D&D 5E (2024) Ravenloft: The Horrors Within preorder page lists the book's contents

tetrasodium said:

Death save

Click to expand...

Death by massive damage. Continue to attack downed characters. Disintegrate, stoned and other insta-kill spells. Stun.

tetrasodium said:

Healing word

Click to expand...

As above, plus control abilities. Try AoE stun. Blindness effects work too. Can’t cast healing word on something you can see. A simple fog cloud works to counter it.

tetrasodium said:

Death save

Click to expand...

You said that. It’s easily countered.

tetrasodium said:

Letstakeashortrest

Click to expand...

You can’t take a short rest in the middle of a fight.

5e’s issue isn’t that the characters are too powerful. I’ve played plenty of superhero RPGs without any issues challenging players. Its problem is its attrition-based encounter building guidelines are a nonsense. Always design significant encounters assuming the party is fully rested.

But that’s a general issue. Horror isn’t about combat*. The focus should be on the investigation, and that tests the players’ abilities, not their characters. The threats should largely focus on NPCs. Dracula was after Mina Harker, not Van Helsing. His job is to figure out what is going on and how to counter it.


*a lot of modern horror movies and games focus on running away and hiding, but that’s not a big feature of the classic literature that Ravenloft mostly draws on. Doesn’t work in D&D - do something else.

Do we know who the artist of the Tarokka deck is?

The teleserie "Games of Thrones" had lot a lot of deaths but only some scenes were pure terror, while "the Walking Dead" was more survival drama than true horror.

The character "Ghost Rider" by Marvel comics is very overpowered, despised his relative nerfing, but the last season was very grimm because it wasn't about killing the monster of the week but about the horrible facts happening before this was defeated.

The publisher can show a style or tone but you after spending your money to buy its product you have to be totally free to create your own story. If it is your own wish, then you should can enjoy the option of playing "trenchcoats and katanas" althought this wasn't the original intention by the authors/publishers

It may have interesting characters and stories but if the domains are relatively small then there isn't enough room for plots about conspirancies and confrotantions between secret factions. This point I miss about the "core region" of 2nd Ed where you could create stories about conflicts with neighbours.

Paul Farquhar said:

But that’s a general issue. Horror isn’t about combat*. The focus should be on the investigation, and that tests the players’ abilities, not their characters. The threats should largely focus on NPCs. Dracula was after Mina Harker, not Van Helsing. His job is to figure out what is going on and how to counter it.

Click to expand...

I think it's also important to mention that horror is never about the violence, but the threat of violence. To yourself. To others. To society. Dracula is clearly overpowering compared to Johnathan Harker, but the horror doesn't come from his (or his brides) attacks, but by the the threat of knowing he can be attacked whenever they want. Similarly, almost any one of the hunters are a match for Dracula, so he targets the "weakest" member (Mina) to keep them off balance. (His error was assuming Mina is the weakest due to her femininity, a mistake that is his undoing). Similarly, the Creature almost never challenges Victor Frankenstein directly, but takes out his vengeance on his family in a way to make Victor know who did it and that he's powerless to stop him.

In a non-horror genre, Superman is rarely physically challenged by his foes, but enemies like Luthor challenge what he loves (Lois, Metropolis, etc) and the question isn't if Superman can survive, but can he do what's needed in enough time. Likewise, Joker isn't a physical threat to Batman, but he challenges Batman's cunning, resolve and morality.

I think we get hung up on the idea that for a threat to mean something in D&D, it has to threaten the PC (and thus the player directly) rather than the world they live in. That may be true if the PC is an orphaned nihilist who only cares about his or her own life, but most players tend towards some type is heroism which let's DMs exploit a weakness. And horror in particular needs heroes that have that kind of weakness. Yeah, it's scary when the terrible monster can rip you limb from limb, but it's even scarier when they threaten to do that to someone you can't defend and can't defend themselves...

Paul Farquhar said:

Death by massive damage. Continue to attack downed characters. Disintegrate, stoned and other insta-kill spells. Stun.

As above, plus control abilities. Try AoE stun. Blindness effects work too. Can’t cast healing word on something you can see. A simple fog cloud works to counter it.

You said that. It’s easily countered.

You can’t take a short rest in the middle of a fight.

5e’s issue isn’t that the characters are too powerful. I’ve played plenty of superhero RPGs without any issues challenging players. Its problem is its attrition-based encounter building guidelines are a nonsense. Always design significant encounters assuming the party is fully rested.

But that’s a general issue. Horror isn’t about combat*. The focus should be on the investigation, and that tests the players’ abilities, not their characters. The threats should largely focus on NPCs. Dracula was after Mina Harker, not Van Helsing. His job is to figure out what is going on and how to counter it.


*a lot of modern horror movies and games focus on running away and hiding, but that’s not a big feature of the classic literature that Ravenloft mostly draws on. Doesn’t work in D&D - do something else.

Click to expand...

I thought it was obviously implied that was across multiple encounters by way of the fact that you can't take a rest during combat, the exact break between them is not important to the point. As to the rest of your post.. I'm sorry but I simply can not take you credible as long as you are trying to insist that the lethality dial is not set to a wildly different bitch on the dial for older editions and 5e.

@Mecheon your fisking could do to read more closely because you overlooked a couple critical points, your entire post is not even addressing what was described, I'll elaborate:

The first one is that not every GM runs the world as an amusement park where everything that exists within the world exists specifically in service of the PCs like a theme park attraction. That does NOT mean the alternative is the gm telling a story though, often it means that the gm is responsible for running as a living breathing thing thing. Believe world the PCs happen to exist in. The players in such a living breathing world are free to interact with that world and watch the ripples of consequence spread from their actions. Sometimes those actions are just because there is a quest from someone or something in the world because the party needs one. Other times those actions are deliberate choices the players made in service of a goal they created for themselves In such a game the story forms as a result of playing the game rather than as a result of someone deciding and telling that story with the game being secondary to story telling. that is a distinction made relevant because someone said the gm only needs to be a good story teller and doesn't need system tools supporting them in their GM toolbox


The second terrible misreading oversight was that I said eberron Ravenloft and darksun all "need" rules that differentiate them from forgot realms not that they "have" them. Those needed rules are things wotc should be responsible for providing making you correct in pointing out the result of the obvious fact that wotc has so far not bothered with supplying those needed rules revisions/additions that should aid in carrying the themes and tones of settings other than forgotten realms. Unfortunately they don't seem to be starting with their third 5e Ravenloft book making it an easy skip given current gas prices.

It's interesting that in Lovecraft's short story Dagon, the only threats to the narrator come from all too human German navy, and himself. The giant deep one he witnesses makes no threatening moves whatsoever.

tetrasodium said:

I thought it was obviously implied that was across multiple encounters by way of the fact that you can't take a rest during combat, the exact break between them is not important to the point. As to the rest of your post.. I'm sorry but I simply can not take you credible as long as you are trying to insist that the lethality dial is not set to a wildly different bitch on the dial for older editions and 5e.

Click to expand...

As with all editions of D&D, the lethality dial is set wherever the person designing the encounters chooses to set it.

"Balancing across multiple encounters" in 5e is just as ridiculous as the fear rules in 2e. And like them, good DMs throw them out the window.

But there shouldn't be "multiple encounters" in horror anyway. It's not a dungeon crawl. If the players are busy rolling dice then they are not being scared.

LuisCarlos17f said:

The teleserie "Games of Thrones" had lot a lot of deaths but only some scenes were pure terror, while "the Walking Dead" was more survival drama than true horror.

Click to expand...

I agree about it not being "horror", but it sells TWD short to just call it "drama". Not sure what the genre is specifically because it covers so much ground but I'm pretty sure that it would include the word "psychological" or "emotional", especially if you know the parts from the comics that didn't make it into the tv series. Everyone was slowly breaking down and developing various traumas to outright mental illnesses.

To frighten someone, you don't need to show violence, but rather cause surprise. For example,

- A girl returns from summer camp and waits for her parents at the station, but they are late. She picks some flowers to pin to her buttonhole and walks home, which isn't too far. She greets an acquaintance, but he completely ignores her. She enters her house with her key and notices some changes in the decor. Her parents aren't home. After waiting a while, the door finally opens, but it's not her parents; it's a couple of tenants who have been living there for two months. To prove she lives there, she looks in the closet and shows a photo of herself winning a championship. A newspaper also appears, reporting on a girl killed in an accident. Then the girl disappears, leaving only some flowers on the table.

- Helen, a new girl in town, explores the streets eager to make new friends. She comes across a girl trembling by the riverbank. This girl, named Carol, explains that she had dreamt she was drowning in the river. After comforting her, Helen walks her home. The next day, Helen goes to Carol's house to see her new friend and finds her mother there. The mother explains that her daughter is very upset because the previous year, her twin sister drowned in the river during her birthday celebration. Shortly afterward, the two friends meet again on the street and go to a party where they have a great time. Afterward, Helen remarks that it was like celebrating a birthday, not realizing she shouldn't have said it because Carol starts to cry. Carol leaves, saying she wants to be alone. The following day, Helen arrives with a gift to apologize to Carol, and is greeted by her mother. When her daughter appears coming down the stairs this doesn't recognize Helen and then this learns that the sister who drowned in the river was Carol.

-A story where a journalist investigates a supposed ghost in a large house. When she arrives, the caretaker answers the door; he has a sinister appearance, but nothing out of the ordinary. That night, a ghost does appear, but she confronts it and discovers it was just a homeless man who had infiltrated the house and was living there in hiding. When she returns to the newsroom and recounts her experience, the editor explains that he conducted a parallel investigation. The caretaker died years ago, murdered by a homeless man who had infiltrated the house.

Paul Farquhar said:

Its problem is its attrition-based encounter building guidelines are a nonsense.

Click to expand...

Not at all. They can be followed, and successfully. They can be happily enough undershot, and you would have to be a psychopath to overshoot them, but you cna build and run a dungeon to 5E assumptions.

In fact, doing so is a pretty good horror experienxe, or at least an action experience with vibes of anxiety if pulled off well (like, say, in Curse of Strahd).