Generating compassion, anger, surprise and other emotions in our games can be fun but one of the toughest emotions to foster is fear. We can describe or experience all kinds of creepy or truly horrific scenes at the table but actually feeling afraid is pretty uncommon, unless the players are ten years old. (Done that, great fun!) Now Im not talking about players running screaming from the table after a real-life SAN failure, just feeling uneasy qualifies.
The situation can be spooky as shit, the setting perfectly eerie and even the gaming environment suitably mysterious but laughter is far more likely than chills. But once in a while...
Anyone actually have a legitimately scary moment in their game, as GM or Player? Did you plan or stumble into a situation that actually gave you that same feeling you get watching a horror film or reading spooky fiction?
Tell us about it.
Quote from: rgrove0172;939455Anyone actually have a legitimately scary moment in their game, as GM or Player?
I played in an Earthdawn campaign for a few years and had a number of fearful moments in that... such as going alone to visit Twiceborn, the setting's queen of the undead. It felt like sticking my head into the mouth of some great beast, surrounded by hordes of Cadavermen (zombies, kinda) and having a negotiation that was a tightrope between survival and annihilation. Some of my fear came from the GM's presentation (he's one of the better I've played with) but the majority, I think, came from my own willingness to be scared and my naive belief at the time that the GM was entirely willing to let me fail (I eventually realized no PCs ever died in his games and after that it was much less thrilling).
Eclipse Phase was another scary thing. Not 'fear' but deep unease... it was upsetting for me in all sorts of mindwarpy ways. Again, I think that was mostly coming from me and not the GM or the other players (who were mostly bitching about stats).
I love horror movies, and being scared, but I keep finding that most people I meet and game with don't. Conversely, I've never been interested in the 'power fantasy' aspect that seems to be the draw for a lot of Players. My favorite games are horror games but I really don't want to play them with people who don't like horror... despite such folks willingness to sign up for such games (then try to play them like dungeoncrawls).
Anyway, I don't think there's any way to scare people in a game who don't want to be scared.
When the PCs are parleying with an NPC that is possessed by a demon, slip a fake blood capsule in your mouth without the players noticing. When you start coughing up blood in front of them, you will get a reaction.
I don't have that big a problem with inducing fear. If anything, I usually have to censor myself a bit and reign it in (I've caused a player to have a panic attack before).
I just have a knack for it. But it also requires the right group of gamers, and effort into creating the right environment.
Three words... Tomb of Horrors
Quote from: rgrove0172;939455Generating compassion, anger, surprise and other emotions in our games can be fun but one of the toughest emotions to foster is fear. We can describe or experience all kinds of creepy or truly horrific scenes at the table but actually feeling afraid is pretty uncommon, unless the players are ten years old. (Done that, great fun!) Now Im not talking about players running screaming from the table after a real-life SAN failure, just feeling uneasy qualifies.
The situation can be spooky as shit, the setting perfectly eerie and even the gaming environment suitably mysterious but laughter is far more likely than chills. But once in a while...
Anyone actually have a legitimately scary moment in their game, as GM or Player? Did you plan or stumble into a situation that actually gave you that same feeling you get watching a horror film or reading spooky fiction?
Tell us about it.
I manged to spooy some players in a rare fantasy game by describing what a group of armed Hobgoblins looked like instead of just saying what they were. In game, the PC were new to the frontier and hadn't seen nonhumans before. They ended up backing off and hiding rather than confront these things.
One group I was playing with was creeped out as Hell in a horror game. We were investigating a disappearance and the trail lead to a little town that was seemingly pretty normal but the more was looked around and talked to the locals, the fucking creepier it became. Nothing overt just little details that added up to sometihng ominous that we couldn't quite figure out.
Quote from: Bluddworth;939489Three words... Tomb of Horrors
I didn't find Tomb of Horrors scary at all... more like puzzling and frustrating... but not atmospheric or creepy. Then again, we never did get very far into it...
Quote from: Simlasa;939491I didn't find Tomb of Horrors scary at all... more like puzzling and frustrating... but not atmospheric or creepy. Then again, we never did get very far into it...
Well if you're talking purely atmospheric and not the pending dread that players feel in trying to get through the adventure on the third try. Then, certainly nothing in D&D I can think of rose to that level of creepiness. Call of Cthulhu RPG had some pretty creepy stuff in it.
I think the main point not to be missed here is that the creation of a truly creepy atmosphere is largely dependent on the storytelling skill (story plot + delivery) of the DM.
Quote from: rgrove0172;939455Generating compassion, anger, surprise and other emotions in our games can be fun but one of the toughest emotions to foster is fear. We can describe or experience all kinds of creepy or truly horrific scenes at the table but actually feeling afraid is pretty uncommon, unless the players are ten years old. ...
It's not uncommon for me. I get scared whenever I'm playing in a game where there are real risks of characters being killed, particularly when it can happen unexpectedly from lucky shots. That's one of the reasons I like playing games with real and present risk of death etc. When the situation starts to look like it may or probably will go badly and lead to defeat and/or death, I find that scary as I usually care about the characters.
QuoteAnyone actually have a legitimately scary moment in their game, as GM or Player? Did you plan or stumble into a situation that actually gave you that same feeling you get watching a horror film or reading spooky fiction?
Tell us about it.
Again, I'm legitimately scared by combat risks, so the various fights in last week's games were scary because they could easily be lost, and I could only do so much to mitigate the chances of defeat and death. These were several road encounters where the party is a knight and his squire, and the opponents were bands of brigands. Although the brigands were generally outclassed in skill and equipment, there were more of them and it was generally several days' march with risk of more encounters before the next safe resting place. I'm playing TFT, and the lack of active defenses and other GURPS ways of avoiding just being attacked and killed gave me an extra feeling of helplessness. We nearly died several times. Once I thought we were winning handily when a brigand with a light sword got around my knight's shield and got a triple-damage hit that almost killed him in one blow, making the rest of the combat desperate as the wound penalties made my knight no longer so superior, though fortunately still well armored. Also the time I had to face a much better knight in single combat to the death. Fortunately I had better equipment and his advantage was mainly in strength rather than skill, so I managed to get in the first hits and rolled so well for damage that they were the only hits.
Thinking back, I think the scariest situations I've been in in RPGs mostly also include scary situations with more or less mundane things. Sticky fights, unexpected combat results suddenly leading to deadly situations, surprise attacks, being cornered, outnumbered, or overpowered. Chases. Running out of time to not get caught or cornered in certain situations. Facing superior opponents/equipment. Fighting in dangerous circumstances, especially near (or while climbing) deadly drops. Games with really deadly weapons that there isn't much to do about, like modern firearms or sci fi weapons without no counters. Situations where I don't know enough about what's going on, so it's not clear what options are going to get you killed or not. Facing wizards with warriors. Non-narrative GMs who don't nerf anything to try to keep PCs alive (i.e. the kind I like).
There have been some spooky/supernatural situations which were scary too, though I think the fundamental things that scared me were the same: not knowing what's going on, not knowing what I can do about it, actual risk of death, being overpowered, etc. It's not that the threats were spooky supernatural weird things; it's that we didn't know what they were, how they worked, or what would or wouldn't be effective in dealing with them or even just escaping them, and trying things that didn't work and feeling like we had little time to come up with something that would work. All those fears happen in regular combat/adventure situations, too.
Oh, I guess other things that scare me are when the other players, PCs, NPCs and even GM seem scared or just seriously concerned or hopeless.
Quote from: Bluddworth;939492Well if you're talking purely atmospheric and not the pending dread that players feel in trying to get through the adventure on the third try. Then, certainly nothing in D&D I can think of rose to that level of creepiness.
Also, whenever I've played Tomb of Horrors it was an isolated game of just that... not part of an ongoing campaign. It was presented just as the tournament thing it originally was. Everyone expected to die at some point, just a question of how long we might last.
Horror movies have never scared me, and I've tried anything from The Ring to Saw when I was younger:). I wanted to be scared!
My players say they've been scared before, but it wasn't from me planning to scare them, I was just narrating the events as they unfolded in my head;).
Quote from: AsenRG;939520Horror movies have never scared me, and I've tried anything from The Ring to Saw when I was younger:). I wanted to be scared!
Saw isn't scary at all... but I dunno, maybe there is some guard that needs to be dropped. I find those halloween walkthrough houses pretty scary but my friend always laughs the whole way through, but she always wants to come along when we go to them.
I got some good scares out of the unfinished (but still largely playable!) Halloween castlecraw (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B17FqxHToBrxOUtVVlFJV20yZUE/view)l I attempted last year. The Perytons in the taxidermy room, the Leucrotta in the flesh laboratory, the flesh Golem, The mad mage (my frankenstein stand-in), and the general atmosphere really added to the "creep out" vibe.
I found that undermining the player's expectations made things "real" for them. In the suggested introduction, they're seated at a table of nobles that transform suddenly into ghouls eating human remains. Stuff like that, where you combine in-character danger, disturbing visual descriptions and a sense of isolation. That's how you get that gut-level fear response.
Mind, it's a slow burn: when I revisit this crawl, I'm going to try and make sure that every room and passage enhances the sense of isolation and dread. It wouldn't have worked without building the apprehension as they explored.
Depends on the players. Ive had groups where no one would be, and groups where some would be, and rare groups where everyone would be.
As a DM the best sessions Ive had were...
End Times for Call of Cthulhu. One of the players really got into the swing of it. The other didnt. That is until the final prequel session and they realize the scope of the stakes at risk if they fail. The colonists will not get vital telemetry for the flight corrections and thats it for the human race.
Isle of Dread for BX. That one really lived up to its name once the PCs ran into the Aranea spider people and the Kopru amphibious things. Oh and being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Back when they were still scary.
The Lost City also for BX. The players, and characters probably thought theyd stumbled into some sort of haunted insane asylum... Back when they were still scary.
A session of Star Frontiers exploring a derelict exploration ship with no one on board. No encounters or traps. Just coming across various crew logs that gradually explained what had happened. And ending with the unexplained mystery of what happened to the last?
One of my favorite moments from a Chill 1e campaign back in the 1980s. The players were sleeping in a ramshackle hotel on the edge of town during an investigation into a series of deaths, likely at the hands of the undead. At 3 a.m., there was a thudding on their door, as if something was trying to break in. A horrible odor of decay filled the darkness. The room was pitch black, no ambient light, so I had them make rolls versus Dex/Agl to keep from tripping over stuff/bumping into things in the dark. So, in the darkness, they got their gear/weapons as the pounding grew louder. Once in position, the one nearest the door turned on the light...
And, mere inches away from them all, were three undead zombies who had been teleported into the room by The Big Bad Villain. They had been pounding on the INSIDE of the door to wake them.
Failed fear checks all the way around as the players (IRL) screamed and panicked. It was an awesome moment.
I have managed to legitimately spook players with CoC on numerous occasions. It only works on the right players. You need the right group dynamics. Noobs, players that don't regularly game together,and D&D players with limited Lovecraft experience are good choices. Also, it only works on the first or second session. You can't do it in a campaign very well (the idea of a CoC campaign is a bit weird to me anyway. It's better suited for one-shots or very short campaigns, like 3 sessions). It doesn't work on the beer and pizza crowd, the jaded guys down at the game shop or your regular Saturday night group very well.
Quote from: rgrove0172;939455Generating compassion, anger, surprise and other emotions in our games can be fun but one of the toughest emotions to foster is fear. We can describe or experience all kinds of creepy or truly horrific scenes at the table but actually feeling afraid is pretty uncommon, unless the players are ten years old. (Done that, great fun!) Now Im not talking about players running screaming from the table after a real-life SAN failure, just feeling uneasy qualifies.
The situation can be spooky as shit, the setting perfectly eerie and even the gaming environment suitably mysterious but laughter is far more likely than chills. But once in a while...
Anyone actually have a legitimately scary moment in their game, as GM or Player? Did you plan or stumble into a situation that actually gave you that same feeling you get watching a horror film or reading spooky fiction?
Tell us about it.
Only moment of horror I ever had were actually in old red box D&D maybe 10 years ago. And it was more exterior circumstance and timing. I was running an sandbox adventure in Threshold an the players decided to go out and hunting werewolves. We were gaming in the middle if the night and pitch black outside the groud level windows. They set a trap for the werewolves with some sheep as bait and waited. So I started to describe how after some hours during the night they started hearing the sounds of the werewolves closing in and the sheep going nuts and all that, and had good moment of tension before the fight. Suddenly a player freakes out, pointing at the window, "what the fuck is that!". I myslef got spooked by the players reaction and stared out the window and looking into the flaming yellow eyes and the shadow of the neighbors cat disappearing in a flash. I had some real emotion of dread that second before I recognized what it was.
Quote from: Simlasa;939480Eclipse Phase was another scary thing. Not 'fear' but deep unease... it was upsetting for me in all sorts of mindwarpy ways.
I had the same reaction to the setting and the similar one that Sine Nomine put out for Stars Without Number; that awful sense that on multiple fronts humanity's beautiful delusions are dying or have died and been replaced with the only rational thing left, a nihilistic-mechanistic pursuit of pointless things in a pointless universe.
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;939811I had the same reaction to the setting and the similar one that Sine Nomine put out for Stars Without Number; that awful sense that on multiple fronts humanity's beautiful delusions are dying or have died and been replaced with the only rational thing left, a nihilistic-mechanistic pursuit of pointless things in a pointless universe.
That's how all the Transhuman setting have felt to me, to tell the truth. Even the ones meant to be optimistic (GURPS Transhuman Space, for example), deeply disturbing, depressing and vaguely creepy.
Quote from: Skarg;939494It's not uncommon for me. I get scared whenever I'm playing in a game where there are real risks of characters being killed, particularly when it can happen unexpectedly from lucky shots. That's one of the reasons I like playing games with real and present risk of death etc. When the situation starts to look like it may or probably will go badly and lead to defeat and/or death, I find that scary as I usually care about the characters.
Again, I'm legitimately scared by combat risks, so the various fights in last week's games were scary because they could easily be lost, and I could only do so much to mitigate the chances of defeat and death. These were several road encounters where the party is a knight and his squire, and the opponents were bands of brigands. Although the brigands were generally outclassed in skill and equipment, there were more of them and it was generally several days' march with risk of more encounters before the next safe resting place. I'm playing TFT, and the lack of active defenses and other GURPS ways of avoiding just being attacked and killed gave me an extra feeling of helplessness. We nearly died several times. Once I thought we were winning handily when a brigand with a light sword got around my knight's shield and got a triple-damage hit that almost killed him in one blow, making the rest of the combat desperate as the wound penalties made my knight no longer so superior, though fortunately still well armored. Also the time I had to face a much better knight in single combat to the death. Fortunately I had better equipment and his advantage was mainly in strength rather than skill, so I managed to get in the first hits and rolled so well for damage that they were the only hits.
Thinking back, I think the scariest situations I've been in in RPGs mostly also include scary situations with more or less mundane things. Sticky fights, unexpected combat results suddenly leading to deadly situations, surprise attacks, being cornered, outnumbered, or overpowered. Chases. Running out of time to not get caught or cornered in certain situations. Facing superior opponents/equipment. Fighting in dangerous circumstances, especially near (or while climbing) deadly drops. Games with really deadly weapons that there isn't much to do about, like modern firearms or sci fi weapons without no counters. Situations where I don't know enough about what's going on, so it's not clear what options are going to get you killed or not. Facing wizards with warriors. Non-narrative GMs who don't nerf anything to try to keep PCs alive (i.e. the kind I like).
There have been some spooky/supernatural situations which were scary too, though I think the fundamental things that scared me were the same: not knowing what's going on, not knowing what I can do about it, actual risk of death, being overpowered, etc. It's not that the threats were spooky supernatural weird things; it's that we didn't know what they were, how they worked, or what would or wouldn't be effective in dealing with them or even just escaping them, and trying things that didn't work and feeling like we had little time to come up with something that would work. All those fears happen in regular combat/adventure situations, too.
Oh, I guess other things that scare me are when the other players, PCs, NPCs and even GM seem scared or just seriously concerned or hopeless.
Those situations you describe. The ones where you're desperate, scared, maybe even bleeding out?
Those are the scary ones.
That's why I'm gradually coming to the opinion of that Stupidity Kills and Everybody Dies are the best lethality levels to run yo' games 'at. It's those small encounters, those little things, that can COMPLETELY ruin your day and cause you to lose your character because you thought you were a badass and the dice thought otherwise.
Humbleness is a bitch, 'aint it?
I think you can get fear in any setting/scene. You need to make the players realize their PC's have willingly gotten themselves into something beyond their ability to fully apprehend. This goes with the "less is more" idea and finding that right balance of letting your players, via what their PC's experience in the given situation, causes their own imaginations run wild with the unknown.
I was running a Dark Ages game (Vampire) and the PC's weren't vampires yet, they were all ghouls. They'd been with these other troops laying siege to this fortification that shouldn't have even existed according to their maps. The resistance they'd ended up fighting against was beyond tenacious or even fanatical - they just kept coming, ill-armored and equipped, they just kept swarming at the PC's more organized forces. A particularly nasty blow one of the PC's delivered severed a man's head and he could have sworn he saw a few beetles come out of the wound. Did they just take wing and skitter away? Too much fighting couldn't tell. Why are those entrails wriggling around on their own? Can't investigate - they're in the middle of battle. By mid-morning there were clouds of bugs in the hot air, it reeked of sweat, decay and shit, almost as if their enemies were half-decomposed already. Nevermind the fact that they would fight a little *too long* before dropping.
By the time the battle was over - the players were *scared* to even approach the fortress.
This is where you use your narrative impulses to color things, but not overtly tell the players what is happening. Give them an inch, their minds will paint the rest of the mile. And if they want more detail - give it to them. But as always leave them *dreading* more even as they want it.
Combat scenes are more tense than frightening for me. I guess its when I feel the least in my character's headspace. I'm fine really and in no danger. I feel concerned particularly if I like and enjoy playing the character but its more like concern for a character in fiction that I like that is at risk that fear exactly. Part of it might stem from with most systems combat is when have the most interaction with OOC and meta game elements like dice, character sheets, attributes, etc. That's not totally it because social interaction systems don't affect me the same way.
Years ago I ran a Cyberpunk 2020 game for two buddies. It became subtly creepy with quasi-supernatural undertones. The result? One of them told me he couldn't sleep because he was so unnerved. I felt awesome.
Quote from: Nexus;939813That's how all the Transhuman setting have felt to me, to tell the truth. Even the ones meant to be optimistic (GURPS Transhuman Space, for example), deeply disturbing, depressing and vaguely creepy.
This is why scifi RPGs are probably and sadly dead to me as a GM despite my best efforts to talk myself into them. Transhumanism looks like our likeliest non-apocalyptic future, and there's no satisfying escapist glory to be had there.
We dreamed of space opera, but we're probably getting Soma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game)
[video=youtube_share;y5CFE-Zdlfs]https://youtu.be/y5CFE-Zdlfs[/youtube]
Quote from: Simlasa;939523Saw isn't scary at all...
Huh, I thought it was just me.
Quotebut I dunno, maybe there is some guard that needs to be dropped.
How to put it...I don't think the ability to be spooked by movies crucial enough for my life to warrant some deep soul-searching;).
QuoteI find those halloween walkthrough houses pretty scary but my friend always laughs the whole way through, but she always wants to come along when we go to them.
If they're something like "horror tunnels", yeah, I find them funny as well:D!