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Khi'Khi
2016-09-20, 04:48 PM
So one strange tendency I've seen in players is to offer very little in the way of reaction to first encounters with a type of monster. Any strange, newly-encountered creature isn't given so much as a second thought by many PC's. Its more of an "Oh, well would you look at that. Lets kill it."

This is not so much of a problem in terms of wildlife, predators, etc. which may be common sights. Where I find it baffling is when low-level and inexperienced adventurers encounter a horde of fetid, rotten, decaying, shambling undead, and their only reaction is to shrug and charge straight at it. Any person would at least pause at the horrid sight. The revolting smell of death should probably discourage melee characters from getting up close and personal with these things.

The undead are a small example. What about the first time a person ever beholds a dragon? Or a demon or a devil? I don't expect the PC's to wet themselves and run, but maybe a cry of surprise? Stopping in one's tracks? Hesitation due to lack of knowledge of this new enemy? Maybe giving up initiative due to the shock? Unless these are relatively common sights, how does a DM make the PC's react like a normal person to these terrifying creatures?

Koo Rehtorb
2016-09-20, 05:03 PM
D&D isn't about that sort of thing. D&D is about finding weird scary things and killing them and stealing their stuff. Play a different game for that sort of reaction, honestly.

In Burning Wheel, for example, there's a stat called "Steel". It's rolled whenever someone encounters a stressful situation like surprise, pain, wonderment(magic), or fear. If you fail it you choose one of four options for your character of "run screaming"(flee and drop what you're holding), "fall prone and beg for mercy", "stand and drool"(deer in the headlights), or "swoon". The amount you fail by determines how long you have to spend doing these things before you recover your senses and can act normally again. The base difficulty is determined by the character's will, and has situational modifiers based on bad the cause is. "Seeing the Living Dead" is as bad as "Volcanic Eruptions".

I suppose you could theoretically hack together some sort of system for D&D that did something like that, but it could certainly get a lot of push back from the players if they don't buy in on it.

Enixon
2016-09-20, 05:19 PM
Assuming you are playing D&D it might be worth looking in the fear and horror rules in the Ravenloft setting book, or Heroes of Horror for 3.5, or Horror Adventures for Pathfinder. But like was already said you'll have to make sure the players are willing to buy into that kinda thing and get annoyed at "the dice telling me how my character feels" and whatnot.

awa
2016-09-20, 05:33 PM
i rarely see enforced fear done well.
The two biggest problems are
first they often act like the pcs are just regular guys who have never adventured, i recall a mid level ravenloft adventure where a horror roll (might have the terminology wrong) was called for becuase a grave had been opened from the inside and just the sight of an empty grave was supposed to terrify them.
Second few take into account the fact that you can get use to something, the first zombie might be scary but after you have killed 20, 1 more is not going to scare you.

part of the problem with non enforced fear is few people want to play a coward and if no one else is acting afraid of the giant monster then you doing so makes you look bad.

Zaydos
2016-09-20, 05:43 PM
Well for some of those creatures you actually already have a mechanic for that (assuming it's 3.x or older, can't say for later).

Take the undead and their stench. Ghasts have that as a mechanic (Fort or be sickened for coming too close). Mummies have despair which paralyzes foes with fear. This is on my mind because I just sprung said undead on players.

Dragons have frightful presence exactly for this reason.

Demons/devils? Assuming this is D&D the assumption is the PCs aren't average people (see Elite Array). If they are average people well... 2e did that 1st level PCs were average people, except possibly suicidally reckless. Here defined as trying to fight demons or devils (lemure needed specific spells, holy water, or magic weapons).

That said there are mechanics for what you want. 2e they were in Domains of Dread for Ravenloft, and I think they were updated in the (Sword and Sorcery's?) 3rd party 3.x Ravenloft though there were issues with both. If this isn't 3.x or older you might could still look at that to get inspiration, and definitely definitely make sure your players are on the same page.

That said I'd advice against using mechanics for this. It had issues in Ravenloft (i.e. specifically horror campaigns), some of that was failure could render you unable to participate in combat but some was that 'why is my heroic fighter terrified of a lemure' (or see Awa's example of a horror check). The best way to make PCs respond is description, atmosphere, and talking to make sure what sort of game they want.

tensai_oni
2016-09-20, 06:02 PM
In one single case: of zombies and other typical undead, I actually can't blame the players because zombies are super overplayed and have outstayed their welcome in popular and gaming culture. So that one gets a free pass.

But since this a general problem then you need to ask yourself - do you do a good enough job selling the enemies as something otherworldly and terrifying? Do you just tell the players "you see a horned demon emerge from the cave", or do you describe how the air around them seems to get uncomfortably hot as a scaled hand emerges from the darkness, grabbing at rock and leaving it half-melted as the rest of the abominable creature appears from within, its eyes glaring with malice?

If you do that and the players are still unimpressed, then there's another aspect: are those monsters actually dangerous? Even the most horrifyingly described monsters can't maintain the illusion of danger if they get flattened as soon as the fight begins, with minimal risk and expenditure of resources from the players' side. If the encounters were fair so far... perhaps it's time to stop playing fair. You don't have to kill the player characters, just send something dangerous enough that they really will be scared for their lives. If they meet a foe that dishes out half the fighter's HP in a single round, perhaps the next time they'll think twice before going "new monster? Meh I attack it".

Dealing with players who have an unimpressed reaction to what should at least give them pause can be really frustrating and I know from personal experience. I hope this post helps.

Zaydos
2016-09-20, 06:08 PM
That does remind me of when I was running 2 games with the same group of players (well ok there was an extra player in one game), one high (12+) level the other low (4th) level.

In the high level one they found a secret door in their family home and found 12 lemures and a demonic altar and were completely blase and went 'welp let's slaughter them', of course I did minimalistic description and it hadn't been crafted as a horror adventure.

In the low level one within half a week of the above (after iirc) I managed to have them freak out for 30 minutes because there were 12 crows in a tree. Now later in that adventure a PC started hallucinating worms were crawling under his flesh and the sorcerer magic missiled himself trying to kill the parasites inside of him (I did not say these players were smart).

Khi'Khi
2016-09-20, 06:10 PM
I certainly agree about not using mechanics for such things. No one wants their tough-as-nails barbarian warrior to let out a high-pitched scream at the seventy-fifth zombie that's menaced him this week.

I was coming at it more from a roleplay perspective. Lets say you're a lower-level player and you've never seen a devil before in your lifetime. The shock of seeing the crimson-skinned, horned, pitchforked-wielding monsters from your campfire stories might just elicit a gasp or an expletive of surprise. I don't think that makes you a coward, I think that means you're reacting to an unknown danger like a real person. While PC's aren't supposed to be "normal people," they are still people who can be shocked and surprised, and a new and never before seen creature is enough to give anyone a shot of adrenaline. Even Bilbo was a bit shaken after looking upon Smaug the Golden is all I'm saying

awa
2016-09-20, 06:53 PM
yeah but Bilbo wasn't a hardened adventure he was an every man on his first quest and a dragons fear is built into the game any way.

Telok
2016-09-20, 06:54 PM
TMI. It's mostly a D&D issue that players face the same critters over and over so they have too much info and experience to be afraid. It also stems from "level appropriate" encounters and the fact that hit point reduction via hitting things with swords are supposed to be things.

Want scary? Don't use stock monsters. Use novel immunities like immune to magic (not the stupid 'infinite SR' thing), immune to metal, immune to mortals, and make sure the party learns about them. Feel free to kill, maim, de-level, and drain characters. Don't limit damage to just hit point effects.

Some people will complain. They don't want new monsters, or needing to run away from some fights, or having to find a weakness, or having characters get hurt that isn't healed immedately. They don't want to ever fear for the character.

icefractal
2016-09-21, 01:52 AM
I think there's a couple factors.

1) It may be the first time the character has seen a vampire, but it sure isn't the first time the player has seen one. Roleplaying a big reaction when not really feeling one can be difficult, especially because ...

2) The players are (probably) not professional actors. This means two things:
a) They can't always generate a good response on the spot, and may choose to default to a milder (and easier to roleplay) reaction instead. I know that personally I sometimes pick "quiet dismay" if I think that "horrified terror" is going to come off awkward and fake-sounding.
b) They're not getting paid, they're going to roleplay the way that sounds fun to them rather than what would be most dramatic. A lot of people like to be the confident, hard-to-phase type.

3) What does or doesn't count as particularly scary in D&D anyway? It's hard to say, with so many creatures out there and not much correlation between appearance and deadliness. I mean, a Thoqqua is a worm made of stone with a fricken head made out of lava ... but in fact, it's not that dangerous in the scheme of things. A lich, meanwhile, looks no scarier than any other undead (and less scary than many), but it's a deadly threat to almost anyone. So sometimes, it's hard to say how a character should even react.

Khedrac
2016-09-21, 02:36 AM
Part of the problem is that D&D has too many monsters.
In a lot of campaigns characters rarely meet the same monsters more than twice, and not just because they level past them as opponents.
This leads to the "charge" reaction because the players are not used to worrying because the monster is new and unusual - everything they meet is new and unusual.

Add this to what people are saying about the players knowing most of the monsters and ...

EccentricCircle
2016-09-21, 04:19 AM
D&D isn't about that sort of thing. D&D is about finding weird scary things and killing them and stealing their stuff. Play a different game for that sort of reaction, honestly.

I have to disagree. Its really one of those things that is down to the choices of the group. All recent editions of D&D have fear mechanics (can't vouch for older ones), its just a case of whether you enforce them, and whether that is the sort of game your group is after.

When starting a new campaign its always worth sitting down with the players and discussing the world the characters live in. I usually tell them not to assume that they are in a fantasy kitchen sink. They have heard myths and legends, superstitions and folklore, but they don't really know what exists and what doesn't.
It is very hard for the DM to "force" the players to react in a certain way to encountering a host of zombies. the much more effective solution is to tell the players how you would like them to react in such an event, and trust them to roleplay is when the time comes. Obviously not all groups will want that level of immersion, but if they are after a more hack and slash type game, then nothing you do when describing the zombies is going to help.

So basically talk to your players about their place in the world, and the kind of mood and story you are going for. Make sure everyone is on the same page.

Yora
2016-09-21, 04:56 AM
D&D isn't about that sort of thing. D&D is about finding weird scary things and killing them and stealing their stuff. Play a different game for that sort of reaction, honestly.

For the first ten years or so, D&D was about exactly that.

There are really three requirements for this, which both faded in the background in the later years of AD&D 1st edition and completely disappeared with 3rd edition.
First, the GM has to populate the adventures with creatures that don't always want to attack the PCs. If you can expect everything to want to kill you, trying to attack it first is the only reasonable thing to do. There also need to be a good number of creatures that only want the PCs to get out of their lairs, that rather get away quickly then get into a fight, and that might be willing to cooperate.
Second, monsters have to be dangerous and pose an actual risk to the party. This means that a considerable number of monsters that can be encountered in the adventure are stronger than the PCs and would likely defeat them in a fight. Not knowing how strong an enemy is and facing the possibility of PCs getting killed is the main reason players would be weary about monsters.
Third, the players need to have other options than confronting every monster they see. There has to be other paths they could take instead to still get to their destination. Doesn't have to be an easy task, but at the very least the players need to have a choice between which scary monster they rather want to deal with.

Grac
2016-09-21, 07:23 AM
Following from what Yora said, it's also good to note that in early editions of D&D there were morale rules for everyone but the PCs. Take a regular set of first level player characters: 3d6, in order with rolled hit points. What's the difference between them and a zero level 'man at arms'? Maybe a single hit point, and the fact that PCs choose when to flee, when not subject to magical compulsions. This single fact sets the PC well above the NPC.

So, with that in mind, why don't the *players* flinch? Because they have seen it all before, or because they are confident in their abilities.

If you want them to be scared, then scare them. Have some monsters thrash them. By the time the third PC dies due to a random encounter, they should get the message and start to be cautious.

Grod_The_Giant
2016-09-21, 08:08 AM
Good narration helps too. If you describe the monsters in sufficiently creepy/dramatic ways, you can elicit a reaction that way. In a recent game I had a room full of skeletons standing perfectly still, and described how every skull swiveled around in perfect unison as soon as the fighter stepped in, which thoroughly freaked out the player.

NichG
2016-09-21, 08:41 AM
The thing is, your players have seen such things before, so it makes sense for them to be blase. Any reaction the characters exhibit is going to end up feeling forced in that circumstance, it won't seem authentic to the player, and insisting on it is going to actually help the players feel it any more than they do. That blase reaction is the players being honest with you and communicating their own read, which is valuable.

Now, what can you do about that? The thing is, players being blase is tied to them feeling like they know what's coming, like they know what to expect. If you want the players to really feel surprised when their characters are on unfamiliar ground, you have to play with your players' expectations - make them doubt their own knowledge, their certainty, etc.

It's a fine line. In some sense, the more blase they are, the more shocked they will be when you go against their expectations. But depending on how you do it, the reaction can either be to engage more closely with the game (try to solve that discomfort in-character) or to disengage and try to deal with it as a player (ask OOC questions, explain the situation with metagame reasoning, even try to argue with the DM that their expectation is more valid than what the DM is describing in game). So the trick here is to know your players and be very aware of what their sense of 'fair' is. If you can break their expectations in a way that still matches up with their sense of fairness, they'll feel actual pressure, that its their job to figure this out. If you deviate too far from their sense of fairness, they'll feel more like anything that goes wrong or strangely is a mistake on your part somehow. So it's a balance.

For example, if you have a red dragon and then have it breathe frost, a lot of players will reason 'ok, the DM is just screwing with us and randomizing abilities so we don't metagame, but I still understand what's going on here so it isn't frightening or surprising or anything'. Its a situation where the expectation is so strong that violating it will seem like an error, not an intentional and meaningful part of the world. But if the party is somewhere dark, and an attack comes from outside of their visual field, and you don't even describe the details - just 'Mark, something hits you from the left and you take 7 damage and I need a Fort save' - then you can get away with more in terms of putting them off-balance.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-09-21, 11:18 AM
For the first ten years or so, D&D was about exactly that.

There are really three requirements for this, which both faded in the background in the later years of AD&D 1st edition and completely disappeared with 3rd edition.
First, the GM has to populate the adventures with creatures that don't always want to attack the PCs. If you can expect everything to want to kill you, trying to attack it first is the only reasonable thing to do. There also need to be a good number of creatures that only want the PCs to get out of their lairs, that rather get away quickly then get into a fight, and that might be willing to cooperate.
Second, monsters have to be dangerous and pose an actual risk to the party. This means that a considerable number of monsters that can be encountered in the adventure are stronger than the PCs and would likely defeat them in a fight. Not knowing how strong an enemy is and facing the possibility of PCs getting killed is the main reason players would be weary about monsters.
Third, the players need to have other options than confronting every monster they see. There has to be other paths they could take instead to still get to their destination. Doesn't have to be an easy task, but at the very least the players need to have a choice between which scary monster they rather want to deal with.

I mean, it's been diluted somewhat, sure. I think the main change, though, is in motivations for doing this. It used to be more along the lines of "Because they're there and have shiny stuff" and now there's more diverse reasons to fight exotic monsters and take their stuff. I would still say the the fundamental assumption of D&D is "Kill weird monsters, acquire experience and loot from killing weird monsters, use experience and loot to kill bigger weird monsters, repeat". And that sort of game play assumption makes it really hard to take the new monster of the week seriously.

I also think modern D&D undermines any sort of fear reaction even more because of a few changes in assumptions from the older editions:

1) DMs are now kind of expected to provide level appropriate encounters. If you encounter monsters it's generally expected that they're supposed to be within your capabilities to beat.

2) Tying into 1, killing baddies is a bigger expectation compared to older editions where it's a perfectly valid (and sensible) style to avoid fighting wherever possible because it didn't reward you much and was extremely risky.

3) Players tend to be more aware of the exact capabilities of most creatures they're encountering even if their characters aren't.

Yora
2016-09-21, 03:51 PM
The source of the whole problem is really that from the mid-80s on adventures were designed under the assumptions that the players are acting out a pre-written story. Everything else follows from that. If there's a strict script, then it is certain that the party will succeed in the end, which means that failure at any point is not an option. Things have to turn out the way the writer intended and if the players act differently or the dice roll badly, it's the GMs job to make sure they still succeed. Level appropriate encounters are a method to make sure the party does not fail, which means that success is guaranteed and nobody expects to die.

Whether that's really as fun as a game with actual risks is another question, but it certainly makes it impossible for the players to be weary of monsters or be concerned about their choices.

Grod_The_Giant
2016-09-21, 04:32 PM
The source of the whole problem is really that from the mid-80s on adventures were designed under the assumptions that the players are acting out a pre-written story. Everything else follows from that. If there's a strict script, then it is certain that the party will succeed in the end, which means that failure at any point is not an option. Things have to turn out the way the writer intended and if the players act differently or the dice roll badly, it's the GMs job to make sure they still succeed. Level appropriate encounters are a method to make sure the party does not fail, which means that success is guaranteed and nobody expects to die.

Whether that's really as fun as a game with actual risks is another question, but it certainly makes it impossible for the players to be weary of monsters or be concerned about their choices.
I... don't think that's true? While there are certainly some railroad-y games that work that way, I think most DMs operate under the assumption of "if you screw up, there will be consequences." Those might not be simple "you die, start over at level 1" anymore, but... I've certainly played, ran, and heard stories of many games where things went very badly for the players because of their own choices.

VoxRationis
2016-09-21, 04:44 PM
I think Yora's on to something, though. A lot of campaigns, even if they allow for permanent PC death, just end up with the player "respawning" in the sense of bringing in a new character of equal (or near-equal) level and equipment.

Keltest
2016-09-21, 04:51 PM
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I wouldn't expect much of a reaction from anyone who is insane enough to deliberately look for these kinds of things in the first place beyond 'Cool, something new to splatter all over the terrain!"

Khi'Khi
2016-09-21, 04:56 PM
Not all tabletop stories are about intentionally traipsing about and looking for monsters though. What about a "thrown into another plane and have to get home" plot? Or an "invasion by mysterious and unknown forces (perhaps never before seen extraplanar beings?)" Some stories have the danger find you, and there at least I would expect a bit more apprehension.

VoxRationis
2016-09-21, 05:00 PM
Part of the problem the OP is having is that most PCs tend to make a career of killing various monsters. When you do that, it's difficult to see them as particularly frightening unless proven otherwise. It's the same reason Buffy makes fun of vampires every time she sees them: she kills them by the truckload, often with such effortless ease that she combines the task of vampire slaying with things like SAT prep, and that makes them difficult to take seriously. In modern RPG play, adventurers tend to encounter enemies that 90% of the time, they can defeat without being in real danger of serious harm. The exceptions tend to be boss-scale monsters and whatnot which are dangerous, but are often foreshadowed to the point where a) they lose any shock value from surprise, and b) they are empirically less dangerous because the PCs got to plan for them.
The solution is therefore simple: include monsters, frequently but not regularly, that are too powerful for unprepared PCs to deal with. Force the PCs to retreat and restrategize before making a serious attempt at slaying such foes. Don't always give them warning, either. Make it so that the players are obliged to think "Should I be running away right now" as a default state of mind, rather than only at particular prompted intervals.

draken50
2016-09-21, 05:19 PM
If you want the characters to be frightened/wary you need the players to have reason.

Also recall the overarching aspects of the game. It involves a group. It's really cute to say "Why don't the players give up an initative" ect. but who wants to be the player that says "I'm too scared to act this round" and ends up with another players character getting killed.

Describe the creature in such a manner that the players don't want to tangle with it. Show it being super strong, or fast or nearly impossible to hit/damage. Make it clear to the players that it's damn dangerous to tangle with, and then give the players a chance to do something before you call for initiative, because as soon as you do it turns into a fight and with all the number crunching and tactics that involves vs. giving the players the opportunity to decide they want to run or find another way around or whatever.

If it's just "It tears a bus in half, roll for initiative" then it's like a cheesy cut-scene before a boss fight in a video game. Vs when you see some big ass thing stomping around in the distance in dark souls.

Psikerlord
2016-09-22, 06:49 AM
So one strange tendency I've seen in players is to offer very little in the way of reaction to first encounters with a type of monster. Any strange, newly-encountered creature isn't given so much as a second thought by many PC's. Its more of an "Oh, well would you look at that. Lets kill it."

This is not so much of a problem in terms of wildlife, predators, etc. which may be common sights. Where I find it baffling is when low-level and inexperienced adventurers encounter a horde of fetid, rotten, decaying, shambling undead, and their only reaction is to shrug and charge straight at it. Any person would at least pause at the horrid sight. The revolting smell of death should probably discourage melee characters from getting up close and personal with these things.

The undead are a small example. What about the first time a person ever beholds a dragon? Or a demon or a devil? I don't expect the PC's to wet themselves and run, but maybe a cry of surprise? Stopping in one's tracks? Hesitation due to lack of knowledge of this new enemy? Maybe giving up initiative due to the shock? Unless these are relatively common sights, how does a DM make the PC's react like a normal person to these terrifying creatures?

I think, for better or worse, to get the kinds of reactions you're after, you either (1) need roleplayers who are happy to engage like this, or (2) make the monster mechanics themselves scary - and make death and/or lingering injuries of some kind a real prospect.

In 5e, it's so hard to die, and encounters so balanced.... you can just charge everything, and know the chance of losing is minimal, and dying almost non-existent. Much more severe death and dying, and lingering injuries/effects of various adverse kinds, are required to make such opponents scary.

Eg, in older D&D, spectres drained levels permanently. Ghosts aged you with no save. Mummy imparted a deadly rot. In any combat your PC died if reduced to -3 hp. All of these kinds of scary mechanical effects translate directly to the player, and the PC.

Edit - this is also why, in my view, most RPGs are better with no raise dead magic. Puts the fear of death in players/PCs.

Efrate
2016-09-22, 07:48 AM
In my group, we always have at least one person with enough of a knowledge skill to identify most anything past around level 4 or so, which means said person has studied it and possibly had direct experience with it at some point. When you see a weird rotting corpse looking thing, and you roll 35 on your knowledge religion, you know enough about it that might be met with caution (ie spectres drain levels) as opposed to fear. You've spent enough time learning about stuff that its more fascinating than fearful.

The system goes for heroic fantasy not grim and gritty fantasy, and thats a lot of the problem. In systems where permanent disability or such is common, injuries cannot be magically healed easily, it has more of an impact. But with happy ol bag of cure light wounds/lesser vigor wands, you have near limitless healing out of combat so you can be reasonably safe all the time unless someone gets instadropped. NPCs are great for showing gear and maybe giiving your PCs a clue about how great they are, but remember, these heros are people who left whatever safe to live a life of battle with no clue about anything, and are making it work. If they balked at a weird monster when they set themselves on this path, it would be more out of character.

A level 2 character in 3.X has already had 13 or so encounters with murdering goblins, shambled zombies, restless skeletons, big scary orcs, and other such Things, and likely seen at least one friend die to said nasties. If the next zombie is a minotaur, well, its not that much different from the human one you smashed last week. A bit bigger, a bit stronger, but still nothing amazing. The first dragon they are likely to encounter is likely a baby, and when its a firebreathing housecast, well, its nasty, but still a housecat.

It also seems a lot harder for casters especially to be fased. In game they have high will due to their extensive discipline and mental training, and they command forces so strong that your average terror is meaningless.

"I had to go to the next town over to pawn this fancy glowy sword I just got. Its a long way by normal travel, it would take me at LEAST a day on horseback. I don't have time for that. Lets tear a hole in reality, travel though a shadowy existence that is a dark twisted mirror of our reality, and walk for a brief bit to get there in an hour. We can be back by lunch!" When that is an easy option, for sheer laziness because you have that insane power, a big scary thing on the next hill is just another possible mobile treasure vault.

NRSASD
2016-09-22, 12:50 PM
I've had success startling my players, but I had to plan for it. Blase reactions tend to arise from monster fatigue, where the players themselves have seen everything before even if the PCs have not. So I get around this with a few tricks:

1. Play a more dangerous system. As others have said, if combat has the small but very real chance of killing or permanently scarring characters, players will be more cautious.

2. Exercise restraint when planning ordinary encounters, but go all out on the exceptional ones. In my current campaign, the PCs spend their time fighting off wildlife, goblinoids, and humans primarily; which is why a spirit infested elven temple knocked them out of their comfort zone.

3. The monster manuals are just guidelines anyways. Tweak stats and adjust abilities, because there are players who will memorize every statblock (I'm one of them). This way no player can know about the precise stats of a monster and plan around it.

Telonius
2016-09-22, 02:03 PM
Many people's reaction when they see a new and interesting species of spider: "Kill it with fire!" or "AAAAGGHHH get it of me RUN!"

Broaden that to magical beasts, aberrations, and undead monstrosities, and it's pretty much the same thing.

kyoryu
2016-09-22, 02:56 PM
1. Play a more dangerous system. As others have said, if combat has the small but very real chance of killing or permanently scarring characters, players will be more cautious.

D&D is plenty lethal. Just use tough critters.

But, yeah. If monsters aren't scary (as in offering an actual, realistic threat to the PCs) you can't expect people to pretend to be scared.

Fable Wright
2016-09-22, 03:20 PM
I was coming at it more from a roleplay perspective. Lets say you're a lower-level player and you've never seen a devil before in your lifetime. The shock of seeing the crimson-skinned, horned, pitchforked-wielding monsters from your campfire stories might just elicit a gasp or an expletive of surprise. I don't think that makes you a coward, I think that means you're reacting to an unknown danger like a real person. While PC's aren't supposed to be "normal people," they are still people who can be shocked and surprised, and a new and never before seen creature is enough to give anyone a shot of adrenaline. Even Bilbo was a bit shaken after looking upon Smaug the Golden is all I'm saying

So, let's say I'm a shell-shocked adventurer who has been fighting for his life more often in the last week than most people will in their entire lifetimes, even with the many monster attacks of a D&D setting. I have seen rotting zombies, living human beings that I could have been friends with try to murder me, and fought the legendary creatures of the woods like Owlbears and more terrifying things I've never heard about with incredible frequency.

Now I see something that I know about and my survival instincts are kicking in. Why should I be surprised that this thing exists? The rest of my world has already been turned upside-down, so why should I care about this one new little data point?

Telok
2016-09-22, 04:11 PM
I remembered one that worked. D&D 3.5 with a 10th level party, hunting the "cave drake."

Dm: The lesser dragon* Power Attacks for 22.
Pcs: @#$%!

* dragons were divided into three categories, least (wyverns, drakes), lesser (dragon hit dice but no colors, spells, or breath weapon), and greater (great wyrm red with class levels).

Gamgee
2016-09-22, 05:47 PM
I'm going to be completely honest with you OP. Having read the zombie survival handbook I would definitely not react like that. I would start getting ready to kill them.

icefractal
2016-09-22, 08:09 PM
In 5e, it's so hard to die, and encounters so balanced.... you can just charge everything, and know the chance of losing is minimal, and dying almost non-existent. Much more severe death and dying, and lingering injuries/effects of various adverse kinds, are required to make such opponents scary.

Eg, in older D&D, spectres drained levels permanently. Ghosts aged you with no save. Mummy imparted a deadly rot. In any combat your PC died if reduced to -3 hp. All of these kinds of scary mechanical effects translate directly to the player, and the PC.

Edit - this is also why, in my view, most RPGs are better with no raise dead magic. Puts the fear of death in players/PCs.See, I've heard this, but I'm not convinced. If the system is more deadly, that will indeed discourage striding in confidently. But it doesn’t promote roleplaying a terrified reaction over a pragmatic retreat. In fact, if the system is highly deadly, then a reaction like:
“Right, shambling corpses, dozens of them … I suggest we retreat."
Is encouraged more than something like:
“Oh god oh god, the dead are walking … we’re doomed! I throw my weapon down and start praying!"

Thrudd
2016-09-22, 09:29 PM
I think there's two different things being talked about, here. Most people seem to be talking about strategies to get the players to fear for their characters, which is a thing that is totally doable. When players are aware that they could "lose the game" in a way, they start playing differently.

The OP really seems to be talking about acting. The implication is that even when players know the game is about fighting and killing monsters and their characters aren't going to lose and they have all seen zombies or dragons in other media a thousand times, if their characters aren't supposed to have ever seen or heard of the living dead before the players should be acting as those characters and speak and act as though something strange and terrifying is happening. I think this is not something you can really expect from a lot of people. Most gamers are not trained actors, and many have no interest in trying to act. Especially in D&D, most people are going to see a tactical challenge to be solved, not a scene in a play to be acted out. It's a nice bonus sometimes if you get a real actor in the group who likes to do that, but don't count on it.

NichG
2016-09-22, 10:37 PM
The thing about RPGs vs theatre is that in theatre, the actors and audience are different people. So in an RPG, you can't just put on a convincing performance to make an emotion feel authentic, you have to also be convinced of the motivation behind that acting because you're privy to it. You don't have to actually feel it OOC, but it must be natural for how you imagine your character (and no external cues from the DM or other players will easily alter that)

Otherwise the impression is more 'pretending to be scared' than 'being scared'.

Khi'Khi
2016-09-22, 11:06 PM
That just the thing, though. I'm not asking that characters wet themselves and run. I'm not asking that they cower and start praying for their lives. I understand that that's not fun; nobody wants to role play a coward. What I'm seeking is just a bit of humanity, especially from low-level players who haven't experienced much. If your second level party's last adventure consisted of beating up a camp of petty bandits, they should probably get a bit of a shock if they come into contact with freaking Glaurung or something.

I also find it a bit disappointing when the players act on knowledge about monster weaknesses that their characters have no way of knowing. Like, a character who has no knowledge of the fey suddenly whipping out a cold iron sword on their first encounter with one. It makes the game boring if the players know what to expect in every encounter, and there are are no new tricks the GM can pull.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-09-22, 11:16 PM
That just the thing, though. I'm not asking that characters wet themselves and run. I'm not asking that they cower and start praying for their lives. I understand that that's not fun; nobody wants to role play a coward. What I'm seeking is just a bit of humanity, especially from low-level players who haven't experienced much. If your second level party's last adventure consisted of beating up a camp of petty bandits, they should probably get a bit of a shock if they come into contact with freaking Glaurung or something.

I also find it a bit disappointing when the players act on knowledge about monster weaknesses that their characters have no way of knowing. Like, a character who has no knowledge of the fey suddenly whipping out a cold iron sword on their first encounter with one. It makes the game boring if the players know what to expect in every encounter, and there are are no new tricks the GM can pull.

This is a big case of "You're playing the wrong game".

Thrudd
2016-09-22, 11:18 PM
That just the thing, though. I'm not asking that characters wet themselves and run. I'm not asking that they cower and start praying for their lives. I understand that that's not fun; nobody wants to role play a coward. What I'm seeking is just a bit of humanity, especially from low-level players who haven't experienced much. If your second level party's last adventure consisted of beating up a camp of petty bandits, I don't expect them to be able to stare down freaking Glaurung without so much as a wide-eyed gasp.

I also find it a bit disappointing when the players act on knowledge about monster weaknesses that their characters have no way of knowing. Like, a character who has no knowledge of the fey suddenly whipping out a cold iron sword on their first encounter with one. It makes the game boring if the players know what to expect in every encounter, and there are are no new tricks the GM can pull.

A generation raised on video games and digital effects movies probably are not going to be easily moved to astonishment. You are expecting them to be actors pretending to have reactions to things, and this simply may not be possible for them. The best you can do is to give them a healthy respect for the danger their characters are in by disrupting their expectations. They may not utter gasps of pretend horror at the description of the new monsters they encounter, but they will make real gasps of dismay when their attacks all bounce off it with no effect, or it breathes acid and melts one of their characters that rushed in without thinking.

There are infinite new tricks a GM can pull, it's only limited by your imagination. If your players are all veterans of many games, don't use many published creatures, invent your own or modify the monster manual creatures so they are unrecognizable.

Zaydos
2016-09-22, 11:19 PM
Don't say it's a fey. I mean in 3.5 let them make Knowledge (nature) checks to recognize it, but don't describe it with the word nymph, or dryad. I had an encounter with a mummy (in a PbP), and one player never did figure out what this creature below was

"His eye catches movement within the wagon. It's a human, no elven, corpse, but it is very much not truly dead. The creature's flesh is desiccated and taunt across its body, bones showing, mouth open in a perpetual scream. With empty sockets the desiccated corpse stares into Tsutsui's eyes and he can feel his scream freeze in his throat only barely escaping his lips before his entire body freezes with fright."

It was just a desiccated undead elf that they'd been told (Gather Information to learn 'what are common dangers in the desert we're going into') were vulnerable to fire and resistant to normal weapons, oh and carried a wasting disease.

Same encounter I just called the ghast a ghast and made no attempt to hide what it was, it was just that mummy felt awkwardly out of character in universe (especially as the rumored origin has them being made from some sort of kingdom destroying curse) so I called them desiccated. The party didn't freak out (they made their saves against despair except one of them) but at the same time one of them is a professional undead hunter, one of them... actually did specifically include text about being scared and ready to bolt (they did recognize it as a mummy, this did not stop them from moving into melee range with it, despite being a party buffer, to flank it with the archer who was still better off shooting it*), one is a cleric who used turn undead and then fell back in... fear. Ok so the party did get a little scared.

This was as simple as not calling a mummy a mummy but merely describing an unbandaged mummy. You can even take this a step forward with... well to reference 2e Spelljammer's page on this... blind landsquids instead of grimlocks (I'd actually go blind-lizardmen of some sort, Spelljammer was a silly place, but the principle is the same), reskinning monsters is a great way to make them new to a player, while still allowing the mechanics for creature knowledge to work (Knowledge {Religion} still tells you about the desiccated elf corpse). And now I wonder how many players would be thrown simply because a nymph was male and not female.

*This was a poor decision.

VoxRationis
2016-09-22, 11:40 PM
See, I've heard this, but I'm not convinced. If the system is more deadly, that will indeed discourage striding in confidently. But it doesn’t promote roleplaying a terrified reaction over a pragmatic retreat. In fact, if the system is highly deadly, then a reaction like:
“Right, shambling corpses, dozens of them … I suggest we retreat."
Is encouraged more than something like:
“Oh god oh god, the dead are walking … we’re doomed! I throw my weapon down and start praying!"
It'd be an odd game indeed that encourages throwing one's weapon down and praying to deal with overwhelming problems. If that's a natural response, it means you've been putting the "deus" in deus ex machina a little too frequently. A better distinction is between "I suggest we retreat" and "Crap! I run out of there!"

If your second level party's last adventure consisted of beating up a camp of petty bandits, they should probably get a bit of a shock if they come into contact with freaking Glaurung or something.
To be fair, I would expect even experienced players to freak out a bit if you dropped an epic-level dragon on their second-level characters. But that's a far cry from reacting with horror at the description of a low-level goblin or zombie.

The Insanity
2016-09-23, 08:53 AM
This is a big case of "You're playing the wrong game".
No, it's more a big case of "playing with the wrong players". Find better ones.

tensai_oni
2016-09-23, 09:24 AM
A generation raised on video games and digital effects movies probably are not going to be easily moved to astonishment. You are expecting them to be actors pretending to have reactions to things, and this simply may not be possible for them.

It's not astonishment, it's simple roleplaying.

By this logic, the "generation raised on video games" shouldn't be able to do any kind of roleplaying at all.

OP, is your group capable of roleplaying in any other situation? I knew a lot of people who are competent roleplayers and can vividly describe their characters' actions and emotions - but as soon as combat happens they can't "sell" for crap. What I mean by "sell" is to roleplay their characters being unnerved or inconvenienced by anything that is happening. I don't mean stuff like the party fighter fleeing instead of fighting: you can fight back but ALSO react with your character acting wary of a strange new monster, or grimacing in pain at a wound given. But these players do not do that. They have to be stone-cold or wisecracking badasses, unmoved by anything. And for a game master that can be very frustrating, especially when you craft an encounter that is supposed to be suspenseful but players brush it off.

tl;dr version:
If players don't roleplay at all, address it and ask them to do it. If they don't and it still bothers you, find another group.
If players roleplay normally but refuse to roleplay during combat, up the encounters' difficulty and see how they react. Vindicative and petty? Maybe. But if they aren't scared unless the threat is mechanically significant, then it's time to introduce mechanically significant threats.

Khi'Khi
2016-09-23, 11:33 AM
It's not astonishment, it's simple roleplaying.

OP, is your group capable of roleplaying in any other situation? I knew a lot of people who are competent roleplayers and can vividly describe their characters' actions and emotions - but as soon as combat happens they can't "sell" for crap. What I mean by "sell" is to roleplay their characters being unnerved or inconvenienced by anything that is happening. I don't mean stuff like the party fighter fleeing instead of fighting: you can fight back but ALSO react with your character acting wary of a strange new monster, or grimacing in pain at a wound given. But these players do not do that. They have to be stone-cold or wisecracking badasses, unmoved by anything. And for a game master that can be very frustrating, especially when you craft an encounter that is supposed to be suspenseful but players brush it off.



That's pretty much it. Roleplaying in any other situation is great, but when it comes to combat, players seem to get tunnel vision. Once initiative gets rolled, murderhobo mode is engaged.

I guess its kind of like video games in that regard, where gameplay and story are segregated. A character might be fazed in a cutscene, but when it comes to actual combat its no issue. And maybe that's by necessity. It may be too much to ask that players consider their characters every emotion in the heat of battle.

tensai_oni
2016-09-23, 01:17 PM
In that case I double on punishing players through complications. If they act blase, interpret it as recklessness and react accordingly - maybe through stealth buffing the monsters in question, definitely not through mechanical penalties to the players in question, but maybe the best way to do that is to indeed add more complications.

Zombies appear and the players just charge them? Describe how they were overconfident and catch another group approaching from the flank, having not noticed it until it's too late and they're already engaged in the fight. Or make them accidentally spring a trap. Or have rickety planks the fight takes place on collapse.

Of course players are allowed notice rolls or appropriate reflex saves in this situation, it's not "rocks fall you die". The important thing is to introduce complications and stress out in the description of what is happening - that this is because the player characters were reckless, overconfident, or refused to take the foe seriously. And if the players call it unfair, repeat that sentiment: that they refused to take seriously or act cautiously in the face of an enemy they ICly know very little about, so the enemy pulled a fast one on them. See if they take the hint.

NichG
2016-09-23, 02:25 PM
In that case I double on punishing players through complications. If they act blase, interpret it as recklessness and react accordingly - maybe through stealth buffing the monsters in question, definitely not through mechanical penalties to the players in question, but maybe the best way to do that is to indeed add more complications.

Zombies appear and the players just charge them? Describe how they were overconfident and catch another group approaching from the flank, having not noticed it until it's too late and they're already engaged in the fight. Or make them accidentally spring a trap. Or have rickety planks the fight takes place on collapse.

Of course players are allowed notice rolls or appropriate reflex saves in this situation, it's not "rocks fall you die". The important thing is to introduce complications and stress out in the description of what is happening - that this is because the player characters were reckless, overconfident, or refused to take the foe seriously. And if the players call it unfair, repeat that sentiment: that they refused to take seriously or act cautiously in the face of an enemy they ICly know very little about, so the enemy pulled a fast one on them. See if they take the hint.

Seems like an extremely hostile DMing style. Punishment isn't going to make the players become more immersed in the situation, its just going to exacerbate the OOC elements of the underlying conflict here. Stealth punishment is doubly useless, since by nature of being stealth its not even giving a clear signal to the players why (or if!) they're being punished - what exactly is the point here other than giving the DM an ego trip?

I think the DM needs to seriously consider why it is that they care that the reaction is blase. What are they ultimately trying to accomplish, in terms of their players' reactions? Presumably they want the players to react more strongly because a blase response says 'I don't care about this' and they want the players to care. Saying 'care, or I will punish you' doesn't make anyone care, it just makes them lie to you better.

Quertus
2016-09-23, 02:48 PM
how does a DM make the PC's react like a normal person to these terrifying creatures?


I also find it a bit disappointing when the players act on knowledge about monster weaknesses that their characters have no way of knowing. Like, a character who has no knowledge of the fey suddenly whipping out a cold iron sword on their first encounter with one. It makes the game boring if the players know what to expect in every encounter, and there are are no new tricks the GM can pull.

Far more concerning, to me, is people's blasé reactions to a lack of role-playing. I mean, if your aren't role-playing in a Role-Playing Game you're doing something wrong missing out on a lot (like, two thirds of the words!).

I think the best answer here is to teach and encourage role-playing. The best way I've seen that done is by asking "why?". Why did your character choose to attack that particular goblin? Why did he draw a cold iron sword? Why isn't he afraid of the undead - what happened to him to make dealing with the walking dead such a casual affair?

Get the players accustomed to thinking in terms of their character's PoV, and in explaining things from their character's PoV.

Of course, since so many DMs seem to be pushing things like, "what counts as familiarity", going forward, my backstories are going to look like this: the 2000-year-old, NI level wizard I apprenticed under made sure to dominate, mind rape, curse to 0 Wis, trap in little jars via Trap the Soul, or otherwise safely incapacitate every creature I would ever want to polymorph into, and, understanding how magic works, made sure I spent enough time with each of them to count as "familiar". And, if necessary, I'll add in having half-spawn children with all of them, just to make sure that I'm intimately familiar with all species. :smalltongue:

Going forward, the metagame has demanded that my characters have rather blasé response to monsters.

So, don't make rules that discourage the role-playing that you want to see. Don't make role-playing inherently suboptimal, don't force it to interfere with good tactics.

Happily, that's not what you're after. You want unobtrusive role-playing. So take a light touch, and gently encourage the behaviors you want to see.

Thrudd
2016-09-23, 03:00 PM
Seems like an extremely hostile DMing style. Punishment isn't going to make the players become more immersed in the situation, its just going to exacerbate the OOC elements of the underlying conflict here. Stealth punishment is doubly useless, since by nature of being stealth its not even giving a clear signal to the players why (or if!) they're being punished - what exactly is the point here other than giving the DM an ego trip?

I think the DM needs to seriously consider why it is that they care that the reaction is blase. What are they ultimately trying to accomplish, in terms of their players' reactions? Presumably they want the players to react more strongly because a blase response says 'I don't care about this' and they want the players to care. Saying 'care, or I will punish you' doesn't make anyone care, it just makes them lie to you better.

"Punish" is not the right way to look at it. A DM should be impartial. Run the game in such a way that is reasonable and consistent with the setting, and run enemies that act according to their intelligence and nature. The objective should be challenge and excitement. That success and even survival of the characters in any combat is not assured should be enough to elicit care in the players and a respect and wariness of whatever they encounter. This sentiment is eroded by a game which allows the players to become complacent through encounters that never truly threaten and characters that have never seen loss and death. The threat of ignominious death must be no idle one.
Correcting course after long experience with being coddled by a DM may indeed feel like "punishment" to the players at first, but there is no other way. Warn them ooc that there will be a shift in play style, that combat will be more dangerous than they are used to, and that the dice will fall where they may.

tensai_oni
2016-09-23, 03:03 PM
Seems like an extremely hostile DMing style.

No, you got me wrong. I am not suggesting heavy punishments in form of unfair odds, TPKs and the like. Just additional complications that make the encounters more difficult but survivable, with attached hints that go "perhaps if you roleplayed this out, the complication could've been avoided".

It's a less direct approach than OOCly addressing the players and explaining your problem with them - but in this scenario I'm afraid the direct approach will most likely not work. The players may see the point better if instead they learn from concrete examples.

As for motivations behind this, it's not necessarily about players' reactions, but their characters' reactions. Gaming is a cooperative experience to which the players also contribute and roleplaying is part of that. Seeing the characters roleplaying a reaction to a monster makes the experience much more fun for the game master. And opposite of that, a lack of a reaction makes the game less fun.

EDIT: Thrudd, you seem to be talking about something totally different than this discussion is about.

It's not about lethality of combat, it's about characters reacting to enemies appropriately in a roleplayed fashion.

If characters meet a freaky enemy or one they've never seen before, it's natural for them to be wary, afraid even. This however has little to do with what their actions will be like from the game's perspective. Let's say a fighter, a first level character fights a zombie. In one scenario, the player describes the character's disgust as the fighter swings the sword at the foe while seeking cover behind the shield, wary so as not to let the undead get too close. In another scenario, the player just goes "I attack the zombie". Mechanically it's the same action, attacking with your weapon. But somehow the former seems much more satisfying as a roleplaying experience.

dascarletm
2016-09-23, 03:45 PM
That just the thing, though. I'm not asking that characters wet themselves and run. I'm not asking that they cower and start praying for their lives. I understand that that's not fun; nobody wants to role play a coward. What I'm seeking is just a bit of humanity, especially from low-level players who haven't experienced much. If your second level party's last adventure consisted of beating up a camp of petty bandits, they should probably get a bit of a shock if they come into contact with freaking Glaurung or something.

I also find it a bit disappointing when the players act on knowledge about monster weaknesses that their characters have no way of knowing. Like, a character who has no knowledge of the fey suddenly whipping out a cold iron sword on their first encounter with one. It makes the game boring if the players know what to expect in every encounter, and there are are no new tricks the GM can pull.


No, it's more a big case of "playing with the wrong players". Find better ones.

Pretty much this, but it isn't only on the players. Their IC reaction and how it is portrayed is based on multiple things, but how you've set the mood as a DM and their personality/mood will be the largest factors. You need to successfully get them into their character's mindset. Provide atmosphere and descriptions that provide motive to elicit fear or apprehension, etc.
Though even then some people like playing the "I'm always brave no matter what," and that is fine. I'd expect such characters to give nuanced fear reactions in a movie or play, but I wouldn't hold your average DnD player to those standards.
Really you need to have the right scene and the right people playing.

Sidenote, I hate mechanical fear in general, and I've rarely seen it done well.

NichG
2016-09-23, 04:21 PM
No, you got me wrong. I am not suggesting heavy punishments in form of unfair odds, TPKs and the like. Just additional complications that make the encounters more difficult but survivable, with attached hints that go "perhaps if you roleplayed this out, the complication could've been avoided".


Unfair odds and TPKs would be, ironically, more 'fair' than what you suggested. If the situation is just challenging, then so be it, that's fine. The players can meet that challenge or fail or whatever. But what you're suggesting is for the DM to punish the players because the DM didn't like their roleplay - that is, to say 'do what I say or I will hit you with this metaphorical stick that I have by virtue of being the DM, and which you don't'. To me, thats what makes this hostile, and a terrible idea.



As for motivations behind this, it's not necessarily about players' reactions, but their characters' reactions. Gaming is a cooperative experience to which the players also contribute and roleplaying is part of that. Seeing the characters roleplaying a reaction to a monster makes the experience much more fun for the game master. And opposite of that, a lack of a reaction makes the game less fun.


I would say that this kind of attitude is just inappropriate for someone who is trying to be the DM. Yes, the DM deserves to have fun, but the DM also has challenges and responsibilities. Blaming the players for not responding when it was the DM's job to make the experience evocative and engaging is one mistake. Abusing their status as DM to punish the players for not making the game fun for them in exactly the way they want compounds that mistake to the extent where I'd say its time for them to step down and let someone else have the chair. That kind of response does not belong alongside any kind of authority.

Part of the reality of being a player is that you might control what your character does but you don't get to perfectly control what happens in the game world or what other players do - it may at times make things less fun, but it doesn't e.g. give you the right to cheat or kick the table over or be a jerk when you fail a challenge or roll a 1 or some other player doesn't do a thing you think would be cool if they had done it. Similarly, part of the reality of DMing is that while you get to control the game world, you don't get to choose how the players feel about it or respond to it. You might set yourself a goal of 'it would be cool if the players got scared of this', but much like the players can fail to accomplish one of their characters' goals, you can fail to present something that the players think is worth being scared of. Blaming the players and using it as a justification for punishment or to beat them into doing what you want isn't productive. It doesn't resolve the underlying reason for the failure.

flond
2016-09-23, 04:50 PM
So I really have two sorts of things to say about this.

1. Differing expectations. Remember that there are all sorts of ways to play a game, and that honestly, a lot of people don't want to play "realistic" responses to shock. Lots of the time, people want heroic responses. And in a lot of settings the response to a monster isn't a scream. It's a quip.

2. Be careful what you wish for. There are a lot of settings, a lot of systems where death is on the line in every fight and players worry about their characters. And...the styles of play common to those systems may not be what you want. If you up the difficulty and present a world where monsters use tactics and try to get the better of the pcs, you may end up with "shadowrun" styles of play. (i.e. 60 real time minutes of planning and a quick retreat if you're ever, ever noticed)

tensai_oni
2016-09-23, 08:41 PM
Okay, I wrote a rather ranty post here but I think I should be able to state what I had in mind more concisely.

Basically I don't think blaming the GM is fair here. My first question to the OP was whether monsters in their game are being described evocatively enough and apparently yes. So that's not a problem.

But what is possibly a problem is something I too had experience with. It usually goes like this:

1. GM starts a campaign where combat/tactical challenge isn't the focus. Player characters still fight but it's pretty much understood by all parties involved that unless they screw up big time, the players are expected to win fights the plot takes them into.
2. As a result of that, the players start taking their victories for granted and stop taking any threats seriously - not just OOCly which is fine, but it starts to bleed into IC behavior of their own characters.
3. The game master gets frustrated because it feels like no matter how terrible a foe they throw at the party, the player characters will just brush it off. The efforts the game master takes into crafting an emotionally vivid encounter seem unappreciated and wasted.

What good solutions are there in this situation? Will the players even realize that what they are doing is not fine - after all, from their perspective the combats were easy so it makes sense for their characters to act like this?

Koo Rehtorb
2016-09-23, 08:56 PM
1. GM starts a campaign where combat/tactical challenge isn't the focus. Player characters still fight but it's pretty much understood by all parties involved that unless they screw up big time, the players are expected to win fights the plot takes them into.
2. As a result of that, the players start taking their victories for granted and stop taking any threats seriously - not just OOCly which is fine, but it starts to bleed into IC behavior of their own characters.
3. The game master gets frustrated because it feels like no matter how terrible a foe they throw at the party, the player characters will just brush it off. The efforts the game master takes into crafting an emotionally vivid encounter seem unappreciated and wasted.

What good solutions are there in this situation? Will the players even realize that what they are doing is not fine - after all, from their perspective the combats were easy so it makes sense for their characters to act like this?

If combat/tactical challenge isn't the focus then use a system that isn't about tactical combat. There are many games out there.

NichG
2016-09-23, 10:16 PM
Okay, I wrote a rather ranty post here but I think I should be able to state what I had in mind more concisely.

Basically I don't think blaming the GM is fair here. My first question to the OP was whether monsters in their game are being described evocatively enough and apparently yes. So that's not a problem.

But what is possibly a problem is something I too had experience with. It usually goes like this:

1. GM starts a campaign where combat/tactical challenge isn't the focus. Player characters still fight but it's pretty much understood by all parties involved that unless they screw up big time, the players are expected to win fights the plot takes them into.
2. As a result of that, the players start taking their victories for granted and stop taking any threats seriously - not just OOCly which is fine, but it starts to bleed into IC behavior of their own characters.
3. The game master gets frustrated because it feels like no matter how terrible a foe they throw at the party, the player characters will just brush it off. The efforts the game master takes into crafting an emotionally vivid encounter seem unappreciated and wasted.

What good solutions are there in this situation? Will the players even realize that what they are doing is not fine - after all, from their perspective the combats were easy so it makes sense for their characters to act like this?

I don't think blaming the players is fair here either. In general, 'blame' in the sense of 'now I'm justified to treat them worse because they did something wrong' is counterproductive.

But in terms of responsibility, I'd say this is a situation where it's the GM's responsibility. They have three choices as I see it: alter their expectations, find players who are easier to emotionally influence or who actively want to do what the GM wants, orup their game and GM well enough that players are deeply affected despite their past experiences and jadedness.

That is to say, its not a reasonable expectation to say 'if I read the boxed text, which has been judged to be sufficiently evocative, then arbitrary players will have an emotional response'. Some players have fought hundreds or thousands of zombies during their career and a zombie is just going to not be interesting. Other players are having their first tabletop experience and everything is new and raw. Its not like there's a bar that says 'above this point, you get to stop trying harder', its just different levels of challenge. Getting a reaction from that new player is an easy challenge, while getting a reaction from the veteran is hard; that's just the nature of the challenge. With the veteran, you might often fail, but no one deserves recrimination for that, you just learn from it and do better next time.

If you're dealing with the veteran, and you want to go for it, you have to create an experience that they've never had before, or you have to go against an expectation that their experience has made really solid. You want an emotional reaction out of someone who has played D&D for 15 years? One way would be to break out of that mold as much as possible - don't run D&D, don't even run fantasy with recognizable fantasy monsters, run a game that's different enough that the player is off-balance. Another way would be to look at the kinds of things that a D&D veteran will take for granted, then find ways to make those things become untrue in your campaign during the moments you want a reaction. If you want to up the difficulty, making running away necessary for survival, etc, those are all ways you can try to approach this. You can also violate deep-held design aspects of the system - monsters which can permanently harm a character in ways that cannot be repaired, untrustworthy narration, witholding information (you were damaged but this monster has a numbing venom so you don't know how bad it is), etc. But do it consistently and fairly, don't do things like 'I'm doing this because you didn't roleplay, so if you start to roleplay I'll make it easy again'.

Yet another way is really play up the mood. Leave the game elements alone, but go all out on all aspects of presentation. Use subtle audio cues, keep certain music tracks associated with recurring unknown threats so you can hint to the players what's coming subconsciously without saying anything that would make it concrete and therefore not scary. When you narrate, don't just dump exposition about the threat, but actually keep details really sparse and parcel them out bit by bit so the players are information-receptive rather than in overload. Lead up to the encounter, setting the tone and giving hints as to what to expect, then have a twist where the reality differs from the obvious guess given the hints. If you want real emotion, you need build-up.

tensai_oni
2016-09-23, 11:20 PM
There's a weird IC/OOC blending here. You're talking about creating an emotional investment in a veteran player, but a veteran player and a veteran character are two different things. The player may have seen thousands of zombies, dragons, and whatnot before. But if the character is still low level? They're a novice adventurer. You'd expect them to act like one.

I don't ask players for real emotion OOCly. The fact they're enjoying themselves is good enough. I'm asking for roleplaying - an IC display of the characters' emotions. This weird OOC-to-IC bleed, where characters act out the players' emotions (or rather, lack thereof) even though it doesn't make sense for them to do that - that is exactly the problem.

BTW, I'm not playing DnD. Can't remember the last time I did.

mephnick
2016-09-23, 11:25 PM
No, it's more a big case of "playing with the wrong players". Find better ones.


Ugh. That's a little harsh. I hate playing with overly dramatic players. There's nothing "better" about them, acting isn't role-playing and has nothing to do with RPGs inherently.

But yes, they may not fit with the OP's play style. Give me a group of adults hanging out, drinking and watching hockey while we play over a bunch of actors, thanks. Just different strokes.

NichG
2016-09-24, 12:15 AM
There's a weird IC/OOC blending here. You're talking about creating an emotional investment in a veteran player, but a veteran player and a veteran character are two different things. The player may have seen thousands of zombies, dragons, and whatnot before. But if the character is still low level? They're a novice adventurer. You'd expect them to act like one.

I don't ask players for real emotion OOCly. The fact they're enjoying themselves is good enough. I'm asking for roleplaying - an IC display of the characters' emotions. This weird OOC-to-IC bleed, where characters act out the players' emotions (or rather, lack thereof) even though it doesn't make sense for them to do that - that is exactly the problem.


I don't think its a weird blending at all. It comes down to authenticity, and who the audience is. If you're an actor on the stage, you're trying to convince the people in the audience that what you're emoting is real, but it doesn't have to be because they don't have access to your own thoughts and feelings when you're on that stage. Faking it is 'good enough' (of course, there's method acting, which basically comes from the point that faking it is much harder when you don't feel anything than if you actually feel it).

But in a tabletop game, players are their own audience. That means if someone else emotes, its really easy to verify 'nope, not feeling it, must be fake'. That means that just 'acting' IC isn't enough for the experience to really be authentic - it's going to be a veneer, and it should be no surprise when people notice that and call others on it. Maybe one player could decide to 'act shocked' even if they aren't feeling it, but if the other players aren't feeling it then they'll notice and it's going to seem like hamming it up, not like something that actually increases the immersion for them or adds to the scene. Its like how a horror movie can cross over from horrific to comic, because it becomes over-the-top or expected - if its too cliche, it fails to actually connect in the way it's supposed to, and the experience takes on a very different feeling than intended.

So if you want to get good reactions, you need to make it easier for the players to suspend disbelief - you need to make them feel OOC like they're in the same mindset as their character.

Khi'Khi
2016-09-24, 01:03 AM
But yes, they may not fit with the OP's play style. Give me a group of adults hanging out, drinking and watching hockey while we play over a bunch of actors, thanks. Just different strokes.

Hey now, there's no reason we can't be both. I'm happy to RP one night and watch my Av's lose the next :smallbiggrin:

Khedrac
2016-09-24, 01:58 AM
Given most of the recent reponses I think I will have to re-state what I said earlier in a different way...

How often does the party meet new monsters?

If, apart from the first couple of adventures, these are the first new monsters the party has met then they shouldn't be blasé about them (and it is worth pointing that out to the players).
If they regularly meet new ordinary monsters and these are something special you have found/invented that you wanted to surprise them with, then tough - they should be blasé as they meet new monsters every week and have no reason to assume these are different.

AMFV
2016-09-24, 03:01 AM
That's pretty much it. Roleplaying in any other situation is great, but when it comes to combat, players seem to get tunnel vision. Once initiative gets rolled, murderhobo mode is engaged.

I guess its kind of like video games in that regard, where gameplay and story are segregated. A character might be fazed in a cutscene, but when it comes to actual combat its no issue. And maybe that's by necessity. It may be too much to ask that players consider their characters every emotion in the heat of battle.

Here's the thing, real life combat works that way. You get highly focused on what exactly is going on so that you can function. The parts of your brain that deals with emotional stuff shuts down, so that you don't have to worry about that and you can survive. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, and when people are faced with something scary it kicks in, and then they either fight the thing or they run. The kind of reaction you're describing is pretty rare generally, just because it's not a good reaction to have, it's not something that causes people to survive, and people tend to fight tooth and nail to survive.

I mean sure, you might have a few seconds of "What is that" but once it starts moving towards them, probably even peasants would either try to get away, or try to fight, or try something else that they think would cause survival. The players aren't peasants, they're seasoned warriors, who have been in a lot of combat, shutting off their emotional responses to function better should be pretty nearly second nature to them for this sort of situation.

Edit: I'll note that there are people who freeze when in danger, but it wouldn't really be reasonable to have an adventurer do that, since that's the sort of thing that gets them dead. So if they start freezing up it's not usually a sign that the monsters are too big, but that there's something wrong with them.

Also, to make use of your Bilbo analogy... While Bilbo was pretty shaken up by Smaug, Bard was not. The PCs in most games are playing as Bard, not as Bilbo. Bilbo is the hero of a children's story, and he's quite suitable in that role, but he's not the hero in the sense that most PCs tend to be. They're Bard, or even more frequently at mid-levels and up, they're Huor and Hurin, who would not have even been all that phased by Glaurung, as I recall.

tensai_oni
2016-09-24, 08:17 AM
@NichG:

And this is where we disagree. All roleplaying is just acting, and not necessarily method acting either - you don't need to feel a particular way for your character to feel a particular way. You just need to decide that it makes sense for your character to do that.

It's not only about combat. If your character falls in love, that doesn't mean you as a player have to fall in love either. If your character is honorable and feels disgusted by breach of honor by others, it doesn't mean you yourself feel like that OOCly. An IC/OOC divide is more than optional, it's necessary to avoid misunderstandings.

@AMFV:

It's not about freezing in danger like a deer in the spotlights. OP stated many times that she doesn't ask for players to act like terrified children who are unable to fight back or defend themselves. Just some sort of reaction - wariness, apprehension, mistrust, caution, is what is being asked here. As opposed to almost routine "meh, new monsters, I draw my weapon and move forward". If anything it's the former that makes people survive fights, not latter.

Thrudd
2016-09-24, 10:35 AM
EDIT: Thrudd, you seem to be talking about something totally different than this discussion is about.

It's not about lethality of combat, it's about characters reacting to enemies appropriately in a roleplayed fashion.

If characters meet a freaky enemy or one they've never seen before, it's natural for them to be wary, afraid even. This however has little to do with what their actions will be like from the game's perspective. Let's say a fighter, a first level character fights a zombie. In one scenario, the player describes the character's disgust as the fighter swings the sword at the foe while seeking cover behind the shield, wary so as not to let the undead get too close. In another scenario, the player just goes "I attack the zombie". Mechanically it's the same action, attacking with your weapon. But somehow the former seems much more satisfying as a roleplaying experience.

Characters are controlled by players, they have no life of their own. To get a player to react in a "satisfying manner", they need to be immersed in the game world. That is made possible to the extent which the player's mechanical/game experience has some connection to the character's fictional experience. A player may be blase or matter-of-fact about a combat experience because they know or feel their character is in no real danger. Now, if they found out that a zombie's touch gives the character a disease that drains their abities, maybe they would be saying "ick, look out! Keep a shield between you and them!" That's a mechanical effect that actually impacts the game, and will result in them treating the combat in a more immersive way.

Some people may act for the sake of acting when they play an RPG, because they like to. For that sort of person, you don't need to do much. Just describe the world and they get into it. But that can't be expected of all or most players in all games.

There are certain RPGs which are more about acting than anything else, in those games the rules actually encourage it mechanically. D&D is not such a game, and D&D is what people predominantly discuss here and what the OP is most likely describing.

NichG
2016-09-24, 10:55 AM
@NichG:

And this is where we disagree. All roleplaying is just acting, and not necessarily method acting either - you don't need to feel a particular way for your character to feel a particular way. You just need to decide that it makes sense for your character to do that.

It's not only about combat. If your character falls in love, that doesn't mean you as a player have to fall in love either. If your character is honorable and feels disgusted by breach of honor by others, it doesn't mean you yourself feel like that OOCly. An IC/OOC divide is more than optional, it's necessary to avoid misunderstandings.


Then, why act at all? Why roleplay at all? What's the point, if it doesn't actually evoke any emotions or feelings related to what you're pretending?

tensai_oni
2016-09-24, 10:58 AM
Because it's fun.

NichG
2016-09-24, 11:11 AM
Because it's fun.

What I'm getting at is the reason behind 'why is it fun?'. Why does it affect you to do it, compared to just not bothering? It's because there is some emotional impact of the act, its not just a pro-forma thing.

That's why I consider it really bad form to insist that other people roleplay if they're not feeling it. Roleplaying because you get inspired 'is fun'. Roleplaying because someone will punish you if you don't do it to their standards sucks all the fun out of it.

Grim Portent
2016-09-24, 11:23 AM
Fear and trepidation are not things you can force out of players, nor something you can really expect the vast bulk of the time.

I mostly play 40k rpgs, and in them barely anything frightens me, and as a side effect my characters, no matter what it actually is unless it triggers the Fear mechanics, which doesn't frighten me OOC at all, or belongs to the very small list of creatures I automatically classify under 'nope', in which case I will immediately become as paranoid and cautious as I reasonably can the moment I think they're around. The only reason I find the 'nope' list scary is because I know enough about them OOC to know that they have perfectly good odds of killing me in any fair fight unless the GM is pulling punches and trying not to kill people (which goes against the point of the 40k rpgs) or can do things worse than death but which don't necessarily stop the character from being a PC. Even the nope list won't actually stop 4 out of 5 of my 40k characters from charging it foaming at the mouth and trying to cut it's head off to wear as a hat, simply because that's how most would react, whether due to piety, psychopathy, mental instability or simple inability to comprehend their own mortality.



In a game like D&D though I don't think anything at all would scare me, IC or OOC at all. The sort of characters the game is capable of making are generally epic heroes of the likes of Gilglamesh, Heracles or Beowulf. Warriors and champions who feared nothing and dueled the foulest and most terrible monsters to plague their people. I'd expect the default reaction of them to basically anything in the D&D assortment to be 'Oh, I guess it's Tuesday,' and that's more or less the reaction I and my characters are likely to have. A zombie or demon isn't generally going to faze the average heroic character (heroic in the classical Greek sense, not the modern sense) who can crush a man's skull with his bare hands, or a 7 foot lizard person who can tear out a bear's throat with their teeth, or someone who can bend the eldritch energies of the world to burn men to ashes.

Terazul
2016-09-24, 11:37 AM
@NichG:
It's not about freezing in danger like a deer in the spotlights. OP stated many times that she doesn't ask for players to act like terrified children who are unable to fight back or defend themselves. Just some sort of reaction - wariness, apprehension, mistrust, caution, is what is being asked here. As opposed to almost routine "meh, new monsters, I draw my weapon and move forward". If anything it's the former that makes people survive fights, not latter.

Even in this case, a lot of the issue here seems to be different expectations on how a typical low-level adventurer is supposed to react to things. If we're talking about say, DnD, if a player in question is a Wizard or Cleric, both classes that can literally specialize in necromancy or gets a feature dedicated entirely to dealing with them, it follows that they have at least some passing knowledge of the creatures, even if it isn't exhaustive. When you can shoot lasers from your hand from level 1, when you see a shambling skeleton it entirely seems plausible (to me) to go "Oh hey" before moving in to deal with it. The same can be said for people in the party with said laser-shooters, because they know people who in turn shoot lasers. The stock pause or sense of caution is mostly represented by initiative, because that's how long it takes you to respond to whatever it is in the first place. Because yeah, in DnD at least it is implied that you have trained quite a fair bit (oh hey, non-NPC class levels) because you have some understanding that you're going to be out there fighting all sorts weird stuff.

Most fear in these types of games is reactionary; As someone pointed out earlier, the types of things to intrinsically elicit fear often have mechanics for it, and often times individuals (characters and players alike) won't be scared until they realize just how much of a threat they're dealing with, whether that be through damage, or some sort of status effect. Cautiously waiting it out to see just how bad it could be is typically a poor choice, because it just means the monster gets a free jump on you; If you're making a career out of this, taking it down as swiftly as possible is probably the best way to respond, especially if its a head-on encounter, and not the PCs sneaking up on something that hasn't noticed it yet, or a scenario that seems like it's a trap.

Cautious approach is good sometimes, but often in this sort of game just means "hey you guys like getting hit with Mass Hold Person, right", from a gamist perspective. From a roleplaying perspective, some individuals also might be playing reckless just because in real life you actually need to be so cautious all the time, and being heroic is a fun change of pace. It's fun tackling Flail Snails into lava.

AMFV
2016-09-24, 02:12 PM
@AMFV:

It's not about freezing in danger like a deer in the spotlights. OP stated many times that she doesn't ask for players to act like terrified children who are unable to fight back or defend themselves. Just some sort of reaction - wariness, apprehension, mistrust, caution, is what is being asked here. As opposed to almost routine "meh, new monsters, I draw my weapon and move forward". If anything it's the former that makes people survive fights, not latter.

Not really true. Being wary or apprehensive is somewhat useful sometimes. But really the thing that makes people survive in fights is training. Training that so deeply ingrained that is basically a physical response. You cut all of the emotions out of it, there's no emotional component, the fight starts you take cover and begin firing. You see an adversary you move towards it and engage if that's your role. If you don't do your job, because you're "wary" then you're killing your party members. Now sometimes a more wary approach is appropriate, but not necessarily in the case of "a monster that looks sort of like things we've encountered before" Then it's "do your job". Doing your job is what makes you survive, being wary or cautious when inappropriate to do so, kills you. It's not about having an emotional response when you are a combat Soldier, it's about doing the things you're trained to do every time no matter how frightening the situation is. Now if the situation is markedly different or there is something that might elicit a judgement call, then it's time for that. But I imagine that players already are doing that, since that's just tactical acumen, not necessarily anything that might seem like standout roleplay

Kane0
2016-09-24, 11:16 PM
I don't expect the PC's to wet themselves and run, but maybe a cry of surprise? Stopping in one's tracks? Hesitation due to lack of knowledge of this new enemy? Maybe giving up initiative due to the shock?

That would result in quite a large number of deaths. Especially in D&D where the first round of combat is often the decider of the fight.

5e does have two additional optional attributes though: Honor and Sanity. They have uses, and the fact that they are optional leaves them more open to tweaking to match the game you want to play. Just make sure you run it by the players of course, few enjoy sitting down to a game significantly different to what they were expecting.

Satinavian
2016-09-25, 01:44 AM
There is also the question, how new and interactive the monster is. Zombies ? The most common undead ?Those are not strange or surprising, those are just a part of the world the PCs live in. It would be like modern humans (in e.g. central Europe) seeing a boar for the first time while hiking.

And why should the reaction be "Oh, no, a shambling unnatural corpse. What should i do ? What can I do ? The horror !" and not
"Thank the gods it is only a zombie. Not a human who can actual think strategically while fighting and use weapons. If i remember the stories correctly, we should be fine, right ? "

Fri
2016-09-25, 02:44 AM
What I'm getting at is the reason behind 'why is it fun?'. Why does it affect you to do it, compared to just not bothering? It's because there is some emotional impact of the act, its not just a pro-forma thing.

That's why I consider it really bad form to insist that other people roleplay if they're not feeling it. Roleplaying because you get inspired 'is fun'. Roleplaying because someone will punish you if you don't do it to their standards sucks all the fun out of it.

Because you want to make cool and interesting story? RPing is some sort of collaborative storytelling after all. I doubt Stephen King is really trembling in fear when he's writing his character trembling in fear in his stories. You can see "it'd be really cool for the story if my character tremble in fear/fall in love/rolling in the floor laughing because of this thing that's happening in the game right now," eventhough you're not actually in fear/fall in love/rolling in the floor laughing.

NichG
2016-09-25, 03:02 AM
Because you want to make cool and interesting story? RPing is some sort of collaborative storytelling after all. I doubt Stephen King is really trembling in fear when he's writing his character trembling in fear in his stories. You can see "it'd be really cool for the story if my character tremble in fear/fall in love/rolling in the floor laughing because of this thing that's happening in the game right now," eventhough you're not actually in fear/fall in love/rolling in the floor laughing.

Stephen King may not be experiencing any fear when he writes, but the writing is designed to impart at least some of that emotion to the readers. Maybe not as strong as a person would experience in the situation in the stories, but enough that the reader feels something a bit outside of what they would normally experience in their day-to-day life, enough to get the feel of authenticity without the actual danger of doing dangerous things. The author in that case doesn't have to feel it, because the author is not the audience.

If you want to push the author analogy, I'd say its more like Stephen King is the GM, and the players as the readers. The GM doesn't have to be afraid of a zombie to make a scary zombie, but the GM does have to succeed in making a scary zombie. If an author blames his readers for not being affected by the stuff he writes, that doesn't really lead to him becoming a better author. It's his job to make something that makes the reader want to suspend disbelief enough to make kind of connection to the book.

But actually, I think a better view of tabletop gaming is that each person at the table is the author of the story that they themselves are reading. The players choose what to roleplay and what not to roleplay based on the mood that they're feeling. Someone saying 'hey, roleplay this way!' just shatters that mood - it defeats the purpose, gets in the way of the players actually feeling anything at all.

Fri
2016-09-25, 11:36 AM
I actually completely get what you mean. I mean, sometimes the GM or whoever fails at generating the necessary mood, like when it's meant to be romantic scene, but the gm is george lucas and don't understand how earth human bond.

But I guess I disagree if you're saying that the gm is the only author of a game. RPG is a collaborative storytelling game after all, even if your part is "I awesomely hack at enemy limbs." It's still you taking part on making a story. And despite the gm's failure at making a proper mood, if you're friends and you understand that this is meant to be a scary mood, and you think it'd be proper if the bookish wizard you're playing is scared in character, you can still do it. You don't have to, but you can, and it's often more fun that way.

NichG
2016-09-25, 12:44 PM
I actually completely get what you mean. I mean, sometimes the GM or whoever fails at generating the necessary mood, like when it's meant to be romantic scene, but the gm is george lucas and don't understand how earth human bond.

But I guess I disagree if you're saying that the gm is the only author of a game. RPG is a collaborative storytelling game after all, even if your part is "I awesomely hack at enemy limbs." It's still you taking part on making a story. And despite the gm's failure at making a proper mood, if you're friends and you understand that this is meant to be a scary mood, and you think it'd be proper if the bookish wizard you're playing is scared in character, you can still do it. You don't have to, but you can, and it's often more fun that way.

No, I'm not saying the GM is the only author. That's why I put the third paragraph in my last post. Everyone is an author. But I'd say that, because everyone is also the audience, authenticity of the experience is key. You can't fool yourself by just faking the surface of things the way that you could fool a 'reader' who isn't you, so getting the form of things right is a lot less important than getting the essence right. Though, perhaps an aside, but I'd imagine that the best authors do actually feel something akin to the characters they're putting to paper when they write.

Satinavian
2016-09-25, 01:21 PM
I disagree that it is required for the player to feel the same as the character for proper roleplay.

I even disagree that it should be an aim to align character and player feelings. Sure, it makes a lot of things easier if both feel the same.

But then we have all those feelings that while totally ok for characters are nothing you want to instill in real persons. There is a reason we have all those commonly excluded topics that are often related to player feelings.

The other issue is that a lot of people have characters that are not that much similar to the players and should show completely different feelings to the player in regards to the same topics/situations.



So, no, if you are unhappy with roleplaying from players, discuss it. Don't try to make players feel the way you think the characters should feel.

Der_DWSage
2016-09-25, 01:59 PM
Stephen King may not be experiencing any fear when he writes, but the writing is designed to impart at least some of that emotion to the readers. Maybe not as strong as a person would experience in the situation in the stories, but enough that the reader feels something a bit outside of what they would normally experience in their day-to-day life, enough to get the feel of authenticity without the actual danger of doing dangerous things. The author in that case doesn't have to feel it, because the author is not the audience.

If you want to push the author analogy, I'd say its more like Stephen King is the GM, and the players as the readers. The GM doesn't have to be afraid of a zombie to make a scary zombie, but the GM does have to succeed in making a scary zombie. If an author blames his readers for not being affected by the stuff he writes, that doesn't really lead to him becoming a better author. It's his job to make something that makes the reader want to suspend disbelief enough to make kind of connection to the book.

But actually, I think a better view of tabletop gaming is that each person at the table is the author of the story that they themselves are reading. The players choose what to roleplay and what not to roleplay based on the mood that they're feeling. Someone saying 'hey, roleplay this way!' just shatters that mood - it defeats the purpose, gets in the way of the players actually feeling anything at all.

I'd actually like to expand on this-if you're trying to elicit an emotional response from players, whether it be fear, sorrow, joy, or anything else, you have to take a closer look at things. What exactly gives it the emotion you're looking for here? And how much effort are you willing to put in to set the mood for that emotion?

In the exact instance that the OP has set, there's a conflicting set of expectations. D&D is very much a game of 'Kill, loot, level up.' That's the default expectation. The OP wanted 'Dark Souls-level fear, just enough to make you sweat while still letting you be heroes.' And I'm not sure how exactly the undead were presented, but if it was given little more than 'A set of shambling corpses block the road' the players probably similarly went 'Okay, this is just a combat encounter. Let's roll them bones.' The default expectation was not challenged, so they didn't stress over it.

There's some good examples of how to set the emotion here-the slow description of the dessicated corpse, the eerie focus of the skeletons that just turned to face the player without doing anything else-a focus on what made them unusual, taking about thirty seconds to two minutes of description to set the mood of the scene.

It won't always be successful. Some people might find it funny that there's a cockroach sleeping in a man's eye, or somesuch. But the more practice one has, the more reliable it gets. And the more reliable it gets, the less you have to rely on stereotypically scary monsters-after a while, you can describe a goblin licking the blood off its knife, and get the same reaction as a dragon drawing in a breath for a breath of fire.

Cluedrew
2016-09-25, 02:42 PM
No, I'm not saying the GM is the only author. That's why I put the third paragraph in my last post. Everyone is an author. But I'd say that, because everyone is also the audience, authenticity of the experience is key.You know I'm not a fan of the whole author/audience analogy. I mean it has its uses but audience always implied a passive observer to me, like watching a movie on a screen. People in a role-playing game however see the state of the game (or hear or have it signed to them) then act on the game and the process repeats. The same can be said for the GM, except the balance and order tends to be different, however the same steps are there. And there is a word for someone who is participating in this sort of interactive cycle: player. It is no different in this regard from the umpteenth Call of Duty game.

OK, aside closed, onto the main point.

Personally I don't usually feel the same emotions as my characters. At least not when we are talking about any sort of strong emotion. I will deadpan my character screaming "Shoot it! Shoot it with everything!". I am not my character and I generally don't pretend to be. When I act it is usually for the presentation to other people around the table and less often about mindset or my internal feelings.

Because of this and other personal experiences I would say that putting the character's in danger will not get the players to act that out any better. Even if they are afraid and start double-guessing themselves or hesitate they have no reason to added that to the description of the character's actions. In fact it may have the opposite effect as they player, more than ever, wants to take the most optimal root to victory and realistic reactions hinder that.

If you think that role-play is breaking down talk to the players, a "Have any of your characters seen an undead before?" when the charge at zombies at level 1 might be all you need. Or not. There are a wide variety of people in the world.

Aotrs Commander
2016-09-27, 07:26 PM
I also find it a bit disappointing when the players act on knowledge about monster weaknesses that their characters have no way of knowing. Like, a character who has no knowledge of the fey suddenly whipping out a cold iron sword on their first encounter with one. It makes the game boring if the players know what to expect in every encounter, and there are are no new tricks the GM can pull.

Then you need to throw the monster manuals away and make new creatures that the players CAN'T know anything about.

(That's what I do... For basically all of my campaign worlds. And Worse, I'm nasty enough to incorporate the myths and rumours about said monster, so if the PCs make knowledge checks (and don't get high enough), they may only learn what "they" and the "man in the pub" says...)

Real ignorance beats feigned ignorance every single time.



Come to that, veteran players just might not get excited about fighting monsters they've fought dozens of times before; they may have even passed the point where feigning fear of trolls for the umpteeth time has just become boring. Doubly so if they have to do it every time they encounter a new monster.



For that matter, the reactions of a dude who lives in a world with actually functioning magic, and confirmed afterlife, filled with monsters is just NOT going to be the same as an Earth-human encountering something in the Cthulu mythos or whatever. Heck, even in this day and age humans are far less fearful of the unknown because they're just better educated. So I think it's entirely within character for folk in a fantasy world to not be especially scared at seeing a fantasy creature, in the same way Earth-humans aren't scared at encountering a lion. It's when it's in a hostile posture that they are scary (and that's right back to "mechanically threatening.")

(Rolemaster, for all its other sins, has the edge in that last regard, because no matter what level you are, it is statsitically possible for you to be killed at any time by anything. A hobbit with a bent knife could statisically possibly kill Morgoth. (Staticially plausible or LIKELY is a whole different kettle of fish, of course!))

Khi'Khi
2016-09-28, 01:19 AM
Then you need to throw the monster manuals away and make new creatures that the players CAN'T know anything about.

For that matter, the reactions of a dude who lives in a world with actually functioning magic, and confirmed afterlife, filled with monsters is just NOT going to be the same as an Earth-human encountering something in the Cthulu mythos or whatever. Heck, even in this day and age humans are far less fearful of the unknown because they're just better educated. So I think it's entirely within character for folk in a fantasy world to not be especially scared at seeing a fantasy creature, in the same way Earth-humans aren't scared at encountering a lion. It's when it's in a hostile posture that they are scary (and that's right back to "mechanically threatening.")



I don't know about you, but unless there was an incredibly sturdy barrier between me and that lion, I would be scared no matter what posture it was in. I don't think all the "better education" in the world is going to override survival instincts. In fact, knowledge about a particular monster might make you even more cautious. If I know a monster's skin is covered in poison glands, I'm gonna be a lot more afraid of melee than if I didn't know that.

Despite the possible lame deaths that might ensue, I do like the idea of a game where "anything" is still a threat. A knife in the chest will still seriously harm you no matter how many years you've spent fighting, after all.

Lemmy
2016-09-28, 12:14 PM
When everything you see is wonderful, it's difficult to retain the feeling of wonder. D&D characters often make extremely long journeys through extremely dangerous/unknown territory... It makes sense they'd get used to seeing new and amazing things on a weekly basis.

Besides, no player can completely shut down their meta-knowledge.

CursedRhubarb
2016-09-28, 12:47 PM
Sounds like the trouble is your players don't like to keep at least some of the RP elements in combats. Forcing them to do so could backfire, but you can use Inspiration to encourage them to do so and it can be as simple as:

"You see a gigantic reptilian creature, it roars as a pebble skitters out from your feet, waking it from it's slumber. Roll Initiative"
Player 1: "I run in and hit it with my axe"
Player 2: "I cast Magic Missile at it"
Player 3: "I grit my teeth and wipe a bead of sweat from my brow before readying my shield and charging forward to take cover behind the rock nearest it"
"Player 3 gains Inspiration as he/she steels their will before the mighty foe."

While players 1 and 2 are happy to simply tank and spank for battle, player 3 adds some flavor and gives their character more life.

Eventually they will start getting more into it and will find it fun and that it can enhance combat scenarios. Or not and player 3 will tend to have Inspiration a lot more often than the others and eventually they will figure it out.

Aotrs Commander
2016-09-28, 12:54 PM
I don't know about you, but unless there was an incredibly sturdy barrier between me and that lion, I would be scared no matter what posture it was in. I don't think all the "better education" in the world is going to override survival instincts. In fact, knowledge about a particular monster might make you even more cautious. If I know a monster's skin is covered in poison glands, I'm gonna be a lot more afraid of melee than if I didn't know that.

I would be wary, certainly, but only because a lion is a large and dangerous creature.

I would not be going "oh my Lichemaster, what is that?" I would be going "that's a lion, better be careful."

(Actually, strictly, as an epic-level Lich I'd be going, "that's a lion, it cannot possibly hurt me in any way but since I like nature and junk, I'mma not going to provoke it into attacking just because," but let's just ignore that for the moment.)

There is a big difference between "hard scary" (because it represents something that you will likely lose if you fight or is at the very least significantly dangerous) and "horror-scary" because the thing is inherently frightening (as often that not because of ignorance). It is very difficult to impose the latter in an RPG in a purely descriptive fashion, even more so to something that the player recognises.

"Hard-scary" is MUCH easier - and gets easier with familarity - you just have to pitch something that is stronger than the PCs.

"Hard-scary," however, is also more likely to engage the player's mechanical aptitude (e.g. "oh crap, it's a troll, we need to break out the fire and acid and hopoe it doesn't rend because we're, like, level four or something") if the gap is not so obviously enormous (e.g. "that's a great wyrm, we're level 1, RUN."). (And it is not an unrealistic response for trained combatants, like the characters may well be, to go into focussed, serious mode like real (properly-) trained soldiers rather than panic.)

(Animated skeletons and zombies, though, are... Not scary in either, fashion, frankly; unless you are playing a very different system to D&D where they are more "hard scary" relative to the PCs. Because even at level 1 D&D, a skeleton or zombie is not really more or less dangerous than a level 1 human fighter opponent. I certainly don't find them REMOTELY inherently scary.)

Garimeth
2016-09-28, 01:44 PM
I understand that that's not fun; nobody wants to role play a coward.

Which is ironic, because IRL the overwhelming majority of the population respond to violence against them by running or simply being in shock and doing nothing.


Not really true. Being wary or apprehensive is somewhat useful sometimes. But really the thing that makes people survive in fights is training. Training that so deeply ingrained that is basically a physical response. You cut all of the emotions out of it, there's no emotional component, the fight starts you take cover and begin firing. You see an adversary you move towards it and engage if that's your role. If you don't do your job, because you're "wary" then you're killing your party members. Now sometimes a more wary approach is appropriate, but not necessarily in the case of "a monster that looks sort of like things we've encountered before" Then it's "do your job". Doing your job is what makes you survive, being wary or cautious when inappropriate to do so, kills you. It's not about having an emotional response when you are a combat Soldier, it's about doing the things you're trained to do every time no matter how frightening the situation is. Now if the situation is markedly different or there is something that might elicit a judgement call, then it's time for that. But I imagine that players already are doing that, since that's just tactical acumen, not necessarily anything that might seem like standout roleplay

AMFV is spot on, and a perfect example is house clearing. If the number two person in the stack going into a room with the enemy hesitates AT ALL, then number 1 is dead, and so is number 2, and possibly number 3. Never mind when you start talking about moving up stairs...

Hesitation is devastation.

icefractal
2016-09-28, 04:24 PM
Hesitation is devastation.This, especially in D&D. No matter how deadly the foe is, "wait and see" or "attack in a 'cautious' (and less effective) way", are just bad strategies. Running away is fine, negotiating is fine, but if you are going to fight you should go for it 100%.

And every counterpoint I've seen to that has been in the realm of house-rules or DM fiat. Like the idea of adding more enemies if the PCs rush in "too quickly".

NichG
2016-09-29, 12:06 AM
There is a big difference between "hard scary" (because it represents something that you will likely lose if you fight or is at the very least significantly dangerous) and "horror-scary" because the thing is inherently frightening (as often that not because of ignorance). It is very difficult to impose the latter in an RPG in a purely descriptive fashion, even more so to something that the player recognises.

"Hard-scary" is MUCH easier - and gets easier with familarity - you just have to pitch something that is stronger than the PCs.

"Hard-scary," however, is also more likely to engage the player's mechanical aptitude (e.g. "oh crap, it's a troll, we need to break out the fire and acid and hopoe it doesn't rend because we're, like, level four or something") if the gap is not so obviously enormous (e.g. "that's a great wyrm, we're level 1, RUN."). (And it is not an unrealistic response for trained combatants, like the characters may well be, to go into focussed, serious mode like real (properly-) trained soldiers rather than panic.)

The thing I like to aim for is a form of "Hard-scary" where the difficulty isn't strictly 'how can we possibly survive this?' but more like 'there are nasty consequences to mishandling this'. If I want to make things very memorable or scary, I like to attack the underlying status quo assumption of 'all we have to do is win, then we can patch everything up afterwards at our leisure'. That way, even as each player has a role to fill in the party, I'm giving each player cause to think of the personal cost to helping the team over helping themselves. Experienced players can be very dissociated when making tactical choices, but if you bury a real choice about goals and prices that they're willing to pay there's not just a tactical answer to that.

For example, I recently ran a fight where the enemy had fairly low-damage attacks but every time they landed an attack, they could make one person or thing forget all memories, connections, and allegiances to the target. So maybe someone can stand there and tank it, but whoever chooses to do that ends up losing a lot of stuff outside of the one fight. I wouldn't say the players were terrified or paralyzed with fear or anything like that, though there was some hesitation to their tactics (it was about two rounds before any of them actually damaged the thing, mostly focusing on defensive buffing/etc beforehand). But the long-term goal here for me is to layer on a theme - the players mostly think D&D demon when someone says 'demon', but if every time they face a 'demon' in this campaign it has this kind of pattern of having attacks designed at being harmful in the aftermath, I'm hoping the players will internalize that and actually start to use it to reason about how to handle situations.

Therumancer
2016-09-29, 01:52 AM
Almost everything that can be said has been said so far. One point that I don't think was made so far (unless I missed it) is that in the default settings of most D&D games, which tends to be (depending on era and edition) The Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, or Mystara (The D&D Known World) magic and such is pretty common, as are monsters. You have entire nations that run military forces of wizards, mage schools, or even wind up being ruled by mageocracies. Along with that comes the way those magic users and such employ or deal with monsters and such. Seeing some horrible thing get taken down might be a daily occurance for those who like to spectate at an arena, and a zombie might be forbidden magic, but it's forbidden for moral reasons having to do with people's views of disturbing the dead. Some wizard can go "bippodity boppity boo" and cast a monster summoning or animate dead spell and produce controlled monsters at will. This is not to mention military forces that might intergrate Ogres, trolls, low order demons, and undead and such into their typical orders of battle. In The Forgotten Realms for example the Zhentarim had an entire *corps* of beholders at one point.

The basic point is that a fear reaction for adventurers in a *typical* D&D setting is not appropriate, and even for most non-adventuring NPCs a loose zombie or whatever is like a dangerous snake or concerns a wolf might be prowling around nowadays, something you call the guard for (and they do come, and deal with it). Cities like Waterdeep, or the nation of Glantri, or heck even "The City State Of The Invincible Overlord" for my fellow grognards sort of play havoc with what we'd come to see as fear reactions to the monsterous. It takes something really special to get people bent out of shape, and something truly apocalyptic to make an adventurer go "I think I just soiled my loincloth".

To be entirely fair, this also plays into some other fantasy tropes other than fear which a GM can exploit thematically. With all the tieflings running around, and the ease with which people throw magic and deal with monsters around, it's easy to underestimate how dangerous some things can be. Some careless wizard getting fried dealing with demons might have been careless specifically because he underestimates them BECAUSE he knows thayans summon and control them en-masse for example.

In a setting where monsters and such are genuinely rare, calling for fear checks and the like is more appropriate (and stats enforce on players what the players might not do themselves, which is why mechanics for fear can be important) HOWEVER, the problem with this is that such rarity has to be genuine. If the PCs are meeting a rare monster every day and making fear checks constantly, it begins to not make much sense. To put things into perspective Conan ran into some weird crap in his adventures, the younger Conan had a sort of "run off in the desert howling" experience after "The God In The Bowl" where he ran into a really big snake (I think I have the story name right) however even in Hyboria where this stuff is rare Conan was taking a sort of "so what" attitude in his later-in-life stories where he had seen it all. In stories like "Pheonix In The Sword" he's dealing with the idea of wizards, monsters, and enchanted blades like it's all stuff he's seen before, which he has. Granted Conan is an adventurer, part of what defines him as time goes on his how blaise he is in dealing with stuff that freaks everyone else out, the local wizard freaks everyone out since magic is so rare, but Conan who has travelled thousands of miles has seen plenty of them, and has even formed his own (negative) opinion based on a kind of experience few people have. When Conan says he hates wizardry or something similar, he's actually speaking from the perspective of a dude who has decapitated a few of them.

For those who have read this far, one system that works fairly well for emulating a "Conan" type evolution is from 3.0 Call Of Cthulhu (D20) where it recommends giving each player 1 point of sanity resistance per level if it's a heroic/adventuring type campaign. Which means as the PCs become more experienced they can just laugh off the SAN hits that infamously drag down even the most successful CoC investigators. The first few ghouls are scary, but to an 8th level character or so there is no way the potential SAN loss can overcome his SAN resistance so he just takes it in stride. That's one way of handling horror with otherwise heroic characters.

Ravenloft as a setting always struck me as being rather wonky because the characters are almost inevitably from somewhere else, usually a regular D&D setting, and Ravenloft rarely accounts for the experiences of such characters before they came into the demiplane. As someone pointed out the discovery that something dug itself out of a grave might freak out someone from Ravenloft in a domain where things are normally fairly quiet as the dark lord tends to be relatively laid back, it would also be disturbing to say a Call Of Cthulhu type adventurer, but to some dude who just walked out of Faerun that's nothing, especially if your dealing with characters high enough level where they only reason why they don't walk around with their own zombies and such is a matter of moral prerogative (ie good aligned characters do not generally practice necromancy, although some examples to the contrary exist via things like Jakandor and other rare civilizations where the relationship with the dead is viewed differently). I've felt that Ravenloft would likely work best with the assumption that all PCs are from the same domain or ones that tend to openly border on each other ("classically" the domain lords do not always seal their borders), and I would of course still consider even then what the environment the characters are from is like, the more actively malevolent a domain, the less freaky it's going to be to notice weird things.

Some systems like Palladium (PAlladium Fantasy, RIFTs, Etc...) have alternate systems that can be worth looking into. For example in RIFTS Horror Factor exists (even if people tend to forget about it). HF generally does not turn into "run away screaming like a little girl" rather than a momentary stun/hestitation which can be exploited if used correctly, and assuming the thing doing the scaring is smart enough to know it's scary. Palladium also published their Nightspawn/Nightbane setting where the PCs are oftentimes scarier (have higher horror factor) than the bad guys, it being a sort of dark super heroes game on a lot of levels, as a result scaring what should be scary monsters can become a valid strategy when opening a fight. I've literally seen encounters where the bad guys show up go "boogity boogity" get laughed at and then wind up themselves being scared/momentarily stunned when the PCs assume their morphus forms and get ready to rumble. That's a REALLY oddball game though.

Kami2awa
2016-10-03, 01:23 AM
I would recommend watching some horror films to see how they build up fear slowly over the course of the plot. Very few horror films show the monster from the start, and no horror I've ever seen has the characters know exactly what they are dealing with from the start.

Also, one route to avoiding this problem is that you don't use the rulebook terms for monsters. Don't say "6 zombies attack." say "Six ragged, hunched human figures lurch towards you. As they emerge from the darkness, you see their flesh is rotting away." There are enough humanoid undead in the game that they can't be certain exactly what they are fighting.

dps
2016-10-03, 02:07 AM
Then you need to throw the monster manuals away and make new creatures that the players CAN'T know anything about.

(That's what I do... For basically all of my campaign worlds. And Worse, I'm nasty enough to incorporate the myths and rumours about said monster, so if the PCs make knowledge checks (and don't get high enough), they may only learn what "they" and the "man in the pub" says...)

Real ignorance beats feigned ignorance every single time.

Early DnD sort of did just that--the players weren't supposed to read the monster manuals and know all about every monster.

Satinavian
2016-10-03, 03:09 AM
Early D&D did a lot of stupid stuff.


I am not a fan of "make new creatures the players can't know about". Because most of the time you want the players to know stuff about the setting for better roleplaying and more engagement. That is something you should not throw away to get some surprises.

Also, a new creature is not that interesting per se. Players not knowing the best way to deal with it will usually lead to PCs doing the standard way of using their best generic attacks and abilities which most of the time are reasonable effective. That doesn't result in more memorable fights.

Der_DWSage
2016-10-03, 03:11 AM
Hm. There's another thought that popped into my mind-once you've played D&D for a while, you come to a realization that 99% of the monsters you fight don't have any kind of lasting consequence once you're done-and as such, most of them are just XP pinatas.

Unless you're fighting something with Level or Stat drain, permanent penalties, (Such as via Bestow Curse) or does something that can't easily be undone, (Such as a Cockatrice turning someone to stone at early levels, or a Rust Monster eating your equipment) you just beat it up, take your HP damage/see a Cleric for the burning sensation, loot the corpse, and move on.

D&D is the wrong system to try and inject fear, is what I'm getting at. Maybe Torchbearer would be more what you're looking for.

NichG
2016-10-03, 04:06 AM
Early D&D did a lot of stupid stuff.


I am not a fan of "make new creatures the players can't know about". Because most of the time you want the players to know stuff about the setting for better roleplaying and more engagement. That is something you should not throw away to get some surprises.

Also, a new creature is not that interesting per se. Players not knowing the best way to deal with it will usually lead to PCs doing the standard way of using their best generic attacks and abilities which most of the time are reasonable effective. That doesn't result in more memorable fights.

This comes down to doing surprise right. Surprising someone is not adding a note to the margin that they can't know about, but which will never actually matter. Surprising someone is done by making it so that they have an expectation and then that expectation is violated in a way that matters to them.

'This thing you think is a kobold is actually a dlobok, and has +2 Cha compared to a normal kobold and is resistant to sonic!' isn't going to do anything. The Cha isn't going to matter 99% of the time, and the sonic only matters when the party asks it to.

'This thing you think is a kobold is actually a dlobok, a race created during a magical accident involving attempts to exploit Greater Consumptive Field to power a mythal, and each one you kill during an encounter transmits its strength to all its allies (stacking +2 to Str)' means that when the party encounters 50 of them and starts to pick them off one at a time, it should quickly become apparent that defaulting to standard operating procedure will result in a TPK. It's a surprise because what the players thought was a valid way to approach the situation turns out to have an unexpected and critically relevant consequence. Best practice for something like this would be to give the players chances to discover things like 'there's a lair, they're different than normal, there's a couple hundred of them in the lair, etc'. Then have them encounter, say, 5, so they can get the message that their a quadratic threat. Then you have the moment the players say 'well crap, if we have to brute force our way through a couple of hundred of these its going to be suicide, we have to do something else'.

Aotrs Commander
2016-10-10, 09:33 AM
I am not a fan of "make new creatures the players can't know about". Because most of the time you want the players to know stuff about the setting for better roleplaying and more engagement. That is something you should not throw away to get some surprises.

Also, a new creature is not that interesting per se. Players not knowing the best way to deal with it will usually lead to PCs doing the standard way of using their best generic attacks and abilities which most of the time are reasonable effective. That doesn't result in more memorable fights.

The fresh ignorance of the players (as not necessarily opposed to the characters) was merely a side-effect. To put it kinda bluntly... I don't like and have never like a lot of the MM monsters anyway; principally because, they never feel like the fit ecology of the world properly. (And world-building is just fun for its own sake.) So when I did Dreemaenhyll, one of the points was to re-envisiage the entire bestiary from scratch in a way that I wanted (and in ways that made more sense to me). D&D's monsters are - by and large - very D&D-flavoured and I play 3.x less for the the "flavour" of D&D as for the functional mechanical system. (There is no "Melf's" Acid Arrow in my games, only Acid Arrow, for example.)

For example, Dreemanhyll cockatrices are actually raptors that have a colouration that's a bit like (if you squinted) a cockrel and they mechanically different (as they go from mythological base - paralysing gaze, petrifying bite; that works, I note with some amusements, like the PF cockatrice does). Simurghs are pterosaurs etc etc.

(As a side-benefit of the ALSO tossing-out WBL and give everyone fixed bonuses instead to make a "it's you not your gear" system, applying the same to everything, not ust the PCs made animal encounters actually potentially dangerous again.)


And then my latest campaign world - barely in the start-up stages - I am going one step further and starting from complete scratch to have an entirely alien world; no humans, no nothing, that will be populated entirely by alien creatures (including the PCs). (This is probably - but not necessarily - going to be mostly Rolemaster, since aside from an initail introduction done in that system, the first major idea of a campaign is a neolithic tribe migrating and RM will handle the primitiveness better than D&D would.)



But what it does mean, is when the PCs first encounter something, it's never not going to be "it's just an [x]" it'll be the first time (usually) that both character AND player have encountered it; keeps things a little fresher, in my opinion; and immersed into MY world, not just D&D stock assets shuffled around a bit. (And, as we tend only to play stuff I write wholesale for day-games - just because of the time it takes me to write - it must also be noted that quite often, a monster encounter (as opposed to the frequent enemy humanoid encounters) is pretty unique, since I generally try to introduce something new each game.)



(And they get enough of the regular stuff when we play adventure paths on Golarion - though to be fair, a lot of that is re-envisioned and much better meshed with its world than the stock MM too.)

Segev
2016-10-10, 10:39 AM
Fresh ignorance of players can be effective. When I ran a game that I originally was going to use Illithids as a villain in, I changed my mind and made up a new monster (for reasons I won't go into here) that has SOME mechanical similarities. The PCs encountered them when facing a civil war between the dwarven ruling class and a rebellion. The rebels had brutally murdered one of the (reasonable-seeming) dwarven diplomats visiting their city, and the murderer not only didn't deny it, but was increasingly mad-seeming in his fanaticism to exterminate the dwarven leadership. The diplomat's head hadn't just been lopped off, but smashed with repeated blows from the flat of an axe until it was a pasty smear on the ground.

The party did pick up on the rebel almost seeming too good an argument for the established dwarven leaders' position, and when they confronted him about it and wouldn't let him worm around the explanations...he dissolved into a dark cloud with glowing golden eyes, and proceeded to use psychic powers against them. It turned out that the diplomat had had the monster living in his brain pan burst out, and that monster ate the rebel's brain and impersonated him.

The silhouettes are adult-stage intellect devourers, which steal the ability to look like those they've eaten the brains of. After a time inhabiting the host body, they can consume it entirely, and even reform it or others they've had. Then go and eat another brain for food and to add to their repertoire.

Even though they used the Mind Flayer's mind blast attack, and mechanically were mostly just mind flayers in whatever body they were pretending to be, the players were surprised and rather horrified by them. They weren't quite sure where the similarities to the known-to-the-players monsters ended.



That said, if you want to get a reaction of concern from the players, describe things in just enough detail. If they don't know what a monster is, don't tell them. If you want it to be horrifying, build up a sense of what's fearsome about it. That devil they've heard about in campfire stories? Have them hear campfire stories about it for a few sessions ahead of time. Build up its powers and its legend. These need not be entirely accurate. By the time they see it, they should recognize the "black devil of Thescria," and be thinking THAT more than "oh, it's a horned devil from the MM." Sure, they'll figure that out if they know their devils, OOC, but they'll be more inclined to react in character before they figure out that they really do know his full suite of powers.

For zombies, play up the suddenness of the realization. Have them be described as people, at first. And only when they lash out does the dim lighting reveal the rotting flesh.

For skeletons, play up the rattle of the bones and the other...uncomfortable...aspects. Have them rest in heaps and piles, and not every one need be a skeleton. Have them hear rattling...follow...them.


Basically, describe the situations in more visceral detail, and don't tell them what you don't want them to know. And...just accept it if they realize that you're describing a wyvern and that this doesn't frighten them. Go ahead and keep describing the scene in the mood and tone you want. If they're not buying in, that's fine. But the more you play it up, the more likely they are to buy into it.