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Wait...your plan is to have the PCs open a door...and die?
Surely there should be a series of checks before they're killed. I would recommend treating it like a trap, something like a Perception check to notice something amiss, a Strength check to force the door, and a Reflex save to not get sucked out by explosive decompression, followed by normal exposed-to-vacuum type checks that really suck, but don't auto-kill you instantly.
I am open to ideas on how to crush my player's character's patience.
Fixed that for you.
But seriously, killing people without telegraphing or the chance to save is often poor game design. You can't set you players before a challenge where they don't have an 'out' of sorts, and if they don't have an 'out', the best time to learn that is before they make a decision with permanent consequences. As if they enter that situation, they can't blame you because they knew what they were getting into.
Taking 20 Discusses how traps can be used in a way that is not infuriating as per Ravingdork's suggestions. To elaborate on them, telegraphing is important, and supremely so for decisions that can result in immediate death. This means things need to hint at their consequences - hence ravingdork's and Taking 20's suggestions on how traps should operate. Otherwise, your players will feel like they just died because you wanted to kill them, rather than them being the ones that made the mistake.
Stop judging their gameplay style. -.-
I'm not sure the OP is talking about simply killing players for opening a door: they said if they get sucked into space, which implies it's not automatic. I basically agree that telegraphing it and having a way to avoid it would be a good idea. Hopefully they know this.
(There are some good suggestions for Starfinder-appropriate dungeon crawls on this Reddit thread and I personally learned a lot from The Angry GM's thoughts on traps.)
As for jump scares specifically: what I've found is that it's mostly about what's around the scare and how much tension is allowed to build. I don't use "dungeons" a huge amount, but when I do use them I leave plenty of space in them where the main content is atmosphere. Like, "atmosphere" in the storytelling sense, where they don't find traps or monsters but just hints about what's gone on or is going on in the place they're exploring. The stretches of finding just hints of horrible things build the tension to make actually finding a horrible thing a lot more satisfying.
In a recent session my group were searching an abandoned space pirate anchorage where a group of robbers had found a more ancient Something hidden in a sealed level and awakened a diabolical ancient Signal that drove them all insane, and was now driving people in nearby settlements crazy too (the team were there to shut the Signal down). The artificial gravity was knocked out, most of the atmosphere was gone, crystallized blood was floating in the air in various places, and one of the madmen had scrawled the Signal's repeated message all over the walls as if trying to work out a math problem... but there were encounters in only a few places.
The team were immediately motivated to do three things: try to get the power back on so they didn't have to cope with Zero-G, try to figure out what was with all the wall scrawlings, and above all try to get to the source of the Signal, which had some team members' sanity fraying too. The first thing led them straight into some potentially quite nasty booby traps laid by one of the maddened robbers (who had been trying to deny gravity and atmosphere to his enemies b/c he was leading the Sarcesian faction of the expedition, which fights best in vaccuum). The second led them to want to explore as fully as they could and eventually into an encounter with one of the dead robbers, a now-undead Dragonkin who had gotten wounded in the fighting and accidentally nano-zombified himself by trying to jury-rig a nanite field dressing (because Science!). But it was the tension of exploring, trying to work out just what had happened in this place and waiting for things to jump out that made those encounters more satisfying. I found it was great for laying the groundwork for the level's really big set-piece encounter.
Hope that's some help.
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I would make sure you discuss that with the group in Session 0, before they make characters.
I've played games like that before and really loved it, but I've also played games like that when I wasn't in the mood for it, and it sucked. It can also turn into a power play between the DM and the Players if everyone isn't on board.
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Impending doom is more effective than direct onslaught, i.e. jump scare.
Either they can or can't kill the jump scare. Then what?
Is it just another tick mark on their power rifle?
Well, if nuanced, that jump scare might be a hint at so many more to follow that the PCs are at risk. Or maybe it was unkillable and the PCs are in a perpetual chase scene, sealing doors and hoping not to run into a dead end.
There are many ways to threaten, or maybe threaten to overwhelmingly threaten might be a better way to think of things. A reactive dungeon works well at this, where the PCs can't expect the monsters to stay in their assigned rooms. "We'd better be careful," is music to my ears. The main issue here deals with player expectations (as pithica mentioned). In PFS (and likely SFS) there's an expectation that full frontal assault will prevail, and somewhat that retreat is unfeasible. Clarify with your players that neither is true beforehand so they don't build "Bob the Always Bold", but rather "Bob the as Bold as the situation reasonably allows". Also many PCs expect there will be ample time between fights for recovery, so address that.
As mentioned before, atmosphere matters. Once, my players were in a public square of a long dead city, so to give them a sense of history I had them roll to hear the voices of the families shopping, children at play, hagglers haggling, etc. Only one person did, but after the description another player was shivering with fright. I reassured her that her PC didn't hear those things and she didn't need to act. "Who's acting?! I'M freaked out." I kinda smiled, but then realized everybody else was nodding in agreement. As Lovecraft pointed out, having reality seem an illusion can be the most unnerving trait of horror, a fact I accidentally uncovered.
Time pressure factors in too. The PCs should not want to stick around (a.k.a. spend time taking 20 on every door and possible trap site). I believe this was the reasoning for wandering monsters back in the day. So little of XP came from monsters (most came from treasure) that fighting extra monsters wasn't a good thing. In that case, you might want to award XP by chapter, so PCs don't fish for extra fights and you can uncork the bottle of baddies. Other forms of attrition, or outright threat tied to a timer, could also work.
And lastly, since it's your first dungeon crawl, play wild for the fun, but careful enough to give the PCs an escape route or two should game balance be a bit miscalculated.
Cheers
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That angry GM trap article gives better advice than I ever could. I encourage you all to take a look, if you haven't already.
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Working on my first Dungeon Crawl and i kinda want to not have my pc not to open every door they come across and i want the place to be scary. So i have a couple rooms that are open to warp vaccum so if they get sucked out into space they are killed by being atomized by the warp threshold sorta thing. I put monsters in some locked rooms. And the such.
As for jump scares i have couple. But i could use some more scary ones. Some that are non-lethal. And some that are lethal if players are not smart. I am open to ideas on how to crush my player's character's sanity.
not sure if serious , but if you are ..don't
games should be fun and this is not fun.
your not going to scare your players , this is a game not real life
but you will piss them off
*edit* now if this is a reasonable dc saving throw then
thats a bit different
but traps and the like should be at least possible to avoid or circumvent
there should be clues
Well i could just give them everything they want with no challenges.
There is quite a large amount of daylight between "running a game with no challenges" and going out of your way to be a killer GM. I don't want to jump to conclusions here but I have to admit you do sound a weeee bit distressingly eager about punishing what you think of as "greed" and "stupidity." On that score I think people are right to caution you to put that in perspective and focus on making challenges winnable and fair.
That doesn't mean filing all the sharp edges off your game world, I get your frustration with GMs like that and I've been there. It just means a GM should not be too eager to deal in death and judgement, since even the very experienced cannot see all ends, as Doctor Who once famously said in a little movie called Goodfellas.
Fair enough. For best motivator to make people selective about what they want to explore I'd reiterate Castiliano's recommendation about time pressure. The prospect of being caught by something horrible or having some kind of count-down trap or self-destruct running would do nicely.
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Even if they *can* carry a huge rug like that, it's still a very troublesome thing to have to carry throughout a place with tight areas, and when you're expected to go into combat at any time. I'm sure a stray laser or some such could ruin that already-stained rug even further.
Fair enough. For best motivator to make people selective about what they want to explore I'd reiterate Castiliano's recommendation about time pressure. The prospect of being caught by something horrible or having some kind of count-down trap or self-destruct running would do nicely.
I second this notion. Making it so that unwanted behavior conflicts with completing their objective is a much more elegant solution than just dishing out punishments when the players engage in unwanted behavior in hopes they don't do it again.
We have two large characters in our party so carrying loot isn't much of an issue.
No. Carrying capacity and bulk in general have been divorced from size. There is an indirect connection in that the Large races may tend to have strength bonuses, but not all of them, and the Sarcesian even has a penalty.
We have two large characters in our party so carrying loot isn't much of an issue.does being large in sf increase bulk capacity?
Nope, but a large rug doesn't seem so large to a large character. :-)