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BRC
2011-04-11, 03:50 PM
RPG's tend to be about the PC's overcoming dangerous threats. The more dangerous the threat, the more exciting it is to defeat it, this is why we fight goblins and liches instead of bunnies and guys who just bought a book of magic tricks. MM Descriptions tend to emphasize how evil, powerful, or dangerous an enemy is, hyping up the tension, and making it that much more exciting when the PCs finally bring it down.

This is a good thing, and I'm going to call it "Charge" Scary.

However, there is another type of scary, "Run" Scary. This is when you're trying to tell the PCs that they won't win this fight, that the guy wielding a dragonskull mace and riding a steed made out of obsidian and hellfire may be beyond their capabilities at this time.

Now, assume that there is no metagaming here. The PC's don't know that they are Level 5 and that a Fire Giant is CR10. They know that they can handle Trolls and Ogres, but they don't have a metric for how much more powerful a Fire giant is, in fact, they may not even know what a Fire Giant is.


How, as the DM, do you differentiate between "Charge" Scary and "Run" Scary.

Volos
2011-04-11, 04:05 PM
Take something the players take for granted. Big things move slowly. Mountains are there forever. Arrows hit something when fired, maybe not the target but something. Swords kill things. Magic works. And then show them that their assumptions are wrong, oh so very wrong.

When the Fire Giant moves, it seems to defy it's own size and weight, moving faster they they could expect. When it misses them, if you want to be nice or somehow fumble, it tears a chunk out of the mountian the size of a small house. Their arrows turn to ash when within ten feet of this flaming monster. Their swords turn to putty, very hot and not fun to touch putty. Their magic, while casted, shows no sign of even happening.

There are other ways to do this, but this is the general idea. Make them realize what it is they are up against. One such assumption I proved incorrect to my players was that boats don't eat people while diving from several hundred feet above. Just an example.

Shade Kerrin
2011-04-11, 05:44 PM
'Charge' scary and 'Run' scary....sounds quite a bit like the 'Fight or Flight' reflex attributed to adrenaline.

On topic, I was once able to induce fear via being inconsistent, in far too short a time-frame to not be noticed. "Does a 21 hit? Yes. 20? No. 22. No. Wha?"(Actually, it was a swordsage using a stance)

archon_huskie
2011-04-11, 05:51 PM
I once freaked out a dwarf fighter by telling him that he saw something purple with his darkvision.

Comet
2011-04-11, 06:00 PM
Usually I tend to avoid straight-up 'run' scary, in the sense of "suddenly, a monster appears. It looks scary and your weapons do no damage. Run". I mean, it's not that much fun to run into some monster, be told either outright or in more subtle hints that I can't possibly defeat it and then having to run away.

Every once in a while, sure, it's a refreshing change. But it really does get old fast and isn't as much scary as just plain frustrating.

Now, a much more fun method is to hint that there is something out there, perhaps very near, that the PCs will have to run away from if it chooses to reveal itself. Then keep the threat in the shadows, slowly driving the players insane as their imaginations fill those shadows with the most horrible molestations incarnate in flesh and blood and bones.
When it comes to scary stuff, the players know their own fears way better than the GM ever could. If the monster does eventually reveal itself, the players will, with any luck, choose to run on their own without any pressure from the GM.

dsmiles
2011-04-11, 06:06 PM
I fully believe that at least 5% of encounters should be "run" scary. My players know the game at least as well as I do, so they know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn481KcjvMo) :smalltongue: Yeah, that just happened.

ClockShock
2011-04-11, 06:33 PM
One standard tactic is to have Mr. Run lay some smack down on an innocent bystander. Show them how much it hurts.

Alternatively legends may be sung about Mr. Run (or tales told of his race). In this manner you're having a third party react to Mr. Run how the PCs should react (so it's like the above, but the third party doesn't get hurt)

Given your assumption of no metagaming and no other measure of power - you need to provide a measure of power in game via a third party.

Generally description is possible (go overbaord with things that are scarier) but that begins to rely on metagaming as well ("hey players, i'm describing this loads, better get running") and forces you to describe enemies based on their power.

The other other alternative is to let your players work it out. Never seen a flaming giant before? let's not approach until we know more about it.

Tengu_temp
2011-04-11, 06:54 PM
Unknown things are scary. If you don't know what is the creature capable of, if it's immune to everything you throw at it, if you don't even know what it is and just observe the results it has on the environment or other, unlucky victims - then it's scary, and it might make the players prefer to avoid it. And when you describe the actual monster, make it creepy.

It's very hard to make PCs run away from something just by describing how strong and powerful it looks, unless you want to teach them several hard lessons (read: TPK) that will make them wary of fighting anything that might seem like it's a challenge. And it's better to have overconfident players than paranoid and cowardly ones, if you ask me.

MightyTim
2011-04-11, 09:17 PM
In a game like D&D, making monsters which are, as you say, "Run" scary, can feel a lot like railroading to your players if it's done incorrectly.

Done correctly, the PCs need to fully understand that this threat is way over their heads, and with the fewer failed actions on their part, the better. If you're typically the type of DM who tries to carefully tailor encounters to provide a difficult, but manageable, obstacle, your players might get into the habit of assuming that they should have a chance against anything you pit them up against.

Certain types of monsters are going to be easier to invoke that type of reaction than others. For example, an elder dragon, or the Terrasque, for lower level adventurers is probably almost immediately going to invoke this kind of reaction. It's obvious that they can't win. If it isn't going to be immediately obvious to the players, based somewhat on meta-knowledge, as a DM, you need to make it painfully obvious (through descriptions), that this challenge is of a different order of magnitude than they usually face.

IMO, the best way to do this is to hint at it throughout the campaign. In OP's example, if they're coming up against a Fire Giant and the DM wants them to just run for it, the Fire Giant probably figured prominently in reason for the quest itself. Sure, they fought orcs and trolls, but this Fire Giant leveled an entire city in minutes. The son of the Duke rode into battle with a legion of soldiers and they were cremated alive.

Alternatively, I like to keep a prominent NPC around for the sole purpose of dying a horrific death in an instant, to either cover the PCs escape, or just prove a point that they don't have any chance.

As I stated in the beginning, trying to invoke the "run" response from PCs can easily feel like railroading if not handled well, so use with caution.

rayne_dragon
2011-04-11, 09:18 PM
D&D is not a game that is condusive to "run" scary. As a player, I'll generally keep an eye out for an escape route during any battle so that I can flee if the battle goes badly (although I rarely actually do so). As a DM I usually assume that players will try to fight something so while I may play up how tough and strong a monster is and drop hints that it's going to be deadly, when they actually encounter the monster I'll usually have it toy around with the party first, like a cat playing with a mouse before getting more serious. And I wouldn't mess around with creatures that the party could potentially handle if I wanted a monster like that - I'd make sure it was something the party couldn't handle, like an ancient red wyrm. Of course I don't like to put in encounters the party has no chance of handling. I'll usually create an encounter with what makes sense (and I disregard CR in favour of theme when appropriate) then allow the party to decide if they want to fight it or avoid it.

NichG
2011-04-11, 09:22 PM
One way to invoke a feel of 'Run' scary is to make it not obvious at first that there's even something to fight. PCs will fight a giant man made of lava that causes streams of lava to flow down the landscape where he steps that may immolate people and terrain. PCs will generally not try to fight a volcanic eruption. PCs will fight a turtle the size of an island that can kick up tidal waves as an attack, but will not try to fight a tidal wave itself.

If you make the threat something that looks like it is absolutely beyond the PCs' scale (physically, not in terms of level), they'll be more likely to run. There may be a creature behind it, but the creature might be well hidden by the effects they are generating until the reveal when the party is already fleeing.

TroubleBrewing
2011-04-11, 09:37 PM
I once freaked out a dwarf fighter by telling him that he saw something purple with his darkvision.

... Mark? Or someone else I used to game with? I saw your location, and I WAS THERE WHEN THIS HAPPENED. Or someone I knew was.

Ezeze
2011-04-11, 09:53 PM
You're over-thinking this. The absolute best way to get your PCs to do what you want is to ask them to. At the end of a big, dark, scary description, tell them to run. As long as running away is entertaining (and you give them XP for it, which you should) they shouldn't have a problem.

kieza
2011-04-11, 11:14 PM
I tend to just tell my players when something is meant to be run from, although I also tend not to include random overpowering encounters. If something is meant to be run from, it's either a plot point, or the setup to a pursuit encounter. (Edit: One of the big problems is that if you mix the two, the players may not know which is which.)

The exception was one short campaign I ran for only two players, in which I wound up doing something interesting. Rather than decrease the difficulty of the encounters, I added lots and lots of useful terrain: in fights with one large monster, I put in lots of ways to hide and make hit-and run attacks, or lure it into situations that would allow them to deal lots of damage. In fights with plenty of weaker monsters, it was cover for ambushes so they could thin out the ranks before closing. For that campaign, I let the players know that they would be facing things that they couldn't take in head-on combat, and that they should be running or finding ways to gain the advantage most of the time.

BRC
2011-04-12, 12:09 AM
You're over-thinking this. The absolute best way to get your PCs to do what you want is to ask them to. At the end of a big, dark, scary description, tell them to run. As long as running away is entertaining (and you give them XP for it, which you should) they shouldn't have a problem.

Handling a "Running" encounter is a different subject (My preferred method is a combination of interesting terrain, a slow moving baddie that will smash their faces (The thing they are running from) and a couple mooks between the PC's and safety).

And yes, simply saying "Run" is an option. Preferably though, the DM is able to convey that without resorting to enforced metagaming.

Gamer Girl
2011-04-12, 12:34 AM
Charge scary and Run scary should be the same thing. You want monsters to be scary. The game can quickly get boring if it's:

DM-''You enter the Pit of Doom and see the Evil Lich Lord covered in undead maggots!'
Players-'Yawn..we attack''


The two types a scary should be Game Scary(Oh the ghost is so scary that you get a -2 to your rolls) and Real Scary(Players-"We run, withdraw, retreat and get away from that Lich fast! "

Starwulf
2011-04-12, 01:17 AM
Not a DM, but I would say an effective way to show how the monster is beyond their capabilities, is to take a monster that they normally win against(though not always a certainty) , say an Ogre or a Troll, and have it wander by the Run Away Now. Then have the Run Away Now monster pick it up, break it in half with no effort whatsoever, and swallow the pieces whole, all while laughing or snorting, or barely even paying attention. If it can casually decimate a monster the party sometimes struggles against, it should be clearly beyond their capabilities.

Telonius
2011-04-12, 09:05 AM
It's easy and sometimes cliche'd, but find a helpful NPC that the PCs are reasonably sure are more powerful than they are. Have the bad guy kick his butt. Unless their Wisdom is collectively less than Peregrin Took's, they'll take the hint.

Cyrion
2011-04-12, 09:26 AM
Take advantage of the skills they have- knowledge, survival, etc. Tell them some bit of information based on their knowledge rolls that should make them question the wisdom of going toe to toe. If the party hears, "The mage remembers that of the beastiaries he was reading in the Great Library stated that this monster is immune to [his favorite bit of magic]" or gets information about something the beastie can do that they can't counter, then they should realize that maybe this is a fight for another day.

This way you're rewarding invested skill points, possibly in some otherwise little-used skills, and you don't need to indulge in metagaming.

Also, don't make them feel like they'll be penalized for running away- their running should not kill them, kill someone else, keep them from achieving the larger plot goals, etc.

Heliomance
2011-04-12, 12:50 PM
And yes, simply saying "Run" is an option. Preferably though, the DM is able to convey that without resorting to enforced metagaming.

I dunno, I can see that being effective. Depends how it's handled.


The creature is black, its skin rubbery. It seems hunched, or possibly coiled, tensed for immediate motion. Its gaping maw houses fangs sharp as any snake, and its form sends shivers of recognition into your hindbrain. Your instincts scream at you that this is a predator, your predator. Every reflex you have left over from the animal that is you from the time before history, instills one, overwhelming desire into you.

Run.

*disclaimer: I wrote this in about 30 seconds. I am aware that it lacks polish.

Sarco_Phage
2011-04-12, 12:54 PM
There's another way to convey the sense of "run" to the players without actually saying it, but it involves an NPC who is individually more powerful than the party.

Have the new threat off him in a straight fight that they only arrive to see the end of. Pretend-roll dice behind the screen/on your laptop to "simulate" the fight, and have it "end" shortly before they get there. They'll wonder why the ominous dice-rolling has suddenly stopped.

And then they round the corner and see their godwizard buddy pinned to the wall by a hideous creature made of corpses and sin. Etcetera.

Yukitsu
2011-04-12, 01:33 PM
I never, ever ever do "run" scary, nor do I do "charge" scary. I make an encounter, and let the players react as they want to, trying to find their own solution to the problem. Trying to make either type of encounter is in my opinion, a bad call, since you're trying to dictate player action.

I'm basically a horror genre DM however. My players tend to run from a ton of my encounters, despite the fact that 90% of what I run literally can't beat the party.

BayardSPSR
2011-04-12, 01:52 PM
Do it indirectly, through NPCs, as many have said, either by showing (NPC dies fast) or telling (NPC says RUN or does so). The Fellowship of the Ring has two examples, both pertaining to the Balrog. For the 'show' it takes down Gandalf (kinda), and for the 'tell', we see Legolas - thus far afraid of nothing - freak out about it.

On the other hand, Aragorn and Boromir do try to stay to fight for a while until Gandalf explains that they can't possibly hurt it; I guess the lesson is that the PCs are always going to get it wrong once in a while - which is the danger of scary things.

Pisha
2011-04-12, 01:56 PM
Hmm... I recall only two times when our party has ever run (once in epic levels, even!)

The first time, we were traveling through a desert when a group of ogres (giants? Something big) was spotted approaching the caravan. Despite being told to wait and see what they wanted, certain members of the party (who shall remain nameless) decided to take the initiative and attack them. Huge battle ensues, we throw our best spells and attacks at them, they beat us bloody but we manage to kill, oh, all but two of them. And that's when the blue dragons show up. And the remaining giants turn to face them, shouting things like "There they are!" and similar.

One intelligence roll later, we realize a couple of things. These giants were hunting the dragons. We used up our most powerful attacks (and most of our HP) to kill them. Thus leaving us vulnerable to the dragons.

The second time, we were fighting this giant centipede-like thing that lived in a lake of lava (look, I don't know.) We're giving as good as we get, but collectively we've dealt out close to a thousand points of damage, and the thing is still going strong. Finally, one guy gets frustrated. He pulls out a little statue, something we'd found in a dungeon once and never got around to selling. It looks a little like a wonderous figurine, except that it's creepy and full of tentacles. He says something like "Well, I always wanted to find out what this did," and breaks it.

At which point, the GM grins evilly, grabs a green marker and begins drawing - well, lay your arm down on a gaming mat sometime and trace the outline, that's about the size of these tentacles. As they began grappling the centipede thing, we ran.

In both instances, the GM used cues - the amount of damage the dragons did, combined with the number of them, or the Will saves against Fear that left most of us with a burning desire to get away, quickly, thank you from those tentacles - but the common factor, I think, was the slow sudden realization that we had made the situation so, so much worse. Generally speaking, I don't expect our GM to try for a TPK. If he throws something at us, there's usually going to be a way to defeat it (like, say, a band of friendly dragon-hunting giants!) But if we mess up, the gloves are off - and that's scary.

valadil
2011-04-12, 04:26 PM
How, as the DM, do you differentiate between "Charge" Scary and "Run" Scary.

Lemme just build on a couple thoughts by some other posters...


One standard tactic is to have Mr. Run lay some smack down on an innocent bystander. Show them how much it hurts.




And then they round the corner and see their godwizard buddy pinned to the wall by a hideous creature made of corpses and sin. Etcetera.

Together they form something I call the transitive law of badassery. It works like this. If A is more badass than B and B is more badass than C, A is therefore more badass than C.

Make the PCs into C and the scary thing A. Now you need a sacrificial B. As was suggested, this can be an NPC the PCs have fought before. It can be an NPC who has fought on the PC's side, as long as he's demonstrated his prowess. (Allies are actually good sacrificial lambs here, because not only do they demonstrate how tough an enemy is, they make things personal if the PCs had any attachment to the ally. I like this for building up a BBEG rather than a one off monster though.) You can even use other monsters the PCs have fought. If they went toe to toe with an adult red dragon last week and barely lived to tell the tale, a monster that can one shot the same dragon is damn scary.

Anyway, now that you have your B, feed it to A in front of the PCs.

Yukitsu
2011-04-12, 05:17 PM
Am I the only one here who consistently deals with that method by trying to avenge the NPC?

Pisha
2011-04-12, 05:30 PM
Am I the only one here who consistently deals with that method by trying to avenge the NPC?

Lol, not at ALL. I think the trick there is exaggeration. Truly, truly ridiculous amounts of overkill may (hopefully?) make even the most confident and vengeance-bound PC think twice. (Maybe.)

Honestly, some of it also has to do with GM-player communication. Not just to the extent of "Big scary description. Run," or even Wisdom/Intelligence checks to let you know you should run, but if you're running a world where you expect your players to occasionally face something they're gonna have to run from, make sure they know that. Many players may honestly not realize running is an option. I didn't, when I first started playing.

faceroll
2011-04-12, 06:13 PM
1d4 investigators per round.

NichG
2011-04-12, 07:20 PM
Situations where I've been in a party and we fled something:

- Elder black pudding in a dungeon against a three-person party of about level 9. It was a status quo dungeon and we missed the turnoff and kept going into more and more dangerous areas without realizing. The paladin in the group, ostensibly the meat shield, was grappled and dissolved within something like a round. Then it moved to grapple me (the wizard) and I said 'nuts to this' and teleported to safety. Of course then the third party member, a kobold monk, used spring attack to take down the thing solo.

- In another game, we were raiding the vault of Dispater in Baator for an artifact. We snuck in using Ironguard to walk through the walls of his tower, and then made a run for it as fast as we could. By the end we had something like five Pit Fiends on our tail among other things, and we burned a Miracle to flee to safety with the artifact. But then we went into that with the intent to flee.

- On several occasions, we fled from something one of the party had done, usually involving setting up ridiculously huge explosions of varying scales.

- Another campaign, we're exploring this library that seems to be outside of time and space, and we meet the librarian. We talk a bit and it seems that the library archives artifacts from places that were destroyed by some prescient cosmic force that was going around wiping out universes that would give birth to people in the future who would fight it. The librarian then says 'Oh crap, I think I set you on a path to fight it. It's coming.' The library begins shaking and a wall of black energy starts eating its way through the library, dissolving the artifacts. We just broke and ran from that one.

- Similarly, we fled a situation where a giant hand reached down from a crack in the sky and began to annihilate the landscape (as in, it touched a mile wide island which instantly sizzled away into nothingness).

- We fled a weird skeleton thing with a dunce cap when a powerful being we were with panicked and told us to run. However, we did fight it for a few rounds so that others could get away. Probably this was less effective than the other things, since we might've gotten confident about beating it if we had fought it for longer, except that it had an attack that permanently reduced max hitpoints so none of us wanted to push our luck, fail, and have to fight it again later.

- We fled a thing made of horrible corruption and suffering at the advice of some allied NPCs. Of course, I was playing the sort of character that just had to test its strength, so I let it get one hit on me to see what it could do. A few thousand damage and a high DC disjunction-on-hit later and the rest of the party gladly fled.

- We (partially failed) to flee an array of a hundred psionic drones that could coop-manifest psionic powers to boost to DC. One PC (mine) was captured, the rest escaped.

BG
2011-04-12, 07:28 PM
I'm in agreement with most everyone here by having the baddie do something (sometimes even offscreen) to an NPC or a location. Finding an entire fort destroyed can also motivate players.

A specific example I can think of was in an OWoD Sabbat game. Throughout our adventures in this one house, we kept occasionally seeing a figure wearing a black hood out of the corner of our eyes and only if we rolled really high, that would be gone if we looked directly at it. Needless to say, by the time we encountered the figure, which did nothing but stand in the middle of a room, none of us wanted to mess with it.

This is off topic, but I will always bring it up whenever you need a way to scare players or to create tension in a horror-type game. Jenga. Have a Jenga tower set up. Set a condition, things like "10 real life minutes pass" or "Each time the player uses a certain skill". Every time that condition comes up, a player has to pull a block and place it on top. Make sure the players know, that if and when the tower falls, something very bad will happen. Also, make sure they know that multiple very bad things can happen to prevent them from just knocking it over and taking the consequences. Tension will pile up like nobodies business.

Yukitsu
2011-04-12, 11:00 PM
Lol, not at ALL. I think the trick there is exaggeration. Truly, truly ridiculous amounts of overkill may (hopefully?) make even the most confident and vengeance-bound PC think twice. (Maybe.)

Not in my case really. The last time I was in this situation, I squared off solo against 2 level 17 clerics (exactly 17 as guessed from dictum) and an army of 200 5+s at level 9. While I wasn't willing to run away, I was willing to use tactics, and everything at my disposal to make sure it happened.

To be honest, I can't honestly understand the motivation for designing an encounter solely for the purpose of forcing players to run away. Especially binary state ones where it's "you run, you live, you stay, you die." I think if I understood that motivation, I may consider running more, but when I DM my game, I hate running for timid players.

BRC
2011-04-12, 11:32 PM
To be honest, I can't honestly understand the motivation for designing an encounter solely for the purpose of forcing players to run away. Especially binary state ones where it's "you run, you live, you stay, you die." I think if I understood that motivation, I may consider running more, but when I DM my game, I hate running for timid players.

A "Run" encounter can help change up Gameplay from the standard pattern of "Run into bad guys, kill bad guys, steal pants off corpses of bad guys, repeat".

Daftendirekt
2011-04-12, 11:48 PM
Not a DM, but I would say an effective way to show how the monster is beyond their capabilities, is to take a monster that they normally win against(though not always a certainty) , say an Ogre or a Troll, and have it wander by the Run Away Now. Then have the Run Away Now monster pick it up, break it in half with no effort whatsoever, and swallow the pieces whole, all while laughing or snorting, or barely even paying attention. If it can casually decimate a monster the party sometimes struggles against, it should be clearly beyond their capabilities.

Like this? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs_kkJRNbf0#t=01m00s)

Dsurion
2011-04-13, 12:41 AM
I've got a little trouble relating to people here. I've never had a problem with getting players to run. I don't even try. All it takes for them is the realistic approach of, "Is it larger than us? Does it look like it weighs more than us?" and they'll generally try to find a more advantageous position of attack or retreat. And when they do either, their plans are way more interesting than most encounters would have gone anyhow.

Of course, that falls apart with magic. But my last DM had a hilarious solution for that. Magic in his world was strictly controlled by a college of wizards, the head of whom wore a set of extremely goofy-looking mage robes his mother crafted for him. When other colleagues offended his attire, he forced it to be standard uniform for all persons attending the college. Thus, we knew who was a mage almost all the time because they looked ridiculous :smalltongue:

Yukitsu
2011-04-13, 01:22 PM
A "Run" encounter can help change up Gameplay from the standard pattern of "Run into bad guys, kill bad guys, steal pants off corpses of bad guys, repeat".

I think if your options are "encounters that can only be solved with direct combat" and "an encounter where the only manner in which the PCs can win is scripted by the DM" you probably need a bigger basket of encounters.

BRC
2011-04-13, 01:26 PM
I think if your options are "encounters that can only be solved with direct combat" and "an encounter where the only manner in which the PCs can win is scripted by the DM" you probably need a bigger basket of encounters.
Alright, then throw in "Encounters where the PC's will lose in a straight fight, but can win with good tactics", "Encounters the PC's don't need to fight", ect.

In the case of a "Run" encounter, it's not that "The PC's can only win by doing exactly what the DM says", it's that the "Win" condition is redefined from "Kill the enemy" to "escape".

They can still do so any number of ways, they can just try to straight outrun the enemy, taking AoO's from mooks in their path, they can kill the mooks, risking the bid evil catching up to them. They can manipulate the environment to slow the big evil thing down. A Retreat can be just as exciting as an Assault if done right.

Tyndmyr
2011-04-13, 01:33 PM
I think if your options are "encounters that can only be solved with direct combat" and "an encounter where the only manner in which the PCs can win is scripted by the DM" you probably need a bigger basket of encounters.

I would agree with this.

I tend to determine encounters based first on what makes sense for the setting and/or plot. CR is a rough guide at best.

Other criteria include "is it boring" and "is it survivable"? Note that survivable need not mean winnable. I'm not adverse to "if you see it, you're already dead" encounters existing....but the players do need to have adequate warning that such things exist and a means of avoiding them. They are not necessarily designed to be encounters as such, but are parts of the world that the PC simply cannot hope to beat down. At least, not yet.

For instance, you can't kill gods at level one. Even if you someone managed to find one to attack, doing so would be terminally stupid. These sorts of possible encounters exist everywhere, but they should never be framed as a good idea to do. If possible, they should not even be framed as an option.

Now, in encounters where the players are expected to survive...the bread and butter of the campaign, I hope, I build them to allow a minimum of three ways out that the players could reasonably pull off. Once I've hit that, I'm done. They need not use one of those three ways to do it, but it's a way for me to make certain that I'm not throwing them something impossible. Sometimes one or all of these ways involve fleeing. That's cool.

Fear is thus not something I specifically plan out, but that happens to come up fairly frequently while adventuring due to uncertainty and atmosphere. After all, if the players know "this is an encounter the DM has planned for us to run away from", the fear is gone. They're no longer in suspense. The fear comes in not knowing the way out, or sometimes, in not even knowing what the threat is yet.

Yukitsu
2011-04-13, 01:46 PM
Alright, then throw in "Encounters where the PC's will lose in a straight fight, but can win with good tactics", "Encounters the PC's don't need to fight", ect.

Well, yes but once you have these two types of encounter, you've pretty much covered everything you'll ever need in a game. The former to make the game interesting, and the latter to add background to the world. Adding the "you can only win by running" to this list brings down the average quality, not increasing it.

There's no real point in throwing encounters that are so easy the players can just walk into it and win without trying, you may as well just notch their EXP up a little on certain random encounter rolls, and there's pretty much as much variety as the players can handle when they're stretched to their limit tactically. There's equivalently no real point to making encounters that cannot be beaten by the party. Either they run and live, or they stay and die. Adding a challenge to the escape just means instead of arbitrary death or life based on a choice, it's arbitrary death or life based on a choice and on lucky die rolls.

Tyndmyr
2011-04-13, 01:49 PM
There's no real point in throwing encounters that are so easy the players can just walk into it and win without trying,

There is a bit...there's the verisimilitude...not every bear on earth instantly levels up with the players. The bear doesn't know they are high level now. Occasionally running into something familiar(and now easy) when going back to an area they were in before(something fairly common in many campaigns) makes the world feel more real.

And sometimes players just love stomping all over others and showing off how powerful they are. Is it a challenge? Not particularly, but not every single thing in the game needs to be.

I'm ok with the world containing non-level equivalent things, on both sides of the spectrum.

Keep in mind that I'm comfortable with awarding xp for achieving the goal, regardless of how the challenges were overcome. Bribed your way past the guy you can't kill? Fantastic. Full xp.

Yukitsu
2011-04-13, 01:52 PM
There is a bit...there's the verisimilitude...not every bear on earth instantly levels up with the players. The bear doesn't know they are high level now. Occasionally running into something familiar(and now easy) when going back to an area they were in before(something fairly common in many campaigns) makes the world feel more real.

And sometimes players just love stomping all over others and showing off how powerful they are. Is it a challenge? Not particularly, but not every single thing in the game needs to be.

I'm ok with the world containing non-level equivalent things, on both sides of the spectrum.

Sorry, clarification. There's no real point to running it, and rolling the dice for it. I can't count the number of times I've been banging my head on the table edge when the DM kept rolling up 0 resource expenditure encounters which chewed up an hour in total that could have been spent on interesting or plot related encounters.

Tyndmyr
2011-04-13, 02:13 PM
Sorry, clarification. There's no real point to running it, and rolling the dice for it. I can't count the number of times I've been banging my head on the table edge when the DM kept rolling up 0 resource expenditure encounters which chewed up an hour in total that could have been spent on interesting or plot related encounters.

Oh, I'll roll the dice for it, like for everything else...but I generally don't run a lot of them back to back. I tend to design things so that there is variety in encounters pretty much everywhere, so unless the players are deliberately engaging in commoner slaughtering or some such, they shouldn't be dealing with endless lowbie stuff. That only happens if the players seek it out

And hey, even commoner slaughtering should lead to nasty encounters eventually. Sooner or later, you'll kill or threaten someone that matters to someone who can track you down and do nasty things to you.

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of giant random encounter tables, though. I'd rather do a big more prep to determine what makes sense. If you roll, you sometimes roll badly. An older campaign I was in ALWAYS rolled some kind of bear for the random encounters. It got to the point where the DM stopped rolling and said "Screw it. There are bears. Everywhere. Just more bears".

NichG
2011-04-13, 02:20 PM
A non-exhaustive list of types of encounters I can think of off the top of my head...

- Straight-out comparison of strength and tactics. Party vs. band of orcs, party vs. dragon in a cave chamber, that kind of thing. Could be 'easy' or 'hard'.

- Encounters with a trick/secondary beneficial objectives. Party vs. a buffed up optimized wizard. Low level party (no party-wide flight) attacking a castle - need to open the drawbridge/break the walls/tunnel/something to get it. This is something that is initially overpowering but can be made easier by achieving the secondaries.

- Encounters against overwhelming strength with victory conditions other than 'kill enemy'. This can be things like 'hold a position for 5 rounds', 'survive', etc.

- Encounters where the objective is information gathering. Send a guy to fight the BBEG early to determine information about how to prepare to fight him for real. Probably would be more PC-initiated than DM-initiated.

- Encounters whose purpose is show or achieving some pseudo-cooperative result. Exhibition match in a tournament with a reward for flashiest move, that kind of thing.

Tyndmyr
2011-04-13, 02:22 PM
Also, puzzle encounters.

This incorporates a pretty wide variety of encounters, but it's basically any encounter where beating it consists of learning how it works.

lord pringle
2011-04-13, 02:29 PM
The scariest NPC I ever ran was a homebrewed class that could do a bit of every type of magic. My players thought he took levels in those classes and freaked out.

BRC
2011-04-13, 02:33 PM
I would agree with this.

I tend to determine encounters based first on what makes sense for the setting and/or plot. CR is a rough guide at best.

Other criteria include "is it boring" and "is it survivable"? Note that survivable need not mean winnable. I'm not adverse to "if you see it, you're already dead" encounters existing....but the players do need to have adequate warning that such things exist and a means of avoiding them. They are not necessarily designed to be encounters as such, but are parts of the world that the PC simply cannot hope to beat down. At least, not yet.

And figuring out ways to provide such a warning is the purpose of this thread. I'm intentionally removing obvious tools (like relaying on the players having Metagame knowledge or simply declaring that this fight is beyond their capabilities), because I want this discussion to explore other techniques.

In my experience, the assumption is that, if the PC's run into a group of baddies, that the DM has selected the baddies so they can provide a challenge, while still giving the PC's a probable chance of victory which they can increase with good, but conventional (Read, some varient on "Stab it with the sharp end) tactics. This is not a bad thing, when the PC's run into some goblins, they shouldn't freak out unless there is a convient rockslide they can trigger.

That said, sometimes, either for story purposes, or to mix up gameplay, you want a situation the PC's can't just fight their way out if. You want a threat that will beat them in a straight up fight. This may mean they avoid a fight, it may mean they run for safety, it may mean they need to ensure that the conditions of the fight are as much in their favor as possible.



Well, yes but once you have these two types of encounter, you've pretty much covered everything you'll ever need in a game. The former to make the game interesting, and the latter to add background to the world. Adding the "you can only win by running" to this list brings down the average quality, not increasing it.

"You can only win by fighting" is basically standard fare, is it not? What's wrong with setting up a thrilling high-speed chase, or any situation where the solution isn't a frontal attack. If the assumption is that the players can face encounters head-on, you need some way to indicate that this particular challenge may require a different approach.


There's no real point in throwing encounters that are so easy the players can just walk into it and win without trying, you may as well just notch their EXP up a little on certain random encounter rolls, and there's pretty much as much variety as the players can handle when they're stretched to their limit tactically. There's equivalently no real point to making encounters that cannot be beaten by the party. Either they run and live, or they stay and die. Adding a challenge to the escape just means instead of arbitrary death or life based on a choice, it's arbitrary death or life based on a choice and on lucky die rolls.
It's not necessarily as simple a binary choice as you seem to be considering it. A good Retreat encounter is far more than "We attack" "okay you die" or "We run" "okay, you live". Obviously, it can work out like that (especially in DnD, where movement speeds are fixed), but if you properly prepared for one, you can make it far more interesting.

Consider this situation, a city street at night. The PC's have run afowl of the Law and are surrounded with city guards closing in. Do they try to rush the lines, breaking through before they get mobbed? Do they try to break line-of-sight then conceal themselves, hoping the guards will miss them in their search. Do they take to the rooftops, dodging volleys of crossbow bolts as they flee across the city? Once they're no longer surrounded the guards are still going to chase them. Do they try to hide, do they steal some horses and flee the city, do they hope they can find their allies in the local thieves guild and convince them to give them shelter? Do they try to approach the Captain of the guard and convince him of their innocence? Which way do they run, into the cramped alleyways where they could be surrounded again? To the major thoroughfares where the guards will be able to clearly see them? Inside a nearby Warehouse?

Yes, the PC's lose if they decide to stay and fight, just like in a Standard encounter the PC's will lose if the wizard tries elusively to hit things with his nonmagical quarterstaff and the fighter trades in his greatsword to pursue his dream of killing a dragon with nothing but modern dance. But once the PC's decide to run, the encounter is hardly over.

Tyndmyr
2011-04-13, 02:56 PM
And figuring out ways to provide such a warning is the purpose of this thread. I'm intentionally removing obvious tools (like relaying on the players having Metagame knowledge or simply declaring that this fight is beyond their capabilities), because I want this discussion to explore other techniques.

Yeah. I try to avoid such techniques...I dislike them in general. I don't actually have any clues that are specifically designed to say "you can't possibly win this". It's more descriptive. They find out as much as they can, and determine if they can take 'im.

A lot is setting expectations. A lot of people assume that if it can be fought, they are meant to kill it. They typically do not bother with information gathering, and leap right into combat. Those people die a lot in my campaigns.

Information can be gathered in almost any number of ways once you have PCs that care about it. Spells. Skills. Roleplaying encounters with NPCs. Clever uses of Locate Object, as per last session. The information on how badass someone is won't always be starting them in the face, so sometimes they need to look.

Sure, a god or what not...you assume a certain level of challenge. Having him utterly slay an NPC is solid too...but this is such a commonly used tactic that you need to be careful to avoid overuse and cliche.


"You can only win by fighting" is basically standard fare, is it not? What's wrong with setting up a thrilling high-speed chase, or any situation where the solution isn't a frontal attack. If the assumption is that the players can face encounters head-on, you need some way to indicate that this particular challenge may require a different approach.

I'd rather challenge the assumption to begin with. The more variety you throw in all the time, the less players will assume that "stick the pointy end in" is the best solution.

BRC
2011-04-13, 03:15 PM
I'd rather challenge the assumption to begin with. The more variety you throw in all the time, the less players will assume that "stick the pointy end in" is the best solution.
I (And most of the DM's I've met, I'm not going to go as far as to say "All" or "normal" DM's, and even "Most" is a little pushing it, considering I havn't met that many) find that assumption convenient. Most of the time when my players run into something that wants them dead, they can kill it. For every batallion of dread knights there are five goblin raiding parties that are well within the PC's abilities. The Assumption makes my job easier, when the bandits ride into town the PC's strap on their swords and fight without spending half an hour making knowledge checks, carefully watching the bandits fight the town militia, and asking locals if these bandits are all former elite soldiers who turned to banditry after the war ended. Though that's less "Challenging the assumption" as you said, and more Reversing it.

Mind you, a lot of this depends on the player's expectations. If they frequently run into things they can't beat, then they'll be on the lookout for signs that this is not a fight they can win with a frontal assault. However, that's marginal. The same techniques that tell a cautious party they should run can usually be applied to a party convinced of it's own invincibility.

Tyndmyr
2011-04-13, 03:31 PM
It's a common assumption, certainly. And not always a bad one. If a game is advertised as a pure dungeon crawl, I'm going to assume that stabbing and burning will be fairly routine solutions. And I certainly do enjoy a good dungeon crawl.

I'd say that combat encounters still make up the majority of encounters I write(especially as I dislike hp-tax traps), but since the campaigns tend to be goal oriented(even if it's the players writing the goals), encounters are usually incidental to the goal. Certainly many possible encounters are. Some information is gained organically through play, as I sprinkle descriptive text and chatter in as appropriate. Some gets found as a result of searching for it...which strikes me as rather more realistic than the heroes that always know exactly where to go and what to do by a series of coincidences.

Sure, you need to find a balance, since most games aren't dominated by investigation, but the odd Speak With Dead can provide valuable info while still being fairly interesting, and not greatly detracting from game time.

Edit: Also, nothing is such a good indicator of non-invincibility as death. I've found that rolling in the open is also a good indicator to players that I'm not going to fudge them into living.

Gamgee
2011-04-13, 04:01 PM
The Feeorin Fallen Jedi/Sith. Only a few feet taller than them, but badass beyond magnitude. They never did manage to beat him. His stats weren't even super. They just seemed by fate to be incapable of rolling well to kill him. Not to say he was a wimp, but with their bad rolls he easily finished off one and knocked him out. He was about to choke another to death with force grip. I can't remember how, but they managed to get away.

They encountered him twice more, always running. They learned to fear the sound of a lightsaber igniting in the shadows.

Another was the droids that had shields capable of redirecting blaster fire back at them. Oh boy were they pissed, managed to beat them. The next time they fought them they said **** it and ran. Could have beaten them, but the costs would have been high.

Pisha
2011-04-13, 04:20 PM
To the OP: I think the reason you're getting so many responses that verge on metagaming, despite saying that you don't want them, is that in most cases, the players' decision not to run is based on metagaming.

Not consciously, in a "cheating" way of course. But... look, in real life, no matter how strong and well-trained and confident you are, there are people you don't want to fight, because you rationally know they're better than you and will hurt you. In D&D, the players know they're playing a game. And if the GM has thrown a monster at them, the unspoken logic goes, there must be a way to defeat it. If they can't see it yet, then they just have to try harder.

To an extent, that's good - it's what keeps the PCs from giving up as soon as it gets hard! But if it really is designed as a terribly unbalanced, unwinnable encounter, you may have to do a little counter-metagaming to let them know you're really not expecting them to "figure it out."

As for why you'd have an encounter like that... I can think of a few reasons. Maybe you want to introduce the Big Bad early in the campaign, giving the PC's an idea of just how powerful he is. Maybe you want to give them a chance to use skills other than fighting. (I.e., getting out of the red dragon's lair without waking him - or distracting him if he does wake up!) Maybe you want them to start using skills other than attacking! (In the giants/dragons incident above, our GM later admitted to me that the encounter was pretty much designed to teach us not to kill first, ask questions later - if we'd tried talking to the giants, we would have had powerful allies and wouldn't have tried to run!) In a related vein, maybe you really, really want to impress on the PC's just what a silly thing they just did. Or maybe you want to set the mood for an adventure. A world where the PC's occasionally have to run is going to be a bit scarier than one where they can reasonably expect to win everytime if they're clever enough.

Lord.Sorasen
2011-04-13, 04:29 PM
Sometimes the scariest battles aren't the ones you can't win, but the ones you cannot afford to win.

Consider a large cave : zombies rise out of a pool near the bottom in mass and begin to climb up the cave in mass. This isn't too bad for the PCs; they'll take on any challenge really. But then, the cave walls begin to rumble, and you can feel the ground quake as walls begin to collapse. The party could win this fight, but doing so would risk death - and not awesome killed by zombies death but trapped in cave death.

"scary" campaigns work best when the party lacks a cleric or druid in this way, because suddenly you don't really have a way to recover. Every bit of damage, in this scenario, matters. Hell, even if they do have a healer, denying a party the chance to rest and regain spells can effectively force a party to run away. One way is the time limit, but honestly I dislike this way because it feels forced. But the wandering monster route works as well, and there's something to be said about a scenario where the wizard needs to choose between remaining in trance to prepare new spells and helping the party ranger not get mauled by owlbears.

I guess this doesn't really work with you guys, huh? My party is super inexperienced, and I made the open market limited mostly to mundane, so one doesn't see the party cleric casting infinite spells or anything.

Yukitsu
2011-04-13, 05:10 PM
"You can only win by fighting" is basically standard fare, is it not? What's wrong with setting up a thrilling high-speed chase, or any situation where the solution isn't a frontal attack. If the assumption is that the players can face encounters head-on, you need some way to indicate that this particular challenge may require a different approach.

Well, no. I've always approached encounters with the mindset of "you can only win by winning" that meaning if my goal is "attain plot item from person A" I'll generally consider my chances with disarm or slight of hand then running off with it instead of combat. I DM in a similar manner, where the NPCs are reacting to the PCs by trying to protect their goals, not by trying to kill off the players, and where players don't need to kill anything if that's not their aptitude. Anything else frankly, doesn't make much sense to me.


It's not necessarily as simple a binary choice as you seem to be considering it. A good Retreat encounter is far more than "We attack" "okay you die" or "We run" "okay, you live". Obviously, it can work out like that (especially in DnD, where movement speeds are fixed), but if you properly prepared for one, you can make it far more interesting.

Consider this situation, a city street at night. The PC's have run afowl of the Law and are surrounded with city guards closing in. Do they try to rush the lines, breaking through before they get mobbed? Do they try to break line-of-sight then conceal themselves, hoping the guards will miss them in their search. Do they take to the rooftops, dodging volleys of crossbow bolts as they flee across the city? Once they're no longer surrounded the guards are still going to chase them. Do they try to hide, do they steal some horses and flee the city, do they hope they can find their allies in the local thieves guild and convince them to give them shelter? Do they try to approach the Captain of the guard and convince him of their innocence? Which way do they run, into the cramped alleyways where they could be surrounded again? To the major thoroughfares where the guards will be able to clearly see them? Inside a nearby Warehouse?

What I did, as a player when I was in this situation, was move from alley to alley setting traps (ghoul glyph, bundles of explosive runes, symbols of pain) and ambushed them around choke points. I don't really see any cue there that avoiding combat is in any way preferable to simply killing them all off, and honestly, the tactical minutae of wearing them down with guerilla tactics is far more exciting to me than any of those attempts at retreat.


Yes, the PC's lose if they decide to stay and fight, just like in a Standard encounter the PC's will lose if the wizard tries elusively to hit things with his nonmagical quarterstaff and the fighter trades in his greatsword to pursue his dream of killing a dragon with nothing but modern dance. But once the PC's decide to run, the encounter is hardly over.

Except the only indication that they shouldn't stick around and fight is basically a metagame one. The methods used by a fighter or wizard to win in combat is self evident in world, but honestly, I don't give two wits about how "badass" you try to make an encounter sound, I'll just salivate at the challenge.

BRC
2011-04-13, 06:41 PM
Well, no. I've always approached encounters with the mindset of "you can only win by winning" that meaning if my goal is "attain plot item from person A" I'll generally consider my chances with disarm or slight of hand then running off with it instead of combat. I DM in a similar manner, where the NPCs are reacting to the PCs by trying to protect their goals, not by trying to kill off the players, and where players don't need to kill anything if that's not their aptitude. Anything else frankly, doesn't make much sense to me.

And what if the goal is simply "Survive".


What I did, as a player when I was in this situation, was move from alley to alley setting traps (ghoul glyph, bundles of explosive runes, symbols of pain) and ambushed them around choke points. I don't really see any cue there that avoiding combat is in any way preferable to simply killing them all off, and honestly, the tactical minutae of wearing them down with guerilla tactics is far more exciting to me than any of those attempts at retreat.

If you manage to pull off a one-man insurgency and take down the entire town guard, then more power to you. You managed to defeat the DM's expectations. A good DM would pat you on the back and adapt the campaign to account for this.



Except the only indication that they shouldn't stick around and fight is basically a metagame one. The methods used by a fighter or wizard to win in combat is self evident in world, but honestly, I don't give two wits about how "badass" you try to make an encounter sound, I'll just salivate at the challenge.
Which precisely illustrates the point of the thread. How does a DM differentiate between making an enemy seem dangerous to make it all the sweeter when the PC's defeat them ("salavating at the challenge" as you put it) versus making an enemy sound dangerous because they ARE dangerous.
You seem like a perfect test audience, what would a DM have to do to convince you that you should not attempt to defeat a given enemy or group of enemies.

Toliudar
2011-04-13, 07:24 PM
I feel that variants of this have been covered, but I'll clarify one of my faviourite techniques to force my players to move off of their SOP attack. Rather than making the opponent effectively immune to the players' attacks, have their usual attacks seem to strengthen them, in the spirit of Sebastian Shaw (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Shaw_(comics)) or Parasite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_(comics)). They may not run, but they'll certainly stop attacking, and might do something more interesting than "I power attack again."

This works well in tandem with the creepy-masochistic response - an opponent who seems to revel in being hurt, targeted, etc. One of the few times I've managed to genuinely freak out my tabletop group was with a human-seeming figure (albeit with a badly scarred face) who systematically put himself into the path of their weapons and spells, laughing hysterically and saying "Thank you".

Heliomance
2011-04-13, 07:59 PM
For my upcoming campaign, I've outright warned the players in advance that I won't be puling punches, that they will be thrown up against over CRed encounters, that I fully expect some of them to die, and that there will be obstacles and fights that they will only win by thinking outside the box. That sometimes, they will need to run.

I only hope they believe me.

dsmiles
2011-04-13, 08:02 PM
I only hope they believe me.
That's the problem. Even the DMG says that a certain percentage of encounters should be nigh-impossible. No one believes it anymore. A LOT of players think monsters are just bags of XP and phat lootz...I just don't get that mentality.

Järnblomma
2011-04-13, 08:20 PM
I've actually never had this problem, but I can see why people have it.

I think the best thing is to subvert the players expectancies. When I wanted my characters to run I did like this:

They were in a bar. There were three bad guys od the Church of Deos, a wierd christian communist sect that are the general bad guys. On of them was designed to flee: he looked small and unimposing. This made them understand he would run and that they then must run after him. One was designed for them to fight: he looked well trained and lean, with two swords tied to his back. This made them salivate at a challenging duel with much coolness.

The third man I wanted them to run from. He was big. Like really big. Like not possibly human. I hint at this supernatural connection ("It feels not physically possible that someone is that large. He looks more like a gorilla than a man."). When they begin to fight that one chrges at them and the guy with a crossbow shoots him and hit cleans in the Gorillas belly. He seems to fall but then just stands up and continues to charge. The bolt did good damage and the one who shot simply says "That's not possible!" as the Gorilla charges with a bolt lodged in his tummy. I smirk and respond "No, it's not". The player promptly turns tails and runs, clearly frightened for his characters life. I enforce this view with having the Gorilla charging THROUGH the tables, not around them, and not noticing it really.

They managed to put both this one and the other two down after a while, but I could'e kept em running if I so wished.

Though I must admit I had some plusses already. My players know decently about realistic damage to bodies to know it is not physically possible to continue to charge after beong hit in the belly by a crossbow bolt and I tried to do my setting realistically. Also I had little supernatural things in the campaign, making them all the jumpier when something did not seem human.

Essentially: Subvert what they thought was established rules, have a clear plan from the start and give them the time to run. Combine subtle meta-gaming with more overt in-game nudging. Do the opposite of what they expect happens in a situation.

This works for me, at least. :smallsmile:

Yukitsu
2011-04-13, 08:44 PM
And what if the goal is simply "Survive".

I generally don't make that one of them. I'm kinda blood knightish. I prefer "take as many of them down with me as I can."


Which precisely illustrates the point of the thread. How does a DM differentiate between making an enemy seem dangerous to make it all the sweeter when the PC's defeat them ("salavating at the challenge" as you put it) versus making an enemy sound dangerous because they ARE dangerous.
You seem like a perfect test audience, what would a DM have to do to convince you that you should not attempt to defeat a given enemy or group of enemies.

Make it so utterly lacking in glory, interest or challenge that the slogging monotony of killing it is by far less interesting than walking away. Generally, the more horrible, betentacled and horrific the enemy the DM makes, the more awsome it is if you kill it, and the less disappointing if it kills you. But if I'm at risk of getting hit by an endless stream of boulders rumbling down a corridor, (really happened) I'll leave, because not only is it not awesome to beat up a bunch of boulders, if I do get crushed to death by one, it's a really stupid death.

The alternative is to target their fears. Fear of something you can kill is something you can get over, even if your assumption that you can in fact kill it is wrong. If I were an IRL whaler, and saw a Terrasque, I may very well assume same general principles apply, and get over my fear of it that way, and then I'd get horribly crushed. If I were to see, say, my entire house' interior walls sprout eyeballs that pivoted around to follow me, I would probably not be capable of rationalizing that fear, even if they were completely harmless.

When I do run horror campaigns, a bunch of level 2s squaring off against a 20 foot tall wolf made of insubstantial ashes, who burned everything it touched didn't bat an eye from the party, but they consistently ran away from a pale young woman with a constantly seeping eye wound (my favourite NPC in my campaign. Sadly, the PC she was tied to shot himself in the head). Giant hordes of acid zombies that ruined their weapons rust monster style made them concerned, but an arm flailing around in a barrel made them turn tale and run.

Mutazoia
2011-04-13, 08:51 PM
For me if I work scary into my campaign...I work SCARY into my campaign. "Fight" Scary is what you get when your pally finally gets his full suit of plate and then runs into his first rust monster. "Run" scary is what you get when your mage and clerics are out of spells for the day and the Vampire rolls into camp.

SCARY is when your players just KNOW your going to do something mean and nasty and evil...they don't know what...they don't know when... If done right your players will never walk into a fog bank again....

Read some Lovecraft ;)

Silverlich
2011-04-17, 09:06 AM
You could try making something that the players know they can't fight. It's hard to power attack a global plague of some disease or another.

Moofaa
2011-04-18, 04:54 PM
My usual method is to give the characters either some evidence of the Big Evil's power, such as seeing the aftermath after Big Evil toppled a city entirely on his own, or by giving them a direct "taste" of the Big Evil's abilties.

My favorite recurring villian was a telepath in a sci-fi game I ran some years ago. One of their first encounters with him involved a party member being mind-controlled from simply hearing the telepaths voice over a com system while in-flight. Something that according to my rules could not be possible because telepaths required direct line-of-sight. This immediately frightened them because now the players know in both the game and meta-game sense that this individual's power cannot be quantified.

Stage 2 had him constantly messing with the PC's dreams. I took this idea from LotR and Sauron, who was a constant unbeatable menace despite the lack of a physical presence.

Stage 3 was a short combat encounter. They had just encountered him inside of an ancient alien science lab after wandering though miles of creepy tunnels. Much of the alien technology was activated through telepathy. They arrived just in time to see a machine replacing part of the Big Evil's skull, and suddenly with sparks and lighting everything electronic system in the place became active as he stood up from the operating table.

PC's, scared to death, took some potshots at him and ran like babies as the place around them came to life (pun intended, since it was a cloning facility and creatures were bursting out of the walls/floor from cryo all around them)