Darths and Droids #1940 píše:
Sometimes a group of heroes will be very reluctant to actually use a piece of equipment that you've given to them as part of the adventure. As if that handy ring of invisibility you gave them is going to corrupt their minds and turn them into servants of evil and allow an ancient necromancer to run roughshod over the civilised world or something. As we all know, that sort of stuff never happens...
So how can you encourage your players to use useful items rather than either—(a) assume they're too dangerous (artefacts and strange one-off items), or (b) save them for a rainy day (healing potions, spell scrolls)—then stuff them in a sack, and forget about them?
You need to provide tailored incentives to use such items. For simple items, this isn't too difficult. If they're hoarding healing potions, obviously you have to hurt them faster than they can heal by other means.
For weird artefacts that might very well kill them, you need to provide a stronger incentive. Here's how to do it scientifically: Determine the probability that the players think using the item will cause something calamitous, and then raise the stakes. For example, if they think using the MacGuffin of Doom 75% likely to cause a Total Party Kill, you then need to provide a situation which is 80% likely to kill them if they don't use it. Easy!
N.B. This may or may not be the thinking used by CERN scientists who decided using the Large Hadron Collider was worth the risk of destroying the universe. How many of them do you think are gamers??