How to scare the **** out of your pcs

[Das Platyvark]

What the title says.
Any advice on how to do this, or past experience in pulling it off?

[super dark33]

get them an inch close to death, or take away all thier items.

[BlueInc]

Three main things: Mood and Scale.

Mood: Use music, atmosphere, and good descriptions of what's going on.

Buildup: Don’t immediately show the scary thing. Make sure to show something of its effects first; if you’re pitting the players up against a serial killer, make sure they get to see what he does to his victims. If there’s some sort of disease or curse the players have to confront, make sure to show the worsening stages of affliction.

Scale: You've got to convince the players that what they're seeing is significantly worse than what they're used to.

[bryn0528]

"Best way to scare crows," said Mr. Vandemar, "you just creep up behind them and put your hand round their little crow necks and squeeze until they don't move anymore. That scares the stuffing out of them." -Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere.

But in seriousness, I find that the best way to invoke fear is to sow doubt into your players minds.

In the game that I'm running currently, I managed to really shake a player up by giving her odd metaphoric dreams that lead her to believe she was the killer of some NPCs. The crowning moment was when she was awake and heard thumping noises coming from down below (they're on a ship, you see). She goes to the source of the sound, and it's coming from a coffin of one of the killed NPCs. She opens it, the corpse grabs her and whispers an enigmatic message. The next thing she knows, she hears a scream and the other player runs in the room. She finds herself pushed up against the wall, looking at a nailed up coffin.

[evirus]

I once had a GM that would go get his paper shredder and plug it in next to the gaming table before introducing X life threatening combat we were to face. This was presubamly to shred our dead PCs.

Looking back I think this was purely theatrical since I don't think he ever used it, but boy did it get our attentions.

[Telonius]

Three little words usually do the trick for me. "Are you sure?"

This works well too: "You don't find any traps." (Make sure to smile as you say it).

Call for spot checks occasionally.

[BlueInc]

Call for spot checks occasionally.

Yes.

When doing effects related to insanity ask innocently: "What's your Will save?"

[Titanium Fox]

Yes.

When doing effects related to insanity ask innocently: "What's your Will save?"

I had a DM that would randomly ask a single, targeted player for a will save intermittently for no good reason. In the middle of towns, in the middle of combats, in the middle of resting. Not only did it terrify the heck out of said player, the rest of the party was worried that if he ever failed this recurring effect, since it was so prevalent, it would end up killing off more than just the target.

Granted, the DM and Player had been best friends since High School (this was Senior Year of College), so the player wasn't OOC upset. But still. It works if you can pull it off.

[T.G. Oskar]

18 gnome goons and a gnome corligano appear in front of the Wizard character of one of my players. Three of them hold one of the player's spellbooks in each hand. Another two hold an item he was hiding (a Creation Pattern). They appear right after the Wizard emerges from his trance (no time to allow him a Listen check).

The reason? To teach him a lesson.

And the best part? None of the guys were statted. Some stuff was considered: the corligano held dual gnomish quickrazors and the other 18 gnomes were holding hand crossbows in each hand, but they held no stats whatsoever, so I could pull anything I wanted.

So yeah; it's definitely a bit of abuse of DM power, but it was quite funny. I actually pulled a Mafia-esque intimidation act, complete with "here's all we know about you and your people" thing. I did got him some stuff just for scaring the poor guy off (some spells to add to his spellbooks, plus a measle 500 gp just to listen to the lesson), but the reaction was priceless when he saw 18+1 gnomes ready to gut a wizard up.

The best part was that it wasn't planned whatsoever. He had made a nice plan (they were trying to lay low after getting someone pissed off) and he just happens to go to Zilargo, so it was basically waiting to happen (of course, if he returned to Aundair he'd have faced the Royal Eyes, and if on Sharn he'd have to face the Dark Lanterns). Later on, my player actually thought I'd simply force him to roll a new character, and what he did actually advanced the story a bit more, so it was really an interesting thing to pull off.

Oh, yeah...the lesson? Play the game. Not The Game, nor playing D&D, but play the political, social game of the different factions in Eberron.

[Delcor]

My DM did htis to me once, and it scared all of us:

I opened a door, and he picked up a truckload of dice and rolled them, and after looking over the result said "Oooooooooh" with a sadistic grin.

Only much later did he tell us it was just to scare us. Ironically we were inside a haunted mansion.

Random spot checks also scare the pants off me.

[Yukitsu]

I do the opposite. I tell my players exactly what I'm doing, why and what is around the corner. I put the wierdness at the periphery at first, but then it becomes more and more central, until finally they get used to it, or cope with it or evade it. And that's when the wierdness gets violent.

It's so effective that despite running nothing but under CR encounters, and tons of non-violent encounters, my party ran from just about anything, burned an island down just to get away from the eyes, and one of the characters shot himself in the head instead of dealing with the problems.

Example:
Players: Why are you rolling those dice?
Me: I want to know if it can hear you.
Players: If what can hear us?
Me: The watcher.
Players: What's the watcher.
Me: It's the one that's watching you.

[Private-Prinny]

I ran a short RL campaign, and two things worked exceptionally well for scaring my players.

1. Doubt. The main villain was a Beguiler and master of disguise, to the point of actually being the plot NPC that assigned the player's missions once or twice. After what he could do was cast into broad daylight, I asked for Sense Motive checks and Will Saves for 20% of the relevant NPCs that they met after that, and I had the NPC be the villain once or twice. Once they knew that I was willing to play that card, they had to make an agonizing decision every time someone asked for help. To this day, I think they still have some suspicions that an NPC was really the villain in disguise.

2. Implacability. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoSell) This one requires a bit of dedication to describing combat, but you simply have to use the divorce of fluff and crunch to your advantage. During normal combats, describe the wounds being inflicted, the obvious signs of damage, and the enemies' gradual defeat, and describe them often enough to make the players used to having little flags of dialogue to mark their progress in a fight. When you throw something tougher at them, simply describe it as if they are fighting The Black Knight. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhRUe-gz690) There's damage being done, albeit slowly, but the enemy simply does not care. If you can pull this off, they will be terrified of the monster that treats their attacks as nothing more than a slight inconvenience.

[Lateral]

Metagame terror works pretty well if you have an OP-prone group. Our DM set us up against three of something that, from the description, we THOUGHT was That Damn Crab. At level 3.

Turns out it was actually three reskinned Large Monstrous Centipedes. They were all one-shotted by the party psion's Energy Missile. :smallsigh:

[Fax Celestis]

That Damn Crab

On that note... (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3227211#post3227211)

[Lateral]

On that note... (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3227211#post3227211)

You're evil and I love you. And loathe you.

...My inner DM and my inner PC are engaged in a battle to the death because of this. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY. :smalltongue:
-------
(Slightly) more seriously, it occurs to me that to send metagame-prone players screaming, you'll also really need to heap it on; make it excessive. Like above, only DON'T DO THAT TO YOUR POOR PLAYERS.

[TriForce]

i got a player scared to hell and back once, by something relativly simple

they were traveling trough a forest close to the town, when they came across a wounded deer (it had a crossbow bolt in its flank and was near death). my players, all good aligned and IRL big softies for something like that, wanted to help him. when they came close, a single man on a horse approached them, acted arrogantly and just like a *******, and without warning shot a new crossbow bolt in the deer, killing it.

now i have to admit, i milked the situation for all that it was worth, so i managed to piss off one character in particular, who decided he had enough and threw a magic missle towards the npc, in a attempt to scare the ( he assumed poacher) off so he would leave them alone. turned out, the guy fell down dead, since he was just a lvl aristocrat.... yes aristocrat, he was part of the noble family whose land they were standing on.

ofcourse the escort of the now dead nobleman hurried to see what took him so long, and saw the whole thing. so the wizard got arrested, and the session ended. i informed the player that the character will be put on trail the next session, and he has until then to make a case for himself.

knowing he was guilty, the penalty for murder was hanging, and the fact that i as a DM can be quite the ruthless bastard, he was scared **** of what might happen to him next session :) and my remarks in the days between those sessions didnt help one bit :)

now the really fun part was that i allowed one of the players ( the one with the most experience by quite a bit) to play a devil that assumed the form of his former character (a paladin), and thus was guiding the players to become more evil without them knowing, this was also one of the reasons i managed to get the wizard so pissed. i also had planned that the wizard would ofc come out of this completly unharmed, but in a way that it all furthered the devils plans :)

[Bard for Kicks]

Is this a scare your PCs without killing them or can you kill a couple of em in the process? :smallamused:

Have your PCs exhaust all their spells on a creature that may seem to be the Boss. Then. Real Boss time. (It has been done. Scared me ****less)

Or. Latch a bomb onto a creature that is wrecking the area. The bomb explodes if anyone tries to attack the creature or remove the bomb forcibly. The creature's int is nada so it can't be diplomacied or anything...PCs can't kill it. Townsfolk can't kill it. Wish won't work either. ( I don't think ) So the PCs will inevitably die unless they can resolve the issue without violence or spells....have them figure it out :smallamused: and have fun watching them suffer. muahahaha

[RedWarrior0]

Ars ludi has something to say about being scary (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/156/bears-are-not-that-scary/).

[The Glyphstone]

Not 3.x, but I managed to scare, or at least worry, the party when running Deathwatch once.

To make the closest analogue, the group had just beaten the Load Bearing Boss demon, and now the dungeon was starting to collapse around them. I told them they had a certain amount of time before the whole thing imploded and killed them, and to represent this, I put a handful (12 in all) dice in front of me and them, in plain view. Every so often, I took a die away and returned it to the box. The 'time budget' was more than enough for them to escape, but it still freaked them out to where they pulled out all the stops and ran for it - monsters in their way got snared and evaded, or just outrun entirely, rather than fought; the only pauses were 1-round stops to summon disposable monsters as rear-guard sacrifices.

[FMArthur]

This. (http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/23/storyg.jpg)__________

[Tvtyrant]

This. (http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/23/storyg.jpg)__________

This made me so happy :D

[Flame of Anor]

This. (http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/23/storyg.jpg)__________

Holy ***-ing *** on a *** *** *** lorem ipsum *** *** and Daniel Radcliffe *** *** *** *** and a stick of dynamite *** *** *** your grandmother's pointed *** *** in a bucket of *** *** *** *** *** *** Mickey Mouse *** *** alakazam!

[Divide by Zero]

This. (http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/23/storyg.jpg)__________

This is pretty much the greatest thing I've ever read in my life.

[King Atticus]

I've only DM'd once, and then only for a short while. The only thing I threw at my players that scared them was a Dragon Turtle that lived in a subteranian cave. He was way over the level they should have faced at that time but to be fair they weren't supposed to face him...at all. He played on the idea of "the watcher", there was a decending path that circled his lake starting about 50 feet above the water. He was supposed to be mostly mood setting: spot checks to see something moving in the water, listens to hear his jets of steam, etc. He was the gaurdian of the lake the only time he was going to attack was if they tried to cross the lake and circumvent the rest of the cave (A slight railroad but the option was still there if they were foolish enough to try it) By the time they finished the cave they would have been a high enough level to take him out fairly easily if they wanted to.

The very first thing my player (a mischievous halfling) did when he saw a cliff overlooking a lake was go cliff diving. As hard as I tried not to kill him he decided to stay in the water and swim around and ended up getting destoyed and sent to the bottom of the lake...carrying pretty much all of the party's loot. All told my dragon turtle killed 2 or 3 pc's (they continued going back and taunting him). He's still alive and swimming around down there somewhere.

To this day I just mention my Dragon Turtle and they break into a sweat :smallbiggrin:


So I guess my point is...sometimes they'll find ways to scare themselves. Have an environment where there is a whole spectrum of threat ranges, let them bumble around and when they get in over their heads, fear will prevail.

[Tokuhara]

If you REALLY want to scare the players, deception is the most satasfying. I also suggest updating "classic" deceptive monsters. Fear is less powerful than causing a situation where neither option is beneficial. I suggest Mimics, but on a broader scale. Mimics are evil man-eating mundane objects. Have fun with an idea like this: Make the party enter an empty room, then have a random PC make a forititude save. If he succeeds, then Blam-O! Nothing happens. If he fails, then the player starts to be Digested as the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and their only exits become mindless eating machines.

On a side note: Ravenloft is frightening, especially around All Hallow's Eve. I once was in a Midnight game as a wizard where I failed a save and wound up buried alive. My familiar (a raven) was grasped in Strahd's grip, as he was sitting above my grave. I looked through my raven's eyes, as I saw Strahd and he wished me a good afterlife, followed by him biting the Raven's head off and my DM telling me those 4 most painful words: "Make a New Character." I am still scared of being buried alive EXCLUSIVELY because of this DM

[ClothedInVelvet]

I had fun playing an adventure titled Frozen Whispers, a ready-made single session thing. There's a wendigo that infects creatures with a degenerating madness. Anyway, the rogue got unknowingly touched by the wendigo and I politely asked him for a will save. Because they had not seen any sign of anything bad at this point (which just built suspense), they started freaking out. Then they found a body who was horribly mutilated, but the blade was in his own hand and there was only one set of footprints in the snow.

Anyway, the druid makes it clear that the infected one can't touch him, in case whatever the will save was for is passed by touch. But the rogue doesn't want to go down alone, so he tries to touch as many people as possible, which starts a fight in the party. They end up subduing him, but find that the only shelter is the cabin of the guy who cut himself up. The inside is completely barricaded already, but there's blood all over the walls and axe marks and such. The more they look around they realize that he had locked himself inside, but whatever had gotten him hadn't broken in. So instead of staying there, they start trying to get back to town in the middle of the night to find a cleric to remove disease.

On the way back, the rogue starts losing wisdom, and when he's on watch, he starts eating the druid (there goes the no-touch thing). On the way back, they have to subdue and tie up both the rogue and druid, but the town turns out to not have a cleric. Also, the druid broke free, killed, and ate part of the barkeep. At this point, the party is just in a panic, assuming they're all infected with this disease and having to find a cleric. So in order to hide the body, they make the druid carry it, leading to the best ooc dialog in the adventure:
Druid - So I'm carrying my rations on my back?
Rogue - No, that's the barkeep.
Druid - I know.

Long story short, they found a cleric, but they never went back into the forest to complete the mission.

[weckar]

Mentioning Tomb of Horrors or a Limbo of the Lost campaign usually works.