D&D General Gore in D&D

[Son of the Serpent]

Interesting, why is it that you use gore in this way? Is it fun for your group or for you? Does it enhance realism or the horror in the campaign?

Medically-precise, you say?

It's interesting to see one poster who seems to exult in the gore.

Because realistically things are sometimes gory. And it keeps tension high in some cases used properly. Which is something you want to generate if your pcs are currently in a ver hostile environment like the abyss. Or a suddenly hostile environment. Such as when everything seems normal but then u find the discarded partially assimilated victim of a "thing" (ala john carpenter) in a normal seeming sleepy mountain village.

Fun for both.

It enhances the realism and the horror. The trick is not to use too much too often and to make it USUALLY make sense either immediately or later (although something never quite getting explained once or thrice in a long campaign is acceptable if the campaign is very mysterious). The stab of fear is only able to he generated if you ration these things or tie them dorectly to how deep of a pool of naughty word the pcs have yet to realize they just waded into. All is not well in essex county.

Also yes. Medically precise. Some forms of torture are highly enough advanced that when performed by a professional (even ancient ones) they entailed a fair bit of medical understanding for fine tuning and getting the job done properly.

 

[BookBarbarian]

My current DM asks "How do you want to do this?" and each player gets to decide their own level of gore.

Most of us describe how we cut, stab, or burn a foe to death, but I don't think anyone has gone into the details of the gore.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

My current DM asks "How do you want to do this?" and each player gets to decide their own level of gore.

Most of us describe how we cut, stab, or burn a foe to death, but I don't think anyone has gone into the details of the gore.

I also agree with this. A pc's actions are 99% of the time exactly what the player envisions. Shouldnt be any other way because the player knows what the pc is intending to do. If the pc is the prime actor then the player decides what happened.

Anything contradicting what the player intended is weird.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't get too gory most of the time; not because it bothers me but because when I played under a DM who did revel in decsribing the gore I found it got old really fast. When everything is gory, nothing is.

But on some spectacular critical or whatever, be it against a PC or an opponent, I'll pull out the gory vocabulary and give it a spin.

(after a party member once got absolutely crushed (to -57 h.p.) by a massive crit from a Giant, my after-combat description went something like: "You eventually find what's left of Sharana. Her head's in her boot, and there's nothing left of what was between except red mush.")

 

[generic]

I don't get too gory most of the time; not because it bothers me but because when I played under a DM who did revel in decsribing the gore I found it got old really fast. When everything is gory, nothing is.

But on some spectacular critical or whatever, be it against a PC or an opponent, I'll pull out the gory vocabulary and give it a spin.

(after a party member once got absolutely crushed (to -57 h.p.) by a massive crit from a Giant, my after-combat description went something like: "You eventually find what's left of Sharana. Her head's in her boot, and there's nothing left between except red mush.")

I agree that describing everything in gory ways makes gore lose its effect.

For example, I describe the average mook being dispatched very simply, and with basic, mechanical terms.

However, when a character is killed, or when a major enemy is slain, the gore is more intense under my style of DMing.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I don't get too gory most of the time; not because it bothers me but because when I played under a DM who did revel in decsribing the gore I found it got old really fast. When everything is gory, nothing is.

But on some spectacular critical or whatever, be it against a PC or an opponent, I'll pull out the gory vocabulary and give it a spin.

(after a party member once got absolutely crushed (to -57 h.p.) by a massive crit from a Giant, my after-combat description went something like: "You eventually find what's left of Sharana. Her head's in her boot, and there's nothing left between except red mush.")

There is a correct and an incorrect way to revel. Revel every day like sanguine wants you to and youll just be hungover every day until you eventually get korsikov's. I do revel. But i revel sparingly. Sounds like that dm was a goreholic. It does get old when an addiction controls your life.

I agree that it gets old. Thats why its mostly a garnish. Not the bread and butter.

 

[generic]

There is a correct and an incorrect way to revel. Revel every day like sanguine wants you to and youll just be hungover every day until you eventually get korsikov's. I do revel. But i revel sparingly. Sounds like that dm was a goreholic. It does get old when an addiction controls your life.

I agree that it gets old. Thats why its mostly a garnish. Not the bread and butter.

When gore is the bread and butter, combat takes too long.

Sure, it may sound plebeian to say, but I don't have an infinite amount of gaming time.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

When gore is the bread and butter, combat takes too long.

Sure, it may sound plebeian to say, but I don't have an infinite amount of gaming time.

Couldnt agree more

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I sometimes feel like I use decapitation too much. My descriptions if it aren't really gory. "The sword takes off his head and his body collapses," is the sort of thing we're generally talking about. I have a player (who is actually the DM most likely to run horror campaigns in our group) who has an aversion to dismemberment, so every now and then I try to remember that.

But there is just a sense of finality and emphasis in a decapitation that makes me want to describe things that way without even thinking about it.

 

[Bohandas]

Comparing the two is like comparing hard scifi like gattica, the martian, 2001, arrival, etc to soft scifi like star trek:ToS or buck rogers.. All of them are science fiction just like both of the others are "horror"... but they are wildly different genres

2001 isn;t hard sci-fi, it's a parade of magic space aliens, killer rogue AI, and magic space alien AI