Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Son of the Serpent" data-source="post: 7889556" data-attributes="member: 7015476">My first tip for getting thw rules out of your way:Throw. CR. Out. The. Window.2.  Make talking take real time (meanwhile the creature or what have you aint slowing down or pausing)3.  Have creatures that ignore certain rules.  You manipulate them.  Totally not cheesy.4.  Attack ability scores.  Even if you arent playing 3.x use the 3.x rukes on ability scores.  It can be brutal.5.  Do negative levels.  Do them how i do them though.  Randomize what abolities that a character got at a certain level are lost (makes people not immediately way less powerful but also gives a more real feel to something as unpredictable as sapping ones soul)6.  Take advantage of the dark and use cu de gra rules.7.  Curse the cleric's holy symbol.8.  Make the rules your bitch.  At the right time.  Tastfully.  Then the rukes wont get in your way.9.  There are lots of monsters that you can use which exist, can be modified, or can be created which would reasonably ignore certain rukes players rely on.Horror is best in d&d when your players realize that they cant reliably count on normal tendancies of rules.they get paranoid.  Thats good.  They panic.  Thats good.  Got rules that are slowing down the horror so that it doesnt keep players on the edge of their seat?  Like taking damage and hp rolls are slowing the rush of fear?  Experiment with monsters that have specific damage instead of a roll.  Roll a ton of rolls (50) before the game day even happens.  Keep them in order on a sheet.  For certain things you wanna go fast (like a jump scare or a hurried sequence of events) put that sheet of paper under a piece of cardboard with a cut out hole to show the score (so you dont know what the next roll is.  Try to forget.) And move it down the list as needed crossing out the scores as you go so you dont accidentilly back track to earlier rolls.  Then you need only decide or roll for whom that premade roll is for.  Much quicker.  Have characters roll saves you think they are going to need later 10 minutes ahead so they really have no clue what itll be for.  Do this sometimes knowing in your head ahead of time you are throwing that one away before you even see it so that they dont have the ability to know if something is gonna happen soon.  Try to make these roll ahead rolls be taken somewhat steadily and often so you get the ones you need and no ine knows if you were recording a certain time or not.  The unpredictibility will make them unable to use the fact you asked fir a roll to tell if something big is about to happen.I hope some of this was helpful.</blockquote>

Verification