D&D General Horror is hard

[bsss]

But to bring this back to the OP - descriptive horror has little to do with the game being played. I use descriptive horror now and then, I just think it's most effective in small dollops so it stands out.

Oh yeah, for sure. Exactly that, actually, my thoughts are just a continuation of my argument that nothing about D&D excludes something as broad as horror, because horror is more than overcoming challenges and surviving combat. How and when you dial it in is up to the table, but a lot of horror topics slot in fine, after you address the real, but also not that system-y, difficulties in the OP.

 

[AlViking]

Oh yeah, for sure. Exactly that, actually, my thoughts are just a continuation of my argument that nothing about D&D excludes something as broad as horror, because horror is more than overcoming challenges and surviving combat. How and when you dial it in is up to the table, but a lot of horror topics slot in fine, after you address the real, but also not that system-y, difficulties in the OP.

I think some people have a very narrow definition of horror and others have a much broader view. I accept that I can rarely if ever truly frighten my players, or at least not all of them. I can occasionally make some go "Eww!!!" or give them a bit of a chill. But I can't do jump scares, a continuing feeling of dread just becomes background noise after a while, even threat of imminent death or the PC being nerfed is met with a shrug eventually.

Unless you are playing a very short term campaign I think the best you can do is Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural horror. Since I enjoyed both of those series and they had a mix of action, comedy and horror, I don't think that's a bad thing.

 

[bsss]

Unless you are playing a very short term campaign I think the best you can do is Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural horror. Since I enjoyed both of those series and they had a mix of action, comedy and horror, I don't think that's a bad thing.

Yeah, I do think it's an extra level of difficulty to keep your foot on the horror-gas for an extended campaign in D&D, but I believe a big part of that is when horror is kind of an add-on to D&D, often the goal is: play D&D with horror stuff sometimes, but above all, play a D&D-style fantasy game, and I think most groups approach it that way. That of which is totally fine, of course. Fatigue and/or OP's "too much of a good thing" can cause problems if the horror part is a secondary goal rather than the primary. Even if someone and some groups could play The Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep for months/years, that doesn't mean they would or should do D&D horror that long.

 

[tetrasodium]

Yeah.

I go back to my experience with the original Ravenloft - Stradh, with a touch that will drain two levels, in a castle built/modified specifically to allow him to gaseous form all over the place? That was freakin' scary, and sure as heck changed our behavior at the table. Not that changing our behavior helped - he almost TPKed us and the only thing that saved us was a poorly-worded wish...

Mind you, I tend to avoid such mechanics like the plague these days, mostly because, as I saw back in that game, If I don't fudge they can end a campaign in its tracks. But I cannot deny their effectiveness in scaring me into behavior change at the table.

I think that a lot of people also ignore forget or are unaware of just how commonly seeded magic items were in the days of expected magic item churn and pc death/possible gear destruction simply under the assumption that the PCs wouldn't find most of it but would probably find some and some of what they did find would be useful to someone at the table.

Some of the old reprint modules updated in typ with more magic items in single dungeons than entire HC adventures make for a good example of that.

I've tried using such mechanics these days and have run into more than one player who simply chooses to ignore them by deciding not to mark them on their sheet or that the gm telling them otherwise was wrong then simply resetting it during the first rest & I mentioned it earlier in the thread. Before anyone accuses me of anything from that statement I'm including players who simply refuse to track their HP and sit there complaining that I skipped their turn after public ally catching+calling them out on it with the actual value other than answer me like "full" that even other players voice being obviously wrong in that statement.


Castle Ravenloft itself shouldn't be undersold on the huge amounts of effort Hickman and them put into it kicking off the Hickman revolution and Hickman manifesto with pharaoh (?).that got a huge amount of interest and tsr hired him on to bring the special sauce over to d&d giving him a second chance after months/years(?) of time learning how pharaoh could have been better along with system level changes to carry the setting/,time better. Hickman's work is obviously not the standard that the average gm should be expected to carry for the system just to avoid system level support like every prior edition included with castle strahd

 

[tetrasodium]

And you think any change in player behaviour means with 100% certainty means those players are scared?

The question strikes me as the sort of thing I've seen in players who lacks the experience playing those old editions for fun and interacting with those who did the same rather than an exclusive diet of 5e player that would never consider gming. Why do you act as if I was never one of those players and that I have never spoken to players who voiced the same kinds of "That was freakin' scary" comments as 234 up there?

You seem to assume that as a DM I want to enforce the kind of changes in player behavior that you want. I

I'm not playing at your table and would probably never even encounter a scenario where I might even be in a place where it's up for consideration, why would I care what you as a gm want to do just because I can speak of tools that as a gm and player can speak about gm tools that I miss?

Also "enforce"? Id use a term like "inspire" because those monsters inspired in me over the very real risk they posed for my characters over the years. What's with the endless yellow journalism style framing? I talk about the importance of plausible risk/consequence and you tell me that I just want to kill PCs. I talk about various monsters were scary on a mechanical level and you tell me that Im trying to "enforce" player behavior.

 

[Sorinth]

@tetrasodium
My very first post on this subject which you responded to was

While it's obviously very subjective, many people didn't feel scared by stuff like negative levels or destroying items, they simply felt frustrated when they encountered those monsters. That's a very different thing.

A couple posts back I said this

If you find losing your weapons/armour scary that's fine for you, and I've never said that it CAN'T be scary, all I said was that many people encountering those situations didn't feel scared, they felt annoyed/frustrated. And when talking about a Horror game, if the mechanics lead to annoyance/frustration then that tends to break the kind of immersion that is critical to most Horror games.

So please stop lying/insinuating the nonsense you're accusing me of in this post.

The question strikes me as the sort of thing I've seen in players who lacks the experience playing those old editions for fun and interacting with those who did the same rather than an exclusive diet of 5e player that would never consider gming. Why do you act as if I was never one of those players and that I have never spoken to players who voiced the same kinds of "That was freakin' scary" comments as 234 up there?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Why do you act as if I was never one of those players

Why do you act as if you were the only person to ever play 1st edition? I think you will find a large proportion of people on this forum have been playing at least as long as you, and had a very different experience.

Reason your players were scared back then? You were kids.

 

[tetrasodium]

Why do you act as if you were the only person to ever play 1st edition? I think you will find a large proportion of people on this forum have been playing at least as long as you, and had a very different experience.

Reason your players were scared back then? You were kids.

You are the one who keeps trying to tack back to 1e. I keep talking about things that were still present in 2e & 3.x. at one point I even had to point out to you that a 2e reference I made wrt the silver/+2 on a ghoul that you brought up was still an accurate in 2e even if it could also be true even further back.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You are the one who keeps trying to tack back to 1e. I keep talking about things that were still present in 2e & 3.x. at one point I even had to point out to you that a 2e reference I made wrt the silver/+2 on a ghoul that you brought up was still an accurate in 2e even if it could also be true even further back.

You keep going on about how the game was oh so much harder and more dangerous, yet you never played a version that was actually hard?

 

[tetrasodium]

You keep going on about how the game was oh so much harder and more dangerous, yet you never played a version that was actually hard?

No. I keep talking about things like how a bunch of monsters specifically named lack the sort of scary mechanics that allowed them to fill a role that was relevant to horror. If those mechanics made the game easy or hard is a different matter unrelated to horror