D&D 5E For Players: What makes an encounter "scary"?

[Oofta]

That was very nasty of you, my good sir !

Well, I did warn you.

 

[Oofta]

I agree that oftentimes the player's imaginations can be more terrifying than anything I could ever come up with. Sometimes the best monster is one they don't clearly see or truly understand. Add in some flourish and descriptive narration.

I also think that for many people having their PC die isn't particularly scary. It may be disappointing to have a story end, but there are always more PCs. Coming close to dying can often be worse than death itself. Being debilitated or controlled, having some dark secret or lingering threat. Knowing that you have a curse or infection that can't be easily fixed and wondering what the outcome is going to be. Those can be more frightening than death.

Of course there's also players that no matter what happen are just never going to be scared. It's just a game and it can only have so much impact.

 

[J-H]

The two I've seen be the most scary based on player reactions were:
1) The Avatar of Death in Castle Dracula. "How many HP do you have?" "Ok, you're dead." Power Word Kill gets people's attention, especially when it's the main tank/damage-dealer going down on like round 1 of combat, especially since they had two fights before this and no chance to rest because a horde of skeletons was chasing them. Many memes appeared in Discord that evening.

2) Running the Tomb of the Serpent Kings for a 2nd level party... it's an adapted OSR module, so it doesn't follow all 5e rules. There's an enemy that does nearly no damage and is slow, but is immune to hit point damage. I heard someone's voice break and the sound of worry with "We can't damage it, I don't know what to do about it!"
I don't think it even did more than 4 points of damage the whole encounter, but because it required a different solution type, the party fighter was a bit panicked.
(they pushed it into a pit trap and left it there)

 

[overgeeked]

So having talked a lot recently about the "difficulty" of encounters, you could argue the "feel" of those encounters is actually more important to the game experience. I've also found DMs underestimate the impact of encounter threat on their players because they are dealing with more perfect information. A DM might go "man this encounter is boring no one is being threatened" while the players think "holy crap I might die!".

So for players, generally what about a 5e encounter makes it scary to you....even if once all said and done the party handles it "easily".

If you mean scary as in worried...as a player, I'm literally never worried about an encounter. It's a game. Worst case scenario I can make a new character. Shrug. I tend to have at least a six pack of finished, level-appropriate characters waiting and ready to go. It'll take the DM longer to work my new character into the story than it will for me to pull up my next character.

If you mean scary as in horror, I'd point to the advice in Van Richten's for that. Some of it is good. But I'd also point to the latest edition of Call of Cthulhu for better advice on running scary encounters.

 

[Krachek]

As a player nothing! Sorry, I have faith in balanced encounters, or otherwise in the great wheel of new character creation.
But I play lately characters with phobia or superstition. That was great.

 

[Shiroiken]

Scary is very relative. Death is scary at lower levels, while only annoying at higher level. In our last session, my character was killed by my nemesis, who took the actions to attack me while dying in order to kill me. It was annoying because I was out of the combat. Afterwards I was brought back to life, so I wasn't "scared." I was more concerned by the fact that my head was cut off, leaving a nasty scar, and that my left eye is gone. These types of consequences are scary, including mission failure (hostage killed, ritual completed, etc).

Generally combat is scarier when something is unexpected, or when facing the complete known/unknown. Going into a fight assuming 2-3 opponents, only to have reinforcements arrive, makes me consider that we've gotten in over our head, and should regroup. Fighting a creature we know nothing about (because it's new or a reskin of a different monster) is scary, because we don't know what we're dealing with. Sometimes knowing what we're dealing with is even scarier though!

 

[iserith]

I think for me it's probably when the encounter escalates when we're already not doing so great like when another wave of enemies turns up or the villain hits some kind of milestone and becomes stronger or the environment suddenly turns hazardous like a collapsing ceiling.

 

[jayoungr]

Over the weekend, I ran an encounter with a tentacle-y sea creature for a level 6 party. This creature has multiple attacks and has the option of either dealing damage or grappling/swallowing a target. The players were seriously freaked out when it climbed over the edge of their ship, grabbed the halfling rogue, and immediately swallowed her in the same round--even though the rogue took no damage in the process.

Had I chosen to make those attacks deal damage, the rogue would probably have lost about a third of her hitpoints, but I don't think it would have had such an effect on the players.

 

[Tazawa]

From yesterday.

Meloon Wardragon comes looking for his axe. Everybody immediately ran away.

 

[overgeeked]

Here's an example.

Four person 1st-level party. As the DM, I put them up against a CR2 creature. I doubled its hit points and its attacks. The party killed it after three and a half rounds. One character dropped twice and got to two failed death saves both times. That was basically it. The group won, spent their daily resources, and were purely gung-ho and charge the entire time. Not a glimmer of fear or even hesitation. To get to the point where players are "afraid" you have to start dropping characters. Like dead. Otherwise they superhero regenerate after an 8 hour rest. It's hard to make someone afraid of anything if they can basically survive everything.