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I agree with playing with your friends. It's not just TTRPGs. People suck. I don't play games on XBox with a mic and headphones either. I don't want to hear from "those people".

That being said, there are lots of different games out there for TTRPGs and they don't need to be mechanically dense or video game like to ease people into it.

Forbidden Lands is my go to game and I am introducing 2 friends who have never played TTRPGs to it as their first game this weekend.

It's not the mechanics they are questioning. It's getting around the idea that they can do anything. They will work their way through that problem after about 10 minutes.

 Lance845 wrote:
I agree with playing with your friends. It's not just TTRPGs. People suck. I don't play games on XBox with a mic and headphones either. I don't want to hear from "those people".

That being said, there are lots of different games out there for TTRPGs and they don't need to be mechanically dense or video game like to ease people into it.

Forbidden Lands is my go to game and I am introducing 2 friends who have never played TTRPGs to it as their first game this weekend.

It's not the mechanics they are questioning. It's getting around the idea that they can do anything. They will work their way through that problem after about 10 minutes.

True, but you know what helps with that problem is a system where what you can do is written out for them and fairly limited in the situations where it's awkward to pause and think for a while (i.e., when everyone is taking turns in combat) and where the resolution mechanism is pretty simplistic out of combat where people are just roleplaying freely and have more time to think about their actions.

It's also nice to have different classes with different degrees of complexity when it comes to combat. We have one player who really gets into the mechanics on a druid which gives them a huge array of different action options each round - do you cast a spell, throw a cantrip, do a weapon attack, use a special ability, or turn into one of a dozen odd animal forms - and then another player who loves roleplaying but just wants to play a safe archer and shoot their bow in combat.

I have had much more success getting non-RPG folks to play a rules-lite system than D&D because all the layers of D&D is too much for what they are actually looking for.

They want to sit around the table and tell stories with each other and occasionally roll a dice or two. Rules-lite has been infinitely better at this.... for me.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
I agree with playing with your friends. It's not just TTRPGs. People suck. I don't play games on XBox with a mic and headphones either. I don't want to hear from "those people".

That being said, there are lots of different games out there for TTRPGs and they don't need to be mechanically dense or video game like to ease people into it.

Forbidden Lands is my go to game and I am introducing 2 friends who have never played TTRPGs to it as their first game this weekend.

It's not the mechanics they are questioning. It's getting around the idea that they can do anything. They will work their way through that problem after about 10 minutes.

True, but you know what helps with that problem is a system where what you can do is written out for them and fairly limited in the situations where it's awkward to pause and think for a while (i.e., when everyone is taking turns in combat) and where the resolution mechanism is pretty simplistic out of combat where people are just roleplaying freely and have more time to think about their actions.

It's also nice to have different classes with different degrees of complexity when it comes to combat. We have one player who really gets into the mechanics on a druid which gives them a huge array of different action options each round - do you cast a spell, throw a cantrip, do a weapon attack, use a special ability, or turn into one of a dozen odd animal forms - and then another player who loves roleplaying but just wants to play a safe archer and shoot their bow in combat.

Again, I am glad you enjoy that, but I don't see those as good things. Classes are not representations of people. They are a thing I pick in Diablo to give me a build I work on.

As for combat, maybe I need to not be vague and open ended about it so that you have something to actually compare it to?

In the Uni System by Eden studios you perform an action by rolling 1d10 and add stat plus skill. A total of 9-10 is 1 success. 11-12 is 2. 13-14 is 3. So on and so forth. Character sheets have a little box for combat maneuvers with your totals on it so the math is already done for you and you have a little chart showing successes. Everyone gets 1 defensive and 1 offensive action for free. Each additional action is a cumulative -2 penalty. The opposing player can try to defend and ties go to the defender.

So I want to shoot a bow. Dex+bow+1d10. I want to dodge, dex+dodge or acrobatics+d10. What if I want to take my time and aim? Perception+Bow and you add the successes to your attack but you have lost your place in initiative and you now act last in the round. It's intuitive and easy and you always add the appropriate skill and stat with the players even being able to say "I want to use x stat with y attribute because" and the DM can approve. The players can do anything. It's far easier for the players, especially new players to conceptualize than DnD because they don't need to memorize minutia for rules and they can get as creative as they want. "I want to run and cut the rope holding the chandelier up and then swing from the rope to kick the guy in the face. "Okay. Thats going to be 2 actions with a test. Give me a Dex+Sword to cut the rope. You only need 1 success. Give me a simple strength test to hold on to the rope as it pulls you up (str doubled+d10). Then give me a Brawl+Dex for the kick. It's -2 because it's your 2rd offensive action in the round but I will give you a +1 Str modifier to your damage for the extra umph from the swing."

Thats far easier and far more immersive for everyone involved. DM and players.

In Forbidden Lands you have a table of fast and slow actions. Every turn you can take 2 fast actions or 1 fast and 1 slow action. Move, Parry dodge. Fast actions. Attacking is a slow action. Same as before, ties go to the defender. Moving around the battlefield is simple and abstracted into zones. So in a in the open table area is a zone. Behind the bar is another zone. Being in the same zone is "Near". Getting into melee range is "Arms Length" So If I want to get behind the Bar by jumping it it's a move action (Agility+Move and has to be rolled because it's rough terrain to jump the bar). Then I can save my second action to defend. So on and so forth.

Not being DnD and placing players into level/class boxes doesn't mean getting infinitely more complex or so abstract as to be meaningless. There is a full spectrum of systems out there that are capable of both strategic crunch and open ended narrative driven action at the same time while keeping it simple and easy to digest.

I will definitely be checking Forbidden Lands out, because it seems like it scratches some itches left unscratched by D&D 5e.

I never heard of it so looked it up. It looks interesting and I'll have to check out hopefully some youtube reviews of it tonight if they exist. Apparently it started out as a crowdfunding project and now Modiphius is involved?

 warboss wrote:
I never heard of it so looked it up. It looks interesting and I'll have to check out hopefully some youtube reviews of it tonight if they exist. Apparently it started out as a crowdfunding project and now Modiphius is involved?

Modiphius is international distribution for Free League (A Swedish company). Free League is the company that makes it and a number of other games using their Year Zero game system. Mutant: Year Zero would be the game the engine is named after. Free League is a faction from another one of their games Coriolis. They have been doing crowd funding for a number of their projects (but not all).

Their games include.

Alien* (as in the movie franchise)
Coriolis* (A sci fi game described as 1001 arabian nights in space with firefly and dashes of alien/lovecraft for good measure)
Forbidden Lands* (Rogues and Raiders in a cursed world - Their fantasy game)
Tales From the Loop/Things From the Flood (based on a art books about a sci fi 1980s/90s that never was. Amazon Prime made a show based on the RPG)
Mutant Year Zero (post apoc wasteland survival. Think Fallout. Is actually several games that can all be mixed and matched. Genetically engineered anthropomorphic animals. Sentient robots. Mutant survivors. Decadent humans surviving in an ark for generations).
Vassen (Victorian myth and monster hunters)
Symbaroum (A very Dark Fantasy game that takes place in a single massive dark forest. This is the one game with huge mechanical divergence from the others.)
Twilight 2000 (A post world war survivalist game)

* These are the ones I own.

 Lance845 wrote:

 warboss wrote:
I never heard of it so looked it up. It looks interesting and I'll have to check out hopefully some youtube reviews of it tonight if they exist. Apparently it started out as a crowdfunding project and now Modiphius is involved?

Modiphius is international distribution for Free League (A Swedish company). Free League is the company that makes it and a number of other games using their Year Zero game system. Mutant: Year Zero would be the game the engine is named after. Free League is a faction from another one of their games Coriolis. They have been doing crowd funding for a number of their projects (but not all).

Their games include.

Alien* (as in the movie franchise)
Coriolis* (A sci fi game described as 1001 arabian nights in space with firefly and dashes of alien/lovecraft for good measure)
Forbidden Lands* (Rogues and Raiders in a cursed world - Their fantasy game)
Tales From the Loop/Things From the Flood (based on a art books about a sci fi 1980s/90s that never was. Amazon Prime made a show based on the RPG)
Mutant Year Zero (post apoc wasteland survival. Think Fallout. Is actually several games that can all be mixed and matched. Genetically engineered anthropomorphic animals. Sentient robots. Mutant survivors. Decadent humans surviving in an ark for generations).
Vassen (Victorian myth and monster hunters)
Symbaroum (A very Dark Fantasy game that takes place in a single massive dark forest. This is the one game with huge mechanical divergence from the others.)
Twilight 2000 (A post world war survivalist game)

* These are the ones I own.

How is the Alien RPG? I really like the idea of it but I’m afraid it could be a bit one-dimensional.

 Horla wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:

 warboss wrote:
I never heard of it so looked it up. It looks interesting and I'll have to check out hopefully some youtube reviews of it tonight if they exist. Apparently it started out as a crowdfunding project and now Modiphius is involved?

Modiphius is international distribution for Free League (A Swedish company). Free League is the company that makes it and a number of other games using their Year Zero game system. Mutant: Year Zero would be the game the engine is named after. Free League is a faction from another one of their games Coriolis. They have been doing crowd funding for a number of their projects (but not all).

Their games include.

Alien* (as in the movie franchise)
Coriolis* (A sci fi game described as 1001 arabian nights in space with firefly and dashes of alien/lovecraft for good measure)
Forbidden Lands* (Rogues and Raiders in a cursed world - Their fantasy game)
Tales From the Loop/Things From the Flood (based on a art books about a sci fi 1980s/90s that never was. Amazon Prime made a show based on the RPG)
Mutant Year Zero (post apoc wasteland survival. Think Fallout. Is actually several games that can all be mixed and matched. Genetically engineered anthropomorphic animals. Sentient robots. Mutant survivors. Decadent humans surviving in an ark for generations).
Vassen (Victorian myth and monster hunters)
Symbaroum (A very Dark Fantasy game that takes place in a single massive dark forest. This is the one game with huge mechanical divergence from the others.)
Twilight 2000 (A post world war survivalist game)

* These are the ones I own.

How is the Alien RPG? I really like the idea of it but I’m afraid it could be a bit one-dimensional.

Yeah, I don't know about an entire Alien RPG but I ran Alien as a Monster of the Week one-off a while back and it was absolutely stellar. Redesigned the alien's physiological characteristics somewhat so people couldn't metagame using their knowledge from the movie, set up a big sprawling ship map and followed the Monster of the Week "what would happen if the heroes did nothing" track, making sure to set up scenarios where characters were split up, isolated, or multiple things went wrong at once so players could either let one thing fail or split the party. I tracked the player's 'near-miss points' myself (though I explained how all the mechanics would work to the players beforehand) and every encounter would end, outwardly, with a player getting away from the alien and receiving a note that said either, basically "you escaped successfully" or "you were injected by something from the creature, and now you know that you are a part of it. Soon, you will change and ascend your human form, but you must continue to play along until you can find a time and place to do that safely. If you survive the scenario, you will win and the other players will lose."

The final scene was basically the paranoia scene from The Thing where the alien is defeated, the players start to celebrate, and one of the remaining NPCs starts screaming "NOT NOW, NO ITS TOO SOON" and explodes out some extra limbs to let the players know that some of their crewmates may no longer be on their side.

 Horla wrote:

How is the Alien RPG? I really like the idea of it but I’m afraid it could be a bit one-dimensional.

It's set up to be played in two ways.

1) Cinematically. Basically as a series of contained 1-2 shots. Characters are not generally meant to survive for ongoing campaigns. Adventures are set up in 3 acts. Characters are given agendas that they hide from the others. It sort of meant to hide a Burke or Ash on your crew. All the premade adventures for the game so far are Cinematic.

2) Ongoing. Full character creation and ship building rules. World generation tables. Big history of the universe and background on lots of things.

Mechanically it's great, but I agree with you that it's really probably best used as a series of one shots. Go full theatrics. Play in the dark by giving your players glow sticks to look at their sheets/dice. Face their couch/table against a wall. Do your DMing behind them so you can throw books on the floor behind them for jump scares, tap them on their shoulders. flick water off your finger tips onto the back of their necks. Buy a cheap red strobe light if they try to blow the ship up and then start a real counter for how much time they have left. Thats how I intend to use it. I am currently working on the idea of making maybe 5-6 cinematic one shots that show different characters in different areas seeing different angles on a singular over all story and ending it with a final session that ties the events of all of them together.

That actually sounds pretty fun, I could see the group I’m in going for a couple of “seasons” of Alien between D&D campaigns. We play online though so hard to immerse them with props and jump scares though - hopefully post-apocalypse we can do that. Thanks for the perspectives!

Running an Alien campaign would be tricky for multi-session play on, say, the Nostromo where you have a very limited cast and no way to replace a dead PC. If you set it on a Space Station like Sevastopol from Alien Isolation or a colony then a player can take over control of an NPC, such as a colonial marshal, engineer etc. to carry on playing in the campaign after their original character's death. Also allows for more threats than just the Alien, such as synths, other survivors etc. to break up the flow of the game so it isn't 100% Alien fighting 100% of the time.

I think a combination of multi-session mini campaigns and one shots would work well. You could even follow the events of the films pretty nicely:

1) One shot on Nostromo or other non-military spacecraft, survivors will carry on into part 2.
1.5) One shot or small multi-session campaign on colony who go to investigate wreck encountered in part 1 (either they stumble onto it or, if a survivor from part 1 gave information to a company, maybe they are told to investigate). Make this a pure survival game. The players just need to get a distress call out, gather whatever supplies they can, find a secure space to hold up and survive if possible. They cannot escape and lack the firepower necessary to kill the aliens, though they can fashion equipment (flamethrowers jury rigged from blowtorches, molotov cocktails, pipe bombs etc.) to repel them in small numbers and for short amounts of time. Survivors will be encountered in part 2.
2) Survivors from Part 1 who choose to go are attached to a detachment of marines to investigate reported issues at colony from part 1.5. So the players can choose to carry on with their character from part 1 (if they survived), their character from 1.5 (if any survived) or a new character in the form of a marine or company man. This would be another mini campaign, involving the marines arriving, attempting to locate and rescue the colonists, gak going south, needing to hold up and defend themselves, call down a new dropship/get to an LZ, get systems such as power, communications, maybe even life support depending on how far along the terraforming process is etc.
3) I'd set this on a Space station with survivors from part 2 rerouted to dock for repairs to their ship or some other reason. Alien had somehow got on board (or perhaps have a supply ship leave the colony in part 1.5 with an alien on board). They are made to undergo quarantine and sealed off in a part of the station (or perhaps the ship docks automatically but fails to awaken them from hypersleep until several weeks later) and when they come out, all hell has broken loose. People are missing, order has broken down, the AI seems to be malfunctioning, large parts of the station are locked down etc.

And so on.

Yeah, the only complaint I'd have with any of that is the amount that the horror of Alien (or thing, or cthulhu, or any established horror canon property) is the amount metagaming is absolutely going to ruin the experience.

People know about Xenomorphs, they know the various cthulhu monsters, they know about how The Thing works. You have to make your own thing if you want 'figuring out how the rules of the creature works' to be any part of the experience. Otherwise you'll be relying on all your players to feign ignorance the whole time.

Yeah. It is somewhat important to reskin things to keep the unknown as part of what is going on.

I find that you can't achieve real horror in a TTRPG. The closest you can get is thriller/action-horror, mostly via close call combat where death is likely and by setting a disturbing atmosphere.

I have played with a GM who managed it, mostly through Silent Hill style psychological stuff and body horror or cosmic horror.

But he is a really talented GM, I have rarely seen anyone else pull it off, or pulled it off myself (I had a successful gothic horror campaign but I would say it was more of an adventure or mystery campaign with horror themes, I don't think the players felt scared often).

 LordofHats wrote:
I find that you can't achieve real horror in a TTRPG. The closest you can get is thriller/action-horror, mostly via close call combat where death is likely and by setting a disturbing atmosphere.

You can't create real horror, that's true. But I think when people want to play in a horror game, what they really want to do is take on the PREMISE of a horror movie, but in their own perfectly rational, not at all afraid because they're not in real danger mindset, and see if they could "do better" than the characters in whatever most recent movie they saw.

The problem is that any established canonical universe that everyone is familiar with will basically result in the "figuring out if you could do better" being a total moot point. If you set up a horror scenario and the villain is a Vampire, every player either has to spend the whole game pretending their characters don't know about vampires, or they are just going to metagame and easily defeat the vampire because they know about garlic and stakes and crosses etc.

strangely, it does seem like a lot of people are really interested in the play-acting aspect, which I have really never understood in the context of an rpg. the players going in with extensive metaknowledge is practically a selling point of 99% of RPGs by now - "hey its Thing You Know the RPG! Don't play an RPG, just sit around a table and find a way to work in quotes and references to the source material you're familiar with!"

I think it's kind of a balancing act. There's knowing you know what you know, and knowing what your character probably knows and playing with that constraint. 'It's what my character would do' is kind of a dirty phrase these days often invoked by chaotic-stupid trolls, but it's also a good thing to remembering in RP.

There are times where I've known exactly what the best course of action was and chosen not to take it because the context would suggest superhuman foreknowledge on the part of the character. I know that door is a mimic, but this is also a creepy house with body part looking things everywhere, so my character actually has no reason to think a tongue handle doorknob is out of place in this environment where we've yet to meet any mimics.

I think it'll vary heavily by group and premise. The vampire thing for example I think would be most exciting if the group didn't know who the vampire was and had to investigate suspects, all while NPCs are dropping after each long rest. That would build a suitably horrific atmosphere, but the characters themselves would not feasibly be the ones who are in danger.

Since Alien has kind of been the subject. They just put up for preorder their first campaign expansion book that focuses on the Marines (my understanding is they intend another book that deals with blue collar workers ala alien (space truckers) and another that focuses more on colonists).

https://frialigan.se/en/store/?product_id=6209999667349

 LordofHats wrote:
I think it's kind of a balancing act. There's knowing you know what you know, and knowing what your character probably knows and playing with that constraint. 'It's what my character would do' is kind of a dirty phrase these days often invoked by chaotic-stupid trolls, but it's also a good thing to remembering in RP.

There are times where I've known exactly what the best course of action was and chosen not to take it because the context would suggest superhuman foreknowledge on the part of the character. I know that door is a mimic, but this is also a creepy house with body part looking things everywhere, so my character actually has no reason to think a tongue handle doorknob is out of place in this environment where we've yet to meet any mimics.

I think it'll vary heavily by group and premise. The vampire thing for example I think would be most exciting if the group didn't know who the vampire was and had to investigate suspects, all while NPCs are dropping after each long rest. That would build a suitably horrific atmosphere, but the characters themselves would not feasibly be the ones who are in danger.

I did a game similar to this where all the "clues" pointed to a Vampire, but it was really a semi-gelatinous, large, blood sucking slug.

However, it was great seeing the players accuse the various NPCs, and even a point where some party members were starting to suspect a different party member had been "turned".

They ended up eventually fleeing and never finding out what was really going on. Good fun!

For anyone curious about the Alien RPG. I present to you Heath Death, a brilliant short campaign run by the wonderful people at Loading Ready Run.

https://youtu.be/bv1PdTcx3JM

Horror in DnD is hard, but I think doable if you go more of a action-horror style where you know that ultimately there's going to be a big ol' scrap with abig ol' Terrible Beasty, but where you have the chance to add in sufficiently creepy/unsettling/ content along the way so yhat final encounter is the release of built-up tension, paranoia and fear. Aside from low,levels, combat is rarely lethal enough to have an instant grisly death be a looming threat, but all the other tropes of horror storytelling can still be made to work. Only partial glimpses of the monster, sowing doubt and discord until the heroes turn on each other and, lazy as it might be, just leaning into the gore/body horror a bit to make something mechanically mundane still very unpleasant (though obviously, never beyond the tolerance of the people you're playing with).

The advantage you have is that just by virtue or playing a horror game. they're signing up for the genre. and something that might be innocuous in a classic high fantasy becomes suddenly noteworthy as part of a horror game, and the players will latch onto that if they're doing it right. Undead are a good example. In a fantasy game, they're a low level trash mob to be cut to bits with ease, and interchangable with goblins ir pixies or wolves. No one has ever been scared fighting a basic skeleton warrior... But in a horror game, the fact that dead body just got up and is groaning at you with airless lungs while the still-feeding maggots drip from its loosely hanging jaw, and chunks of flesh slough away as it begins to lurch with unknowable intent... That *should* be scary if you've built up the right atmosphere. and if your players are suitably willing to buy into the tone the game is going for

You can then mechanically augment that if you want. Make it immune to physical damage perhaps. Let it use shards of its own shattered bones as weapons that deal poison or necrotic damage as the curse spreads to its targets. Let it bite a victim who then has a day to find a cure or suffer the same fate. Now that zombie, who's still maybe doing sod all in the way of actual damage. is one good roll away from setting a time bomb ticking, and it can't be just cut down, and now suddenly it's a threat. Apply that formula to a gnoll (already scary if you ask me. because hyenas, man...) or a giant or a hell, a kraken, and you've got yourself a bona fide horror beastie This is an extreme example, and possibly still not the most interesting, but it gets the point across. Setting the tone is 80% of the work, and the players are actively helping with that, and the rest can be just a few mechanical tweaks to raise the stakes or change the familiar into the unknown.

And that's before you get into Star Spawn and Oblex and Dbyuuk and Mind Flayers where even more of the heavy lifting is done in psychological or body horror long before they even catch sight of the monster. Yes, you can kind of only pull it off once with a given creature, and the more knowledgeable your players the harder you have to work, but it's not impossible and can be very rewarding. And when your players know the monster manuals inside out. you've still got an ace in the whole, which is that a guy in a mask with a creepy voice is a scarier monster than any statblock you'll ever find...

All that said, if you want to go all in on the horror in gaming and really eke out every drop of suspense and trepidation, Dread is to my mind the best game to do it with. Needs to be done in person. as it uses a Jenga tower for resolving its actions, but when that's a thing that can happen again, I highly recommend it

the_scotsman wrote:
...or they are just going to metagame and easily defeat the vampire because they know about garlic and stakes and crosses etc.

That is where you can twist that around a bit. Have garlic do nothing, crosses only work when used by those with a conviction in their faith, running water might weaken the vampire but not stop it completely, same with thresholds, does the vampire need to sleep on its home soil or can it wander freely? Then mix in some different vampire lore from different regions so you have your vampire by way of Stoker in Dracula, throw in some Slavic Strzyga etc.

But have all that folklore such as garlic repelling vampires exist within the game world, maybe it is also believed that silver works, or salt. It isn't like false remedies and protections wouldn't exist.

Now the players try garlic and it doesn't work. Is that because garlic doesn't work on vampires? Or maybe it isn't a vampire? This cross the anti-religious edgelord is waving isn't doing anything either, how come? We've managed to stake it in the heart and buried it again but the next night the grave had been disturbed and the body was gone.

Get the players really guessing and questioning all the assumptions they brought with them from outside the game on how vampires work. Have them grasping at whatever clues they can gather in game on weaknesses of the vampire, some of them true, others just superstition.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LordofHats wrote:
I find that you can't achieve real horror in a TTRPG. The closest you can get is thriller/action-horror, mostly via close call combat where death is likely and by setting a disturbing atmosphere.

In rebuttal of this claim I present Exhibit A

I think I have referenced it somewhere else on the Forum recently, but Horror in an RPG (like D7D especially) is like trying to write a good Superman story.

Superman is immune to most attacks, can't really be killed, and has few weaknesses. Really, a straight combat solution will NOT work against Superman. You can not outright endanger him, so how do you make a compelling story with Superman? The trick is you do no physically threaten Superman at all, instead you threat his values OR things around him that he values.

Horror RPGs are the same, they shouldn't threaten the PCs physically that often. Instead, they have to threaten what PCs think of the world, each other, and the NPCs around them.

Well I think thats more true with a game like DnD where everyone has piles of HP and combat amounts to chipping away at them. But games where HP pools are small, damage has impact, and there is a potential psychological impact as well can be good for horror games.

I once played a game where the players had a separate stamina pool. When they got down to 10 Sta they would take a -2 to all actions. at 5 it was -5. At 0 they had to start making rolls to not pass out from exhaustion.

Even without the mechanical effect players started having their characters acting tired and needing to rest when they got down to 15-20 because they had some kind of gauge to show them how tired they were and a mechanical impact around the corner.

Horror can be done, and mechanics can consciously and subconsciously influence RP. You just need the right systems.

the_scotsman wrote:

...the players going in with extensive metaknowledge is practically a selling point of 99% of RPGs by now - "hey its Thing You Know the RPG! Don't play an RPG, just sit around a table and find a way to work in quotes and references to the source material you're familiar with!"

That sounds like my nightmare! I've deliberately kept myself ignorant of most DnD monsters just so I can have the fun of discovering them through the game, but I only started playing about a year ago.
It was a bit tiresome recently though to roll play for three sessions about not knowing silver hurt werewolves, but only because it was impossible to hurt it without that knowledge!

We did also have a situation where we encountered some medusa things, but everyone was really good about not metagaming and going in with a mirror or hiding around the corner!.

 Lance845 wrote:
Well I think thats more true with a game like DnD where everyone has piles of HP and combat amounts to chipping away at them. But games where HP pools are small, damage has impact, and there is a potential psychological impact as well can be good for horror games.

Yes, I was specifically referencing D&D Horror games more than something with a bit higher lethality.

The question is always what makes a good horror game.....

Had our first real encounters last night at a newly minted 2nd level and almost TPK'ed thanks to a Leroy Jenkins by a party member... Wow... yeah... those BBEG are damage sponges.

Kind of excited. My artificer has succeeded in building a Linear Combustion Bow (musket) in my Strahd game after several weeks of planning. I've never used a gun in a DnD game before but it felt appropriate for a character I'm playing as a mad scientist tinkering with weapons and armor. Then I gave it the Repeating Shot infusion, so I literally have a machine gun, which is visually pretty impressive in my head.

Been running my campaign through discord and roll20 now for a few weeks, characters are all still level 1. Chased them around with my homebrew wraith I posted about earlier called a Bloodwraith. Was lots of fun, made the cleric wee himself in fear at one point.

I'm trying to make online dnd as fun as possible and as enthralling as it is in person but it's pretty difficult. I'd like a way to produce sound effects that every player can hear straight away, roll20 appears to have a music function but I cannot get it to work for the life of me, any ideas?