Keeping your players off guard is helpful in building suspense and also keeps them guessing as to what’s coming next. The most common ploy to do this is to simply roll a die or two behind your screen and smile at the players, but why not take it up a notch.
Pick a player at the table and have them roll a die, the result selects someone else at the table. In my case I have four players so I’ll have someone roll a four-sider the result is the second player. Once your second player is selected have them roll a d20 and then smile. The trick here is to actually have something happen with respect to the result – not everytime and not always bad, just often enough so they don’t know what’s coming.
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