D&D 5E Everything We Know About The Ravenloft Book

LuisCarlos17f said:

Terror doesn't mean repulsion caused by extreme violence. Terror is when you feel "this can't be right, it's impure or antinatural". If you only throw hordes of undeads against the players then it is not Ravenloft neither a terror game ever.

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Terror just means extreme fear. If I'm on a hike and look down the trail to see a 600 pound grizzly bear barreling towards me at 30 miles per hour I will most likely be in a state of abject terror. Horror is the feeling you have after seeing something frightening or repulsive. If I'm on a hike and I come across the remains of another hiker who has been partially eaten by a grizzly bear I will most likely be horrified by the scene. (And more than a little scared the bear is nearby.)

MGibster said:

Trying to scare your players is a fool's errand. Your players are sitting at a comfortable table amongst friends, and if stereotypes are to be believed, filling up on Cheetos and Mountain Dew which is not fertile ground for fear. Unless you're one of those gamers in their 40s who has to worry about their waistline and cholesterol.

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You can scare players. It takes some work and some investment on the player end, but you can do it. It has happened.

But it requires dread, not jump scares.

MGibster said:

Ditto. It gets old and repetitive as well. I much prefer it when the PCs are competent and the situation is still dire.

How do you model that in D&D 5th edition? The rules as written don't really take into account the debilitating nature of taking a mace right to the knee or getting speared in the gut. And if it did, healing magic makes such injuries trivial.

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You use the lingering injuries optional rule. Healing magic is not ubiquitous. My current party doesn’t have divine spells or a bard.

Chaosmancer said:

You can scare players. It takes some work and some investment on the player end, but you can do it. It has happened.

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Sure, it's not impossible. I might also get a player to fall in love with me because they confuse my excellent role playing of an NPC with my own personality but what are the odds of that happening again? The best most of us can hope for is to have a situation where the player feels as though their character is scared.

TheSword said:

You use the lingering injuries optional rule. Healing magic is not ubiquitous. My current party doesn’t have divine spells or a bard.

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There aren't any rules for broken limbs there just lost ones. Which is kind of weird because you'd think broken would be an option. And I would argue that healing magic is ubiquitous with your current party being an oddity.

MGibster said:

Sure, it's not impossible. I might also get a player to fall in love with me because they confuse my excellent role playing of an NPC with my own personality but what are the odds of that happening again? The best most of us can hope for is to have a situation where the player feels as though their character is scared.

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I mean, sure, the player themselves likely isn't scared for their life, but that doesn't mean I haven't been able to unsettle and worry them, that I haven't been able to make them feel desperate and... scared.

I can definitely see this being a style thing, but I'm just saying it happens.

MGibster said:

Terror just means extreme fear. If I'm on a hike and look down the trail to see a 600 pound grizzly bear barreling towards me at 30 miles per hour I will most likely be in a state of abject terror. Horror is the feeling you have after seeing something frightening or repulsive. If I'm on a hike and I come across the remains of another hiker who has been partially eaten by a grizzly bear I will most likely be horrified by the scene. (And more than a little scared the bear is nearby.)

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This only works because you know you are no match for a grizzly bear, and you don't see dead bodies very often.

Player Characters are more than a match for a bear, and even if they aren't a match for the monster charging towards them will probably assume that they are and charge back.

And they see dismembered corpses every day - usually because they make them.

Once I managed to pull this off in D&D, when I, with no hints or warnings, threw a full sized dragon at their low-mid level party (that's actually what's going in in my profile picture). But I'm pretty sure it won't work ever again on the same group of players. It also helped that it wasn't Ravenloft, and therefore they weren't on their guard.

A horror game means characters feeling "bad vibes", it is not despair neither repugnance by the gore. Wraith the Oblivion or Werewolf: the Apocalypse were grimmdark (urban) fantasy, but not true gothic horror. Zombieland is a mixture of action comedy and horror. Walking Dead is drama + horror. Mortal Kombat or Eternal Doom are grimmdark action but not horror. Bleach (manga anime) and Supernatural are supernatural action, Ghost Whisperer is supernatural drama, and with some little pieces of horror. True Blood is supernatural drama. Horror is when the reader worries because he wants the characters could survive. If you are used to think only the final girl is going to survive then it is not right horror fiction.

Ravenloft has not been designed to be mature horror, but with different tones, even space for kid-friendly horror stories. It is gothic fantasy with misteries, supernatural dramas and higher or lesser pieces of terror.




* Don't you miss dragonborn subraces based in the interfan planar dragons? What about the abysall paragenasies?

* My plan is to add the cult of the elemental eye summoning dread elementals(grave, mist, pyre and blood) against the undead army of the necromancers. The dark powers send heroes who try escape the demiplane to combat against secret temples in the material plane as a "poisonous gift". Later those heroes are abducted to fight against unwellcomed cults in the own demiplane.

* I say it again: I would rather a madness system as the one for Unknown Armies. I can't believe my PC losing sanity points because she has seen a sea pokemon.

MGibster said:

How do you model that in D&D 5th edition? The rules as written don't really take into account the debilitating nature of taking a mace right to the knee or getting speared in the gut. And if it did, healing magic makes such injuries trivial.

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There's a lingering injury table in the DMG. It suggests (I'm too lazy to look it up atm) that if a PC suffers a really severe wound--like over half their total hp in one blow--or is brought to 0 hp and then revived, then they could get a lingering injury. Broken limb is one of the effects, as is internal organ injury. I think most people assume that merely restoring hp isn't enough to heal a broken leg (I know that I think so). You'd need a lesser restoration (for a nice DM) or regeneration (for an evil one).

Edit: It's been pointed out that the Lingering Injury table doesn't have an entry for broken limbs. Still, it wouldn't be so hard to model it after a missing body part, but let it heal naturally over time or with a lesser restoration.

Paul Farquhar said:

This only works because you know you are no match for a grizzly bear, and you don't see dead bodies very often.

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Well, first, you don't tell your PCs what they're fighting. And change up the monsters, even if only by their appearance. And if they figure out what the monster is, make it seem more like it is. Yeah, it's a grizzly bear. But it also seems to be far too intelligent for a mere animal, and are its eyes glowing? Secondly, the setup to the combat is actually the most important part. Make the setup as weird and creepy as possible. And if the PCs manage to take down the foe quickly, you can play up the idea that it was too easy--that there must be something else in play.

OK, my favorite example, one my players talked about for literally years after. I will be honest and say I was running this Ravenloft game in GURPS 4e, not D&D3e at the time, and my players are very good at allowing themselves to being scared. But:

In case you don't remember (and for those people who haven't played older editions of RL much), there is a monster called the carrion stalker. It looks like a cross between a horseshoe crab and a human ribcage filled with entrails, and it acts like a face hugger. It's sole purpose is to leap out at you, inject its eggs into you, then die. In 3x, it's CR 2; it'd probably be a lot lower in 5e, since it literally gets only one attack that does a very measly 1d2 of damage plus damage from the larvae. The players were the equivalent of 6th or 7th level at the time, and I think when I converted the carrion stalker to GURPS it was worth negative a ton of points and maybe had 2 hp.

The setup of the encounter was: there was a corpse in the middle of a field. It had a carrion stalker around it. Around the corpse was a tremendous flock of ravens. Zillions of them, everywhere, surrounding the corpse (that was hidden by tall grass) and staring at it. The ravens wanted to eat the corpse (ravens in this setting may be pretty smart and normally be Good-aligned, but they're still carrion birds) but didn't want to get too close to the stalker.

Along come the PCs. The ravens are thinking, "Hey, here are humans! They have sharp things and opposable thumbs! They can kill the creepy bug monster and let us eat the yummy yummy dead thing in peace!"

What they did, because ravens can talk (but not all that well, and at the time I assumed they sounded a bit like parrots), is, as a group, look at the PCs and say, "Humans! Humans, food? Humans, food, humans!"

And the PCs, who were powerful enough to have killed everything there without breaking a sweat, said "Run!"

Paul Farquhar said:

This only works because you know you are no match for a grizzly bear, and you don't see dead bodies very often.

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Honestly, anything that weighs 600 pounds and is charging me at 30 miles per hour is going to inspire terror in my heart.

Paul Farquhar said:

Player Characters are more than a match for a bear, and even if they aren't a match for the monster charging towards them will probably assume that they are and charge back.

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And this is one of the reasons why D&D has an uphill battle when it comes to horror scenarios. The D&D mindset is that the PCs can overcome the threat. And that's a great mindset for heroic fantasy adventure. Not so great for a horror game.