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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 8214633" data-attributes="member: 93670">Hopefully be turning to page xx-yy of vrg to ravenloft so both GM & players can make use of the rule or rules that they feel best supports the situation & need rather than the gm needing to say "I emailed everyone a word doc with some houserules a while back to cover this sort of thing" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Jump scares are cheap easy to overuse horror, use other means.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Turn a mirror onto the player or the PC itself.  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bDGH3dKo90" target="_blank">"You would make  a good dalek"</a> works because it does just that by showing the PC in that scene that he's so unhinged & deep into the abyss that he became the bigger monster.  You can do this most effectively by doing it subtly over time  till it goes from "guess I was a bit more agressive than I needed to be, but it works!"  & just ticking it up a notch every so often</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Imperil a plan. Take the famous "GAME OVER MAN GAME OVER", the trained space marine loses it right then & there because he's been holding it together the whole time & watched the solution to all of his problems crash down in flames mere feet away. The Dark Powers are great for this with a penchant for giving hope  & mabye even allowing that hope to come to fruition often enough to allow it to be snatched away when someone gets a little too full of themselves.  Look at TWD as another example & think back to how many times a zombie had the thing the PC equivalents needed (weapons, keys, maps, etc) when the stakes weren't very high only to fail them when the stakes were <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3L_gKGAtiI" target="_blank">critical</a>.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">That last example raises another option in making an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVPUpScXbcg" target="_blank">utterly overwhelming enemy</a> into a friend or forced patron of necessity as a consequence of success elsewhere. Alexandria was too successful & the Dark Powers stepped in.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KZtOmbFhg8" target="_blank">maim an npc</a> that destroys the PC & then <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa-84oFhLBg" target="_blank">draw out doing it again</a>.  Bonus points for added horror if you ca tie it to a previous choice.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Use Prophecy against the players.  This one is difficult without being vague  yet detailed enough while using a bit of quantum ogre in the mix because the players will try to stack things to avoid it ever triggering, but Glenn from twd is a perfect example of this as everyone who read the comic knew exactly how he dies & even with changes in the tv show that gave hope that it might be different it was still as utterly soul crushing to watch as it was to read when the same thing happened.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Play with a crisis of faith.  Ravenloft in the past supplied a wide variety of tools for playing with this</li> </ul>Switch it up & don't overload on  anything specific  It's perfectly fine for a session or even a large number of sessions to pass without anything horror/fear related happening .  Just let the drama build & keep putting sprinkles on it until the time comes to snatch that last cherry away with fire & flames.The tools were solid, but overuse  of a tool in horror robs it of value so the GM needs to know when to apply & ignore them.  Nearly any time someone wants to cast tensers disc it's no big deal... but  casting it to haul that white marble from the blessed spring before the children of the night making music in the surrounding forest close in on the city the party has been trying to build up is a different matter.Agreed.  Unfortunately 5e removes a lot of the toolbox for combat as war & includes mechanics to obliviate the risks it brings to the table.  Hopefully the rvenloft book will include some variants a gm can point to rather than having to homebrew them</blockquote>

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