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Hello all;
Been a DM for 15+ years now. Calling out for all the DM's and players alike now.
As a player, did you ever experience tension, fear or terror during your plays? Under which conditions did this happen to be?
As for DM's, did you ever hear your players catching their breath, turning pale with fear during your campaigns? What was the thing that caused this?
Maybe if we can collect these memories here under a topic, so that DM's that want some tension in their plays can make use of them.
Any other strange feeling / cause for these may also come in handy.
I wonder what makes players cringe... I know this is borderline subjective but... is the tension just limited to "save or die" dice throws? Just for the mathematical output of chance of success? Or is it the creature design, the temperature and illumination of the room played, the dm's voice... Let us find out.
I can honestly say I've felt tension and, while not fear, the thrill of a "life or death" situation as a player. I wish every game I get to play in is like that. Except Serpent's Skull. I've lost 4 characters in the volume of the damned thing already... lol
As a DM, I work really hard to make my players feel what is going on in a particular scene. I have made people actually cry during emotional scenes, physically ill enough to leave the table during others, and have made an entire table full of grown men jump and reflexively shout profanities by startling them.
One of the things I've learned to do over the years is subtly find out what my players' phobias are, and when they least expect it, have their characters confront such. I have a friend whose phobia of snakes is so pronounced she's had to leave the table when her ranger encountered them.
Good times.
When I was much younger I used to get really invested in my characters and would have emotional reactions to what happened to them.
After I got married and had kids, a mortgage, more responsibility at work, etc. I found it much easier to be disengaged from my characters.
That has greatly reduced the intensity of my own internal emotions while gaming.
But I still feel anxiety, anticipation, satisfaction, frustration and other emotions, it's just at a much lower intensity.
Fear is difficult to elicit during a game. Tension less so, and the rules can help that greatly. Setting up any important task with better than a 50% chance of failure (and making sure the players know it) is a great way to get the tension flowing. A great example of this was from my groups Council of Thieves session last Sunday. Basically, so I don't have to spoiler anything, we were attempting to rescue an ally, but couldn't kill anyone that we were fighting. The enemies had no such compunctions about killing us, and we had brought some allies (very low level with only npc class levels) with us to help out. We all knew that they were one hit kills for the enemy, and that there was a very good chance the whole thing could very quickly go pear shaped on us. Altogether a very tense encounter.
Fear is a different story altogether. The only times I've ever actually be afraid during campaigns were during World of Darkness games. Two in particular, both for different reasons.
The first was in a Vampire the Masquerade game. The party was a group of Sabbat vampires that were the sole survivors of a war party meant to take Toronto from the Camarilla. We infiltrated the local Camarilla (under the direction of an NPC who was working against us the entire time, it turned out), and the entire time were being stalked by a wraith that was obsessed with killing vampires for some reason. The scenes with the wraith were downright terrifying. From the storytellers description of it, to the song he would play every time it made an appearance, with a healthy dose of metagame knowledge that this thing could quite literally make hate to us if we weren't smart about it. Very well done, but difficult to do, considering the whole thing is set by atmosphere that can be easily ruined (getting cheetos, spilling a drink, farting...all of these things will kill that feel pretty immediately). Turns out we were very justified in our fears of this thing. The game ended in a TPK when one member of our pack decided to stand his ground against the thing while the rest of us ran. We thought he was right behind us, and when we realized he wasn't ran back in just such a way that he was able to kill us off one by one. The whole thing wouldn't have happened that way, but that particular player was sick of his character, wanted to kill him off and write up a new one, not considering the fact that, as Sabbat vampires we were all slightly blood bound to each other, and thus very likely to run back to his aid, whereas in another game we would have just left him to die.
The second time, with the same group, different storyteller, was a New World of Darkness game that we ego quested, basically making game versions of ourselves and running a campaign. We were chasing a supernatural serial killer who was picking off people at random and killing them in gruesome elaborate ways (think Saw if the killer set things up so that other people would accidentally set off his contraptions). It was creepy, and incredibly tense when the killer abducted a friend of ours. The actually scary parts, however, had to do with a side plot about how people exposed to the supernatural were contracting a "virus" of sorts. It would affect their eyesight first, then cognition, leaving them little more than zombies, creeping off to the dark uninhabited places of the city to escape from everything. There was a fair amount of creepiness going on in those encounters, and some existential terror as we realized that the "monsters" we had killed were actually people just like us, people who looked where they shouldn't have (what were doing), and came down with this affliction (which a few of us were starting to exhibit the symptoms of). Also will go down in history as the campaign where a friend of ours killed his own mother.
My players have also been getting fairly creeped out by book 4 of Carrion Crown, but that has mostly inspired righteous fury (thanks to the paladin) than actual fear. Oh, and insanity, lots and lots of insanity.
Thanks for the replies friends.
Seemingly we can deduce these things from what we have discussed:
1-)Subtly finding out player phobias and playing towards this.
This approach may or may not be something good to do, depending on the severity of the phobia. Now I remember one of my players reaction to giant scorpions, which were being used by goblins to poison the water supplies of a town. He led a group of specialist rangers who were called night whispers (lash user rangers, swinging from tree to tree, hence the sound and the name) He bravely stood and fought against a white dragon young with his fellow friends... but in the first sight of giant scorpion he ran back. Many of the night whispers had died because of this. I remember him gathering his feet below himself to remove them from ground... where perhaps he believed a scorpion may sting him.
2-)Chance of success: there seems to be a balance point between possible success / failure rates, when revealed to players somehow, seems to create a tension. But this kind of tension is mechanical and mathematical, surely some players love it but some dont.
3-)Time pressure: some kind of time pressure may require players to think differently, which may stimulate different reactions in their brains, hopefully including tension. Combined with other elements this may prove usefull.
4-) Setting: World of darkness seems to have advantage when used right, because it's very nocturnal and instinctive. I also remember warhammer 40k rpg -the inquisitiorial one- was very easy to die in, which created another level of worry. Each shot being fired at you could end you right there. This may also be considered inside chance of success...
Overall: Still not enough. What I can say at the moment is...
Pushing players out of their ordinary thinking route makes it easy to incite fear/tension. No body feels fear in their normal state of mind, because everyone knows this is just a game. You have to make them think "hey, it is very easy to die in this system" or "in this setting, death comes in very horrible ways." This means they have to compare the system/setting they play in with other systems. We all do this instinctively, especially if we have experience with more than one system. ADdition of time pressure into equation may change how mathematician players minds work, causing them to feel some tension they don't normally feel.
Please, send more experiences and help me gather all the information together.
Atmosphere, and the unknown, are the prime tools in your toolkit for deriving tension and fear from your players.
I have had players visibly get shivers from games I've run. It's all about playing on their senses, throwing things at them that they can't just dispose of by force; play on the 5 senses and make them feel like they are experiencing what their characters are experiencing.
For instance; maybe they get a wiff of some kind of flowery perfume, and a few seconds later someone in the party notices a human-like shape pass by a doorway. Upon further inspection, there's nothing there. They experience a strange, subtle buzzing in their ears, it gets louder and louder, they come upon a room and as soon as they wing open the door, it stops...
I've found that subtle things build tension better than loud, in-your-face ones. As soon as a player can identify what is causing the disturbance, much of the fear is gone. Simply throwing a big, scary high-CR monster at the party won't scare them at all. Not knowing what on earth is playing with them will worry them more, even if it's really just a delicate Fey in a playful mood.
I've done it once. (I'd claim twice, but Olangru's Temple in Savage Tide elicited more disgust and nausea than horror so I don't think it counts ;) )
I began a game by having the players roll up two versions of their characters - a commoner-style version (ended up with two commoners and an expert) and the actual classed character. The three of them started with their commoner stats and I gave them a little info about the world. One of the things I was careful to point out was the fact that in this setting, you did not venture beyond the city walls at night - strange, bloodthirsty creatures stalked the lands once the sun set, killing or kidnapping all they encountered.
Needless to say, within a couple of hours the party got stuck between towns at night.
Played up the darkness, the eerie look of the moon, the oddity of the night stillness interrupted occasionally not by insects or wolves but by metallic noises "like blades scraping against blades", things like that: lots of description of things that are just ever so slightly off. The party's effective helplessness in the face of something clearly meant to be tackled by experienced adventurers - which they soon became, as this scene ended with an event that gave them access to their full-scale character sheets - on top of the surreal unnaturalness of the scene elicited the effect I was going for.
Sadly it's one I haven't managed to reproduce since.
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Music can play a BIG role in setting atmosphere. But, some players don't like music during gaming. Gotta weigh the likes your "audience."
Music can play a BIG role in setting atmosphere.
Seconded so very much. The song I used during the above scene? The One Who Is Torn Apart by Yasunori Mitsuda from the Xenogears soundtrack... YouTube it if you're not at work like I =)
I was able to get a decent feeling of horror in Book 2 of "Rise of the Runelords" ("The Skinsaw Murders"), when the party was exploring a haunted house.
I used music, sound effects, lighting, and good written descriptions (I re-wrote much of the boxed text), and think I really pulled off some good horror when haunts manifested.
Setting the mood is tough to pull of in my game, though-- I have one-to-three players who remote in via Skype, and we use a and virtual table-top (MapTool). Music tends to eat the Skype bandwidth, making audio choppy, so I've had to cut that part out.
In the sessions where I did successfully pull off a sense of horror, my remote players happened to all be in town, so we actually got together in person. I think it would have been a lot harder to pull off under our usual circumstances.
During one of my first ever horror-themed games I ran, I played the score to Bram Stoker's Dracula. The music, combined with being a grey, rainy day in RL, amplified the creepy-factor and made the game much more immersive and memorable.
Looking back, the homemade ruleset I used was atrocious, but the scare-factor and fun were well worth it.
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Fear has long since gone by the wayside in gaming for me. Everything seems designed to keep characters alive these days.
Of course, that will depend entirely on what game it is you're actually playing.
In Traveller, it's possible to not survive character generation (although I consider that to be rather inane and stupid).
In Call of Cthulhu, at a certain point a violent death is probably the best thing that can happen to you. Otherwise, permanent insanity looms...
Hell, it can even depend on what adventure you're running. Orc and a Pie is infinitely more survivable that is Rappan Athuk.
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As a DM I've pulled this off just a couple of times. Pretty much the suggestions on storytelling tricks and setting the mood were similar, but the key ingredient for me was the fact that the sessions were solo player sessions - I could pull it off with one or two players, but more than that and I think something is lost in translation. My only advice on making it work would be that the characters should be relatively low level, so they have more of a feel of being mortal and vulnerable.
The one that comes to mind in terms of 2nd edition D&D was an adventure from an older Dungeon Magazine where the character arrives at a remote wilderness outpost in the midst of a blizzard, and is essentially "trapped" at the outpost with an innkeeper and a motley collection of strangers. Unbeknownst to them, a young Slaad starts stalking and murdering the NPC's, and the character is trying to sort out the "murderer" from the group, slowly gathering clues as people disappear one by one. So a mix of "Alien" and "The Thing" in a D&D setting and is not totally original, but it had the perfect horror elements of fear, paranoia and lack of control in that one. The pacing was hard to pull off from a DM standpoint and you couldn't rush it, but it was well worth the time invested. It was brilliant - it was years ago but the player still remembers that one with great clarity and wants to throw things at me whenever I bring it up!
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Running a chat game on Yahoo chat once, I was describing to the players how they'd walked into what had been a great temple, though much of the ceiling was gone and they could see the stars outside. But hanging from chains anywhere there was a place to put one was a human body, each swaying very slightly in a breeze. They were hanging from hooks that had torn through the flesh of their shoulders, and the air was filled with the sound of softly tinkling chains, almost like windchimes.
Then, they began to hear whispering, and looking around, saw all the people were alive, and whispering rhythmic passages in a language they couldn't understand. All had their eyes open and stared blankly downward with slight smiles on their faces.
At that moment I told them the door behind them had slammed closed. A few seconds go by and I hear from everyone except one player. I sent a note to ask if she was still there, and she said she had had to quit shaking before she could type. When I asked what she meant, she said at the exact instant I said the door slammed, a friend of hers signed off Yahoo chat, with its little door shutting sound. She had the sound up on her computer pretty loud and she said she screamed so loud a neighbor came to check on her.
Proud, I was.
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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.
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Its in the detailed questions for me.
Slowing the game down, and asking each player exactly what they do. Even an underground puddle can be made creepy and scary, possibly an ooze.
Where do you step? Are you stepping over the puddle? It seems to be just a ripple in the surface. This is fear of the unknown especially when you are almost trying to give them help with knowledge checks and hints and the like.
It only works for a few hours but the relief of combat can be tangible for my players. Something they understand.
Cheers
Very nice everyone, thank you. I believe in time we can turn this into a more or less solid resource for fear related gameplay techniques.
I am trying to summarize what have been written by you. What I want to do is to boil all these down to some kind of "fear 101", a "how to" guide for fear realted gameplay.
One other thing I believe is true: You cannot prolong fear for too long. Human physiology and psychology fights against it and tries to turn it into other feelings after some time. So sometimes you should let your players experience other, more neutral tone feelings like the feeling of progression, success, pride etc. But be carefull, to much joy or jokes may change psyche in a way that prevents any more fear for that session. This may also be used to end fear themes for the day.
* Fear of the unknown: People fear what they don't understand. However some players strictly want to keep control of everything in the game. (Control freaks?) When you try to create tension and fear in some way, like sounds suddenly stopping when players open the door, their minds begin to think like that: "Hey, I didn't roll for stealth, how the hell did they hear me? The dm is bending the rules again!" Well maybe if he keeps playing normally he will find out the reason, but for the rest of the game such players loose their connection. On the other hand, I believe it is not healthy to dismiss ideas because they may not work on different kinds of players. So for the rest of this study we will take into consideration "normal/average player", and it will be up to individual dm's to handle different kinds of players.
*Music: If you can find the right kind of music, it may help inducing fear/tension. This is under category of environment. I believe a low sound volume is essential, to prevent distractions and to keep it subtle. Music should not become the primary aspect, it should just help you.
*Low number of players/lower level of characters make it easier: When playing one-on-one or with a couple, it is much easier to drive things towards what you want. This is true for all aspects of the game, including fear related issues. Also lower level characters make it feel more like a "survival" kind of game rather than "hack&slash" so it helps. I wonder, what would still make the players fear after long time, when they are in their 13+ levels.
This is it for now. Please warn if I missed something. I will gather everything under a much better format next time. Also please forgive language errors, English is not my main.
When I DM-ed "Hangman's noose" I used an alarm clock which rang every 20 minutes. The players knew every time it rang something horrible would happen (one of the events during the night) and that each event would be worse than the last. They also knew they could prevent this by solving the murder.
I have never experienced an evening on which the players were more tense and more in a hurry to solve the adventure.
The other one was an adventure with meenlocks (Palace of the twisted king from Dungeon 116). I played up the creepyness of the adventures and kept delaying the moment the players really saw the monsters. They kept hearing all kinds of noises, seeing blood on the walls and their dreams were disturbed by the monsters. This led to a really creepy atmosphere and one of my players told me afterwards she hoped she would never encounter meenlocks again in an adventure.
I've been there a few times :)
One of the keys is actually CARING about if your character lives. A LOT of the games I see here are TOO dangerous. Danger should be used sparingly... if EVERY game your player shows up with a new character... and if he's gone through 3 characters in the same campaign... then Death becomes jaded.
If the character has won every battle that he's come against... and NOW there's an enemy he MAY not beat?!? THAT gets me nervous.
Also, Backstory plays into this too. If wives, parents, kids are threatened, and you can make it feel REAL... THAT can be scary... as opposed to random NPC #7...
I was in a game where my character had to go fight an unspeakable horror RIGHT before his scheduled wedding... The feeling was VERY strong that splitting the party was necessary, but that one half may never make it back... it was VERY thick in the air that night...
Also, Nerf ressurections. Lose the spells, up the cost, Destroy the soul, SOMETHING... If you can fall down and get back up, then dying isn't that scary anymore ;)
I've got one guy in Serpent skull who has been raised twice... I stated that if he died again, It would be cheap to bring him back again... but we're in book 6 now, so I PROBABLY would, just to avoid introducing a 16th level new guy :-/
But yeah... death was too common there, I don't feel the ever-present threat that they want me too ;)
All good points Phantom! IN my games, I try to nerf resurrection spells quite a bit, depending on the nature of the game. In a horror game, there are usually possible side effects that make resurrecting seem less desirable. For example, the spell might awry and the PC has a chance at coming back as some kind of undead...
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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Fun story of player anxiety
After the (in game) fog clears, I run up to my room, saying "I forgot something" and come back down with my Ravenloft boxed set. Everyone starts freaking. We play the rest of the night with them being paranoid. We end with them entering a villiage and finding out they're not in Ravenloft, but just 30 miles south of Waterdeep. The kicker? The players were so scared that they never thought to use their characters NWP (one had astrology, the other navigation) to check the stars.
Bad story of player anxiety.
One of the players almost came over the table to throttle me. I knew she was an incest survivor, but didn't know that's what he called her. So I accidentally pushed a berzerk button and ruined the entire night for her. Though killing the BBEG may have been a kind of therapy...
IN my games, I try to nerf resurrection spells quite a bit, depending on the nature of the game. In a horror game, there are usually possible side effects that make resurrecting seem less desirable. For example, the spell might awry and the PC has a chance at coming back as some kind of undead...I like this idea. I've already ruled that NPCs cannot cast spells over 6th level in my campaign, so the PCs won't have true resurrection until one of them can cast it (and I use the 3.5/AD&D rules on this, so the level lost cannot be restored). But if a screw-up can create an undead.... >:)
Ravenloft 3e has rules for this. In a nutshell, the recipient of the spell has to make a Save, with the spellcaster's Caster Level helping reduce the DC. I've seen mishaps and misses by 1 point before, and things got very interesting...
@ Josh M - in another thread (and maybe in this one and I missed it) didn't you say your real life career is scary movies? You should be our guru on this subject. Therefore I'm posing this mostly to you but also to anyone else in this thread.
My group always meets at one guys house and plays in his dining room. We've tried several times in different permutations but can't break away from this space. As such his kids occasionally trounce through earlier in the night.
To add to that all 3 of my players are in their mid-to-late 30's (as am I) and we have combined almost a century of gaming experience.
My point is: does the age and experience of my players factor in as much as the lameness of the environment?
I haven't evoked such strong emotions since college just over a decade ago. Back then my players were younger, the environment more controlled, more personal. We had tears, gasps, dice-flinging frustration and one time such celebration as required my upstairs neighbor to come down and threaten to beat me up and call the cops.
Nowadays I'm lucky if I get a "cool room man" from my current group...
@ Josh M - in another thread (and maybe in this one and I missed it) didn't you say your real life career is scary movies? You should be our guru on this subject. Therefore I'm posing this mostly to you but also to anyone else in this thread.
My group always meets at one guys house and plays in his dining room. We've tried several times in different permutations but can't break away from this space. As such his kids occasionally trounce through earlier in the night.
To add to that all 3 of my players are in their mid-to-late 30's (as am I) and we have combined almost a century of gaming experience.
My point is: does the age and experience of my players factor in as much as the lameness of the environment?
I haven't evoked such strong emotions since college just over a decade ago. Back then my players were younger, the environment more controlled, more personal. We had tears, gasps, dice-flinging frustration and one time such celebration as required my upstairs neighbor to come down and threaten to beat me up and call the cops.
Nowadays I'm lucky if I get a "cool room man" from my current group...
A lot of what I'm abut to say works equally well for just about any role-playing game group, regardless of genre. It's just with a game where atmosphere and tension are just as important as dice rolls and stats, these factors are amplified.
Age and experience play a big role in successfully selling a scene to your players. The less time spent flipping through pages and looking up rules, the more focus your group has on what's happening in the moment. The same could be said for any game, really. But when it comes to actively pulling an emotional reaction from your players, focus is everything. Get tripped up by a rule, or forget a detail, and all the tension can quickly get lost.
I've found that playing appropriate music really helps prime the group for what you're trying to portray; horror movie music scores work excellently; a good score can evoke brooding, dark feelings, and help give your game more of a movie-feel. Also, the music helps drown out white noise, and smooth over other distracting noises from other rooms in the house. Doesn't have to be loud, background music is best kept just below talking level, maybe lower if someone in your group has a soft voice.
Gaming environments can be tricky. I've ran successful campaigns in basements, living rooms, cramped bedrooms, outdoors, parent's houses, etc. I've found that as long as your players are interested in what you're running, your surroundings become less important. Readily-available gaming space is a luxury where I'm from, so if you guys have a room at all, you're halfway there.
Your big mood-killers you want to reign in are out of game distractions, which you may or may not have much control over; phone calls, texting, loud TV's, kids, etc. It gets difficult to keep the group focused and attentive when the little ones are prancing through the room, but that's life. I have the same issue at my house; my step-daughter loves to show off and act goofy whenever we have company over, and it gets massively distracting. But, she's a kid, and the kids come first. The game has to work around them. You might have to pace the game in such as way that the intense stuff happens later in the session, maybe after the kids go to bed. If not, and you're able to pull off an atmospheric, intense scene with a kid next to you making funny faces, you're a better DM than I, lol.
Also...
My career isn't in doing scary movies, although I wish it were. I had 2 years of film and screenwriting classes, but no job opportunities were available after I finished school and I had to take what I could get. So, I don't work in the field, but I've had some schooling and a lifetime of scary movies(started watching them at 5 years old) for reference material. Being an OCD detail-freak helps too, YMMV.
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This may not be relevant.
I've felt dread in role-playing situations. Realized that I as a player was thinking "it's hopeless, we'll never (defeat the bad guy and save the girl)".
The GM calmly described the situation, took our input, and kept describing what happened. But since we were very invested in our characters, defeating said baddie, and saving the girl, I felt...literally dread. I know I went pale. I could feel my eyes widening. Time started to slow. It became hard to breathe.
Having a character you're invested in, having a situation that character cares about, and really being there as a player group and focusing are the things I think caused it for us.
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RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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There was an old Dragon magizne article (TSR, not Paizo) that talked about fear.
I don't remember all of it (and don't have my CDs with me) but I know part of it was to avoid numbers unless the players wanted to count out; "Dozens of writhing heads and hundreds of spindly legs" "How many are there?" "Do you want to take a round and just count?" Part of it was describing vs telling; "The large humanoid, bigger than any man you've ever seen, smashes its massive club against its hand, the slap of wood on flesh stinging your ears. 'Pay my toll tiny things!'" vs. "It's an ogre, with a club, he wants you to pay him to cross the bridge." And part of it was mixing things up. "You stab the wolf man mightily, the silvered sword cleaving its flesh, it responds by pulling the blade deeper to reach you and" *clatter of dice* hits you for X damage, as it wrenches the blade out, the wound already healing. (Wolfwere [cold iron] vs werewolf).
Of course this was all 2e type stuff, so there was no "Roll knowlege(X)" to find these things out.
Another "Scare the players, not the characters" moment.
The party ran screaming from the description of them assuming their original forms on death.
Since I don't use gore that much, I get strong reactions when I eventually do. Like when my players went through the Ogrekin farmhouse in book 3 of Rise of the Runelords, some of my players actually looked pale. lol
As mentioned above, the whole part with the Skinsawman and the murder investigation that happens in that book set a new tone for the gaming table.
The game of Call of Cthulhu has the knack to make players cringe. Heck, even as a DM just reading those Cthulhu adventure modules beforehand gave me the creeps.
Maybe it is the unknown that makes it scary.
Ultradan
Having a character you're invested in, having a situation that character cares about…
I think this is difficult to do when that character is just a pawn to move around the game board for the best tactical advantage.
For suspense to work, I think you need player buy-in. You only need one guy joking around to completely kill the mood.
@ Court Fool & Josh M: I agree that both atmosphere and player buy in go a long way (most of the way in my opinion) to achieving the kinds of reactions the OP was asking about.
Back when I did evoke a lot of emotional responses I had the following elements working for me:
1) controlled environment: all the points Josh made - dark and ominous music, my own apartment, subdued lighting, and no distractions. One of the points I always made was when the really intense things started happening I asked players to remove their books and put them in the adjoining room.
2) dedicated roleplayers: I'm not starting an argument; simply stating that, in MY experience (for my life only) I've had better reactions from players who were intense roleplayers that ALSO optimized tactically. Listen to my post here: there is NOTHING wrong with optimizing or tactical gamers.
Anyway, BECAUSE my old gaming group were such intense roleplayers, often character gen sessions took the whole night and we'd have to actually schedule another night to open a campaign. The players in that group wouldn't always be elaborate; they were however deliberate. The specifically created certain characters for a reason and interwove those reasons into a party from the beginning. IMO this "character reason" gave the player a personal interest in the character and the game. If I made a fighter to avenge my father then he'll be avenged and nothing on this EARTH will stop me save death itself (and once not even that...)
Nowadays as a grown up it feels like the end scene in Goodfellas; I have to play like all the other regular GM's. Bad flourescents that don't dim in a living room overlooking a busy street; kids and a dog that use game nights as their personal stage; heck like the movie I referenced I can't even get decent food where I live - where I grew up in Chicago there was good pizza on every corner; up here it's bread, cheese and ketchup from a chain...
Anyway, I'm restarting the game in a week. I'm looking for SOME kind of hook to get my board-gaming friends to start seeing the less-tactical side of PF. I'm swiping Josh's suggestions of creepy ambiance - it's a fey-based campaign after all, plenty of chances for a mite with prestidigitation to really annoy and unnerve a party of optimizers that CAN'T find the target they could so easily eliminate...
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PS @ Josh: I thought I remembered some connection between you and scary movies. Everyone reading this post: ignore Josh's modesty. He's your go to guru for scary stuff...
Since I don't use gore that much, I get strong reactions when I eventually do. Like when my players went through the Ogrekin farmhouse in book 3 of Rise of the Runelords, some of my players actually looked pale. lol
As mentioned above, the whole part with the Skinsawman and the murder investigation that happens in that book set a new tone for the gaming table...
Ultradan
This is a very good point. Gore, like any powerful stimuli, can quickly wear out it's welcome and leave the players numb to it, if used too often. Use it sparingly, and it'll drive home your point much better, and get a stronger reaction from your players.
I've played with DM's who made every room in the dungeon a gore-fest, and before we were halfway through it, players were asking to just skip the description and roll initiative. This is exactly the reaction you don't want.
Another big thing about gore to keep in mind, is that you have to really gauge your players, and how they might react, so you can measure how much to use. For example, my wife is incredibly squeamish; she does not like gore at all, but she can handle a little bit for the sake of story. She gets queasy very easy. On the other hand, I have a friend who absolutely revels in it; his go-to movies on any occasion include anything done by Clive Barker, and typically plays characters who mutilate themselves in some manner. So for him, the more the merrier. Also, mixing these two players in the same game has had mixed results...
@ Court Fool & Josh M: I agree that both atmosphere and player buy in go a long way (most of the way in my opinion) to achieving the kinds of reactions the OP was asking about.
Back when I did evoke a lot of emotional responses I had the following elements working for me:
1) controlled environment: all the points Josh made - dark and ominous music, my own apartment, subdued lighting, and no distractions. One of the points I always made was when the really intense things started happening I asked players to remove their books and put them in the adjoining room.
2) dedicated roleplayers: I'm not starting an argument; simply stating that, in MY experience (for my life only) I've had better reactions from players who were intense roleplayers that ALSO optimized tactically. Listen to my post here: there is NOTHING wrong with optimizing or tactical gamers.
Anyway, BECAUSE my old gaming group were such intense roleplayers, often character gen sessions took the whole night and we'd have to actually schedule another night to open a campaign. The players in that group wouldn't always be elaborate; they were however deliberate. The specifically created certain characters for a reason and interwove those reasons into a party from the beginning. IMO this "character reason" gave the player a personal interest in the character and the game. If I made a fighter to avenge my father then he'll be avenged and nothing on this EARTH will stop me save death itself (and once not even that...)
Nowadays as a grown up it feels like the end scene in Goodfellas; I have to play like all the other regular GM's. Bad flourescents that don't dim in a living room overlooking a busy street; kids and a dog that use game nights as their personal stage; heck like the movie I referenced I can't even get decent food where I live - where I grew up in Chicago there was good pizza on every corner; up here it's bread, cheese and ketchup from a chain...
Anyway, I'm restarting the game in a week. I'm looking for SOME kind of hook to get my...
I can definitely relate. It's been really hard getting a good horror campaign rolling in my end of town lately. My house has been turned upside down in preparation of a new arrival, so after she gets here, gaming is pretty much off-limits for a while, and my available time out of the house is severely limited as well. So, I'm just playing casually in a friend's campaign and taking this time to stockpile my resources and plan something big, like a Grand Re-opening once my time frees up again.
As for using Fey, I haven't had a lot of experience using those, but I do recommend an old Ravenloft 3e book on the subject; Van Richten's Guide to Shadow Fey.
Also, thank you for the kind words!
This is a very good point. Gore, like any powerful stimuli, can quickly wear out it's welcome and leave the players numb to it, if used too often. Use it sparingly, and it'll drive home your point much better, and get a stronger reaction from your players.Since I don't use gore that much, I get strong reactions when I eventually do. Like when my players went through the Ogrekin farmhouse in book 3 of Rise of the Runelords, some of my players actually looked pale. lol
As mentioned above, the whole part with the Skinsawman and the murder investigation that happens in that book set a new tone for the gaming table...
Ultradan
Sometimes too strong though. Running Olangru's temple in Savage Tide, I threw in a level of disgustingness that I rarely have the stomach for, and a couple of my players had to leave their desks (we gamed over Vent at the time) at risk of nausea. I promised to keep it toned a bit lower in the future.
On the other hand, I have a friend who absolutely revels in it; his go-to movies on any occasion include anything done by Clive BarkerPfft. Barker is sunshine and kittens. Tell him to watch Tokyo Gore Police.
Nah, he's not into Japanese stuff. And really, Japan does everything better/worse/more than anything else in the world, so it's almost not worth mentioning.
And I wasn't trying to imply that he's the biggest gore freak ever, just stating a factual example of gore he's into. I didn't pull the Barker reference out of thin air, he's actually a big fan. Not trying to start a contest here.
Sorry, internet one-upmanship is just a pet peeve of mine.
Sometimes too strong though. Running Olangru's temple in Savage Tide, I threw in a level of disgustingness that I rarely have the stomach for, and a couple of my players had to leave their desks (we gamed over Vent at the time) at risk of nausea. I promised to keep it toned a bit lower in the future.This is a very good point. Gore, like any powerful stimuli, can quickly wear out it's welcome and leave the players numb to it, if used too often. Use it sparingly, and it'll drive home your point much better, and get a stronger reaction from your players.Since I don't use gore that much, I get strong reactions when I eventually do. Like when my players went through the Ogrekin farmhouse in book 3 of Rise of the Runelords, some of my players actually looked pale. lol
As mentioned above, the whole part with the Skinsawman and the murder investigation that happens in that book set a new tone for the gaming table...
Ultradan
Which is exactly why I mentioned getting to know your players, and their general reaction to stuff like that (2 paragraphs down in the post you quoted). This is probably a lot tougher to do over chat, but now you have a bar standard you can compare against.
Which is exactly why I mentioned getting to know your players, and their general reaction to stuff like that (2 paragraphs down in the post you quoted).
This is what happens when I post pre-caffeine heheh....
Which is exactly why I mentioned getting to know your players, and their general reaction to stuff like that (2 paragraphs down in the post you quoted).This is what happens when I post pre-caffeine heheh....
Heh it's all good. It's got to be tougher to gauge that sort of reaction too, coming from a published adventure. With homebrewed stuff, you have full control over the amount of detail and nastiness you present to your players. With a module, you're handling someone else's idea of horror and sometimes it can even catch the DM off guard.
I know when I read that adventure, I was a little surprised at how rough it is. I'm used to modules being a little more generic and PG-13 at worst. I know there's rougher stuff out there, but just saying in general.
I don't think regular d20 is a good system for horror.
Hit points are too reliable (sanity points are just hit points for your brain). You gain the ability to estimate danger, if you X HP left, and you know something can only do 1/3 of X, you don't feel fear the first hit.
The ability to calculate odds is too reliable. Horror isn't about doing math, unless that math always results in your death. Activating the part of. Your brain that does math is reducing the effectiveness of the fear part of your brain. It's distracting you.
My favorite horror game is Dread. The use of a jenga tower creates uncertainty, peril and inevitability.
Stealing Cthulhu is a good book about the genre as well.
Fear, Horror, and Madness saves in Ravenloft beg to differ :)
There are certainly better systems, one that were built around horror itself, but I like the flexibility of the d20 system. Gut-wrenching horror isn't going to permeate 100% of play time, so the system lets me handle all the non-horror related stuff pretty well.
Systems that are built purely on horror are excellent at doing that, but it gets tough to keep something like that going long-term. A flexible system lets me carry a game for years at a time. My longest running Ravenloft game went about 3 years.
Nothing I've ever seen in a ravenloft game has impressed me as anything beyond reskinned basic d20 mechanics. The DM can infuse horror, but the mechanics of the game are working against him.
In society, my witch has run twice into scenarios where everyone else was incapable of trying to hurt opponents (as in, Hold Person, Charm Person, unconscious, etc...) and subsequently, I have to run around to try and not die and then heal people up... Or stall enough that someone else can come back and bring on the hurt.
Also, constantly, my magus keeps getting knocked out in unfavorable conditions (went to -8 once, stuck in black tentacles, was not near a party healer...)