The key I've found to instilling any emotion in a game is to spoon-feed the scene to players. Interaction is key. With fear in particular, players must believe their plight is a natural consequence of their own decisions--that the DM is an uncaring arbiter who is functionally indistinguishable from the game setting.
I suspect that players/DMs will invariably assign greater weight to the disadvantage/advantage states than the +/-4 analysis would imply. Psychologically, I hate having to take the lower of two rolls, just as much as I love being able to take the better of two rolls. Human minds are funny, irrational things.
I agree with the OP, haunts are pretty non-interactive from the player's POV if the GM is at all slavish about following the rules as presented. My work around was just to start saying "yes" whenever players asked me if they could do something to affect the haunt. PC: "Can I slap it with disrupt undead?"
PC: "Can I scare it off by pretending to be [NPC name redacted]?"
And so on. This isn't at all hard to pull off so long as the module gives adequate background information as to the nature of each haunt. I felt that this approach was more fun for the players, and more in tune with the actual in-game purpose of haunts.
My group is nearing the end of HoH. Our game is run over IM, with OOC talk handled over skype, and cosketch for the maps. Great, great job by paizo and Michael Kortez here--this is one of the best experiences I've had with published adventures. That said, I've mostly kept things as written, but there were some exceptions: 1) Didn't use trust points. 2) I didn't like much about the way the professor's journal was handled in this adventure writeup. So I downgraded it to a few sheets of paper that remained unnoticed on his corpse, not to be discovered until his re-animation. Instead of the journal in the adventure I used a modified form of John Lynch's writeup. 3) The encounter "Smoldering Revenge" was staged during a performance by the Twisted Kin at The Outward Inn, instead of at the town hall meeting. One of the performers pulled out a tarot deck and I combined this event with the "A House on Fire" optional event. 4) Mosswater Marauder. I gave this guy 36 hp, made him vulnerable to being attacked by his own hammer, and had the screaming skulls re-assemble and pop back up whenever all three were killed. Made the encounter a bit longer, and a bit more tense. Also ensured everyone had some meaningful choices as to how to contribute. 5) The Splatter Man. Going to run him as written, until one of the PCs gets the idea of bringing out his spell book. Then TSM will go bats*** crazy with magic missiles at that poor PC.
He could have confiscated something from one of the prisoners--that strikes me as the most plausible reason for a prison warden to have an item of historical significance on his person. The splatter man was a celebrated scholar of the study of personal names and their origins, so he could have had a sheaf of notes on his person that expounded the lineage of the whispering tyrant. Father charlatan might have had something of interest as well, since he was in the business of bilking people out of miscellaneous valuables.
I had the journal buried on the professor's body. (Small, slender book that stayed unnoticed in his breast pocket.) It will be on his person when he rises as a zombie and comes a-knocking... Good ideas with the ouija board. May have to cop some of them.
Yeah hearing that just makes me want to see it all the more! :) |
