Your (fiend) patron senses your desire for greater power and expanded arcane knowledge.
One night, you are visited by them in a dream, and are offered a deal. In return for an additional occult secret and for the power that comes along with it (an eldritch invocation), you let your patron into your mind, giving it a small degree of control over your thoughts and actions to attempt to tempt you towards evil and to help it achieve its mysterious goals. With this level of access to your thoughts, the patron can choose at any moment to trigger an intrusive, dark or dangerous thought, a temptation tugging at the edge of your consciousness to give in to darkness and react to your situation with violence, cruelty, or otherwise malicious intent.
When the patron decides to trigger this thought, the DM will roll a (red) D20 in front of the warlock. This signals to the warlock that the patron is triggering one such dark thought, which may be interpreted by the player as they wish, in accordance with what seems appropriate to the situation. The thought will usually be to perform an action that is obviously possible (often at least slightly tempting) and obviously evil or cruel, such as lashing out at a merchant charging unreasonable prices, or refusing to help someone in desperate need who has previously wronged or angered you. The number rolled on the red D20 indicates to the warlock the strength of the temptation. A natural one correlates to the idea being untempting and easily dismissed out of hand. A number of 2-6 indicates a minorly tempting idea that calls for consideration but can be fairly easily refused, a 7-12 indicates a fairly tempting idea that requires some significant degree of effort and willpower to refuse, a 13-17 indicates a significantly tempting idea that requires presence and clarity of mind as well as a significant amount of willpower to refuse, an 18-19 indicates an incredibly tempting idea which requires a gargantuan amount of energy and willpower as well as a perfectly rational and clear state of mind to refuse. Finally, on a natural 20, the idea suggested is no longer simply an idea. The patron briefly takes control of your decision making abilities and forces the first intrusive and dark thought entering your mind to be acted upon. In the first stage of this deal, even a nat 20 can only force you to go as far as hitting someone, or completely losing your temper, but never so far as to force you to kill, maim, significantly harm or damage someone or something (unless said action would otherwise be significantly tempting to the warlock already, given the character's circumstance). This temptation roll may be made a maximum of 2 times per dawn (per warlock with this deal) by the DM.
Later in your adventuring career, you may be offered further rewards, increasing almost exponentially in power as the pact progresses. Each deal if taken will grant greater degrees of additional power, but will also result in the patron gaining a greater degree of control over your mind. To represent this greater degree of control, for each further iteration of the pact, the range of rolled values for which the idea is "significantly tempting" decreases by one predefined range. For example, at first a 13-17 is required for the idea to be significantly tempting, but after the second iteration of the pact, the lower range of 7-12 is also included so any roll of 7-17 is "significantly tempting". Once all rolls lower than 17 are "significantly tempting", if the pact continues escalating, the full range of "significantly tempting" rolls (2-17) increase in strength to "incredibly tempting". Note that Nat 1's and Nat 20's are excluded from this scaling, so a nat 1 will always be dismissible out of hand and a nat 20 will always result in momentary demonic possession. However, at higher escalations of the pact, a natural 20 can drive you to darker and more violent deeds, such as transitioning from the control capping at a single hit, to being able to prompt a series of blows, then to forcing you to do irreparable damage to the target, to potentially even being able to drive you to murder. See above for description of each level of "tempting".
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