4 ms·

IMHO one of the hardest parts of DMing is building tension and a sense that there is real danger, without just bringing out enemies that can completely roll ove

IMHO one of the hardest parts of DMing is building tension and a sense that there is real danger, without just bringing out enemies that can completely roll over the players. Ideally the group should survive, but constantly feel threatened and like they "just barely" made it through a story's climax. In other words those victories need to be earned, which is a fine balancing act since dice rolls are random and bad things happen. It can also lead to awesome situations when the dice go extremely well, everything lines up, and the players feel like legit bad-asses. It is the DM's job to create situations where that can happen!

carapace 7y ago
I still remember a friend of mine telling me that he had been genuinely scared at one point in an adventure. Like watching-a-horror-movie scared. (A flying castle attacks the city; it's made to crash; someone has to go in there and find out what's up; cue our heros; they enter through a breach in the wall into a kind of internal moat; it's dark, you're up to your waist in water, and there's something in here with you! (Water Weirds. Damn near invisible snake-like water elementals...) Good times!)
- ajuc 7y ago
  My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anything or you'll get infected by HIM. I borrowed it from SCP series - it's a "memetic hazard" - nonmagically infects brains when it's thought of or spoken of. Mechanically players roll a Wisdom save whenever there's infection opportunity, on a fail they start shouting the meme (then others have to roll :)), on a bad fail they become possesed and run somewhere. You of course don't explain it to the players, just ask them to roll when needed :) As they explore searching for the artifact they were hired to recover they find the whole mine is full of dead bodies calmly sitting in circles, pools of dried blood, all the books are burned and there are bodies of dwarves who were fighting each other before they died. Then there's the last room with a huge portal that starts to activate when players who got possesed run into it. The climax is a big pvp fight between the players that try to teleport to their new god and the rest of the party trying to knock them unconscious and drag them away before the portal activates :)
  - RhysU 7y ago
    What is "SCP"?
    - ajuc 7y ago
      A genre of web fiction with scary x-files like stories. Great source of ideas for scary monsters/dungeons/villans/legends after reskinning from modern times to whatever setting you need. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation
  - carapace 7y ago
    That sounds great! The guys I was DM'ing for wouldn't have fallen for it though: they had a knack for confounding your best laid plans. E.g. they would have just read the warnings and bugged out. Or forced captured kobolds to go in first or something. Later on in the wrecked flying castle there was a room with a clockwork horror in it that I was sure would give them a hard time. They trapped it in a chest right off and ran away before it broke out. Another time I had a classic dungeon set up for them complete with a lich. They woke up the lich... and ran away. Like all the way out of the dungeon and then halfway across the freaking continent. They just left it for someone else to deal with. Unrelated story time... In another campaign one player had this dwarf fighter and he had rules-lawyered and finagled to get him specialized with two axes and multiple attacks per round. Three with the right and two with the left, five attacks per round. We nicknamed him "the Blender" because he could just chop the shit out of anything. He was stupid and reckless, a follower of the great god of war VTRE (Victory Through Reckless Endangerment!) and he was awesome. This was a Spelljammer campaign (am I the only one who loved/loves Spelljammer!? It was so much fun) and one battle in particular they were fighting a ship of mindflayers. Scary right? The Blender jumps on a loaded ballista and tells the crew to launch him at the Illithid ship. He crashes into the deck, bounces up, grabs his axes from his belt, and proceeds to straight butcher the mindflayers. I forget the details but it was one of those times that the whole table is howling, the dice are hot, and it's just unbelievable but so fun no one cares.
grawprog 7y ago
I'll usually fudge at least a few dice rolls as a DM depending on how the game or encounter's going as the situation requires. If I roll a bunch of crits in a row for example, i'll maybe just call it one instead a bunch, maybe that wasn't a one hit kill when it should have been, stuff like that. If it's too random it usually stops being fun for everyone. It's a really hard balance though you don't want the players to be frustrated, but you don't want them to feel like their cheesing through the game. For dungeons at least i try to go for that nethack or metroidvania vibe of slowly going deeper while your supplies and health dwindle, so each encounter needs to be considered more as they get deeper. Above world adventures I try and let them be more free in their decisions but keep the consequences a bit higher for things. I've yet to play any computer or console rpgs that really come close to the feeling of playing a good d&d game, even the ones that heavily use the rules. Nwn online came close, but those typically had human DMS the single player game was fun, but even on coop, still wasn't really like playing dnd without a DM player.
- dhosek 7y ago
  I remember one looking through the rule book for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG which had an interesting concept: players had a certain number of "plot points" (I forget exactly what they called them) which allowed them to overturn an unfortunate die roll. It was based on the idea that in the TV show, the main characters would often manage to get out of a tight spot through well-timed luck.

carapace 7y ago

I still remember a friend of mine telling me that he had been genuinely scared at one point in an adventure. Like watching-a-horror-movie scared. (A flying castle attacks the city; it's made to crash; someone has to go in there and find out what's up; cue our heros; they enter through a breach in the wall into a kind of internal moat; it's dark, you're up to your waist in water, and there's something in here with you! (Water Weirds. Damn near invisible snake-like water elementals...) Good times!)

ajuc 7y ago
My best horror dungeon so far was a 3-level abandoned dwarven mine. 2 first levels are infested with kobolds and pseudodragons, players kill some kobolds, block off some others with explosions, solve puzzles to get through blocked lift to the last level and see that it was blocked from inside on purpose, there are dwarven runes on the walls written with blood warning not to speak to each other and not to read anything or you'll get infected by HIM. I borrowed it from SCP series - it's a "memetic hazard" - nonmagically infects brains when it's thought of or spoken of. Mechanically players roll a Wisdom save whenever there's infection opportunity, on a fail they start shouting the meme (then others have to roll :)), on a bad fail they become possesed and run somewhere. You of course don't explain it to the players, just ask them to roll when needed :) As they explore searching for the artifact they were hired to recover they find the whole mine is full of dead bodies calmly sitting in circles, pools of dried blood, all the books are burned and there are bodies of dwarves who were fighting each other before they died. Then there's the last room with a huge portal that starts to activate when players who got possesed run into it. The climax is a big pvp fight between the players that try to teleport to their new god and the rest of the party trying to knock them unconscious and drag them away before the portal activates :)
- RhysU 7y ago
  What is "SCP"?
  - ajuc 7y ago
    A genre of web fiction with scary x-files like stories. Great source of ideas for scary monsters/dungeons/villans/legends after reskinning from modern times to whatever setting you need. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation
- carapace 7y ago
  That sounds great! The guys I was DM'ing for wouldn't have fallen for it though: they had a knack for confounding your best laid plans. E.g. they would have just read the warnings and bugged out. Or forced captured kobolds to go in first or something. Later on in the wrecked flying castle there was a room with a clockwork horror in it that I was sure would give them a hard time. They trapped it in a chest right off and ran away before it broke out. Another time I had a classic dungeon set up for them complete with a lich. They woke up the lich... and ran away. Like all the way out of the dungeon and then halfway across the freaking continent. They just left it for someone else to deal with. Unrelated story time... In another campaign one player had this dwarf fighter and he had rules-lawyered and finagled to get him specialized with two axes and multiple attacks per round. Three with the right and two with the left, five attacks per round. We nicknamed him "the Blender" because he could just chop the shit out of anything. He was stupid and reckless, a follower of the great god of war VTRE (Victory Through Reckless Endangerment!) and he was awesome. This was a Spelljammer campaign (am I the only one who loved/loves Spelljammer!? It was so much fun) and one battle in particular they were fighting a ship of mindflayers. Scary right? The Blender jumps on a loaded ballista and tells the crew to launch him at the Illithid ship. He crashes into the deck, bounces up, grabs his axes from his belt, and proceeds to straight butcher the mindflayers. I forget the details but it was one of those times that the whole table is howling, the dice are hot, and it's just unbelievable but so fun no one cares.

grawprog 7y ago

I'll usually fudge at least a few dice rolls as a DM depending on how the game or encounter's going as the situation requires. If I roll a bunch of crits in a row for example, i'll maybe just call it one instead a bunch, maybe that wasn't a one hit kill when it should have been, stuff like that. If it's too random it usually stops being fun for everyone. It's a really hard balance though you don't want the players to be frustrated, but you don't want them to feel like their cheesing through the game. For dungeons at least i try to go for that nethack or metroidvania vibe of slowly going deeper while your supplies and health dwindle, so each encounter needs to be considered more as they get deeper. Above world adventures I try and let them be more free in their decisions but keep the consequences a bit higher for things. I've yet to play any computer or console rpgs that really come close to the feeling of playing a good d&d game, even the ones that heavily use the rules. Nwn online came close, but those typically had human DMS the single player game was fun, but even on coop, still wasn't really like playing dnd without a DM player.

dhosek 7y ago
I remember one looking through the rule book for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG which had an interesting concept: players had a certain number of "plot points" (I forget exactly what they called them) which allowed them to overturn an unfortunate die roll. It was based on the idea that in the TV show, the main characters would often manage to get out of a tight spot through well-timed luck.