D&D 5E Thrills, chills, and amazement.

[Libramarian]

The most important thing is for the encounter to be to new and scary to the players, not just the characters. If the players know that the encounter is not actually very dangerous or disruptive, and you're relying on getting them to see it from the PCs' perspective for effect, it's like trying to make a rice cake delicious with the perfect seasoning. It's possible, but it's so much easier if the encounter is inherently(ie for game/mechanical reasons) scary.

I ran quite an effective encounter last session involving a groaning spirit (banshee). It came out from behind a screen, so at first I described its hair floating above the screen, like seaweed underwater. Then tattered white robes with a peculiar luminescence. Red-rimmed, staring eyes and a snake-like flexible jaw. The players were pretty scared, but mostly because as soon as they realized this was an undead monster they were on edge, because we play 1e where undead either drain levels or have some kind of crazy save-or-die/suck ability.

 

[AverageCitizen]

As a player, I get that feeling when the story places a lot of consequence on my actions. If a whole lot of story is at stake, I get that feeling.

 

[Fralex]

I point you to these campaign journals for inspiration: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?116836-The-SilverClawShift-Campaign-Archives

These are fantastically executed adventures run by a great DM who really knows what he's doing. It's 3.5e, but the dramatic tension can be applied to any RPG.

One example of good immersion techniques is the way he likes to give players secret notes, even if it's just so the guy who rolled the knowledge check gets to tell the party what he learned himself.

 

[pming]

Hiya.

One thing not mentioned yet...pacing. I Keep a campaign of Call of Cthulhu every year or so; it lasts roughly 3 to 6 game sessions. The key to a good CoC campaign is many, but pacing is extremely important. Add that with "normal things behaving decidedly non-normal" and you get the creep factor rising. The same method's can be used to get other feelings aroused in players. Couple pacing with foreshadowing and you can get some "thrilled" emotions going. Take pacing with a dash of secrets and you start increasing a sense of foreboding or hope (depending on the secret learned). But, the key thing is...Pacing.

Now, that's not an easy thing to just "do". It takes practice, and it takes you knowing your players...not their characters, the actual people sitting at the table. You need to be able to read their faces, body language, vocal tone, etc. But once you master that...the world's your oyster!

One more tip: "All mountains start with a single grain of sand". In other words, don't tell the players/PC's that an army is massing just over the mountain range through Dead Gnolls Pass. Start small (pacing, remember?); a single gnoll scout is killed by some farmers. Then, over the course of another session or so, toss in more and more gnoll-related tid-bits of info and encounters (secrets reveled, remember?). Keep bumping up the pace a little bit here and there. Use some forshadowing to indicate that there's definitely something up with gnolls in the area.

Eventually it will get to the point where the players don't know which way is up...this is when you can spring the "You look to the hills. They look like they are on fire! It slowly dawns on you all...the hills aren't on fire. It just looks that way. Hundreds, nay, thousands of campfires dot the landscape. The gnoll army is here!". Allow that to sink in for only a moment, then roll some dice and... "Suddenly you hear a muffled gurggle from the sergeant next to you. Blood falls from his mouth and he sinks to the ground, a look of painful surprise on his face. The gnoll assassin's blade still drips with blood as he looks into his next victims eyes...yours!".

See what I did there? Hit them with a big reveal...gave them a moment to think about how to defend, attack, prepare, defend, etc against the gnoll army a few kilometers away. In other words, I deliberately got them thinking and imagining distance between them and the threat. But then...BLAMMO! Right in the kisser! The player, in his minds-eye, was picturing a vast landscape with far-off threats....then BLAMMO!...his imagination has this deadly threat pop up out of nowhere, right in his face! (like a jump-scare in horror games/movies) This will give the players that dreaded thrill of "Oh crap! I'm not ready! WhatdoIdowhatdoIdowhatdoIdo!?!?!...". Let that play out for a few rounds. Then...DOUBLE WHAMMY! Rocks hurled by the gnoll siege weapons strike a tower nearby, the walls of the castle, and one crashes through one of the inner courtyard buildings. The gnolls have launched a surprise attack! Now that sense of "That's it. We're all gonna die..." kicks in.

If (when?) the PC's and their allies/friends push back or defeat the gnoll's, slow the pacing down. Use slightly longer pauses in your speech. Use longer sentences with more detail. Let the players catch their breaths and start to think about what just happened. Let it all sink in. At some point, you'll see smiles, and probably moments of utter silence as they actually start to realize just how close they came to dieing. A sense of accomplishment, relief, and yes...that tingly feeling going up their spine.

This is all done with pacing. You need to put the players emotions through the wringer...jump them from dread, to fight-or-flight, to hopelessness, to joy. The pacing of when you try and illicit these emotions in your players will determine the ultimate success.

Good luck!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Fralex]

Hiya.

One thing not mentioned yet...pacing. I Keep a campaign of Call of Cthulhu every year or so; it lasts roughly 3 to 6 game sessions. The key to a good CoC campaign is many, but pacing is extremely important. Add that with "normal things behaving decidedly non-normal" and you get the creep factor rising. The same method's can be used to get other feelings aroused in players. Couple pacing with foreshadowing and you can get some "thrilled" emotions going. Take pacing with a dash of secrets and you start increasing a sense of foreboding or hope (depending on the secret learned). But, the key thing is...Pacing.

Now, that's not an easy thing to just "do". It takes practice, and it takes you knowing your players...not their characters, the actual people sitting at the table. You need to be able to read their faces, body language, vocal tone, etc. But once you master that...the world's your oyster!

One more tip: "All mountains start with a single grain of sand". In other words, don't tell the players/PC's that an army is massing just over the mountain range through Dead Gnolls Pass. Start small (pacing, remember?); a single gnoll scout is killed by some farmers. Then, over the course of another session or so, toss in more and more gnoll-related tid-bits of info and encounters (secrets reveled, remember?). Keep bumping up the pace a little bit here and there. Use some forshadowing to indicate that there's definitely something up with gnolls in the area.

Eventually it will get to the point where the players don't know which way is up...this is when you can spring the "You look to the hills. They look like they are on fire! It slowly dawns on you all...the hills aren't on fire. It just looks that way. Hundreds, nay, thousands of campfires dot the landscape. The gnoll army is here!". Allow that to sink in for only a moment, then roll some dice and... "Suddenly you hear a muffled gurggle from the sergeant next to you. Blood falls from his mouth and he sinks to the ground, a look of painful surprise on his face. The gnoll assassin's blade still drips with blood as he looks into his next victims eyes...yours!".

See what I did there? Hit them with a big reveal...gave them a moment to think about how to defend, attack, prepare, defend, etc against the gnoll army a few kilometers away. In other words, I deliberately got them thinking and imagining distance between them and the threat. But then...BLAMMO! Right in the kisser! The player, in his minds-eye, was picturing a vast landscape with far-off threats....then BLAMMO!...his imagination has this deadly threat pop up out of nowhere, right in his face! (like a jump-scare in horror games/movies) This will give the players that dreaded thrill of "Oh crap! I'm not ready! WhatdoIdowhatdoIdowhatdoIdo!?!?!...". Let that play out for a few rounds. Then...DOUBLE WHAMMY! Rocks hurled by the gnoll siege weapons strike a tower nearby, the walls of the castle, and one crashes through one of the inner courtyard buildings. The gnolls have launched a surprise attack! Now that sense of "That's it. We're all gonna die..." kicks in.

If (when?) the PC's and their allies/friends push back or defeat the gnoll's, slow the pacing down. Use slightly longer pauses in your speech. Use longer sentences with more detail. Let the players catch their breaths and start to think about what just happened. Let it all sink in. At some point, you'll see smiles, and probably moments of utter silence as they actually start to realize just how close they came to dieing. A sense of accomplishment, relief, and yes...that tingly feeling going up their spine.

This is all done with pacing. You need to put the players emotions through the wringer...jump them from dread, to fight-or-flight, to hopelessness, to joy. The pacing of when you try and illicit these emotions in your players will determine the ultimate success.

Good luck!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

Yes, this! One thing the DM in the campaign journals I mentioned did was, when the players had spent all week preparing for this MASSIVE invasion of undead and abberations, start the combat several rounds before anything actually happened. To quote the player recounting the story:

We heard them long before we saw them. That was the worst part. The DM would describe what was going on.... it was cold, we could see our breath and the eerie pale lights and unnatural arcane glows making weird ripples on the disturbed snow, our own trenches fading into the distance. We could HEAR chirping, crawling, chattering... the archivist informed us it was only the young and less adept broodlings and juveniles we were hearing. The adults... we wouldn't hear them. We might not even see them before they closed the gap between us.

Then the bastard started giving us turns. We would pace, ready actions, stare into the distance... making us describe what we did around the table a few times waiting for the slaughter to come to us. I've never felt so darn HELPLESS in a game before, being given a turn and trying to think of something else I could do to help our fight, though there was nothing.

 

[Quickleaf]

Can't thank you guys enough. I have a huge notepad file with all of your responses and my notes on it now. Keep them coming, if you can!

I'd say the #1 thing you as DM can do to engender a sense of wonder and amazement is to say yes to your players, and really run with their ideas.

One game I ran began wih the PCs learning of a impending red dragon attack, their preparations for the attack, and then a massive battle. While the threat level was high and I included a lot of cool opportunities for roleplaying & phased combat, the parts the players got excited about were their contributions. The barbarian wielding the temple bell tower chain, the wizard learning to ride a hippogriff in a "crash course", the bard convincing the guards to light a smokescreen (by lighting on fire the roof of a moneylender the hard *happened* to owe money to), etc.

However, ultimately this is up to how receptive your players are to experiencing wonder and amazement during a tabletop roleplaying game. There's a lot there you cannot control as DM, so don't sweat it too much.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Turn the air con down to a really low temperature to set everyone shivering. Play subsonics with mismatched phases (almost everyone finds this faintly nauseating). Start a piece of music that matches resting heartbeat and gradually ramps up, the theory being that their pulse will match it.
Turn the lights down so that everyone has to concentrate and squint.
Serve drinks and ban toilet breaks so everyone needs to pee.
Have uncomfortable chairs.

These may be excessive, but applying just one or two will really ramp up tension.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I've been DMing various games for a long time now, and one thing I've always wanted but never really got in the sense that the players have chills going down their spines when they encounter something, or something happens in the game, or they do something amazing, and the rest of the party feels that same epic chill that you first get upon seeing the orc hordes besieging Helm's Deep in the Lord of the Rings movie. Not talking about specifically mass combat, however, because that never really works, but the same sort of sense of amazement.

I guess I'm looking for advice on how to work towards engendering that sort of feeling. Any thoughts?

I ask my players all the time what it is they'd like to see in the future, what kind of things they didn't like, what kind of things they really liked, etc, but all I really get is, "Oh, yeah, it was fun." I get the impression that, as a DM, I am "technically proficient", rather than good or amazing.

Here's my thoughts:

I had a DM who wanted to provide that kind of experience to his players. It drove the campaign in directions that were a real turnoff for me and I ended up leaving. In my opinion, D&D works best when it's about empowering the players to make decisions and suffer the consequences, and not about conveying awesome experiences that the DM wanted you to have. I do occasionally give my players weird and interesting things to see like a hole that goes right through the planet, but I don't try to emphasize the awesomeness of them, I'm pretty offhand about it and I let the players decide for themselves what is awesome. And usually what is awesome for them is something they did, like use a monk's Stunning Strike to stuff a CR 12 Chain Worm's leg into a cursed Bag of Devouring so that the Bag of Devouring eats the Chain Worm (it was way too tough to fight normally).

So as far as enabling awesome experiences, the only advice I have to give you is the Rule of Yes: make it an official house rule that the first time they try something new and crazy, it works. Even if you're not sure it should work exactly that way, it works, as long as no one has ever done it before in this campaign. The second time you'll figure out rules for it and make it realistic, but for example the first time they try to grapple the enemy wizard and cover his mouth so he can't cast spells, it just works (i.e. normal grapple attempt must be made but if it works, silencing is automatic). That won't create awesome experiences in and of itself, but it does pretty much guarantee that you won't miss out on any potentially awesome plans that the players are mulling over in their heads.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The most compelling moments that players seem to enjoy in a game is lucky rolls like critical hit or a missed spell save at a key moment in the game that accomplishes something epic. That is almost impossible to script. You can create the encounter, but you can't script the dice rolls.

Yes you can! Just make sure the opponents have one or more Diviners on hand for Portent. j/k

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Players need all necessary information, but they don't need perfect information. In a dungeon, for example, accurately and fully describing everything they can see within their light source. But beyond their light source is completely unknown. This creates a sense of claustrophobia, a sense of fear of what's lurking in the dark. The same principle can be applied to the wilderness.

Oh yeah, so much this. E.g. if they're going through an underground tunnel, have the tunnel dip down into a subterranean lake chest-deep and a couple hundred feet wide. They can't see below the surface. Players get really nervous about not being able to see what's lurking.