Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 02:04:15 PM
^ Was that an accidental repeat post?

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 08:35:23 AM

I didn't say it did. I just think you are overemphasizing personal horror and internal conflict as essential. Maybe I don't understand what you mean by personal horror.

The heart of gothic stories is melodrama. It's not a genre of clinical detachment, but of overwrought emotions. Virtually everything about gothic horror is aimed at emphasizing the emotional elements. Even mundane things like the weather and the lighting conditions are used to help set the mood. But it's fundamentally centered on the emotional journeys of the main characters. That's why secrets, transformation, betrayal, self-doubt, grand actions, and tragedy are so central. It's about setting up and then wringing the most out of the characters' tribulations. It's the domains of dread, not the domains of bayesian risk assessment.

I was posting late so not sure if I accidentally reposted or repeated myself. Thanks for the clarification here. I agree melodrama is part of it. There is definitely an emotional weight to good gothic horror stories, or at least a lot of them. Again here I think I just don't see how you force that in an RPG. You can certainly make adventures that have emotional weight to them, but you can't force a player to go on an emotional melodramatic journey. That said, I find it tends to arise pretty naturally among player characters in a setting like Ravenloft (where you have curses, where you have horror checks and you have the potential for things going in that direction). But most of the melodrama is in the backstories of the villains, which I think is okay. At least for me, that works pretty well. The heart of a given adventure for me in Ravenloft is the villain.

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 02:19:51 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 08:40:54 AM
Porting the structure of literature into the structure of an RPG is always a problem.

Absolutely.

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 08:40:54 AM
Are you looking for a more narrative RPG approach?

Are you looking for tickets to Munich?

(The answer's no, but literally nothing I said suggested I was looking for a more narrative approach, so your question seems really random and out of the blue.)

I was just asking because it sounded like you wanted more gothic literary structures in the game based on what you were saying. I was just having trouble seeing how the things you identified would be ported in on the player side without some kind of more indie style design (wasn't meant as a swipe, I just didn't know if that was the school of thought you were coming from).

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 14, 2021, 02:26:04 PM

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 02:04:15 PM
^ Was that an accidental repeat post?

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 08:35:23 AM

I didn't say it did. I just think you are overemphasizing personal horror and internal conflict as essential. Maybe I don't understand what you mean by personal horror.

The heart of gothic stories is melodrama. It's not a genre of clinical detachment, but of overwrought emotions. Virtually everything about gothic horror is aimed at emphasizing the emotional elements. Even mundane things like the weather and the lighting conditions are used to help set the mood. But it's fundamentally centered on the emotional journeys of the main characters. That's why secrets, transformation, betrayal, self-doubt, grand actions, and tragedy are so central. It's about setting up and then wringing the most out of the characters' tribulations. It's the domains of dread, not the domains of bayesian risk assessment.

You know, I think this ultimately explains why, despite the developers' best efforts, Vampire the Masquerade has always run better as "trenchcoats & katanas" than as the "game of personal horror" they keep trying to make it; including canceling the series for the "personal horror; this time we mean it" of Requiem that fizzled and the current abomination that is V5 that gutted the system again to try and add Requiem elements and enforced "Bella Swanning" (the term I've heard used for V5's Touchstone system that requires you to tie your character's convictions to particular mortals and suffer potential loss of Humanity if they fail to live up to the mental picture you have of them, basically requiring you to stalk them and micromanage their lives to keep them from changing too much lest you fall to The Beast).

The problem being that whenever you devolve the elements of gothic/personal horror down to mechanics, you're forcing the players into a degree of clinical detachment from their PCs and so any horror you might have been able to generate falls by the wayside with the call of "make a Conscience check."

The result is people try to use the mechanics for something else and the playerbase coalesced around "trenchcoats & katanas" and "supernatural political thriller" as the most viable genres and every dev since has warred to drag the game back to their original vision of how it "should" be played only to be undone as the players stick to older editions or slap enough house rules onto the current one to make their preferred genres viable.

It's actually rather bemusing to me that the Dark Lords of the World of Darkness are sort of caught in a Hell of their own making where they constantly struggle to make the world bend to their wills only to be undone by overwrought fans of the prior editions refusing to capitulate.

Second aside; between the demi-plane nature of Strahd's realm that sort of incurs onto regular reality, the deal with Death, way more monsters to kill and bands of heroes questing to defeat them, Ravenloft almost feels like it's got more spiritual roots in the Castlevania video games than Bram Stoker's novel.

Yeah, totally. That's one of the reasons why I left the World of Darkness fandom a decade ago. I was one of those fanatics who would defend the morality mechanic against those I perceived as wanting to play murderhobos. It took me a while to realize that the way RPGs are typically designed necessarily requires violent conflict and that any mechanic which gets in the way of that is a bad mechanic.

If you want a game to explore personal horror or sappy melodrama, then you have to design the rules from the ground up to support that sort of thing. You can't just bolt half-baked personality mechanics onto a standard combat-focused simulationist ruleset like the White Wolf games always did/do. That's why I found the humanity mechanic in Feed so refreshing. Rather than punishing players for playing RPGs the way that they're designed, it works like a lightside/darkside mechanic. There's actual temptation to losing your humanity and becoming more vampiric. "Humanity" is also more qualified and important here, as all character traits are actually divided between the two categories. The problem, as always, is that you need the players to be emotionally invested in roleplaying the struggle or otherwise you'll be playing b-movie monsters terrorizing innocent victims (which is explicitly provided as a setting option, conveniently enough).

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 02:48:43 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 14, 2021, 02:26:04 PM

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 02:04:15 PM
The heart of gothic stories is melodrama. It's not a genre of clinical detachment, but of overwrought emotions. Virtually everything about gothic horror is aimed at emphasizing the emotional elements. Even mundane things like the weather and the lighting conditions are used to help set the mood. But it's fundamentally centered on the emotional journeys of the main characters. That's why secrets, transformation, betrayal, self-doubt, grand actions, and tragedy are so central. It's about setting up and then wringing the most out of the characters' tribulations. It's the domains of dread, not the domains of bayesian risk assessment.

You know, I think this ultimately explains why, despite the developers' best efforts, Vampire the Masquerade has always run better as "trenchcoats & katanas" than as the "game of personal horror" they keep trying to make it; including canceling the series for the "personal horror; this time we mean it" of Requiem that fizzled and the current abomination that is V5 that gutted the system again to try and add Requiem elements and enforced "Bella Swanning" (the term I've heard used for V5's Touchstone system that requires you to tie your character's convictions to particular mortals and suffer potential loss of Humanity if they fail to live up to the mental picture you have of them, basically requiring you to stalk them and micromanage their lives to keep them from changing too much lest you fall to The Beast).

You don't see that as much in D&D, because D&D has kind of become its own genre. People's see six stats and hit points, and think of dungeons and video games, so they're less like to confuse it with the high fantasy or sword & sorcery in other media. But is has cropped up at various points. For instance, 2nd edition had a heavy emphasis in the fluff on high fantasy and being heroes. But that contrasted with the rules, which were fundamentally the same brutal system as 1e. As a result, some new players came in expecting to play epic heroes with plot immunity and grand destinies out of the starting gate, and died to a random orc.

This seems to happen more in other genres, like gothic horror or urban fantasy. People default back to their expectations based on other media, and there's a period of struggle. Those that keep beating their head against the rules tend to become frustrated, while those who adapt and run games that the rules support, even if they lose some of the key elements of the genre they're supposedly playing, have more fun. The katanas and trenchcoat crowd are a good example.

That's why I think recognizing that Ravenloft is D&D with some gothic trappings, not a gothic horror RPG and only secondarily D&D, is important. You can stumble upon a version that works for you, which I suspect is the case with Bedrockbrendan, but I think some degree of conscious awareness helps avoid the many pitfalls.

We could avoid a lot of these problems if the designers actually knew what they were doing. These problems arise from a fundamental mismatch between the designers' intentions and how the games actually work. Rather than trying to force a square peg into a round hole ad nauseum, it might make more sense to design games around the intended genre. Maybe take a page from Amazing Engine and allow players to create Meta-PCs that can be moved between different game settings even if the setting-specific rules work very differently.

Traditional RPGs may simply not be a good fit for drama and psychological genres. D&D has a bad enough time with moral dilemmas and meaningful temptation using only the existing rules. In a world with "objective" morality where you channel the power of your demonstrably real god, you can't have moral grey areas or moral dilemmas. You can't have meaningful temptation because you always know that the bad choice is bad for you. If a paladin falls, then it's because either the player or the GM is a dick... or both.

The trolley problem breaks in down under D&D logic because the objective morality that D&D operates is horrifying and borderline cosmic horror when you stop to think thru the logical implications. The most good thing that you can do in D&D is convert as much of the universe as you can to good, and then utterly annihilate the universe to prevent evil from gaining more power.

That's not heroic fantasy. That's the plot of the grimdark series Prince of Nothing.

At this point, I'm struggling to think of a reason to actually play D&D. I can get basically the exact same experience, or a vastly superior experience, by playing dungeoncrawler video games or watching youtube shows based on D&D.

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 02:19:51 PM

Why not use the system from Call of Cthulhu?

You're fighting the structure of the game itself. D&D is a game of levels, with piles of hit points followed by a sharp line between perfectly okay and dead, huge increases in power, advancing threats, spells that can be cast in the middle of great melees and blast armies, and a limited skill system. Yes, you could run a pure murder mystery with no combat encounters until a final showdown with the villain, but that's not how any of the published adventures work. And even if you do, you're still largely missing the central transformation and emotional journeys of the protagonists.

That's why I'm emphasizing that Ravenloft is D&D with some gothic trappings, not a gothic RPG that happens to use D&D as a game system. In general, you need to play to D&D's strengths. While that doesn't necessarily mean a dungeon -- though it's worth noting that the ur-Ravenloft adventure I6 literally has a dungeon, and even the above-ground rooms are treated as a variant on a dungeon crawl -- it will typically involve multiple combat encounters, a sense of serial continuity where the party stays together usually under the guise of monster hunting and grows massively in competence, and most of the emotional freight will be shunted to one-off NPCs.

I think it might potentially be more scary if you took a Cthulhu approach. Definitely retaining the D&D system, gave it a different feel. I still liked that and felt it was a nice blend of D&D and Gothic Horror. I think it could have been done more like Cthulhu (heck I made a game more like that myself so I see your point). But I don't see how making a powered down, more lethal game, would bring in the other elements you are talking about. I do see how it makes the game scarier and less likely to focus on combat.

I can only speak for myself, but I ran Ravenloft with monster hunts and minimal encounters. There certainly might be other encounters with deadly creatures here and there but more int he style of a horror movie than D&D slaughtering monsters till you get to a bad guy. And had tons of session with little to no combat as the players solved the mystery. I mean yes if you run I6, that has a big dungeon. I never ran Ravenloft adventures in my campaigns with massive dungeons. Again if it didn't work for you, it didn't. For me the D&D elements were never a big problem (I think they gave the game enough juice and areas to go in, that it enabled longer term campaigns, but still blended in those gothic horror and classic horror elements nicely). I just don't see how shifting to Cthulhu or changing the system leads to the player characters undergoing the transformational journey you are looking for (unless you are thinking of insanity mechanics, but again, Ravenloft kind of had that with the horror check and the powers checks do transform you over time if you engage in evil actions). They did introduce stuff like madness mechanics later to the setting but I thought those didn't work very well and didn't really add to the experience of play much (just gave you another subsystem to bog things down). I liked the simplicity of fear and horror, curses and powers checks---and I liked that the bad guys in an adventure were essentially a reflection of how domain lords operate (the domain lords are sort of the blue print for things)

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 02:48:43 PM
That's why I think recognizing that Ravenloft is D&D with some gothic trappings, not a gothic horror RPG and only secondarily D&D, is important. You can stumble upon a version that works for you, which I suspect is the case with Bedrockbrendan, but I think some degree of conscious awareness helps avoid the many pitfalls.

Agreed. Ravenloft works better as "Castlevania the RPG" than as "Bram Stoker's Dracula the RPG."

Hell, I've even seen YouTube videos come up on my feed of how to play as the main protagonists of the Netflix version (which is way better than it has any right to be as an adaptation of a video game) and I'd bet it wouldn't even be hard since the main trio basically follow the Fighter/Mage/Thief trope in terms of team composition*).

* Trevor is the thief (relies more on speed and dirty tricks, uses a short sword, whip, throwing knives, etc., knows monster weak-points and how to exploit them; would probably be a Fighter/Rogue multi-class in 5e), Sypha is the Mage (specializes in elemental magic, though in the games its stated several times that she's a Holy Magician so would probably be a Cleric with an elemental domain in 5e) and Alucard is the Fighter (strongest of the group, uses a magic sword and later a shield... in 5e he's probably a Mage-Knight subclass since he's got a few supernatural tricks of his own that are technically more OP Dhampir racial abilities, but for a game would fit better using the subclass features).

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 03:05:04 PM
Again here I think I just don't see how you force that in an RPG. You can certainly make adventures that have emotional weight to them, but you can't force a player to go on an emotional melodramatic journey.

You don't, that's one of the things I've been emphasizing because it's a clear difference from the source material. In Ravenloft adventures, NPCs, particularly one-off NPCs, carry most of that emotional weight. It robs it of the central place it takes in gothic horror, but allows it to still occur, albeit at a greater emotional distance.

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 03:25:48 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 03:05:04 PM
Again here I think I just don't see how you force that in an RPG. You can certainly make adventures that have emotional weight to them, but you can't force a player to go on an emotional melodramatic journey.

You don't, that's one of the things I've been emphasizing because it's a clear difference from the source material. In Ravenloft adventures, NPCs, particularly one-off NPCs, carry most of that emotional weight. It robs it of the central place it takes in gothic horror, but allows it to still occur, albeit at a greater emotional distance.

I get what you're saying but what I don't understand is how you propose those elements get introduced. I mean if you want the emotional aspects of gothic horror to be experienced by the players and not by the villains, what do you think they could have done differently to achieve that? This doesn't seem a problem keyed to the leveling system. It seems an issue with, if this is a traditional RPG, it is only really going to come up if the players decide to go on those kinds of emotionally transformative journey's every session (or you could do it in the 90s storytelling way, with quite a bit of railroad, which plenty of Ravenloft releases did, but I don't like that approach: much bigger fan of the monster hunt, Van Richten book approach to play)

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 03:29:50 PM

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 03:25:48 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 03:05:04 PM
Again here I think I just don't see how you force that in an RPG. You can certainly make adventures that have emotional weight to them, but you can't force a player to go on an emotional melodramatic journey.

You don't, that's one of the things I've been emphasizing because it's a clear difference from the source material. In Ravenloft adventures, NPCs, particularly one-off NPCs, carry most of that emotional weight. It robs it of the central place it takes in gothic horror, but allows it to still occur, albeit at a greater emotional distance.

I get what you're saying but what I don't understand is how you propose those elements get introduced. I mean if you want the emotional aspects of gothic horror to be experienced by the players and not by the villains....

I literally just said "you don't".

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 03:16:19 PM
I can only speak for myself, but I ran Ravenloft with monster hunts and minimal encounters. There certainly might be other encounters with deadly creatures here and there but more int he style of a horror movie than D&D slaughtering monsters till you get to a bad guy. And had tons of session with little to no combat as the players solved the mystery. I mean yes if you run I6, that has a big dungeon. I never ran Ravenloft adventures in my campaigns with massive dungeons. Again if it didn't work for you, it didn't. For me the D&D elements were never a big problem (I think they gave the game enough juice and areas to go in, that it enabled longer term campaigns, but still blended in those gothic horror and classic horror elements nicely). I just don't see how shifting to Cthulhu or changing the system leads to the player characters undergoing the transformational journey you are looking for (unless you are thinking of insanity mechanics, but again, Ravenloft kind of had that with the horror check and the powers checks do transform you over time if you engage in evil actions). They did introduce stuff like madness mechanics later to the setting but I thought those didn't work very well and didn't really add to the experience of play much (just gave you another subsystem to bog things down). I liked the simplicity of fear and horror, curses and powers checks---and I liked that the bad guys in an adventure were essentially a reflection of how domain lords operate (the domain lords are sort of the blue print for things)

I'd be interested to know what you consider a typical adventure outline in Ravenloft. Not looking for a ton of details, just whether you think in terms of location or scene based adventures, the composition of mysteries vs. combat, how much socialization, that kind of thing. Basically, how you fill up the playtime. Because while you seem to be missing a fair amount of what I've been trying to say (that "what I'm looking for" in the quoted section above is another tickets to Munich moment), I do suspect you found a happy medium between D&D and the gothic elements that worked for you and your group. I was never a huge fan of I6 myself (admired some parts, not others), and while my exposure to the other published adventures was minimal, they didn't sound that good.

Agree that some of the mechanics in Ravenloft don't work particularly well. Many of the concepts are good, but the implementation is shaky. The DMs I know who used them well tended to ad hoc them a lot.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on June 14, 2021, 08:20:17 AM
I just noticed something in Curse of Strahd (5E).

On p36, 'A Vistana's Tale', the NPC in question tells the story of a mighty wizard who contested with Strahd but was felled. Later on, the PCs might discover said wizard is still alive, but driven mad by Strahd and/or the Dark Powers. This is an addition from the original Ravenloft 2E adventure.

So why is this an issue? Well, in a truly spectacular example of what tropers call 'worfing', the maddened wizard is Mordenkainen. Yeah, that Mordenkainen. The guy who does shots with Elminster in Ed Greenwood's kitchen.

No, no, no, what the fuck, WotC. We already know Strahd is a badass, why are you fucking up Greyhawk's preeminent archmage? That's just fucking insulting.

I noted this early on. Mordenkainen reduced to a loony old mage out in the wilderness.

Quote from: Omega on June 14, 2021, 03:51:40 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on June 14, 2021, 08:20:17 AM
I just noticed something in Curse of Strahd (5E).

On p36, 'A Vistana's Tale', the NPC in question tells the story of a mighty wizard who contested with Strahd but was felled. Later on, the PCs might discover said wizard is still alive, but driven mad by Strahd and/or the Dark Powers. This is an addition from the original Ravenloft 2E adventure.

So why is this an issue? Well, in a truly spectacular example of what tropers call 'worfing', the maddened wizard is Mordenkainen. Yeah, that Mordenkainen. The guy who does shots with Elminster in Ed Greenwood's kitchen.

No, no, no, what the fuck, WotC. We already know Strahd is a badass, why are you fucking up Greyhawk's preeminent archmage? That's just fucking insulting.

I noted this early on. Mordenkainen reduced to a loony old mage out in the wilderness.

Now I want the mad hermit in Keep on the Borderlands to be Mordenkainen, as well.

Nobody's quite sure what happened. The event itself is lost to reality, scrubbed away. But there are echoes in various prophecies, and suspicious details may be whispered by gods who were imprisoned far outside the Great Wheel. The hints suggest it was something about alignment. Something about a 17-way war between law and chaos, between good and evil, and finding the balance between. Whatever happened, the original Mordenkainen was the fulcrum, and it shattered him. His fall was so grand, he fractured across the Primes. In every mad mind, there's a little bit of Mordenkainen, and every completely lunatic is a broken avatar of the lost archmage. It's said that reassembling his fragments would remake the universe, but nobody's quite sure what that means. But megalomaniacs and the mad seek the keys, and reach out to entities across the veil, looking for clues.

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 04:03:25 PM

Quote from: Omega on June 14, 2021, 03:51:40 PM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on June 14, 2021, 08:20:17 AM
I just noticed something in Curse of Strahd (5E).

On p36, 'A Vistana's Tale', the NPC in question tells the story of a mighty wizard who contested with Strahd but was felled. Later on, the PCs might discover said wizard is still alive, but driven mad by Strahd and/or the Dark Powers. This is an addition from the original Ravenloft 2E adventure.

So why is this an issue? Well, in a truly spectacular example of what tropers call 'worfing', the maddened wizard is Mordenkainen. Yeah, that Mordenkainen. The guy who does shots with Elminster in Ed Greenwood's kitchen.

No, no, no, what the fuck, WotC. We already know Strahd is a badass, why are you fucking up Greyhawk's preeminent archmage? That's just fucking insulting.

I noted this early on. Mordenkainen reduced to a loony old mage out in the wilderness.

Now I want the mad hermit in Keep on the Borderlands to be Mordenkainen, as well.

Nobody's quite sure what happened. The event itself is lost to reality, scrubbed away. But there are echoes in various prophecies, and suspicious details may be whispered by gods who were imprisoned far outside the Great Wheel. The hints suggest it was something about alignment. Something about a 17-way war between law and chaos, between good and evil, and finding the balance between. Whatever happened, the original Mordenkainen was the fulcrum, and it shattered him. His fall was so grand, he fractured across the Primes. In every mad mind, there's a little bit of Mordenkainen, and every completely lunatic is a broken avatar of the lost archmage. It's said that reassembling his fragments would remake the universe, but nobody's quite sure what that means. But megalomaniacs and the mad seek the keys, and reach out to entities across the veil, looking for clues.

"I'm Mordenkainen and so is my wife!"

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 03:47:33 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 03:16:19 PM
I can only speak for myself, but I ran Ravenloft with monster hunts and minimal encounters. There certainly might be other encounters with deadly creatures here and there but more int he style of a horror movie than D&D slaughtering monsters till you get to a bad guy. And had tons of session with little to no combat as the players solved the mystery. I mean yes if you run I6, that has a big dungeon. I never ran Ravenloft adventures in my campaigns with massive dungeons. Again if it didn't work for you, it didn't. For me the D&D elements were never a big problem (I think they gave the game enough juice and areas to go in, that it enabled longer term campaigns, but still blended in those gothic horror and classic horror elements nicely). I just don't see how shifting to Cthulhu or changing the system leads to the player characters undergoing the transformational journey you are looking for (unless you are thinking of insanity mechanics, but again, Ravenloft kind of had that with the horror check and the powers checks do transform you over time if you engage in evil actions). They did introduce stuff like madness mechanics later to the setting but I thought those didn't work very well and didn't really add to the experience of play much (just gave you another subsystem to bog things down). I liked the simplicity of fear and horror, curses and powers checks---and I liked that the bad guys in an adventure were essentially a reflection of how domain lords operate (the domain lords are sort of the blue print for things)

I'd be interested to know what you consider a typical adventure outline in Ravenloft. Not looking for a ton of details, just whether you think in terms of location or scene based adventures, the composition of mysteries vs. combat, how much socialization, that kind of thing. Basically, how you fill up the playtime. Because while you seem to be missing a fair amount of what I've been trying to say (that "what I'm looking for" in the quoted section above is another tickets to Munich moment), I do suspect you found a happy medium between D&D and the gothic elements that worked for you and your group. I was never a huge fan of I6 myself (admired some parts, not others), and while my exposure to the other published adventures was minimal, they didn't sound that good.

Agree that some of the mechanics in Ravenloft don't work particularly well. Many of the concepts are good, but the implementation is shaky. The DMs I know who used them well tended to ad hoc them a lot.

I think I was just confused what you were advocating. Apologies. Wasn't trying to be difficult. I thought you were saying that Ravenloft tried to be gothic horror, but failed in your mind, and you felt it could have better achieved it if it took a different direction, but it sounds like you are saying you can't do gothic horror in this kind of RPG so just embrace the D&D side of things. That is fair if that is how you feel about it. Domains of Dread went a little more in that direction because there were fans who feel the way you do, and the new edition supposedly is going much more in that direction. I think for me, because I came to Ravenloft through the Knight of the Black Rose and black box, and was really struck by it (it was the first setting that clicked for me), it kind of just always made intuitive sense. It did take me a while to figure out how to run adventures well because this was the 90s and there was the storytelling railroad thing in the air (which I certainly did as much as anyone at that time).

But in terms of adventure structures I tended to run it monster of the week, with focus on monster hunts, mysteries, etc.  That wasn't the only structure, but it was one of the reliable ways I found to prep. I stated this several times here, but just in case you didn't see those posts, I really started to connect the dots when I ran Feast of Goblyns and got the first Van Richten book (got that one like the day it came out). Feast of Goblyns had a section on 'major wandering encounters' which was basically about treating NPCs as alive in the setting, having their own agendas and moving around not being rooted to particular places (reacting to PCs, that sort of thing). The Van Richten books placed a lot of emphasis on monster hunts and customizing the monsters so they were almost like a puzzle to solve (so you might need to learn about their history if you want to find their weaknesses---and Ravenloft creatures could be pretty hard to kill if you didn't know their weaknesses). Usually when I prepped, I started with the villain and worked from there. In the case of the monster hunt, let's say a werewolf. It might be quite simple: the players are asked to help a village solve a number of local killings and that leads them down a trail of clues, and ultimately to the werewolf (and in that sort of scenario, often figuring out who the werewolf is might be important). This adventure might have zero encounters until the players are attacked by or confront the werewolf. But I could spice things up if needed (I tended to do so by tying those encounters to the werewolf through minions or another villain or bad guy involved in the adventure somehow). Ravenloft gives GMs a lot of flexibility for tailoring encounters, and encounters are meant to really be played up and just happen one after another like a slog (at least not in the early 90s Ravenloft) so I tended to abide by that and found it worked. If they were facing a powerful undead, like a lich, then certainly there would be more room for encounters with stuff like zombies and skeletons. But I'd say on average there was probably 1-2 combats per adventure for me. Sometimes there weren't even combats, they may just resolve the puzzle of the ghost by laying it rest, or they might flee from the villain and decide not to confront them. Filling up time never seemed to be a problem. And of course if the players traveled, all bets might be off, they could certainly have encounters along the road (but again I would not do it like I do in a sandbox campaign where I am rolling randomly and possibly having 0 possibly having 10 encounters depending on what happens with the rolls). I leaned heavily on the idea of the planned encounter in the boxed set. So one really atmospheric encounter where the players can interact with the emerging threat, hedge their bets, potentially make choices that result in a better or worse fight for them against a terrifying creature (rather than a bunch).

As an example I remember running a haunted house (Think it was the house of lament, which I elaborated on from the Darklords book--pretty sure that is the one it was in). There was basically only one real encounter running through the house when they were trapped in it (which was the adventure itself, trying to find a way to destroy the haunting or escape). I think I had a porcelain statue that was stalking the halls trying to kill them. So they explored and tried to evade that one creature. It has been ages so I don't recall too many of the specifics, but I do remember having this one looming threat that occasionally emerged.

I also eschewed things like magic items (Ravenloft was described as not having many in the black box) and shied away from dungeons: most of those kinds of locations in my campaigns were simpler, more practical, like a real world tomb where a lich might be residing. Experience was dolled out more slowly too. So the party had a pretty long period of low level adventures before getting to a point where they were tackling more powerful foes (and by then it was fun because I was able to throw thing like ancient vampires after them).

Now, if I understand your meaning with melodrama and personal horror. That stuff could still come up on the player end in my games. But I think I approached it in one of two ways: introducing it externally, or allowing it to emerge naturally and feeding it when it cropped up as a result of player choice. The former is a little more hamfisted. I would do it with greater caution these days. But I recall for example having a long time NPC who had been with the party for like two years, end up getting captured and turned into a flesh golem, then sent after the party. That had much more of a personal connection than say just having to deal with a flesh golem that was unrelated to the party in any way. Also powers checks and characters getting corrupted over time could lead to that, but as you said, that isn't something that came up reliably every adventure. The percentage chance for a powers check is actually pretty low (usually 1-2 percent, though it could go up to 10 percent for certain actions). But because it comes with a reward and punishment, there were always players who liked to test that rule and would go down the path (which in my experience worked pretty well in terms of capturing that slow transformation of a character). It might not fit perfectly to literary gothic for some folks, but I found it pretty cool to see in action and I became a lot more skilled in managing failed powers checks the more they came up. Overall though, I was content with this stuff being  on the villain side of things.

Not sure if this answers your question well. I ran Ravenloft regularly from 91-92 to about 2003 (I became disenchanted with the d20 version of Ravenloft). So I did play a lot of different styles and approaches in that time. And I often ran the modules (which had problems, but I ran most more than once, and managed to play most of the ones I ran both as written and just cutting them up and using them as I needed: Feast of Goblyns was great for the latter).

Quote from: Ghostmaker on June 14, 2021, 08:20:17 AM
I just noticed something in Curse of Strahd (5E).

On p36, 'A Vistana's Tale', the NPC in question tells the story of a mighty wizard who contested with Strahd but was felled. Later on, the PCs might discover said wizard is still alive, but driven mad by Strahd and/or the Dark Powers. This is an addition from the original Ravenloft 2E adventure.

So why is this an issue? Well, in a truly spectacular example of what tropers call 'worfing', the maddened wizard is Mordenkainen. Yeah, that Mordenkainen. The guy who does shots with Elminster in Ed Greenwood's kitchen.

No, no, no, what the fuck, WotC. We already know Strahd is a badass, why are you fucking up Greyhawk's preeminent archmage? That's just fucking insulting.

Dont worry about it, Elminster has already rescued him.

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 03:36:55 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 03:29:50 PM

Quote from: Pat on June 14, 2021, 03:25:48 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on June 14, 2021, 03:05:04 PM
Again here I think I just don't see how you force that in an RPG. You can certainly make adventures that have emotional weight to them, but you can't force a player to go on an emotional melodramatic journey.

You don't, that's one of the things I've been emphasizing because it's a clear difference from the source material. In Ravenloft adventures, NPCs, particularly one-off NPCs, carry most of that emotional weight. It robs it of the central place it takes in gothic horror, but allows it to still occur, albeit at a greater emotional distance.

I get what you're saying but what I don't understand is how you propose those elements get introduced. I mean if you want the emotional aspects of gothic horror to be experienced by the players and not by the villains....

I literally just said "you don't".

Classic Pat