Comments on: Scaring Players: Creating the "oh sheet!" moment

By: No One

No One — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 21:54:45 +0000

i had a thought. so your a DM, you make a list of key words. and a list of monsters. your group is traveling and they come across an old person that looks homeless (i figure these scenes have been done before). the “homeless” person asks the group for a ridiculous amount of gold to “get home”. enough to where the group could give that much gold, but probably wont. when they say no, and make up some excuse why they cant. the old man casts a curse. every day there will be a key word, that if spoken it will summon a group of monsters. then before a session at some point you roll to see what the key word will be. make sure your list of monsters are up for the challenge. and every campaign your group would be wondering what the key word would be. throw in a couple of really hard monster. i bet if you do it right, the group may be a little worried about what they say….

would really suck if one of the key words is in a spell that gets cast…

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:48:32 +0000

My own experiences with scaring players matches with yours–they’re a lot more scared if they made a decision that led to the eldrich abomination than if you just spring it on them. Why? Because they know that you’re not going to just kill them randomly, but if they made a foolish error along the way, you may not show pity.

Two other factors play in as well: 1) The fear of the unknown. You can tell them all day long that the lich is 20th level and they’ll just view it as a statistical problem to overcome, but a few orcs in the dark with a clever shaman on their side can leave the players wetting themselves in fear IF they don’t know what they are. Like how in The 13th Warrior, the Eaters of the Dead turned out to be human cannibals–they were scary precisely because we didn’t know what they were and couldn’t get a clear look.

2) Cosmic Horror, things that the players KNOW they can’t stop, but can only escape from temporarily. I once ran a campaign set in a steampunk world where the PCs found and boarded a dimension-hopping train with an AI. One of the PCs asked to see a “map” of the universe. They were strangely horrified to find out that the cosmology had no resemblance to the Great Wheel everyone was used to, but was a chaotic mess with a gigantic hyper-dimensional structure called “The Spike” pinning several planes, including theirs, together. Then the train took them to the dying world with the demented city of people who KNEW that they were doomed and were living the most savagely hedonistic S&M lifestyle that I could describe (pulled largely from a Michael Moorcock book), and they really started sweating . . .

Fun times, fun times.

By: cr0m

cr0m — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:17:12 +0000

Ben, this is an excellent bit of observation. You’ve got player psychology dialed.

By: Ajax

Ajax — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:06:55 +0000

I have one of these “oh sheet’ moments that i use in my main campain arc, so far, five times.
The PC’s have just fought their way through a tunnel of rather easy monsters and one annoying mage. (this is at the biginning of teh campain, and i use easy stuff at first to see what they can do)
well, i tell them all bout the large Dwarven worked cavern they are in , the valted ceilings, the massive pillars, the runic carvings, then i mention teh light comming from inbetween the crack of a very large set of doors. seince they are looking for a lost dwarven forge, they naturaly think they found it. when they open the heavy doors, if they have a cleric, i tell him, “what you see was once described to you, it is a wizard who becomes infuised with his own power, often called a ‘lich’.” If they dont have a cleric, some hidden knowledge rolls take place behind my DM screen.

so far, every time this sene takes place, the players start going ‘oh sheet’, ‘what the creep’, ‘what have we done?!’ ‘we followed the map!’ and generaly start trying to figure out where they went wrong.

what they dont know, at that time, is that the lich (and he is a lich)is a Netual Good cleric who is that way because of a vow he took to protect the same forge that the Pc’s seek.

Generaly i have found that this sort of Good/evil steriotype swiching is real good for this sort of ‘sheet’ moments.
Like the lawfull good necromancer they find at one point.

By: LordVreeg

LordVreeg — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:58:25 +0000

This is older, so no one might read this, but I have found a variation that really brings on a mood.
It works only when you play online, play with laptops, have good slight of hand , or plan way ahead.

If you have set a really good scene, and it is dark and ominous, and then one of the PLAYERS suddenly announces that, “They hear someone laughing”, it scares the pants out of them. Scary stuff that comes out of another player multiplies the ‘Oh SHEET!’ dramatically.

When I got older and started playing online more often, i stumbled by accident on the ability to tell them stuff in private. And so now, even in my diningroom, I’ll still sometimes IM a player if they see something the rest of the group does not.

By: Milander

Milander — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:31:50 +0000

This is what scares characters – imagine you are in character creeping down the corridor, a door is at the end. You know there are people in there having done an awareness skill or whatever, you tell the DM/GM that you want to approach and “listen at door” and suddenly you hear a burst of laughter, creak or cough.

I’ve had people jump out of their chair with this one and it is so simple; download a bunch of sound effects (very easy in this day and age) and USE them. Not only do they add to the atmosphere of the game experience but they can be used to good effect to scare the bejeezus out of players

By: meeple

meeple — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 10:08:20 +0000

I once gave a player nightmares. She is an excellent player and really had a great character worked out — loads of background, a very nice, sensitive character (who wouldn’t hurt a fly, unless of course it was for the pursuit of scientific knowledge) in a Victorian Horror. I described a dream sequence that her character experienced, in which the character was being really vile, unnecessarily sadistic, and wasn’t able to stop; I won’t go into the details as this seems quite a nice place but I made it really personal, and yet at the same time indiscriminate and brutal. The fear was not that something bad might happen to the character, but that, through that character’s dabblings in dark and powerful magic, he might do something really really bad to his beloved… and not be able to stop.

That was cool.

By: Rudolf

Rudolf — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:15:51 +0000

Having the campaign world react to danger is also a great tool.

No joke, I had my players look at the map, and ask the caravan driver why he didn’t just cut through the Dread Forest, and cut weeks off his trip. He replied that the cost of the added guards turned out to be more than the saved time, and there was always a chance of huge losses.

Then, when they decided to take the shortcut themselves, where no one else would willingly go, they had both in-game realism, and the knowledge that they did it themselves.

By: scholz

scholz — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 08:47:00 +0000

I had two very successful (one repeated) moments of fear in my D&D games.
1. The Blood Elemental, it was a slow, but relentless killer that killed an NPC first by drowning the hapless creature in itself. Basically this was a glorified water wierd, but the blood part of it made it very scary for some reason.

2. Carnivorous herbivores. The Wight Deer, and the Demonic Sheep. In both cases they were stumbled upon by PCs wandering (through the scary woods in the former, and in a deserted farm in the latter), and the bloodly faces were enough to get the, albeit low level, characters running for shelter (climbing into trees and barn-lofts interesting enough).

Lesson. Blood is scary when encountered in unexpected places or doing unexpected things.