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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrozenNorth" data-source="post: 9003013" data-attributes="member: 7020832">My experience with CoS is as a player, and I completely agree that it’s tough for both players and DMs.  As a horror setting, it often depends on players deliberately engaging with horror tropes (splitting the party, opening that cursed tome, meeting the villain for supper, taking the advice of the sketchy overly-helpful NPC) but as a game with set mechanics, it also depends on the players playing their characters as reasonably competent adventurers.As a player, it sucks if “playing the trope” kills or permanently impairs your character.  As a DM, it sucks if the players’ optimization and acting like reasonable rational people means they miss important information or drains the fear and terror from the setting.There are a couple of ways of dealing with this:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">better communication with the players: “Look, I promise as a DM if your character acts like a character in horror movie, I won’t use that as an excuse to kill your character or permanently impair them.  Your character can still die in other ways, including by biting off more than they can chew, but if you think that I’ve rendered your character unplayable because you were acting out horror tropes, tell me and we will work something out.”</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">minimizing the situations in which the characters have to act like horror characters to advance the story.  This is harder and takes more work.  When we ran through Death House, the DM didn’t give us a choice.  Going anywhere but the house caused the mist to give us levels of exhaustion.  It was railroady as hell, but that doesn’t mean it was bad. Other posters has pointed out the tool of putting innocents in danger and hoping the party attempts to rescue them.  There is also “offer the party something they really want but put it somewhere they don’t want to go”.</li> </ul>Overall, in our runthrough, we never had dinner with Strahd.  We missed a pretty key part of the story, but it made no sense in-story for the party, who was sheltering Ireena, to willingly enter the lair of her tormentor, and just assume he would freely let us go. What made sense as competent adventurers did not make sense as characters in a gothic horror story.</blockquote>

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