D&D 5E Ravenloft= Meh

[Mirtek]

Frankly no matter how well a DM describes a scene, it simply can't evoke horror in D&D.

Why should I be afraid for character B being stalked by the things that go bump in the night while character C in the other game is smiting fiends back to hell.

Because they have a too high CR and might kill character B? So could an orc warlord with his great axe.

Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman and co. are not literal evil having taken form like even lowest dretch is.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[delericho]

Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman and co. are not literal evil having taken form like even lowest dretch is.

An awful lot of horror, and especially Gothic horror, is about the human condition. That Dracula, Frankenstein, and the rest aren't "literal evil having taken form" is precisely the point - they're what I might become if I took a different path.

That, incidentally, is why I suggest up-thread that Ravenloft would be better suited to only allowing human PCs - because the non-human PCs can also serve to say something about the human condition, but they say something different, and not necessarily compatible.

 

[Jester David]

Of all the old D&D settings TSR made one stands out for me with a resounding meh. That setting is Ravenloft. The whole fear/horror thin never really got to me in the 1st place and if you like that sort of stuff well Vampire/World of Darkness exists.

The problem is the name of the game. Dungeons and Dragons. Ravenloft did not seem to have much of either and I never really got into the whole Bram Stoker/ Frankenstein thing. Strahd has struck me as one of the most boring cliched villains of all time in a D&D universe. Even his book I Strahd was not that good all those years ago as a teenager. If you think the mists of Ravenloft are scary how about the wastelands of Athas and The Dragon who ws guilty of attempted genocide.

I just associate RL with a emo Goth chick calling herself Raven or some crap "Its just a phase Mom". On the pluse side there are no Kender. Dragonlance and Ravenloft might be a toss up between the 2 worst D&D settings. Even Birthright was more interesting IMHO and almost no one played that it seems.

There's lots of dungeons. Crumbling castles, ruined manors, ancient crypts, dark alleyways, and more.
Dungeons... yeah, less so.

I liked it because I enjoyed horror as a kid and the classic movie monsters were more fun to me than the monsters of Greek and Germanic myth. At its heart that's what Ravenloft is: replacing the chimera with the vampire, the troll with the golem, and the minotaur with a werewolf.

 

[MrHotter]

I like how Ravenloft makes D&D feel like a different game.

I'm listening to the podcast where the Board With Life guys play D&D. They were playing a homebrew campaign and it felt pretty standard where people moved from place to place overcoming challenges. They decided to play the original Ravenloft for Halloween and the same players are afraid to look behind curtains and you hear 'oh sh$%, oh sh#@, oh sh^%' from the players more than one time.

I guess it all depends on the frame of mind of the DM and the players on whether Gothic horror would work at the table.

 

[Bawylie]

Heh. I love liches*. But it's ironic... The iconic Ravenloft lich, who is one of the most powerful and most plot-important Dark Lords to boot, is boring. Seriously, Azalin could have been such a cool character, but he's just... Not. There's no meat to his story or his objectives. He's just a bog-standard lich who wants to gain more magic power and escape. At least Strahd's story, whether one likes it or not, has some flavor and Gothic resonance to it.

*Got 99 problems, but...

Sure! But I don't usually use the official big bads anyway. I think Horror is a more intimate genre, so I don't run them as epics.

What makes liches awful isn't their CR. It's their slow bleeding of the area in which they operate, the corruption and pollution of normal people who live in their shadows.

S'good. And it's not just liches, either. A single werewolf makes for a nice, emotionally wrought investigation. Monster showcasing. Moral complexity. An uncaring (at best) or actually hostile nature or foe.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I like Ravenloft too. As a setting for fiction, you can tell a lot of cool stories there. As others have said, it's all in how you present it. You can do Scooby Doo or you can do Interview with a Vampire.

The thing is, D&D rules don't do horror very well. Unless you really work at it, playing horror with D&D rules will lead to a Scooby Doo experience. Horror works better with rules designed to support the genre.

That said, if you want horror, and you want to do it with D&D rules, Ravenloft can work really well if you're willing to put in the effort.

 

[MrHotter]

Sure! But I don't usually use the official big bads anyway. I think Horror is a more intimate genre, so I don't run them as epics.

What makes liches awful isn't their CR. It's their slow bleeding of the area in which they operate, the corruption and pollution of normal people who live in their shadows.

S'good. And it's not just liches, either. A single werewolf makes for a nice, emotionally wrought investigation. Monster showcasing. Moral complexity. An uncaring (at best) or actually hostile nature or foe.

I guess that a lot depends on the expectations of the players. If the previous adventure had the party fighting off waves of werewolves, and then that's followed by an adventure revolving around one lycanthrope, it may not be that interesting to the party.

Personally I like to make every bad guy more than just an obstacles in a long line of battles. That works for my family game that is more story driven, but not so much for the bearded guy group I play with who prefer a 'dungeon of the week' kind of campaign.

 

[ccs]

I liked most of the adventures & variuos RL source books TSR made back in 2e.
I think the setting & its attendent special rules are utter crap though.

 

[Curmudjinn]

That's a benefit of being thrust through the mists into the unknown, over a full-blown in-Ravenloft campaign. The PCs are on their heels and the players have to learn a new way to approach adventuring on-the-fly.

That said, I'm not a huge Ravenloft fan, but I do play it. I prefer gaslight CoC-type horror over Dracula, but there are enough similarities that I can enjoy the experience.
And who's saying you can mix in a little of both?

A Vistani camp worshiping a petrified Mi-Go statue.
A dissected tentacle or tentacle-thing deep in Castle Ravenloft.
Strahd being a Mask of Nyarlathotep.
Etc