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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 2227626" data-attributes="member: 30001">It's hard to scare a player with just an assassination attempt because they're usually over so fast.  IME players tend to only be frightened by things by either good build-up, or the sudden appearance of something really horrible looking (ex. the Tarrasque).  An assassin usually doesn't fit either description (unless you hand the PCs his character sheet to take a look at before he attacks - "wow, this guy has a +20 BAB, now I'm scared").  What you're dealing with is a guy with a knife.  Maybe work on his appearance to suggest more power, and imply somehow (through knowledge checks?) that there are more such assassins where he came from. The other thing is that you usually want to make player choice the deciding factor.  IME players are scared when they're standing in front of a door and they have to decide if they're going to open it.  And the last door they opened had some horrible monster behind it. But again, the situation doesn't really support this because the players are just standing around being ambushed.  They don't really have a chance to stew in anxiety about their decisions. It's harsh - but if you raise the challenge level of your campaign, sooner or later someone will die - and you may want to consider doing this.  I've found that a player death* IMC raises the nervousness factor considerably for the next 50 game sessions (PC death, somewhat less <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ).  The problem is that if the players see their deaths as inevitable, rather than be scared they'll just be frustrated.  If they got killed for just standing somewhere, they'll probably be frustrated.  (* I mistyped this - I mean PC death.  Hopefully no players will be harmed in the playing of your game.)</blockquote>

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