Messages

1

RPGs / Re: What makes you scared, and How can you make a RPG game truly frightful???

« on: September 04, 2009, 08:21:41 AM »

Divine fire -- was that the CoC scenario that they recorded as an Actual Play?

NOTE:  I don't speak, read, or write German.  (Like most of the Internet, I'm only barely literate in English.)  I fed "Divine Flame" into Word Monkey and arrived at the above.  It may or may not be accurate.

Ah, got it.  Thanks!

2

RPGs / Re: What makes you scared, and How can you make a RPG game truly frightful???

« on: September 03, 2009, 09:21:13 AM »

Thanks!

I like to try and get the players into a tail spin. You get them to make a rash choice and then develope problems as a result of that choice.

When I ran Tom's Divine Fire game the players had to fill up a vehical with fuel in order to escape. The fuel close to the vehical had been taken by one of the PCs who'd gone rogue and the only other fuel was across the facility in the plane hangar.

[SNIP neat story]

At that point they started to remove but having them on the edge of their seats, genuinly worried about the lives of their characters, was very cool.

Divine fire -- was that the CoC scenario that they recorded as an Actual Play?

That sort of nail-biting, action-oriented tension-building is another good technique.  I tend to be better at the slow burn, myself -- I find it's difficult to get the balance just right.

3

RPGs / Re: Famous Last Words

« on: September 01, 2009, 12:05:51 PM »

DM: "OK, so now you're hanging on to the dragon's snout with one hand.  What do you do?"
Me: "I say 'Hah, wyrm, now I have you right where I want you!'"

(It wasn't the dragon that did that character in...it was the Death Knight who showed up just afterwards)

4

RPGs / Re: What makes you scared, and How can you make a RPG game truly frightful???

« on: September 01, 2009, 11:45:21 AM »

That's a great horror moment, showing the PCs the bad things that they did when they didn't really think.

Thanks!

5

RPGs / Re: What makes you scared, and How can you make a RPG game truly frightful???

« on: September 01, 2009, 10:43:21 AM »

My go-to technique for freaking players out is subverting their expectations.

Fear is often a response to things not behaving like we think they should.  So if you make ordinary things act in not-so-ordinary ways, you can produce a really creepy atmosphere.

For example, in the Hunter game I'm running, I dropped a hint about a fortune-telling ATM that required a credit card as a sacrifice.  I advised them not to use one of their own.  They stole a random person's wallet and used one of his credit cards.  They got three questions, and the answers came printed out on ATM receipts. 

One of the PCs was a doctor whose brother was Chief of Neurology at the local teaching hospital. a few weeks later, the PC's brother and called the PC in to consult on a strange case where a catatonic patient was admitted with no record of his identity.  When the PC arrived on the scene, he recognized the patient -- it was the man whose card they'd fed to the ATM.  What had happened was implicit; the man''s identity was stolen.  The look of revelation on their faces was priceless.

6

General Chaos / Re: Introduction

« on: September 01, 2009, 10:15:50 AM »

Hi, all.  Name's Kevin.  I'm 31, been gaming since I was about 12 or so.  I live just outside of Boston.  Currently running a Hunter: the Vigil game and starting up a superheroes game over Skype with some old college gaming buddies.