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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tom B1" data-source="post: 7582122" data-attributes="member: 6879023">Good data here. Thoughts from my past and present experience:I was a player in an underdark party. We were in a dark underground city with all sorts of underdark races. One of the PCs got into trouble in a temple (mucking about). It cost him his hand and we were all captured. We were to become galley slaves. No weapons, manacled, one of us missing a hand... and we felt weaker than our foes. Terror of our predicament, but horror at the ease with which one mistake led to a potential TPK. (We got out by starting a fight on the deck of the ship before we were taken below an manacled... biting, using manacles to batter and choke, and me taking the ship's master, a Drow, over the side in a grapple... I had higher Con and expected him to run out of air before I did... which proved true... and it turned out a piece of jewelry I found much earlier but had not had identified was in fact a necklace of adaption... but I didn't know that when I grappled him over the rail and into the harbour). The sense of oddity, of uncertainty of the laws of the game, the sense of dangers we hadn't fought (mind flayers, aboleths, etc) and the horrible nature of what would happen to a group losing a party... that added up to dread. Another time, I had a couple of party members encounter Ice Trolls. The trolls were only 2HD and the players were 2nd or 3rd level. BUT, the Ice Troll required a +1 weapon and the party had no magic weapons. 'chip' 'chip' 'chip' and no real damage. I saw players that would normally have all sorts of bravado recognize the pickle they were in, the unstoppability of their foe, and then the running away ensued! A party of Elves exploring an old abandoned underground Dwarven City were being very quiet. They knew something horrible had happened to kill the occupants, but no idea exactly what. (Of course, the Bard wandered off, the Cleric felt he had to protect the Bard went after him and nobody else knew... so separation of the party - always a great tension builder - was achieved).  The bard and cleric blundered into the area of the broken main gates... and skeletons of dwarven warriors rose silently.... the bard noticed but had phobia undead and lit out of there like a bat out of Acheron.... leaving the Cleric alone and surprised by the undead. Meanwhile, the others (ranger, fighter, mage, fighter/mage) were exploring the rest of the city... while the undead dragon on the ledge at the top of the vault was simply waiting for them to come out... The party were showing signs of terror - missing party members, too quiet, creepy breezes and overly silent spaces - and then while the mage investigated a mine entrance (and met a guardian Earth elemental) and the fighter/mage and ranger watched, the fiighter got swooped upon suddenly by a huge skeletal dragon.... the spectators were terrified and didn't want to yell to attract the critter so they were miming huge teeth closing to the fighter and hoping he'd see and check his six....The terror came from the apparently overwhelming threat, the ominous silence and emptiness of the place (and obvious signs of tough defenders having fallen but not clearly how)... and the horror came when the party recognized the foe - energy drain, life draining breath, flying, large claws, wings, bite, etc... darkness... they won, but there were several incaps that could have ended up as deaders.A party once faced elves that were effectively invisible in the forest. They steadily lost HPs to unseen snipers. Random area of effect spells weren't wiping out the hidden elves. The fact the fight was in 3D (ground, trees, underground tunnels used for surprise and hidden movement....) and the fact the team was steadily bleeding HP without being *able* to identify or injure the foe... that's terrifying. The party retreated from the forest and the mage was so frustrated he was blowing trees to bits with lightning bolts just because he couldn't do anything effective....Lately, in an attempt to draw in the Eldritch Evil sort of themes, players have been exploring a dark temple under a Borderman temple (a much older, deeper evil delving under the local people's cave church complex). I regularly ask for passive perception rolls with no comments on results ... 'You don't see anything' 'You aren't sure if your eyes are playing tricks... you don't see anything tangible' 'Your skin is crawling, but you don't see anything'. When they enter certain parts of the dungeon and trigger traps, interact with statues or odd magical walls and frescoes.... they make saves (and fail) and get penalties to stats, to initiative, to strength, fatigue or other state effects (nauseated, sickened). This is MUCH more effective than actual HP damage - gory wounds are taken in stride... conditions that reduce effectiveness with no clear idea how to fix them... THOSE are scary (even though the net effect may not be huge...). NOT KNOWING how this is done, how it is removed, when these accumulating nasty effects will end, and knowing there's some weird 'does not belong in our dimension' sort of vibe leaves the characters jangled and unsettled. Go outside the rules. Create effects, sounds, hallucinations, gases, contact poisons that are hallucinogenic, do whatever it takes to take the party outside of the head space of 'I have healing and high HP and good weapons so nothing scares me'. Oh, you are fatigued? Sickened? Nauseated? Sounds working differently? Illumination whacky? Strange sounds? Enemy effects that aren't just hit point loss... now that's when you start to creep out your players. Critters with fuzzy spider legs or bodies. Critters with tentacles and too many eyes. Shambling horrors with no eyes or mouths, but ropey strength that are good at slow strangulation.... critters that phase in and out round to round or can emerge from a shadow to strike and then fade away to strike again, harrying, weakening... You need players to face things they don't understand and don't understand how to counter, to suffer effects that are tied to locales and impose conditions vs damage, maybe healing doesn't work as it should in eldritch shrines or divinations produce horrific nightmares and stun those using them.... And always, make unnecessary random checks for hearing, seeing, other forms of detection... sometimes let them hear or think they see something, other times nothing ...that they notice! Never say nothing is there. Separate them if they let you. Being alone without being able to watch your back is tough. Sticky black gunk that they sink into to the knees and have to fight to escape. Spider webs. Halluncination so the real and unreal horrors are hard to differentiate. Get caught fighting on very unsafe terrain with possibilities of lethal falls or collapses. Poisons that run slowly but inexorably. Give them foes that seem to be unstoppable or that are easy to kill, but keep getting back up.Make them way to run, to flee, to never re-enter the dark place they are escaping. 1st edition left a lot of this sort of atmospheric stuff to GMs so they made it up and it was scary. 2nd -> 4th (and even 5th, but it once again is a bit more like 1e) specified *everything* so DMs didn't make up this sort of stuff and so players knew adventures were balanced for their conquest. in 1e, you could sometimes find a +3 sword at level 1... and sometimes your encounter was a level 5 encounter so you'd better be alert, cautious and smart in EVERY encounter....Let the players know you are:a) Willing to kill them if they are stupid or not cautiousb) Willing to hurt them if they aren't careful and explicit about what they do to stay alert and to watch for threatsc) Happy to make them suffer - conditions, poisons, illness and disease, strange magical or inter-dimensional effects, corruption... d) Ok with bleeding them a bit at a time vs. foes they don't know how to truly defeat... and that keep coming.....Once  you've established that they, as players, do NOT know everything that can come at them or how to deal with such encounters and effects... then they know they have to play smart, cautious and get lucky to get out safely. And sometimes, they'll learn they NEED to run, to flee, to bug out... because if they don't, they WILL die. And if the will die in horrible ways (brain eaten, plant slowly absorbs them over 10 years, slowly eaten from inside to host a critter, etc), they'll want to avoid that and will be thankful for simple dangerous foes doing only NORMAL damage...</blockquote>

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