MukkTB
2015-02-23, 02:31 PM
D&D is its own genre but there are a lot of subgenres of fantasy and fiction that one might want to emulate. I have a hard time getting the flavor right sometimes. Sometimes we get bogged down by minutiae. Other times something I'm trying to have be one genre devolves into standard hack and slash. So here are my thoughts and questions regarding various genres.
Horror
Its been my experience that I cannot easily induce horror in my players by describing spooky events, or settings. Even terrible looking monsters don't horrify my players. What actually touches a nerve, is game mechanics that are 'horrifying.' I'm talking about powerful debuffs, status effects, things with high damage, anything mechanical that players can grasp as dangerous. As an example, my players (at level 1) find a lvl 1 raging Orc barbarian more terrifying than some cr 1 walking dead no matter how disgusting it looks. Dying is of course the worst thing that can happen to a character, but there are a lot of bad things that can happen to a character short of making them dead.
As a side note its important that the players receive a chance to to know solid information beforehand about how nasty nasty the particular mechanics are.
My best experience with horror is to ratchet up the challenges by using higher CR monsters, or monsters with undervalued CR. But I then tone down the amount of combat. To some degree or another even nasty monsters are less aggressive, maybe less perceptive of my players. Its scary to hide under a desk waiting for the monster to go away. As soon as combat starts the play begins to edge closer to action adventure.
Mystery
The best description of how to do a mystery game I have heard is to imagine the mystery as a dungeon. Each room in this theoretical dungeon is a scene with several clues or leaders pointing to other places. So you might have as locations, the inn where the man was murdered, his home, the apartment of his mistress, ect.
Exploration
I have a hard time with this one. It seems, that if you want players to apply critical thinking skills you need to be consistent and really tone down DM fiat.
Intrigue
I have never been able to satisfactorily DM a game with something like, court politics. Sometimes my villains are a bit too blatant. Other times things spiral out of control.
I would be quite happy to receive advice about specific DM tricks for any particular genre.
Horror
Its been my experience that I cannot easily induce horror in my players by describing spooky events, or settings. Even terrible looking monsters don't horrify my players. What actually touches a nerve, is game mechanics that are 'horrifying.' I'm talking about powerful debuffs, status effects, things with high damage, anything mechanical that players can grasp as dangerous. As an example, my players (at level 1) find a lvl 1 raging Orc barbarian more terrifying than some cr 1 walking dead no matter how disgusting it looks. Dying is of course the worst thing that can happen to a character, but there are a lot of bad things that can happen to a character short of making them dead.
As a side note its important that the players receive a chance to to know solid information beforehand about how nasty nasty the particular mechanics are.
My best experience with horror is to ratchet up the challenges by using higher CR monsters, or monsters with undervalued CR. But I then tone down the amount of combat. To some degree or another even nasty monsters are less aggressive, maybe less perceptive of my players. Its scary to hide under a desk waiting for the monster to go away. As soon as combat starts the play begins to edge closer to action adventure.
Mystery
The best description of how to do a mystery game I have heard is to imagine the mystery as a dungeon. Each room in this theoretical dungeon is a scene with several clues or leaders pointing to other places. So you might have as locations, the inn where the man was murdered, his home, the apartment of his mistress, ect.
Exploration
I have a hard time with this one. It seems, that if you want players to apply critical thinking skills you need to be consistent and really tone down DM fiat.
Intrigue
I have never been able to satisfactorily DM a game with something like, court politics. Sometimes my villains are a bit too blatant. Other times things spiral out of control.
I would be quite happy to receive advice about specific DM tricks for any particular genre.