That's been my understanding of Ravenloft since it first impinged on my awareness in the early nineties, and that's why I've never been interested in anything set there.
Realistic Consequences vs Gameplay
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That's been my understanding of Ravenloft since it first impinged on my awareness in the early nineties, and that's why I've never been interested in anything set there.
MGibster
Legend
Cambell said:
To make things a little more interesting than a frontal assault to batter down the front gate? Or perhaps to offer other PCs the opportunity to use their skills and abilities to get into the city. The Odyssey doesn't begin with the Greeks kicking down the gates of Ilium and storming the city. Instead Odysseus hatches a clever plan that appeals to the vanity of the Trojan's to get into the city.
Maybe it's the kind of fiction the people at that table prefer. Maybe there has been a cluster of very similar scenarios, and this is Something Different. Maybe it's just what the GM believes makes sense. Any of those works as a reason at the level you're asking about, I think.
Well, I'd say yes and no to this. If you have a table where the goal is to play heroes, there will always be some tension between expediency and heroism and that's a pretty strong tool to define that heroism. The hero lets the bad guy get away in order to save the innocent, or finds ways not to kill the guardsmen who are just doing their jobs, or sacrifices riches in order to do what is right. Obviously you also need to reward the players for their heroic choices, but having to pick between the easy choice and the right choice is a fine tool for that kind of game. Without it the players don't actually get to choose to be heroes and aren't as well defined by their actions. If being a hero were easy more people would do it.
Ravenloft is a great example of this actually. The forces of evil in Ravenloft are, generally, actively trying to corrupt the heroes and work against them. The background is super dark, and both evil and not-my-problem-ism are rampant. This allows the players to shine all the more brightly, or be eaten by the dark. I think you might enjoy it more than you think. Most of my games have at least a tinge of horror around the edges for this very reason.
Well, I'd say yes and no to this. If you have a table where the goal is to play heroes, there will always be some tension between expediency and heroism and that's a pretty strong tool to define that heroism. The hero lets the bad guy get away in order to save the innocent, or finds ways not to kill the guardsmen who are just doing their jobs, or sacrifices riches in order to do what is right. Obviously you also need to reward the players for their heroic choices, but having to pick between the easy choice and the right choice is a fine tool for that kind of game. Without it the players don't actually get to choose to be heroes and aren't as well defined by their actions. If being a hero were easy more people would do it.
Ravenloft is a great example of this actually. The forces of evil in Ravenloft are, generally, actively trying to corrupt the heroes and work against them. The background is super dark, and both evil and not-my-problem-ism are rampant. This allows the players to shine all the more brightly, or be eaten by the dark. I think you might enjoy it more than you think. Most of my games have at least a tinge of horror around the edges for this very reason.
If the party always has to choose between, say, innocents dying and the badguy getting away, that eventually gets tiresome, though; more quickly for some people than others. It can feel like choosing how to lose, especially if there's a punishment for the character waiting no matter the choice.
My understanding of Ravenloft (going way back) from people who adored the setting, is that no on shines in Ravenloft and all choices are punished hard until the characters break. Hard pass.
I like horror, a lot, but I find all the horror archetypes boring when used explicitly. The horror that shows up in my worlds is ... weirder than that. Gnomes who turned themselves into magical cyborgs that speak backward then forward and want nothing more than to convert all gnomes to be like them; contagious madness that turns all languages into something that gets referred to as "polyglot gibberish, and spreads to other non-language-using species, which the party found out about when a starved-lookng wolf mewed at them--and then made a noise like a kookaburra.
Goodnes no, that can't be the choice all the time. Any buffet gets stale when there's only one item on it. As for Ravenloft, I've played it without breaking characters. That doesn't have to be the default state of play at all. I'd also probably suggest that either we're talking about 'horror' in different ways or we have very different definitions of what 'boring' means.
hawkeyefan
Legend
No, as Campbell has pointed out....I'm not asking for the fictional justification of having the knight there. I am asking why the DM has decided to place that NPC in that location. This is something the DM has chosen to do, and he should be aware of what that choice means.
Is it to discourage the front gate as being a viable option? If so, then we're touching on what I'm talking about. If this is done as a challenge to the PCs, to make them think of another route into the castle, that's not a problem. If this is to act as a block, and then one by one the PCs find blocks for every other route they try until lo and behold they have to enter the sewers as their only option.....then it's a problem.
If you say so. Personally, I'd probably help them winnow that list down from 10 a bit by sharing what their characters would be reasonably able to learn or intuit about the situations.
I'm not interested in watching the players chase a bunch of false leads when we play. I'd prefer to get to the good stuff.
Sorry. I've put some time into studying Horror, the genre. The archetypes of Horror: Ghost (lingering evil), Werewolf (internal evil), Vampire (external evil), Thing (created evil). Three of those have archetypal novels: Dracula, Frankenstein, and Jeckyll and Hyde; the Ghost is harder to pin down a single archetypal novel. (Hill House is kinda recent to be the archetypal novel, but it's close). "Boring" is probably too strong, but my reaction to most horror elements is a chuckle of recognition, which is ... not what someone putting horror elements in a story or TRPG is going for. "Uninteresting" is probably closer to the mark.
hawkeyefan
Legend
There's also a difference between Ravenoft the setting, and Curse of Strahd, the adventure that features Castle Ravenloft. While there are elements of the old setting in the new adventure, they are by no means required. The adventure certainly leans into horror, but it is by no means some kind of cosmic horror where the heroes are doomed no matter what they do.
Yeah, I wasn't really talking about the archetypes of horror. Those already inform a lot of the Monster Manual anyway, but I'd agree that taking one of those and trying to make it a centerpiece isn't that interesting. I was talking abut the common elements of horror fiction - (paraphrasing the interwebs here) it explores 'malevolent' or 'wicked' characters, deeds or phenomena. It arouses feelings of fear, shock or disgust as well as the sense of the uncanny – things are not what they seem. There is a heightened sense of the unknown and/or mysterious. These elements are present in a lot of games, I just lean into them a little harder than some people. I also tend to include some elements of body horror - gross parasites, strange conditions, pernicious poisons. Those, used somewhat sparingly and often in conjunction with expanded exhaustion rules, tend to puncture some PCs sense of invulnerability without killing them.
