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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nytmare" data-source="post: 6097642" data-attributes="member: 55178">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, <s>only two real times come to mind</s>.  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.</blockquote>

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