How do you scare your players?

[Rechan]

neither will cause a Player to get that creepy feeling that something is standing behind them, raise the hairs on their neck, get the adrenaline flowing and their hearts pumping. That is the fear I am talking about and to date I've only seen one GM who actually pulled it off.

It's very hard to capture that. As I said before, do things that make little sense, but have an atmosphere to them.

For instance, a light in the distance that turns out as the characters approach. The wind weeping instead of howling when it blows. The distant cry of a baby where none should be. A room in some ruins/abandoned castle/whathaveyou that is pristine, normal, and with nothing wrong with it. The constant drip drip drip in an otherwise dry place, with no source. An object that continues to return to its place, no matter how many times it's removed. Objects that shouldn't be there (an animal's skeleton in a child's toy box). Anything that is deformed (a-symmetrical face, for instance).

The mere presence of statues, I've found, make people very, very wary, because they're expecting the statues to come after them.

The DMG has a suggestion similar to this. Everyone fights mummies, which have a strange, spicy smell to them. They smell that scent again, and gear up for a fight... only to find the embalming room where mummies are made, and there is no threat inside. Then later, outside the throne room, they smell the mummy smell wafting up under the door.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

If you've read/seen it would you care to share?

Hmmm... I had intended to write a review of it for my ENWorld blog anyway. I'll see what I can do.

 

[Adlon]

The original Ruins of Undermountain had some good tables for dungeon dressing...Ok, you ask, how is dressing a dungeon going instill fear in my group who is on an extended overland trek....

I remember, one particular olfactory dressing: the Smell of Freshly Baked Bread


Like, WHO in Undermountain is whipping up Croissants? Well, who in the middle of Eygypt is baking muffins? What else could POSSIBLY cause THAT smell....

All the dressings on those tables were cool for setting a tensive feel.....

Also, I use the voice inflection alot... I'll start out RP'ing an NPC, talk at a normal level voice.. then, at the right time, lower my voice and lean to the grp so they lean to me to hear me better, as if the NPC is being cautious, then BOOM ! The NPC bursts out a short phrase in a mountain-shaking fashion, and the players all recoil ..... funny stuff....

Another time, Undermountain again, I ran it mostly as canon back then... but, I had this NPC gnome, that was an ongoing tension builder for my group for a long time.

This gnome, would every once in awhile, just show up. He is dressed in pajamas, has a sleepy-cap, and a candle in a holder. He proceeds to appear from a doorway, always telling people to be quiet so he can get some sleep, and he'll accept no less, continues to walk through the room, through the other doorway, and is gone.

PC's going to look, get the the exited door, see no gnome.

That was IT, his total role in my game. He didn't answer questions, but he'd lecture them on the merits of being quiet.....

My group never could get this gnome....

 

[Rechan]

Ahha!

That's 8 pages worth of good stuff.

 

[Jack99]

I think you mean "Shilsen".

LOL yeah, Shilsen. Am a bit tired, me thinks...

 

[Delta]

Destroying Magic Items and Level Drain don't actually invoke fear in the Player (IMHO).

We'll have to disagree about that. Admittedly they have to see it coming in advance -- you seem to be more focused on the after-effects.

 

[weem]

I ran a campaign years ago for one player (my brother) who was playing a Mystic (oh yea, old school) that had a moment he always remembers as scary.

Basically, he had come across this cabin in the woods that had children playing outside. From the cabin came a very large women - she was about five and a half feet tall but I described her as weighing 'hundreds of pounds' - her name was "Darla" (don't ask me why). The woman and children were simply that, nothing unusual about the place. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but he somehow ended up on the second floor of the cabin snooping about later that night after she left when suddenly he heard a screaming... like, shake the forest loud and angry scream - when he looked out the window, he saw her "charging" (as fast as someone that big can charge) towards the cabin - behind her, the children followed, their eyes glowing red. She was screaming that she was going to kill him. So, this spooked him but he had no where to go but downstairs (or jump out the window) so he basically braced for her to come up the stairs and through a door he tried to block with furniture. I described to him how he heard the front door burst open, and the cabin shudder... the screams, growing louder as she charged to the stairs, and the the horrible slamming of each step as she made her way to his room. The, she burst through the door shattering it and the furniture blocking it - her eyes were now glowing red and she looked "crazed" but otherwise not unlike how he had seen her before. She basically launched into a bloody smash-ing brawl with him (remember he was a Mystic) which just about leveled the whole cabin, while fending off children who were trying to latch onto him and bit him.

Anyway, it was great fun and scared the crap out of him at the time.

With that said, here are the elements I think help make it scary...

1/ My brother was 13 years old at the time
2/ It was dark in the room
3/ He was alone (like mentioned above about smaller groups)
4/ The waiting for her... those moments of waiting where, without seeing her, he could "feel" (based on my descriptions) her coming for him
5/ The unknown... this was a large women... but something was driving her that was not natural.


This encounter went really well and was a lot of fun, but it was entirely unplanned. She was not a monster with a stat block. She was a women that I added some HP's to that could inflict great damage with her hands -- the biggest advantage she had was the description and warm up to the fight that I gave her.

With that said, I think making players wait for impending doom is fun, especially when they have no where to go. And if that seems to make them feel confident since they can wait and prepare, then throw in a new threat, at the last second from another angle - so in the case of my story above, it might have heightened the fear factor if I had children burst through the window behind him as she was storming up the stairs... he was on the second floor after all - how did they get up there so fast (he would have wondered).

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

If you've read/seen it would you care to share?

Well, here is my review. I hope you appreciate my efforts and give the review a good rating...

 

[Vocenoctum]

I just tell them we're playing a White Wolf game and the players all run in fear...

 

[Vocenoctum]

Back when I played in person, I tried some of the lighting tricks & such, but they never really worked for us. (Playing with flashlights or whatever)

We used to play outside on the porch at night, but our area was well lit. It was still nice atmosphere, but it wasn't specifically "horror". Our horror tended to be light stuff, rather than deep immersion, with a few spooky moments here or there. (I may have posted the ghost story to that other thread, can't recall.)

Taking away a players control of his character used to work okay, but after so many video games that just paralyze you for plot-exposition, nowadays it's not as cool.

Nowadays I play online, so atmosphere is hard to do. The individual players can be sitting in a well lit room, tv blaring and music in the background while people ask them questions. Hard to get a good atmosphere in such circumstances.

In my old CoC in SR3 game, I used sound files, but too many AOL exploits caused most players to shut them off after a while. It was still funny when a player fell from his chair at an unexpected "Roar" from Yig rising.