get comfortable with it. It’s a game where the story is much more player driven than games like dnd and most of the group is having trouble adapting to that style.

Could you share your thoughts on the steps players can take to be more of a driving force in the narrative for those types of games and how they can make the things they want for their character happen? How can we make those thing’s something the rest of the party can get invested in as well?

Thanks so much and keep up the great work

#1 has me laughing, because I do that.... Not just tossing one die, but tossing multiple dice, and then saying, "It seems everything is fine...." A variation on it is to pick up the monster manual, pretend to look something up and read it, and then close it and go, "Okay, so the hall in front of you is pretty dark, it's hard to see down to the end of it... It's eerily quiet... What do you do?" LOL!

I did that "Give them something to protect - Then threaten it" quite by accident several years ago. I'd run things as a GM before, but wouldn't exactly call me experienced at the time.
I was introducing players to Warhammer 2nd edition and used the introduction scenario from the book.
At one point a mutant shoots someone with a Hochland Longrifle, and the scenario makes it pretty clear that it's supposed to get away and that a weapon like that shouldn't be given to the PCs
However, one of my players decided to shoot the mutant at long range with his bow, made an outstanding attack roll and proceeded to one-hit-kill the mutant. So... I couldn't not give them the gun.
Instead I started hinting once in a while that an NPC showed particular interest to this gun.

By the end of the second session they were so paranoid thinking that I would steal it from them, that they started hiding it in their room at the inn and setting up elaborate traps, and spending off-game time trying to figure out how to keep this gun safe!

None of them could use firearms, and they were scared that it would be recognized as stolen if they brought it with them.

They ended up selling it far below market price just to get rid of it, because they didn't want to get caught up in whatever I was planning - which was nothing. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so I was just BS-ing my way through the whole thing, hoping they wouldn't sell it to a collector at premium

I frequently utilize pie-chart type timers in my games to show an approaching threat or track a problems progress towards completion and i usually label them (ie - the tower is collapsing, or the guards are coming, etc.) and one way I've used that in a GM mind game is that when I noticed there wasn't as much tension or the game wasn't moving at the pace I wanted, I put out a blank timer sheet with one or two slices already filled in. Then periodically color in one of those timer slices. They have no idea what it is about and they start worrying what might happen when it gets full.

OR have the players make mystery rolls for you...

DM: Andrew, can you roll me a D6?
Andrew: I got a 2?
DM: OK.

Next round...

DM: Melissa, roll me a D6.
Melissa: It was a 5...
DM: OK.

Makes it so much worse when THEY have to roll. 😂

I do the constant specific questions my players love the tension but that is my table do what is best for yours and your style

I don't understand how is this one supposed to work: Looming GM Currency Pools

My GM doing most of these is why we always take 3x the time to finish a given module. In a good way.

My personal favorite is to just start asking backstory questions sometime between sessions. A player told me out of game that he was scared after I just started asking oddly specific questions about his character's family

If a player rolls the highest roll possible and then you “pretend to roll and stall” before saying “you find nothing” it comes off like you’re trying to get around a great success you didn’t plan on. It looks bad and players will feel robbed. Otherwise good advice.

Thanks for those, great advice. I remember once my GM told us there is a scratch on the stone in the corridor we went through... We spent so much time checing for hidden stuff there 😃

"It sounds antagonistic"
"Good, because sometimes, GMs need to remember they're there to set a CHALLENGE...There has to be stakes to the story, or victory isn't fun"

Using an hour glass…👍

Ming games is the best kind of game I like to play with my fellow players :)

Mind trick from my experience: put up a smile. For some unknown reason players do feel threatened by smiling GMs.

Remember kids: Half the fun of being a GM is the free license for unbridled sadism!

Best DM advice I ever got was become a master of bullshittery.

“ I opened up the chest.”
Do you kick it?
“ no.”

The one about asking oddly specific questions is pure gold, because every now and then you'll be running a scenario where you actually DO need to know which side of the chest the player is standing on as they open it, for some reason. If your players are accustomed to the idea that you occasionally ask weirdly specific questions, they're more likely to answer honestly as opposed to changing their tune just because you asked.

Loved the ending Seth!

Despite many of the tips being highly valuable and incredibly useful, I HIGHLY recommend not applying all 5 mind games at once. In fact, more than 2 can already be harmful. I say this because, from my experience both playing and GMing, it starts to make the players extremely paranoid, uncomfortable, and tense all the time. This leads to exhaustion after hours of play and the creation of conspiracies that can take the game in another direction. So, be careful! But have fun :)

Other than that, great content! Congratulations as always, Seth.

Another mind game would be to use a timer. Set it to an arbitrary time and watch your players rush to come up with a decision in a scenario they think is time-sensitive but in actuality isn't.

Honestly? I think adding these deceitful rolls is a very bad idea and should be considered a sin.

In literature theres something similiar called tchekovs gun. The law states, that if youre going to show the audience a gun, it needs to be used by the end of the film/book. This is, because the audience usually gets excited or fearful about what might happen next and if it doesnt get used or is important to the plot, they might feel cheated and dissatisfied because they hoped for and expected something, that never happened. It is in essence a law, that warns writers and directors of using cheap tactics of making the audience invested. And this is exactly what I see here.

Players will expect something interesting or might prepare mentally for a hard battle or ready up their resources, only for nothing to happen. I would feel dissatisfied and if that would happen regularly, Id quite frankly walk away from that dm if he insisted on continuing to do it. Because all you do is make players excited and dreadfull with cheap tactics. I even see beginner dm's seeing this video and then overusing this tool for tension, whereas real tension should arise from the story, not the rulings, making that beginners take even longer to find their place.

And the worst part is: it tries to solve a problem, that you yourself introduce. Instead of saying 'there arent any traps' just say 'you dont see any traps'. Which is exactly what you would say if the players failed their roll. Likewise you could say 'yeah, you dont notice any strange movements or sounds from the surrounding bushes'. Problem solved.

So what was the Golden Scull about? (End of a D&D adventure.)
It never came up. Maybe in a future adventure...
GM pulls out the golden scull for a Call of Cuthulu adventure...

A variation on 'asking oddly specific questions' and something I discovered by accident: suddenly grabbing the rulebook and turning to a specific page upon the players entering a room or deciding some course of action, and then spending a few seconds reading before letting them carry on.

The timing of this totally freaked my players out, thinking I was looking up the stats for some particularly threatening monster or something when I think really I was checking whether I'd misapplied a rule or made some other goofy mistake.