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Instilling horror
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<blockquote data-quote="Matthias" data-source="post: 6100598" data-attributes="member: 3625"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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).</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Matthias, post: 6100598, member: 3625"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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