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After my last game players came to me to complain about the difficulty of the tarps they encountered. Oddly, their main problem was not the lethality, it was how they were "anachronistic" and didn't make sense in a fantasy game. Some even said they were unengaging and pointless, a vicious blow to any DM's ego. In the spirit of OSR, I decided to give everyone else a lecture instead of addressing my own flaws.
So here are the best ways to run tarps in your game:
Cleverly Camouflaged Tarps
Provocative Open Tarps
If players find hidden tarps unengaging, the obvious solution is not to hide them. Put them right out in the open and let the players try to ignore them. Just try it! This is obviously a much better solution as my players interacted with it right away by walking around it.
Role Playing Tarp
Another strategy is to make your tarp appealing to players who like to roleplay everything to the hilt. As pretty much every recent race revision shows, the best way to do this is to add a usable hole to it. Here, the tarp has a gaping hole ready for your most ardent "bard" type player.
Also, a tarp with a hole in it and an NPC are basically the same thing, topologically. Science!
Incentives
As every good game designer knows, the solution to bad design is to patch it up with incentives. The worse it is, the more you have to bribe or manipulate players to play it.
I am trying out the idea of Tarp Points, or TP. These are awarded for interacting with and commenting on tarps. The real kicker is they give powerful tarp-related bonuses randomized with a tarp related tarot deck or TARPTAROT (which I will sell). It should be impossible for the party to ignore my lovingly designed tarps, because that would be a sub-optimal play strategy.
I have also cleverly integrated it with OSR principles by calling these incentives a ruling. I got this idea from a blog post called "Against Incentive" which I shall read one day.
So that was my solution to this common problem. Hope this helps!
