Adding Fear to Your Game

…Okay, obviously, my last plan didn’t quite work out.  So, rather than tempt fate again, I’ll just say I’ll post when and as I’m able, and leave it at that.  Moving on…

Happy Halloween.  In keeping with the spirit of the holiday, I thought I’d say a little about fear in your game.  Maybe you’re playing a dedicated horror game like Call of Cthulhu.  Maybe you just want to visit the theme for a plotline or two in a game like D&D or HERO.  Either way, if you want to inspire some fear in your players, there are a couple of things to consider.

Description Matters

As with evoking any other emotion, your description of the characters’ surroundings and the NPCs will have a large impact on the amount of fear the players feel.  Sensory detail is your friend.  Perhaps most important are the non-visual details.  Does the old windmill creak and groan as it turns?  Does the wind howl?  Is there no sound at all in the abandoned manor except for the characters’ own muffled footfalls across the carpeted floor?  And while aural cues are very effective, the sense of smell or touch is often even more evocative.  Is the tomb dry and dusty, or damp and musty?  Are the characters having to brush cobwebs off their exposed skin?  Is the air cold and clammy?  Or is it uncomfortably, and unaccountably, warm?

By the same token, though, you want to avoid cliche.  Maybe you’ve seen something like this, when a fantasy game or movie aims for fear:

The center of the room is dominated by a sacrificial pit, the stones surrounding it stained with the blood of countless victims.  Stretching across the pit is a slab of black basalt, likewise drenched in blood, and bearing numerous heavy, rusted chains.  A skull still sits atop it, and many others decorate the room, grinning out at you from alcoves recessed into the walls.  Beyond, the flickering torchlight barely reveals a wooden door, its surface marked by a crimson glyph…

A room like that would be pretty scary in real life, sure.  But these are all fairly standard fantasy trappings, and splashing extra stage blood around the place doesn’t really do much to make it more scary.  A description like this might signal players that they’re supposed to be scared, and they might roleplay accordingly, if they feel their characters would be prone to fear it.  For many characters, though, this won’t be so — they’ll instead play resolute, or angry, or even attempt to mock it.

So… you want to give the players a scare.  How?

Fear of the Unknown

Alfred Hitchcock once said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”  Stephen King said something similar, but even more direct, to the effect that when you show the monster, it immediately becomes less frightening.

To take advantage of this sort of tension, you need to avoid letting the players see the monster.  Show results:  the devastated town, the strewn-about disembodied limbs, the emaciated livestock corpses, the shattered armor of a great NPC hero.  Let them hear the thing slithering in the shadows, or stomping somewhere beyond the treeline.  Let them feel the ground shake, or the unnatural chill of the creature’s presence.  But hold off on letting them see it.  If you must, then let them see just a part — a flashing fang in the shadow, a whipping snakelike tail slinking into the underbrush, an indistinct ethereal glow reflected in a mirror.  Save the big reveal as long as you can.

Fear of the Known

This is an entirely different kind of tension, and it’s driven either by a sense of helplessness or by time pressure.  In this case, the characters know who lived at that abandoned manner.  They were friends, perhaps comrades in arms, perhaps a mentor figure.  And they know why the manor is now abandoned, and they weren’t able to do a thing about it.

This is also the tension that comes into play when the party is holed up, trying to survive the vampire’s assaults until dawn.  Only three hours away, now, but it’s smart, it’s tireless, and the wounds and fatigue are starting to add up…

Fear of the Unexpected

Pulling the carpet out from underneath the characters is a good way to induce some fear in the players, so long as you don’t overdo it.  Give them a scene that sets up an expectation, and then prevent or subvert that expectation.  The homey little cottage on the outskirts of town turns out to be abandoned, perhaps in haste — a pot of stew still sits congealed on the hearth, the flame long since dead.  The characters make camp and go to sleep in the roadside inn, but they awaken in a dungeon.  Every dog the ranger walks past is suddenly growling at him, or slinking away whining.

Avoid Paranoia

Possibly the biggest problem with fear is overdoing it.  If everything is unexpected or eerie or maddening, then the players reasonably become suspicious of everything, and play bogs down as they search everything and interrogate everyone.  Twice, just for good measure.

Pacing is key.  Don’t jump headlong into a horror plot and keep pumping out the terror at maximum volume; you’ll only desensitize them.  Introduce elements slowly, give tension time to build.  If you see your players starting to become paranoid, that’s a sign you’re doing something right — but also that you should ratchet things back a little bit, until they relax a little.  Then it’ll be time for more.  Develop some suspense.  Give the players a break now and then.  The plot will come out better in the long run.

Avoid Mechanically-Inspired Fear

This I know is controversial in some circles, but I’ve always felt that game mechanics are a poor means of inducing fear.  Old-school level drain was one example of this philosophy:  undead are supposed to be scary, so how can we convey that?  Aha!  If they hit you, you lose a level!

Taking away some of the character’s development in this way does scare the players.  The problem is that it does so completely outside of the context of the game.  When they’re afraid of a spectre, for instance, they’re afraid of the “lose two levels instantly” ability — not of the GM’s description of the ghastly wraithlike monster or the horror of its newly-revealed ultimate goal.  In fact, it distracts from all of that, because players tend to focus on that potential out-of-game loss to the detriment of those descriptions of the in-game world.

In short, it’s an easy way of producing fear, but also a cheap and shallow one.  Aim for something with true depth of terror.

(Coming up: A much-belated interview.)

Related posts:

1. More on Skill Challenges…
2. Narration in Combat
3. Review: Open Game Table Anthology, Volume 1