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Spoilers, players please don't read.
So my crew has cleared all of Harrowstone and only has the room with the Splatter Man. I've had a love/hate relationship with many aspects of haunts - from their "how would I know this destruct condition" to what I feel (felt?) were ambiguities in the haunt rules.
Having run 99% of Harrowstone now over several months I have one particular problem that bothers me about haunts. I'm not sure if this is good or bad that my players are playing this way.
Haunts trigger once you get inside their radius - PCs outside of the radius don't see the effects. So a PC who walks into a room and the room starts the haunt, booga booga, the PC seems all this horribleness, but the ones outside the room . . . don't. My PCs have begun to use this very efficiently to their advantage and I think it sort of ruins a bit of the fun of haunts.
Here's an example:
My PCs dug the back way through the secret passageway into the Nevermore, where TSM is. We have a rogue character who is out in front, like a good rogue, he sneaks into the room. Well, the haunt goes off since it affects the room area. No one else sees this, of course. Blood starts appearing on the wall, spelling out the rogue's name, he fails a Will save, loses Wisdom damage, I tell the other characters that they DON'T see this - all they see is their rogue looking pained in the room. So they reach in a drag him out. :(
Is this bad? I dunno. If you think about haunts as basically psychic traps - I totally can see a rogue out in front exploring, getting blasted by a trap and backing out - then the team regrouping and thinking how to tackle the room. But I think it ruins quite a bit of the interesting aspects of haunts. There's been all this work put into the effects and the PCs just go "OK, we're sending in the clerics first, tie a rope to me, if I get blasted, drag me out of there (fail my perception check)."
I mean . . . good role playing . . . good roll playing . . . but working as intended?
There's also something interesting that I'd never really thought about until I was in the moment. Consider this:
The Mourning Maiden haunt has a 15foot radius - which is smaller than the torture chamber room. So as a DM you have to ask PCs to move about the room and when someone gets with 15ft - WHAM! Roll Perception, OMG you see the iron maiden starting to creep open!
OK so what happens here if they fail the Will save, the one that causes them to see a loved one inside - the one that makes them run into the (now open) Iron Maiden? More to the point, what do the *OTHER* PCs, outside of 15ft, see? Because . . . the iron maiden didn't open for them, it's just a piece of furniture.
What I did on the spot I'm marginally happy with, I said that the PC ran up to the device, opened it, jumped inside, and closed it. That kind of works. So next PC goes "wtf!?" and runs into the 15ft radius - now, question, do *THEY* see a loved one inside? I thought their friend was inside. Do they fail it run up, jump in there WITH the other PC? Do they jump in and toss the other guy out of the way?
Furthermore, my PCs decided to basically stand there and beat on the iron maiden - they became convinced that THAT was the way to destroy the haunt. Technically I don't think this would work. My PCs started prying the door off the torture device. Frankly I think the haunt would still exist with the door missing, even if it appeared that a real door was there.
The whole thing just becomes kludgey. What bothers me is that I've felt after running Harrowstone that almost all of the haunts had this kind of kludge. I love the theme and the work put into them, but somehow I don't like how they come out at the table.
I'd appreciate some thoughts from other DMs.
I don't see much of a problem if people outside the haunt don't see anything. The Lone Wanderer seeing something moving in the mirror or being chased down a hallway by some sort of dark, lurking shadow, only to bump into someone else who doesn't see anything at all is a fairly standard trope.
In cases of the names appearing on the walls, the non-effected characters suddenly see their friend freaking out. After all, the purpose of the haunt is for the players to activate a deathtrap on their own. The image of the lone, haunted guy freaking out and tearing at the walls while their friends try to pull him out before he brings the ceiling on his head is pretty evocative.
As for the people who aren't affected by the Maiden, they don't see anything at all, or maybe just a shadowy, beckoning figure standing in it.
Maybe I am missing it, but I can't find anything that says the effects of haunts are only visible to those within the haunt. I just reread the section in the GMG but didn't see it.
Sean
I do not worry too much about AoE when it comes to Haunts. I consider what is going to make the coolest scene. Sometimes that will mean one person seeing the haunt, and other times the whole party. I'd say be fluid with it, and definitely wouldn't allow that tactic to work all of the time.
I have to say that I found Haunts to be wholly unsatisfying and a clunky engine to use. Not only were they far too numerous to continue to deliver impact in Harrowstone, but they were far too limited to constitute a viable threat to a group of PC's that approached them intelligently. After the first half-dozen or so haunts that popped up, the PC's began using the Summoner's eidolon to trigger the haunts.
Once they knew a haunt was in the room, it was simply a matter of dealing with it however they needed to. A very blase method of dealing wtih the horror genre. Oh, there were a few haunts that had an impact; but those generally were haunts that were tied up in other encounters (the Piper's haunt for example, was particularly nasty, especially after re-designing the encounter to actually pose a threat).
Outside of my disappointment with the haunts (which beyond being too numerous, were also very poorly explained, particularly in regards to how knowledge: religion would interact with the haunt) my only other complaint was that the encounters felt very easy. I continuously had to adjust the encounters for my party, particularly with the ranger (who had a reach weapon and combat reflexes), who had a habit of killing off every monster before combat even began. Still, that's a minor issue since I've never had a premade adventure challenge my players without scaling the power level up.
A couple other points of note: The PC's skipped almost the entirety of the book because they were immediately drawn to the prison. After minimal amounts of research (the witch invested heavily into knowledges, and was able to hit diff 25's and 30's at 1st level), they bypassed the Town Hall meeting and the painting of blood on the statue by going into the prison at first level. And even at first level they were able to clear out the first and second floors of the prison, and are now entering the underground level having advanced to third level in the process. Let us just say that Combat Reflexes is nasty in here, high Knowledge...
How many PCs and what point buy do you use?
Can you give some examples how they overcame the persistent haunts, how did they damage them?