D&D General Why fear is good for PCs

[Velocitree]

I went through my DM thought process this week and asked myself: why do I think keeping my PCs afraid is so important?

Here’s what I came up with:

Landscapes of Fear; or, How to keep PCs afraid: Part 2

This is part 2 of a series on landscapes of fear ( Part 1 , Part 3): today I am going to talk about why it’s important to build a landscape ...

dreamshrike.blogspot.com

Hope this is valuable to a new DM: I ran a pretty flat campaign my first time out the gate, and it’s been a learning process ever since.

If you have any tips on how you scare your 5e PCs, pass them along please, I love hearing good tricks.

Right now mine are in a hostile ancient city with defenders of an equal CR, and there’s a mythos that hits the casters with Faerie Fire and wild magic every time they attack the guards with magic. And fifty foot walking statues with laser eyes that just dropped a building on them. But the tables will turn…

 

[bloodtide]

My best tip for Real Fear is run an Old School Style Hard Fun Unfair Unbalanced Game.

Just Random Meaningless Character Death at any time fills many players with fear. They worry the whole game that the DM might say something like "well, that is 11 damage, your character is dead".