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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 8215520" data-attributes="member: 6915329">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!"</blockquote>

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