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".

 

[sevenbastard]

Just Random Meaningless Character Death at any time fills many players with fear.

Dont forget Level Drain!!!

 

[Brotton Goodfellow]

Great blogpost.

There’s two ways I’ve baked fear into my 5E game.

1. Roll initiative every round: A D6 gets rolled by one of the players, and they have to meet or beat my D6 roll if they want to go before the monsters. If I went last in the previous round and then win initiative the next, that means the monsters get back to back turns. You can see how this could become dangerous. My players fear losing initiative and will use up precious resources to win it (Segway to my 2nd point).

2. The Cup of Chance (Doom): I have a skull chalice filled with 10D6. The players can roll these dice and add it to any other roll. They have to take at least two at a time and a result of 1 doesn’t count. When the cup is emptied, something bad happens. It’s usually tied into the reason the dice were used. A fighter drains the cup to pass an athletics check to push a monster over the edge of a cliff into a dark pool filled with piranhas below. The Doom Dice make the athletics check successful, but now the fighter is going over with the monster. My players use this mostly to compete with me for initiative. I’ve since added another skull chalice that lets me use a dice pool. But once I’ve used all the dice something good happens.

I don’t necessarily use fear in the sense of spooking my players, but I will lean heavily on Risk vs Reward. That being said I did run them through an abandoned Dwarven mining city that was overtaken by Necromorphs from Dead Space, and spooked em real good with weird skittering noises and things seen at the edge of their vision in the dark. When the Necromorphs were finally revealed I went pretty hard in describing how grotesque they were and they hit like a dump truck. This combo made them scary for the players.

I plan on running a Witches Coven in the near future, and would love to make that spooktacular.