What makes a monster terrifying?

[jgsugden]

Good roleplaying and great storytelling. Terrifying is the axt of causing extreme fear. Fear is an emotional response.

The art of storytelling is the art of creating emotional responses with your words.

If terror is the goal, then look at the storytelling techniques of your favorite scary stories. Think about the movies and books that most terrified you and figure out what made them terrifying. Then use those same techniques to communicate a scene to your players.

The dramatic pause... the unexplained sound effect... asking for a roll and not explaining why you're asking for it... drawn out descriptions that add layers of frightening onto a description that starts out 'normal'... twisting everyday things into nightmares (like Steven King does with clowns, etc...) All great tools to think about using and practice implementing.

 

[Undrave]

Rules for fighting invisible opponents terrify me.

 

[Tony Vargas]

What makes a monster terrifying?

What's "terrifying" in the context of a TTRPG, where you're all sitting safely around a table?

I suspect there's more than one sense.

There's the sense that you'd get from well-done horror story, more thrill than actual terror, that'd rest mostly on the strength of the DM's narration and the players' imaginations, since we get very little in the way of gruesome F/X in D&D.

There's the sense of getting the players to make decisions for the characters as if the characters were terrified - that can be done by taking away control of the characters, wholly, or partially with conditions like Frightened.

Then, and I think this is the sense generally being used, there's the players being worried for their characters' continued playability. Death, depending on level and other factors, may or may not be much of an impediment to continuing to play the character you wanted, as you wish to play it, just a delay until he's resurrected - heck, a 'dramatically appropriate' death may even be the desirable climax to a character's story arc. Similarly being dropped is just losing turns until you're back up.
OTOH, loss of an irreplaceable item, loss of key/defining abilities, forced behavior inappropriate to the character concept, or permanent changes to the character may be more much more concerning.

 

[5ekyu]

In my experience, what terrifies players is... loss of control.

An umberhulk or creature with that kind of ability to disrupt pretty randomly who can act and what they do will drive PCs or players nuts but not in a long term debilitating way- just a moment by momdnt uncertainty.

 

[Oofta]

I should have added Dominating/controlling a PC can be pretty terrifying. For some reason the party's barbarian attacking the rest of the group is much scarier than just some run of the mill monster.

 

[Quickleaf]

So I've now DM'd a lot of people that have started out as complete newbies to D&D and have progressed to veterans. And the one thing I have consistently noticed is that, relatively quickly, they have grokked the salient driving force in 5e. Whatever small bells and whistles a monster might have, it is, in the end, a bag of hit points. Whatever resistances it might have, whatever abilities it might possess, in the end all you need to do is just cause more damage. Every monster is a nail, and DPR is the hammer. Once that salient point sinks in, the monster qua monster is no longer scary, or even that interesting. The tactics or combat might be, but never the monster itself. Perhaps there might be a save or suck here, or a nifty effect there, but it's all going to be somewhat familiar.

Flip the script. Replace "monster" with "player character", and see how it reads...

Whatever small bells and whistles a "player character" might have, it is, in the end, a bag of hit points.
Whatever resistances it might have, whatever abilities it might possess, in the end all you need to do is just cause more damage.
Ever "player character" is a nail, and DPR is the hammer.

...While it is technically true, it's not the entire truth. Playing that "bag of hit points" is still a fun, thought-provoking, emotionally engaging, and inherently interesting experience.

What's the difference?

Thrilling "dread" or "fear" – in the context of roleplaying games – has to do with perception of danger/threat. And the perception of danger/threat is always contextual, isn't it? Another way of saying that: To meaningfully discuss perceived danger/threat, you need to discuss context, right?

Take the ogre – the epitome of a "big sack of hit points." A lone 1st-level PC will rightfully be very cautious of the deadly ogre which can kill them in a single hit, while a lone 5th-level PC may see an ogre as a reasonable challenge but nothing too dangerous, and a party of 10th-level PCs defending a beloved village from ogres might view them as a significant threat...to the villagers. In each of those scenarios, facing the ogre(s) can still be fun, thought-provoking, emotionally engaging, and inherently interesting.

 

[Salthorae]

2. Be unfair.

I think this plays into #1 a little bit, but I do this and have killed more than 1 PC by following what I think is a "natural" course of action for monsters in combat. Not all of them will continue after a downed PC, but there are quite a few of them.

My players are usually wary of it being a chance in any given encounter though, so it helps flavor up some of the more "bestial" options.

Focus fire is definitely a thing for Intelligent monsters for me though. If it's good enough for the PC's, it's good enough for the monsters.

The wilderness needs to be scary still.

3. Narration.

I agree narration has a huge part to play in amping up dread. I just played over the weekend, and this was done very well by the DM.

Round hole in a dark/unlit dungeon except for our torches (no one had darkvision!), We could just make out a round shape that water was cascading down on top of in the hole when the DM described as shadowy tentacle shape that suddenly whipped around to face our torch we had held over the hole. Then the shape started rising out of the hole... beholder!

I don't do the narration justice here, but yeah. While we weren't low level or inexperienced, we were all terrified and ran like little inexperienced 1st level PC's!

 

[Undrave]

I should have added Dominating/controlling a PC can be pretty terrifying. For some reason the party's barbarian attacking the rest of the group is much scarier than just some run of the mill monster.

Happened last night in my game! Friggin' Aboleth. And we had a NPC Formorian Warlock with us to boot! Luckily, the latter spent most of the fight in Difficult Terrain inside the area of effect of Silence. That was a good move.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The most terrifying thing about any monster is uncertainty. Monsters represent an uncertain possibility for the future, where things are not going as well for you as you might hope.

The two major factors are: 1) how bad things could go; and 2) how likely they are to go that badly.

Monsters in 5E can theoretically kill you and everyone you care about, but the chance of that actually happening is remote. Anything else that they might do to you can be overcome within three days (game time). And even if it is a TPK, you (the player) don't get to spend much time dwelling on it, because you're all going to make new characters for the next session. As far as potential bad things go, it's really not that bad.

Contrast with previous editions, where the worst thing that could happen is that you're set back multiple years of play experience, and continuing to play the game means that the next few years (real time) are reserved for getting back up to normal. Likewise, if it's possible to lose a limb, then that's something which will actually affect your quality of life for as long as you keep playing the character, until you might eventually hope to find someone capable of fixing it in the distant future. Those are pretty dramatic stakes to put on the line, regardless of how unlikely they are to happen.

There's also the meta-uncertainty factor, of unknown unknowns. If a monster shows up and you've never seen it before, then you don't know what kind of possibilities it might represent. That's a whole other level of terrifying.

 

[Charlaquin]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

“The monster attacks... Ragnar, because he did the most damage to it last round.”

It’s a very, very common “tactic” used by DMs, usually to avoid seeming like they’re unfairly targeting anyone. And it never fails to kill the tension in an encounter. It becomes immediately clear that the monsters are going to behave in what ever way will seem the most fair to the players, instead of making tactically prudent decisions. Simply playing the monsters like they want to win goes a long way to making them scary.