Experienced GM, New to Conan

Well I am not going to show my players my hand. My group has been together over 30 years and they will manipulate that. My second game was a breakthrough as well. The players understood the rules a lot better and were able to use their momentum to maximum effect. I kept the tension high as I kept adding mobs and they kept hacking them down. It was fun.

I always roll them dice in the open, then have a go at doom n momentum spends.

I think once players understand Doom and Momentum spends, thereā€™s a lot of tension in what they know you could potentially do and not being sure whether you will actually do it or whether your specific NPCs can do it all. Once you hit them with a Horror, the unknown is a big part of the fear factor, so I shouldnā€™t show them too much then.
In a card game, you donā€™t want show your hand. here, it isnā€™t actually adversarial, but you want them to feel like it is, for a while.

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I agree. That screen will go back up! Iā€™m not sure how long Iā€™ll want to keep it down, but it wonā€™t be forever.

Iā€™m afraid I wasnā€™t clear enough with my analogy. Iā€™ve always found the best way to learn a new card game is by running a few rounds with open hands. After the game is understood, of course, it kind of defeats the purpose of the game to keep playing that way.

That said, because of possible Doom and Momentum spends, it still is interesting to play Conan 2d20 with open hands, like the Monolith game, though I recognize that 2d20 is not built for this purpose.

Anyway, my players said the exercise was a great help. Modiphiusā€™s 2d20 is a lot more of a ā€œgame,ā€ with many more rules options and adversarial entanglements (though I also understand that the game is not ā€œadversarialā€ in a ā€œnegativeā€ context, not, again, precisely like the Monolith game) than what we had been doingā€”OD&D (Swords & Wizardry), consisting of: ā€œTell me what you want to do and Iā€™ll determine what and if you need to roll.ā€

Hey, Iā€™ve just posted Collusion In Corinthia on Fan Resources. It follows on from Kidnappers in Corinthia and ws written to try out the Thief Archetypes and the Heist generator. Have a look and let me know if its any good.

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