Knowledge of 1st Level Characters

[Jehosephat]

I am wondering, especially for 1st Level Characters, where is a realistic fear threshold. For example, if in real live I saw a trio of zombies walking towards me I'd freak. Same goes for any other undead. Heck I'd flip over a 4' centipede or a frog the size of a mastiff. Part of that I'm sure is because I have never encountered any of those things, and as far as I know they don't exist. But in D&D are these things so well known that a 1st level character, new to the adventuring biz., would not think twice about them? Those are some pretty basic D&D monsters, are PCs so above average that all but the most horrific monsters won't cause them to blink an eye? Anyone have any thoughts?

 

[Silveras]

That is largely up to the DM on how s/he wants to run the world.

Characters who come from a city ruled by Necromancers might well be used to seeing Zombies carrying their leaders in a sedan chair on a daily basis.

Characters from the peaceful, pastoral countryside of Wholesomeville might be paralyzed with fear at the sight of a dead body, never mind one that got up and started shambling around.

Ravenloft (2nd Edition) used Fear and Horror checks for such circumstances. These were done as a game mechanic to make the *characters* react to the frightening sights and experiences even if the players were blase about it.

Unearthed Arcana incorporates the Sanity rules from Call of Cthulhu, for much the same purpose. Each time you see something unnatural, you are expected to make a roll. The DC of the roll is determined by what you see ... the more strange or revolting the thing, the more difficult the roll. Each time you fail, you lose a few points of Sanity. Eventually, you crack. Sometimes it is temporary; sometimes it is permanent.

Either of those approaches is good for showing the effects of such weird stuff on the PCs. However, you should make sure your whole groups wants that sort of flavor before introducing it. D&D is about heroes, people who master their fear and do what they need to do despite being afraid. A game mechanic that forces them to run, or go mad, isn't quite in the same vein.

 

[Henry]

1st level characters in default D&D have heard about zombies the same way you and I have heard about rabid dogs. They're quite dangerous, but we can also get the tools to take them down. We understand what drives them and what needs to be done with the poor creatures.

Same way with a 1st level fighter or cleric. That level 1 Wizard or bard, OTOH, will be hemming and hawing and getting the heck out of the way.

NOW, if we want to return that fear of the unknown, make them unknowable. Make them look different from plain zombies; give them glowing eyes, make sparks dance at their fingertips, just make worms wriggle in their eye sockets. This one simple thing will take players who have been "fighting" zombies for years, and make them think twice before engaging them in combat. If NO monster looks familiar, then they are UNfamiliar.

Sorry to sound so simple, but it's advice that has aided me before. It recently worked in the WRONG direction. My group just fought Frost Giants, and were VERY unprepared for them, because I didn't describe them as frost giants - I described them as 15 foot tall giants with pale skin and greataxes that could split trees in one blow. They attacked because they thought they could win; had they known they were frost giants they might have acted differently, or prepared fire spells. As it is, they learned a hard lesson about underestimating opponents.

 

[CRGreathouse]

I think Henry has it right for the default game -- 1st level characters know quite a bit about the D&D world and its monsters, though DMs can change that.

In my camapign, information about monsters is really hard to come by. My 5th level group knows nothing about trolls, mummies, or wyverns, let alone more esoteric monsters like nightmares, basilisks, and rust monsters. This is achieved through good role-playing on the player's parts, as well as ruthless restatting on my part...

 

[Squire James]

Sometimes too much knowledge hurts. I remember playing in an FR suppliment based on "Darkwalker on Moonshae" (the first actual FR novel). Our level 2 characters encountered 5 Firbolgs, and I recalled how the hero of the book pretty much chopped through Firbolgs like swiss cheese even early in the book (when he seemed inexperienced). So I estimated them to be roughly the same as ogres, a tough fight for 5-6 level 2 PC's in 2e D&D but certainly not overwhelming.

Naturally, the DM used the only stats he had for monsters called "Firbolgs", which translated to "Firbolg Giant". As in Monstrous Compendium monsters with 12 HD with several forest-related spell-like abilities (none of which were displayed in the books) and normally aligned as Chaotic Good (but obviously evil in this setting). Nobody told me that callow youths in D&D started out 14th level if they happened to be princes...

After giving the main fighter one good whack and then fudging a bunch of misses (I don't really believe he failed to roll a 5 out of 12 tries), the DM let us run away. Given most threats in that Moonshae setting book were well out of range for us as an adventuring party, the campaign ended shortly thereafter.

 

[s/LaSH]

Well, I could walk up to the average man on the street, say, "Name three ways to kill a vampire" and then point out just how useless that information is in the real world... what sort of data would a native to a world where those things are real have?

A sense of mystery is sometimes a good thing - there are things, after all, that Man Was Not Meant To Know. On the other hand, there are 'old faithful' monsters that everyone knows about. In my world, there's a definite succession of knowledge - everyone knows goblins, the farmboy is familiar with social behaviour amongst wild troglodytes, but an experienced adventurer is needed to properly fight off trolls (which are these weird stony avian critters), and there are things out there that noone has seen before.

However, as for the provocation of fear? I guess it depends. I'm the sort who'll stand down a charging dog, which is not always clever, but there are other people for whom discretion is the better part of valour. Is it a conscious decision? I don't know. Anyway, when I developed my Twilight game, I implemented rules for causing fear in your enemies, normally as an action, but it is possible for your very presence to do it if you have the right abilities...

 

[Jehosephat]

I suppose it just depends. Realisticly, there are some pretty scary things in a typical D&D World. The characters are adventurers and heroes, however, and what kind of adventurers/heroes would they be if they let a little thing like zombies frighten them? Translate that to game play, what kind of game would you have if characters ran at the first sign of every non human they encountered? So I suppose that in the interest of the game, it is better to have characters who are braver than average. This doesn't seem to much of a stretch if you consider that PCs are better than average in alot of other respects too.

 

[Altalazar]

I think that one of the defining characteristics of PCs is that they are the ones that, when they see the townspeople running west, they start running east.

That said, as has already been suggested, if you want the PLAYERS to feel some fear and uncertainty, just throw things at them that are described such that they don't know what they are facing - or use unfamiliar monsters or just change some familiar ones. You could build a whole world up where it turns out that none of the "familiar" D&D monsters exist, but some other monsters, some somewhat similar, some not, DO.