I got shot in a dream once. I felt the bullet hit, and felt my blood splatter. Woke up and it turned out that I had knocked a glass of water off my bed-side table and it had hit me in the chest and spilled.
I tried some experimenting after that by putting whings in my bed when I went to sleep. A round baseball sized marble ball, a koosh ball, a cat toy with a little bell on it...that sort of thing. And let me tell you I had some strange and very vivid dreams.
Back more to the topic...I woke up onec when I was in Iraq with a tickle on my face. When I opened my eyes I was face to face with a huge rat that was sitting on my chest.
AAAAAIEIEIIIEIEIIE!
I screamed like a little girl! The rat scampered over my face, using my lower lip for leverage, and vaulted off the top of my head as I catapulted up upright into a sitting position. It woke up everyone in my tent, and the rat took off dodging around my tent mates you yelled obsenities at it as they jumped out of its path.
After they all stopped laughing, we all sat around because we all had the hee-bee jee-bees and couldn't go back to sleep.
Sometimes fear can just come from the unexpected, but can leave lasting emotional scaring...or just a funny tale to tell over beer and pizzia.
ASEO out
:ROFL:
Oh yeah? Well, this one time at band camp....
I once had my heart was slowing down and I sank into a slow deathdream. Then came the void, sans five senses, sans thought. I witnessed the nothing of it for a long time.
Unnerving to say the least.
But the thing that actually scared me most in this life was a mirror I didn't expect to be there and I am not kidding. When I was fifteen I slept over at a friend's house. We weren't supposed to go out but we did. When we snuck back in, hours later, I turned in his unfamiliar basement and saw myself watching me in the dark. Blood ran cold. Lousy feeling.
I was afraid of the dark for a long time. I was deployed to Iraq two years ago. At night time we would pull guard duty with our NVGs. One night in particular, we had a terrible sand storm. The wind was howling and sand was stinging my face and hands. It was about 2 or 3 in the morning and shift change was coming up. I was about a hundred meters out of the perimeter and I could only see about 1 meter. My batteries went out and I had to replace them, so I got down on my knees and started to change them. As I was changing batteries a piece of debris, a 6" long 2x4, had hit me in the face. It hit me so hard that I had thought someone had swung at me. I was sprawled out in the sand, blind and blood coming down my head. I pulled out my knife and waited for the next blow. After 5 very long minutes, I realized I was alone, but the terror that I felt made me scared of the dark more than ever. Even now I leave night lights on in my house on both floors. The weird part is that the storm stopped right after I got up and it was a clear night with bright stars. I barely needed my NVGs.
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I just found this very cool thread and like to contribute to it.
Some of my fears would be the following:
Drowning in a sealed environment without a chance of escape. Like in a sunken ship that drowns to the bottom of the sea. You're inside and the water is rising and you are struggling to remain on the surface gasping for the little air that is left while facing the inevitable.
Being in a kind of dark labyrinth with several deep chasms and suddenly losing the light that illuminated the whole environment before (maybe dropped it in panic because of seeing something really horrible).
Being paralyzed, blind and unable to move while feeling something disgusting crawling on your skin.
Falling from a really great height and awaiting crushing to the ground.
Hopefully these fears inspire you in some way, Steve. I really like your adventures and i hope to see the one that you are working on right now.
I'd really love to see a good new adventure with a horror-theme. The last good one i read was 'The Styes'.
Somewhere it was mentioned that there'll be a horror-themed issue of Dragon somewhere in the future and i hope its still planned.
Ha! GVD, your law degree is showing! AAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!
That's scary.
Seriously, though. You're definitely on to it. I always found that what my players imagined up all by themselves was much worse than the material behind my DM screen. Keeping them guessing at what their up against is a really good way to at least make the players "nervous," which puts them in a great state of mind to get them "scared" or at least "spooked" as the game develops further.
Now you can annalyze that dream 6 ways till Sunday, most agree that it has something to do with deep down me not believing in a God even though the thought of one not existing scares me. Still, for me, that was terror.
You need a God for this kind of sentiant conscousness trapped in a void after ones physical body is destroyed. Thats not death - thats punishment after death - for that to exist there would have to be some kind of Higher Power doling out the punishment.
I think a distinction has been and needs to be made between what scares (1) the Player Character and (2) the Player.
Brilliant post.
This is in essence what I was trying to get at with my post but failed to really emphasize the critical idea that one is not really trying to scare the PCs but the players behind the PCs and that this can't easily be be done by having them confront a scary or dangerous monster or situation - after all confronting dangerous monsters and scary situations is what PCs do for a living.
I very much agree with your point that the best way to scare the players is to get them to scare themselves. Thats why they should be confronting something thats unknown. Only in confronting the unknown are they in a position to have their own imaginations fill in the blanks. Mood, special effects and good DMing are utilized to help the players fill those blanks in with concepts that scare the crap out of them.
The problem of course is that once they actually confront the UPE they are no longer filling in the blanks with their own fears - their just fighting another monster - here maybe lovecraftian freakiness is the best tack to take.
So argueably one might try for the unknown and disquiting for most of the adventure while the players do much of the work of scaring themselves and then just go for the freaky, alien and truely disturbing for the final encounter.
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Confronting the players with the unknown is all well and good. If done properly, it can certainly achieve the desired effect. But fear of the unknown isn't the only things that scares people. Another major fear-inducer, something that was touched on earlier, is lack of control. Imagine, as someone did in an earlier psoting, that you are paralyzed, unable to move at all. Suddenly you feel something crawling on you - something slimy. At first, your mind will conjure up all kinds of interesting scenarios as to what this thing is, and fear of the unknown settles in. When it comes into view, however, its just a spider. Now, are you going to be any less afraid because you now know what it is? But it is still crawling around on you and you can't do a damn thing. It could bite you a hundred times and you would have to just lay there and take it. Maybe it could lay its eggs in your skin (some spiders do that) and you know they are there, but, once again, you can't do a thing about it. Even when they hatch and start eating you. That is another kind of fear. Loss of control. Basic and primal.
Another major fear-inducer, something that was touched on earlier, is lack of control.
I agree completely except that your presented with a delivery problem as a DM. How do you convey, in a roleplaying situation, lack of control?
I mean I can set it up so that I take over some players character and make it do terrible things...but I don't think this will actually scare the player behind the character - with my players anyway I think all I would maange is to piss one of them off.
So the trick with something like a losing control type scenario or a confronting icky things (like spiders, snakes, hieghts etc.) type scenario is figuring out some method of doing this to your players characters in a manner that evokes a strong emotional response from the actual player.
No easy feat - though if you can throw your players off balance through something like splitting the party up then maybe - just maybe you can pull this off.
I've actually - on two occasions - trapped my players PCs in the timeless void type thing similier to the nightmare given in an earlier post. Here we have a kind of loss of control and a totally hopeless situation. That said reading that nightmare post invoked more emotional response then I ever got from players whose characters were trapped in suich a void. While the players PC might have been going insane the player was just bored - and they have a tendency to wander off occasionally returning to appeal to other players to help get them out*.
Another factor that has not been mentioned is that we are actually all facing a slightly different situation in terms of the mortality level of your game. I mean I actually might be able to scare a player by threatening their character if they had a really strong emotional investment in their character. If they had been playing the same character every week for the last 4 and a half years exclusivly then there is a good chance that the character is 'family'. They have a deep attachment to the character. In this case the DMs job is a heck of a lot easier...
On the other hand the DM has his work cut out for him if the player who's character has survived a full 5 sessions is the current record holder in terms of life span. Obvously your players have learned not to have to much of an emotional investment in their characters if the characters die on average every 2 sessions.
Which means, as DMs, we have to in some sense plan ahead for the horror adveture. Prior to it we should be toning back on mortality and doing some more role playing. Put some sessions into allowing your players characters to grow and give your players a reason and some time to grow attached to their characters. This way it should, in theory anyway, be easier to scare the players even though its only their character that is being threatened.
*As a kind of obvous side note - I recomend one avoids trapping their players in time voids - bored players is a really really bad idea, almost anything is better then boring your players - might want to keep this in mind a bit with the Chambers of Antiquities adventure - make sure you can get your players out of the time void in that adventure withouit having to force the player to wait an hour to be rescued.
I think my favorite scare tactic is twofold - first of all, I love the concept of the Shadowlands from Rokugan/Legend of the Five Rings. A place that so totally corrupts you, that is unforgiving, unyielding and unreasoning - it just is. A place that by you very actions, or inactions, will redefine who and what you are. :-D
On the other hand, bringing back dead gods that use a PC's body as a vehicle and portal for their rebirth is always fun, too.
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Strangely enough, something that I threw into an adventure as an afterthought has been talked about for almost fifteen years by the players involved. I didn't think that this was scary--I simply added it as a flavorful detail.
While the PCs were traveling through a forest, they ran across a path that had been broken through the trees almost thirty feet across. It went beyond the extension of their sight in both directions and had absolutely nothing to do with the campaign.
And that's it. I thought very little of it until a couple of weeks later when I overheard them talking about what sort of thing could create a path like that. Slowly but surely, all of them began to ask questions about it. I came to realize that this sidebar was interpreted as foreshadowing by all of my players! They were completely obsessed with what the creature was and when they would have to deal with it. In fact, this occurred in 1989 and the campaign ended in 2002. The players never came face to face with the thing that made the path. However, just a couple of months ago one of the players from that game e-mailed me with a VERY long theory of what it might have been.
I know that this simply falls under the category of "fear of the unknown," but it somehow worked for my game and I'm still not entirely certain why. Like I said before, I didn't even think it was scary.
I had something similier occur to me in a game. The PCs are exploring the Goblins lair and killing the Goblins. They are pretty low level as befits those who do home invasions on Goblins.
Anyway they come to a passage. Now I new that down the passage lived a nasty minitour. The Goblins had defended this part of their lair with three sets of portcullis and when the Minitour had appeared they had cemented in the bottom part so they could not be raised. A minitour is a pretty scary monster but not That scary.
Well the PCs come upon these bars and realize that they have been cemented closed by the Goblins. They totally freak out. They have no idea what the hell is beyond this but they realize that this is a pretty elaborate system to keep something scary out. But in their own heads they manage to construct something truely Cuthuluesque and they start telling these ideas to each other and just scaring each other more - they become so scared of whatever lives beyond the bars that they abandon the whole freaken dungeon flee back to town and refuse to return under any circumstances. I eventually give them some other hooks and they leave to The White Lake Mine from Dungeon #18.
I've been playing horror-themed campaigns for years. I've found that simply remaining serious and not bastardizing the mood with giggling and out-of-game conversations ads realism to the session. Furthermore the truly scary things always happen in the background. Disappearances are always good for establishing something wrong - but one of the missingis different from the rest. Sure the PCs find 8 of the missing 9 in the kobold lair - but when they find the ninth in the cellar of the Inn, cut up and strung up like some macabre jabbering marionette do they see what true monstosity is about.
Of course gore is only one facet of horror and arguably the cheapest one at that.
I once unnerved a player by locking him ap and having one of the king's enforcer's go down to the dungeon to pay him a little visit. He merely sat there, sizing the dwarf up while smoking his pipe. The usually boisterous Baradaq merely sat there as well waitnig for the stranger to break the silence. He did. He produced a broken bow and told Baradaq that his master was dead and left.
Miguel, my player was unnerved.
I woke up onec when I was in Iraq with a tickle on my face. When I opened my eyes I was face to face with a huge rat that was sitting on my chest.
You're preaching to the choir on this one. I had a camel spider use my face as a trampoline one morning. Nearly had a heart attack!
You guys are such sissies! :P
I woke up onec when I was in Iraq with a tickle on my face. When I opened my eyes I was face to face with a huge rat that was sitting on my chest.You're preaching to the choir on this one. I had a camel spider use my face as a trampoline one morning. Nearly had a heart attack!
You guys are such sissies! :P
I take it back! I just did a search for camel spider on the web. OH MY GOD!!!!!
www.florian-schlachter.de/uploads/camelspider.jpg
I have a thing about insects, so that's what scares me...
As a DM, the impact of a horror-based game is going to be all about descriptions and mood-setting; play with all of the lights out except the one on the table...no stereo, TV or video games in the background...no casual conversations going on between players as you describe the area...it all comes together to build anxiety.
For specifics, I'm sure you and most DMs who post here can come up with a few nice, juicy horror scenarios - unfortunately, many of them would involve the permanent loss of their characters to be truly scary...
Gotta admit, some players will be thinking, "Yeah, my character might die tonight...oh well, I'll start generating a backup, then..." It's hard to scare those kinds...my best idea would to be to introduce the group to a threat that would not kill them, but would instead infect them with insanity, disease, possession or some combination that would truly mangle the person of their character, yet leave them very much alive (and spreading the horror, of course...)
The idea that their powerful and benevolent character may well be corrupted into a deranged, flesh-devouring abberation of nature (undead, even...) would shake any character with any concern at all for their reputation.
...But maintaining the atmosphere of horror truly depends on the players' participation, as well.
M
I woke up onec when I was in Iraq with a tickle on my face. When I opened my eyes I was face to face with a huge rat that was sitting on my chest.You're preaching to the choir on this one. I had a camel spider use my face as a trampoline one morning. Nearly had a heart attack!
Holy crap! Just looked at it. Again... holy crap! It looks like a humungous version of a spider we have here Las Vegas called a Vinagaroon or Sun Spider. I've seen them grow a little over an inch long, but this Camel Spider... HOLY CRAP!!!
I would have been filling my boxers for sure, dude!
Oh my freak’in Lord!!!
I spent 4 months in the Jungle in southeast Sulawesi (Indonesia) back in the early 90's and saw web building spiders that caught birds and bats. I thought they were creepy! That, my friend, takes the cake!
The most frightening experiences I've had are alone in the wilderness. I know about the kinds of things that can live out there (a little knowledge can be a bad thing). Sitting alone in front of your fire at night when you can't see anything gets you jumping at every little sound as you wait for the bear or the snake to appear. Now I can imagine giant creepy camel spiders too. Thanks.
I think that we as a species go out of our way to modify our environment away from the dark loneliness of the wilderness which represents the unknown. Note that most horror stories do a lot to isolate the characters before systematically taking away the things that give them security or power: light, mobility, communication, and a means to harm the enemy. Then after receiving a little information they usually have go against their best instincts, conquer their fear and go out to repair the generator or something (with the creepiness all around) so they can create the one weapon they need to defeat the "thing" (whatever that is). It creates a climate of expectation that you can exploit as a story teller and raise the suspense.
I'm off to the store to buy some Raid.
Cheers,
C.
Some other people have touched on the importance of building a mood. The few times I've run a haunted setting, I made a chart of random "haunts" to help build the mood. Things like having one Char see something out of the corner of his eye, hearing a whisper no one else does that suddenly stops, having the feeling someone is right behind you, sudden cold spots, hearing weeping or hysterical laughing up ahead, thinking a character is walking next to you, then seeing them up ahead, things like that. Just think of the horror movies that REALLY scared you, how they built suspense, and plop those aspects down into your game.
Had them happening sporadically at first, then speeding up the deeper they got. At one point, several of the haunts were overlapping during a fight with REAL monsters. The party was so freaked out by then it was mass confusion. When you have the PLAYERS shouting confusing instructions at each other with real panic in their voices, you know you've done your job. :)
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You guys are such sissies! :PI take it back! I just did a search for camel spider on the web. OH MY GOD!!!!!
www.florian-schlachter.de/uploads/camelspider.jpg
You know, I've always kidded my girlfriedn becasue she is downright terrified of spiders, even little grain-of-salt sized ones. After seeing that damn picture, I can now share some of her terror. Damn, if that thing jumped on me, I blast clear out of my skin.
You guys are such sissies! :P
I take it back! I just did a search for camel spider on the web. OH MY GOD!!!!!
www.florian-schlachter.de/uploads/camelspider.jpg
You know, I've always kidded my girlfriedn becasue she is downright terrified of spiders, even little grain-of-salt sized ones. After seeing that damn picture, I can now share some of her terror. Damn, if that thing jumped on me, I blast clear out of my skin.
Just went to that link:
O M F _____ G!
Back on topic:
I think a big part of building horror in a party would involve the neutralizing or taking away of high powered magic items; true helplessness would foment horror quickly.
It's not easy to scare characters when they can just whip out their "big-ass fill-in-the-blank powerful magic item" and blow whatever it is away...
Either running a magic-poor world where the general population is at the mercy of unknown horrors in the wilderness or populating the world with lots of rust monsters and disenchanters (sp?) would be a very 'Ravenloft'-ish start...
The farther down the food chain that Human society is, the more horrors you can run in the world...
M
Yeah, the first time I found one of those camel spiders in my tent I was to say, un-pleased...I think it was hunting the rats. Lets just say, that if you ever took you boots off, you gave them a good shaking out before you put them back on. Camel spiders, Emperor Scorpions, sand vipers, all things best left alone. Hell, even the sand flies could give you the Baghdad Boil.
ASEO out
Some other people have touched on the importance of building a mood. The few times I've run a haunted setting, I made a chart of random "haunts" to help build the mood. Things like having one Char see something out of the corner of his eye, hearing a whisper no one else does that suddenly stops, having the feeling someone is right behind you, sudden cold spots, hearing weeping or hysterical laughing up ahead, thinking a character is walking next to you, then seeing them up ahead, things like that. Just think of the horror movies that REALLY scared you, how they built suspense, and plop those aspects down into your game.
Had them happening sporadically at first, then speeding up the deeper they got. At one point, several of the haunts were overlapping during a fight with REAL monsters. The party was so freaked out by then it was mass confusion. When you have the PLAYERS shouting confusing instructions at each other with real panic in their voices, you know you've done your job. :)
You SO rock.
I have GOT to make a list and do that!
...I've got wood... heh, heh....heh.
M
It's not easy to scare characters when they can just whip out their "big-ass fill-in-the-blank powerful magic item" and blow whatever it is away...
M
This really gets to the core of the problem. I'll use the camel spider as an example. Every single person that followed that link got the major heebie jeebies. However, plop one in your D&D Game and someone's liable to pin it to the wall with a dagger and forget about it. How do you take that same 1/2 hit dice spider in D&D and make it scare the players the same way the camel spider freaks us out?
C.
Maybe the picture is a good place to start?
This really gets to the core of the problem. I'll use the camel spider as an example. Every single person that followed that link got the major heebie jeebies. However, plop one in your D&D Game and someone's liable to pin it to the wall with a dagger and forget about it. How do you take that same 1/2 hit dice spider in D&D and make it scare the players the same way the camel spider freaks us out?
C.
You don't in fantasy d20. If you want to scare players with any kind of monster you don't make them adventurers. Make them play in a Victorian setting or some such and have them roll up 'normal people'. No weapon skills etc. Players taking the role of Butler his wife and their 5 year old child in the haunted house could probably be scared by a good DM by fairly easily with atmosphere and maybe a little theatrics. Good players would co-operate.
But in fantasy adventure gaming the living dead is just so much sword fodder...and when times get really tough there is a guy you hang with that can produce massive balls of fire and toss them 60 feet from thin air. When you hang in this kind of a crowd Camel Spiders don't seem all that impressive.
When you hang in this kind of a crowd Camel Spiders don't seem all that impressive.
Unless they're a handout...
The times I have run encounters where my players have panicked and their PCs have fallen prey to the players fears have all been instances where a Creature demonstrates the capability of outright kill (way beyond -10 here) a character in a single round. Several times I've watched PC adopt the "I don't have to out run the monster, I just have to out run one of my party members" ecsape plan. For characters of around 4th level Gorillions are a good way of doing this. Their four attacks with the rend for every two hits has made my parties flee screaming. This proves even more true when the creature may eat a fallen PC, or the PC has no means of being returned to life (a decision a DM must make, In my game any method of returning from the dead requires some part of the body (if not all of it) and always costs the PC at least 1 level which must be regained through play).
One party got nicknamed "Susan and the Sissy Girls"
ASEO out
I always thought that a good way to scare pc's in a role playing game is to take away their stuff.
Zombies aren't scary? What happens when they've got no armor, weapons, spells, light, magic and there are zombies pouring into the room?
Suddenly the 20th level fighter (who did not take improved unarmed strike) cannot hurt these creatures immune to his futile blows.
Many times the characters become defined by their stuff and you take it away and things get deadlier and scarier.
We've been playing d20 for about 5 years now and we took a break and played one my favorite games: Battlelords of the 23rd century. It was new to everyone but they started having a blast playing new races and learning about new technology. They were wearing armor and had lasers, pulse rifles, etc. and given and received a couple of criticals - and in this game criticals COUNT.
Then they had to do a stakeout and fight some bad guys without their armor. Almost every melee hit was a critical. Suddenly combat took a much more serious and grim tone and they were jumping at everything. When the police showed up to settle things out one of the guys thought it would be a good idea to run away from the cops. He was smeared in one shot. He then said that he could have done it in D&D. Three guys said it in unison, "This isn't D&D anymore."
So from what I've read there have been a couple of things that have been universal themes: things out of your control, lonliness, violation of the flesh (cannibalism, vampires, etc.), and of course the unknown.
When it comes to a good D&D adventure I say shake it up. Put them in various situations where there stuff doesn't work. The ghazneths from the Cormyr Forgotten Realms novel series are some seriously bada-- bad guys that would screw some parties up and make my characters terrified.
I think that it's also important to realize that if you want to scare the characters, that's one thing.
Make sure everyone understands what their characters know and what they don't know. It's always been frustrating to play in a campaign where a 2nd level fighter yells: it's a chimera! Here are it's strengths and weaknesses! When any other 17 year old rookie is going to practically soil himself if that thing drops down in front of him. Players need to roleplay their characters green. If they've never fought a gelatinous cube they might not necessarily know how to deal with it.
But it sounds like you want to scare the players as well. If you want to do that you're going to have to get the players on edge. They're playing a game - they know it's safe. You really are going to have to freak them out somehow to get the players feel unsafe.
I always thought that a good way to scare pc's in a role playing game is to take away their stuff.
A4, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, was always one of my favorite modules for just that reason. Loincloths and some sand... and it is dark with earthquakes threatening collapse and disrupting your sleep so you can not regain spells. Ready...go.
It doesn't get much better than that.
ASEO out
I always thought that a good way to scare pc's in a role playing game is to take away their stuff.
A4, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, was always one of my favorite modules for just that reason. Loincloths and some sand... and it is dark with earthquakes threatening collapse and disrupting your sleep so you can not regain spells. Ready...go.
It doesn't get much better than that.
ASEO out
Heh! Amen, brother. You either loved it or HATED it, depending on which side of the DM's screen you were sitting on ;)
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But it sounds like you want to scare the players as well. If you want to do that you're going to have to get the players on edge. They're playing a game - they know it's safe. You really are going to have to freak them out somehow to get the players feel unsafe.
I'd say a camel spider (the real thing, not just a picture) would more than take care of scaring the players. Anybody got one I could borrow?
It may not be the same as real fright, but didn't the old Ravenloft game have a horror rating that each character had, and when you saw scarry things your rating went down until something bad happened to your character?
Did this ever make it to Ravenloft 3.0?
What were people's thoughts on this Horror system. I never played it, and only came acros it in a few Ravenloft adventures that were published in DUNGEON.
ASEO out
Remember as Dean Koontz put it, anticipation is far scarier than violence. Cut the party away from one another and make them realize something is around, put them in the dark and give subtle hints to what is going on around them, that's what I do.
I DMed a few games of Call of Cthulhu (Cthulu? Cth-whatever...), and I can say for a fact that just reading the printed adventures for this game will send chills down your spine. Something about the unknown terrifies people.
In Cthulhu, a zombie is a scary thing. You only encounter one (at the end of the adventure). In D&D however, you encounter dozens and act as deli meat for your fighters.
Also, the relative weakness of the characters compared to the semi-invulnerability of the foes scares the players. Knowing that by the end of the adventure, maybe one or two of the starting six characters will make it out alive.
I'm not saying that invulnerable creatures are scary, but unknown or new creatures with a good resistance to damage and a dark setting where the players feel alone is, to me, scary.
The times I have run encounters where my players have panicked and their PCs have fallen prey to the players fears have all been instances where a Creature demonstrates the capability of outright kill (way beyond -10 here) a character in a single round. Several times I've watched PC adopt the "I don't have to out run the monster, I just have to out run one of my party members" ecsape plan. For characters of around 4th level Gorillions are a good way of doing this. Their four attacks with the rend for every two hits has made my parties flee screaming. This proves even more true when the creature may eat a fallen PC, or the PC has no means of being returned to life (a decision a DM must make, In my game any method of returning from the dead requires some part of the body (if not all of it) and always costs the PC at least 1 level which must be regained through play).
One party got nicknamed "Susan and the Sissy Girls"
ASEO out
Yeah but did you really scare your players? Certianly you caused chaos and presumably the players PCs where having bladder control problems but I doubt the actual players where scared. When this sort of thing occures in my games its often pretty funny except for the guy thats been elected as the rube and his swearing and indignation often just adds to the hilarity. Once the players are trying to get away like this they are almost certianly meta-gaming heavily. Counting squares, comparing move rates etc. All of this runs counter to the atmosphere of horror
IMO.One effect of this I think is often in evidence is that ones players are begining to distance themselves emoitionally from the fate of their characters. Something a DM should be on the look out for if your DMing horror and something the DM should be activly counteracting - by describing things through the characters eyes and using every trick of the trade to put the players back into the PCs heads.
I'm also affraid of balloons and raccoons.
Clowns. Scary. Evil.
Everything written in this thread has scared me! Especially the camel spiders and clowns. Those two are just extra terrible! I used to think that I wasn't scared of anything. Not anymore. I don't ever want to play DnD with any of you guys as DM. I'd probably wet myself! :)
--Ray.
What if we combined camel spiders and clowns! Brilliant!
What if we combined camel spiders and clowns! Brilliant!
Ewwwww! Clowns covered in camel spiders. (shudder)
Or... camel spiders covered in clowns! Bwahahahaha!!!
On Mystara there are these magic-using spiders from Herath called Aranea. Just imagine them in clown face paint!
--Ray.