Pathfinder 1E Instilling horror

[tylermalan]

I almost don't want to reveal my tricks, but as a general summary the rules are

1) "Put the player in a situation that cannot be fixed.": Real world horror is derived from the fact that once an injustice is perpetrated, it can never be wholly undone. A murdered person leaves a hole in the universe. A person once tortured is stained by the pain. The wound can be healed, but the scars will remain. An innocent can recieve unwittingly and innocently the dividends of injustice, so that when it comes time to make restitution you must deprive an innocent of what they are now lawfully entitled to. Forgiveness and even repentance don't necessarily undo what has happened, and costs must still be paid. Innocents must suffer for the deeds of the guilty. Responcibility has to fall on the people least deserving of bearing such a burden sometimes because they are the least deserving. Life isn't filled with easy answers.
2) "Force the player to choose between two unthinkable outcomes.": Speaking of, there are going to be times when a person believes unquestionably in two things - say the rights of the individual and the value of life - which sometimes can contrast with each other. Thing about how the players and characters frame their world view. Beliefs like, "The innocent must always be protected.", can cause serious problems if two innocents mutually threaten each other. "Justice must be served", can cause serious problems if the victims right to justice perpetrates injustice on someone else.
3) "Hit the players at a primal gut level." - This depends a lot on the MPAA rating of your table, but there are somethings that alway provoke viseral reactions in players. Figure out where to push the player's buttons. Real life phobias are good fodder if you have a measure of player consent.
4) "Hold up the mirror." - In most games I've ran, at least one and sometimes all the PC's are monstrous individuals who have done monstrous things in the name of 'doing right'. Have the villains do the same things. Have the villains call out the players. Try to get the players to stare in to the abyss. Probably the most horrifying thing to me as a DM is how little horrified the average players are by the actions that they narrate their characters as doing - torture, theft, murder sometimes in cold blood, racism, sexism, sexual assault, betrayal of friends and colleages, treachery, colatteral damage to the innocent, standing idly by and ignoring the sufferings and danger others to protect their own hides. The number of PC's I've DMed for that I actually would like to know IRL is pitifully small.

Keep in mind though that not every player really wants to be scared. You make your game too horrifying and you'll probably start seeing opting out behavior. Also, try to avoid substituting gross for horrifying. There are probably things that don't need to be dwelt on and aren't healthy to narrate.

Wow, deja vu. I actually did all of these things in the single most successful horror game I've ever run (which was Pathfinder). And successful it was. I've read a lot of posts in the past about how it's almost impossible to actually scare players/people in-game. Those posts were wrong! Best game I've ever run, hands down. I might never run a game that good again.

And so, I second this post.

 

[Nytmare]

I'm a big fan of taking advantage of players' fears of the unknown. In my opinion, nothing takes the bite out of an emotionally charged encounter faster than chopping it up into bite-sized definitions and statistics that the players can recognize and start measuring against their own definitions and statistics.

"Two, dim, pinpricks of light, shine out at you from deep in the darkness. They shift slightly and you realize that they're eyes, reflecting your wan torchlight back at you. They move again and blink, and are joined by another...and another..." is infinitely better to me as both a player, and a DM than "You walk into the room and there are four ratmen in the corner. They have an AC of 12."

[EDIT] As for an in game examples of managing to actually scare one of my player, only two real times come to mind. Once was probably about 20 years ago, running a Call of Cthulhu game where the players all thought they were playing in a simple murder mystery game. The players had all wandered off in different direction trying to figure out where some mysterious knocking noise was coming from, and one of them finally realized that it was coming from the room where they had locked the recently murdered corpse of their uncle.

The second (and good lord, now that I'm thinking about it, a million examples are coming to mind) was in a heavily modified Banewarens game. The players, who had managed to constantly find themselves one step behind the bad guys for at least the previous year of game play, had just discovered where they had been hiding out. They rushed to the hideout, expecting to ambush them, but failed to realize that the temple was completely unoccupied because the bad guys were out doing horrible things. So they snuck in, and proceeded to sweep through the building, room by room and floor by floor. I had them roll initiative from the get go, and dealt with every room and round as though it were a combat scenario, and somehow managed to keep them on the edge of their seats for what was probably half the evening, doing nothing more than moving their miniatures around on the map.

The Banewarrens gave me so many great chances to scare my players. If you're not familiar with it, the game breaks into roughly three arcs. In the first the players think they've stumbled onto a treasure trove of magical items. In the second, they discover that the magic items are some of the nastiest cursed items you could possibly imagine, and that they were all purposefully packed up and sealed off from the rest of the planar world a bazillion years ago. In the third, they discover that the only way to seal these items off again and stop the bad guys from destroying the world, is to fight their way to the heart of the vaults to push some MacGuffin button.

There were a million ways for me to keep them in the dark, and keep them second guessing themselves. In addition, the way that the story was written, the players were constantly put into positions where they were asked to make choices, and only discovered waaaay down the line that they either chose the wrong one, or that all of the choices were just different flavors of horrible.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm a big fan of taking advantage of players' fears of the unknown. In my opinion, nothing takes the bite out of an emotionally charged encounter faster than chopping it up into bite-sized definitions and statistics that the players can recognize and start measuring against their own definitions and statistics.

"Two, dim, pinpricks of light, shine out at you from deep in the darkness. They shift slightly and you realize that they're eyes, reflecting your wan torchlight back at you. They move again and blink, and are joined by another...and another..." is infinitely better to me as both a player, and a DM than "You walk into the room and there are four ratmen in the corner. They have an AC of 12."

I think we have to distinguish carefully several things:

1) A character can be afraid.
2) A player can be afraid for their character (they are afraid that they might lose thier character).
3) The player can actually be afriad.

It's a lot easier to achieve #2 than to achieve #3. I've achieved #2 all the time. As you say, giving the players limited information about the nature of the threat they are facing is a great way to do that. Or, sometimes giving them an evocative description of the truly great danger that there characters are in will do it. For example, my current campaign began with a tsunami in the first session of play. When the players realized that the clues all pointed to a tsunami and it was really going to happen, they became afraid for their characters. The scale and scope of the danger was beyond anything they had imagined they would have to face as first level characters.

But I don't think I actually scared the players. None of them became afraid for their own personal safety. They were afraid for the safety of their characters which, already, they were emotionally invested in (because of the character creation process I use). But none was now afraid to go to the beach or temporarily terrified IRL. That I've almost never achieved. Maybe once.

 

[Nytmare]

I don't know. Would you argue that a person engrossed in a horror movie is afraid for the character in the movie, or that their fear has completely cut an end run around their logic circuits, and that they themselves are honestly afraid?

In the case of the CoC game, the player was aghast and laughing at himself because he couldn't stop frightened tears from spilling down his cheeks; and during the Banewarrens game, the players would frequently joke about not wanting to go to the bathroom or out for a smoke alone. I think that #3 is more of a spectrum than you're giving it credit, and that a healthy, ordinary adult can be scared without thinking that they're actually going to be maimed or die, or be eaten by monsters.

 

[Celebrim]

In the case of the CoC game, the player was aghast and laughing at himself because he couldn't stop frightened tears from spilling down his cheeks; and during the Banewarrens game, the players would frequently joke about not wanting to go to the bathroom or out for a smoke alone. I think that #3 is more of a spectrum than you're giving it credit, and that a healthy, ordinary adult can be scared without thinking that they're actually going to be maimed or die, or be eaten by monsters.

I think if you've triggered actual physical fear responces - elevated heart rate, fast breathing, tears, screaming, etc. - then you've achieved #3, so yes, those two examples would seem to count.

 

[amerigoV]

Also, very important:

Whatever they're up against, don't let them get a good look at it.

And if they think they understand what they're up against (or what's going on), unravel that understanding.

The Best way to do this is do NOT use the battlemat. As soon as you put figs down, it becomes a numbers game.


I had grabbed this a number of years ago from ENWorld right before I ran Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Unfortunately, I did not record the name of the original poster (they should claim credit):

Making evil be suitably monsterous and the terrorifying suitable scary is hard, and particularly hard to do without simply crudely and graphically smashing a sensitive subject button in hopes of getting a viceral reaction.

Fear of the unknown: Lovecraft has the right of it. If you want players to respond to your scary monsters, one of the most important things to do is make sure that the players aren’t sure what it is that they are facing. If the monster gets replaced in their minds eye by a list of printed attributes and numbers, most chance of them finding it scary is lost. Even with a monster that the player ‘knows’ give it some flourish in the description or tactics they aren’t expecting.
Make sure that you make the monsters existence a non-enviable one: One of the biggest problems you get into trying to scare people is if you make the monster ‘cool’, attractive and powerful, people don’t fear the monster they instead want to be the monster. You can play this underhandedly occasionally, where you make the monster cool and attractive at first and then reveal the monster beneath the mask, but for the most part monsters should live loathsome and terrible lives (at least from the perspective of anyone sane).

Hunt the PC’s: One of the problems scaring the players is that they are running very capable individuals who always seem to have the initiative and who are hunting down and destroying their foes. What do they got to fear? To scare the players, you have to take away their feelings of being in control of the situation. You have to knock them back on their heels and make them react rather than leave the monsters always reacting to them. Put them in nasty tactical situations.
Throw NPC’s to the monsters: Most of the time the PC is secure and will always be secure. The monster can’t get them because they are one bad dude (or lady), so the player doesn’t know what to fear. To heighten the fear, you need to toss a few victims to the monster so that the PC’s can observe how it kills/maims/cripples/destroys or the aftermath of such an attack. The player needs to be thinking, “That could be me.”

Go after primal fears: Everyone is scared of something, and its usually pretty basic. Instead of going right for something loathsome like rape or torture or gore all over the place, go after the player’s fear triggers: snakes, spiders, darkness, heights, being alone, dirt, being upside down, confinement, drowning, being touched, being contaminated, being eaten, betraying oneself, children, aging (or its effects), whatever. Try to think of every monster as a fear and then supernaturally heighten thing in the monster that is fearful or put the monster in the situation that the player finds fearful.

Be immersive: Try to force the player to imagine the situation from a first person view, not looking down at the character but through the character’s eyes.
Don’t show the monster: You can’t do this all the time, because D&D is about combat, but often you get more out of the monster if you set the mood first before the monster jumps out. Be creepy. Creepy sounds. Creepy smells. Creepy setting. Sometimes it helps to use misdirection to get them looking at where the monster isn’t. That mummified corpse on the throne in the tomb is just a corpse, not an undead monster and the dead king isn’t haunting his tomb but enjoying his afterlife. The real monster is the immortal snake spirit that gaurds the tomb that gets you from behind will you are worried about undead leaping out of sarcophagi or wraiths rising out of the dust, or mummies lurching from the throne.

Whatever the PC’s expect, make it worse: The BBEG must not only be dangerous, but more dangerous than they imagined. You want to provoke the reaction, “You want us to go against that?!??!” You have to make the PC’s question whether they have the chops or the tools to take on the monster at this time, even when you secretly know that its not as bad as the PC’s imagine it to be. You can do this either by playing a metagame where the monster appears to be something with higher stats, or really is a something normally associated with deeper in the dungeon./further in their careers but is a (relatively) weak specimen. Or you can do it by taking something relatively weak and making it appear relatively invincible by giving it surprising hit dice and abilities.

I must have taken it to heart. I am running 50 Fathoms (Savage Worlds - think Pirates of the Caribbean in a fantasy world - not really a horror setting) and one of my players said this on FB the other day:

your campaigns are a mind f**k. Every single session. Got us jumping at shadows. You might have to have players sign a waiver to play your Star Wars Tour of Darkness!

(FYI: Tour of Darkness: Endor:
Forget all the Rebel Alliance Propaganda about what happened at the Battle of Endor, you learn what that hell hole of a moon is really like from a group of grizzled veteran Stormtroopers (ie, the PCs) -- Those cuddly Ewoks are more then they seem...)

 

[Raunalyn]

Several years ago, I ran a game that mixed White Wolf's Mage with Call of Cthulhu. At one point, the players (one of whom was an ex police officer) were trying to stop a drug that was being spread amongst youngsters. The drug caused extreme euphoria, then paranoia, then insanity and later, something horrible.

So, they had traced the dealers to a rave going on in the industrial part of the city. At this point, I just described the scene. The dancers moving on the floor in a chaotic wave; brief flashes of the dancers screaming in either ecstasy or terror. Something in the middle of the dance floor slithering among the ravers. Screams of terror as first one, then another of the drugged ravers began...changing. It gave one of my players, an adult woman in her late 30's, nightmares for weeks.

The point is, take something that is familiar to the players and make them relate to it. Then, twist it. Personally, I like using some type of visceral horror.

 

[Celebrim]

I had grabbed this a number of years ago from ENWorld right before I ran Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Unfortunately, I did not record the name of the original poster (they should claim credit):

If you insist, that's me. It's from Hussar's old "I want scary monsters thread", here

I could tell by reading it it was either me or the late lamented Raven Crowking. I'd forgotten I'd written it until you quoted it.

"Every single session. Got us jumping at shadows. You might have to have players sign a waiver to play your Star Wars Tour of Darkness!"

Ahh... the sweat smell of success. Now, roll for initiative.

 

[Samloyal23]

It is always scary when a player thinks they are in a safe environment and something just breezes through the protection in a surprising way. If players realise they are in over their heads, facing a monster that is too tough, let them escape, run down a hall, and take shelter out of the way in a room with a heavy iron door. Give it a magical seal to block it from being opened. Let the adventurers stack furniture behind the door to totally block it...

...Then have the monster crash through the wall from the other side or crash down through the ceiling and land in the middle of the group in a spray of falling debris.

 

[Matthias]

In my experience, getting the players to react emotionally to some event in the game is only slightly related to the actual in-game thing that's going on. The largest part is how you describe the situation, which is not something that can simply be communicated because that is also dependent on how you as an individual relate to the players and vice versa, and how the players related to one another. When you can reach them on a visceral level in your narrative, and hold their interest enough that they can suspend their disbelief and become genuinely emotionally connected to their characters and what happens to them, the players will happily climb on and ride whatever mental rollercoaster you want to set up for their avatars in the game.

It is the same technique which gets you to connect with the characters on screen in a film; you always have the choice when watching a movie that tries to be thrilling, tragic, terrifying, or thoughtful to either dispassionately observe the events as a fictional documentary and care nothing for whatever happens to these imaginary people, or else you can let yourself feel empathy (or antipathy) towards a particular character and share in their trials and tribulations or rejoice in their destruction.

By herself, a player can give her own character a personality and a sort of "independent mind" (if you have ever played a character which has made a decision or taken on an attitude which well and truly took *you* by surprise, then you know what I mean--and I would certainly like to hear from anyone else who has had this happen to them). But the player by herself can take that personality only so far because there is nothing to interact with in the sense of being "in the real world" versus being in a featureless constructed environment which the player has complete control over.

But when the character is actually interacting with and inside of a world outside of its owner's control, it can then develop beyond being a mere collection of traits, quirks, and flaws which its creator has set for it, encountering situations and problems unforeseeable by the player, and sometimes requiring the player to push beyond the ordinary boundaries of description and prediction she has set for her character. This forces the character to adapt and become something that could only have existed with the contribution of the DM and even the other players (which means that every player character in a campaign is child to every player as well as the DM, even though any given PC is technically under control of only one player).

In my estimation, it's when you can achieve this quality of interaction in a tabletop setting that the most memorable episodes of any game become possible. The hallmark of any great game are those stories you love retelling about what happened to so-and-so's character, how it all went down when you fought the big bad and won, or when so-and-so made a spectacular blunder and almost killed off the whole party besides himself, and so on. This is how you get the genuine horror, gaming moments that will stick with you a long time.