This is part 2 of a series on landscapes of fear (Part 1, Part 3): today I am going to talk about why it’s important to build a landscape that evokes fear. But before I get to that, two announcements:
–My first RPG zine, Shadowfeats: OSR Feats and Quirks for Shadowdark, is out now! 130 even-level Feats. 135 Quirks. Grounded options for Shadowdark that give characters texture and teeth. May your PCs be unique before they die.
–Tales from the Tape Deck is launching soon on Kickstarter. It’s a “tabletop role-playing game that fits in a cassette tape case. Each Volume contains a new setting, character options and rules.” Today’s post is a partly about why you should check it out.
Landscapes of Fear: Why Fear?
"...love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails."
--Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1513) (trans. by Luigi Ricci)
Before I dive into the various tricks I use to make my PCs afraid as often as I can, I want to pause and talk motivation. I am still learning how to be a good GM, and I struggled with this post this week. I had to pull the reasoning for my current playstyle out of my gut, and examine it in the light of day. At the end, much of what I have to say is standard OSR advice for GMs, just hopefully reframed and connected in a useful way.
So, why make your players afraid?
Artwork © Nicolas Samori.
If you are playing Mothership, this isn’t even a question–fear is a game goal. So first, some context: my weekly game is DnD 5e in an OSR style: it’s not horror or even grimdark (we are not into hurt kids or adult themes, its seven dads drinking beer and being heroic). Despite that, I consider making my players afraid very important, for one simple reason.
I had to go look up the psychological term for what I am about to say, and it’s not going to be a surprise to any veteran GM out there: “emotional arousal” (engagement). When we feel one emotion strongly, our physiological response causes all emotions to hit harder. Our attention narrows, our heart speeds up. Joy feels bigger, anger feels sharper, sadness feels heavier. And most importantly, when we are emotionally aroused, our memories are more vivid.
That’s what I want our game to be: memorable, emotional, fun. Full of narrow escapes and hard choices, excitement and sweet victories.
Emotions lie at the heart of storytelling: we feel emotional resonance to a good story or to a friend’s fate. An echo of their reaction, kindled in our hearts. Emotional engagement is central to both the sandbox and railroad styles of GMing: regardless of whether the GM wants emotion to emerge organically, as a result of players making meaningful choices (sandbox), or they want to tell a story that leads players into emotion (railroad), their goal is an emotional reaction. GMs want players to be excited and having fun, to tell stories later about their session.
A good GM lays the groundwork for their players to feel emotional resonance: they create a landscape of emotion. There are lots of emotions a GM can draw upon: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy, Surprise, Wonder, Sadness, Contempt, Trust, Anticipation, Pride, Embarrassment, etc. Sly Flourish is an advocate for evoking wonder through fantastic places, for example.
A good session should cause a diversity of feelings, with positive emotions hopefully dominating. If a session feels flat, with inattentive players (been there)--they are not emotionally engaged in the outcome. This may be because they feel they have no agency in driving the story, no attachment to the story of the world or of their character, or many other things. Pulling on their emotions pulls them back into the game–they will want to meaningfully respond to what happened. If the GM gives them agency to do so, they have achieved a virtuous cycle of Emotionally Engaged GamingTM (see my gorgeous diagram below).
So why focus on evoking fear, amongst all the emotions?
Because, to quote a great blog post, adventure RPGs are “emotional gambling.” Players can’t help but invest emotions, to a greater or lesser degree, in the PCs they role-play: creativity, pride, affection, empathy, joy. Our player characters are small extensions of our identity. When these fingers of our self are threatened with death or harm, however fictional or remote, we feel the stirrings of fear.
By risking loss or harm to our character, we gamble our emotional state. The return is emotional engagement, and more intense joy when they survive and we win.
It’s no surprise then that many fantasy RPGs, 5e included, have conflict as a big part of the core rules and play culture. Combat, by indirectly striking at a player’s mental well-being, creates fear and emotional engagement. If one can ‘win’ the game of DnD, if at all, it’s by not dying in combat. To quote Jared Sinclair’s excellent blog post on win conditions in role-playing games:
“One can be said to win combat if one makes it out alive: "One ought not to die," then. A loss condition is as good as a win condition for instantiating a value system in a game. We could go further, and observe that these parts of tabletop role-play where an implicit win condition pops up (such as "one ought not to die") are also the places where the rules take on a shape more akin to board games or video games.
Even disconnected players value not dying, because dying feels like losing, like punishment. In other words, fear of character death and diminishment is a shortcut to getting your players to care about playing the game.
Triggers of fear: you have to be willing to kill your darlings
"...the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear."
--The Princess Bride (1987)
Nothing I wrote above is a surprise to OSR players: they have long maintained the importance of having a real possibility of character death, it gives the game stakes (i.e., emotional engagement). We have to address the serious challenge of a lack of player risk in many adventure games (and especially 5e), and the downsides of death in OSR games–I am going to talk about that in part 3. But, before I end this post, I think we can learn something by examining this framing a step further.
Common GM advice is to engage players by using all the senses when describing a scene. Emotional engagement often occurs via a trigger, appearing through one of the senses. Thus, it’s important to involve all the senses not only when giving room descriptions, but also when designing a RPG session or a RPG game. Touch, for example, is one of the reasons I think Mausritter is so popular–consider the visceral emotional trigger of physically accepting a condition card and having to pick up and remove a beloved item card to make room. Another example: dice pools are popular, because who doesn’t like throwing a lot of dice to find out what happens? Another: the jenga tower of Dread RPG.
RPGs are predominantly a visual- and hearing-dominated medium. It’s hard to conjure up taste or smells, but increasing the diversity of visual, audio, and tactile experiences can aid engagement. Music, props, bowls with dungeon dice, doom tokens, visuals, minis–yeah yeah I can feel the collective eyeroll of you readers. We KNOW this stuff, this is why the hobby is like it is, why it starts out cheap and can snowball into half your disposable income if you let it. A diversity of stimuli works up to a point, that point being the distraction of your players with too many stimuli (and/or the insanity of the GM trying to prep all this stuff). As always, season to your taste.
But it helps me, at least, to finally connect all the disparate means-to-an-end (tips and tricks) suggested to me as a GM, with the ultimate goal (emotional engagement). It encourages me to experiment for greater emotional arousal, and move beyond my personal default gaming set-up.
What’s more, not all ‘experiences’ (or ‘cues’) translate into strong emotional triggers. If they did, we would be so overstimulated we couldn’t function day to day. The key to running an engaging RPG is to regularly elevate a cue into a trigger, just often enough to keep your players hooked. Boring combat won’t do it, and combat is boring without a risk of failure. If you want your PCs to emotionally respond to a cue, they have to believe it comes with a consequence.
For your words and cues to matter, they have to be backed by action. At the right time, you must follow through at least once when there is a cue–that’s what makes it an emotional trigger. When they make a mistake and you have clearly communicated the danger, maybe they survive this time. But at some point, you must kill your darling PCs, hurt them, curse them, ruin their day, tear down their character sheet piece by piece. All so you can cheer them on later.
Best to do it early, so you can train them in the ways of fear.. A cautious player, about to do something dangerous so they can be a hero, is living their best life.
I want to close this part of this series by giving two examples of successful emotional triggers in my recent games.
In this light, looking at my last session, I made a mistake. There were ‘translator crowns’ that PCs were encouraged to put on to communicate with the denizens of a strange city: they were mind-enslavement devices, of course. I SHOULD have gone to Burger King, gotten some paper crown props, and handed one to each PC that put them on (two did, my players rock). Visceral touch would have increased the player’s horror at their mistake–they were plenty chagrined, but this would have brought it home. I had crafted a solid emotional trigger of fear and horror, but no associated stimulus.
Also in this light, I now know why I had the greatest game of Pirate Borg ever when Ahmed of Suffety Games ran ‘Into the Maelstrom’ for us at PAXU26. Without spoilers, we were on a mission to save some imprisoned friends, represented by a playing card dealt to each of us, and every time a bell rang, the GMs around us (this was a multi-table tourney) removed one of the cards as a PC’s prisoner died. But Ahmed went one step further–he picked up the card from in front of the affected player, and ripped. it. into. pieces. This was some top-level GM emotional impact! It turned what was an annoying cue for other tables, the bell, into an visceral experience that made all of us wince with regret. By doubling down on a cue, diversifying it, he turned it into an fearful emotional trigger.
It also led to absolute hilarity when we later found a random Relic and Ahmed rolled…a resurrection stone. Every time we used it, I kid you not, he went through the pile of ripped cards, trying to find a fragment of each prisoner to return to us. The next day he was in the main hall, a fragment of each of our cards in his pocket: just in case he ran into us, he wanted us to have a souvenir.
Best. GM. Ever. Ahmed clearly knows the value of visceral emotional triggers in creating emotional engagement.
Not coincidentally, he’s designed a new role-playing game that is literally set to a cue, music–Tales of the Tape Deck. Talk about setting the mood–I imagine emotional triggers galore, the music pounding out and coinciding with dramatic events. If this sounds like something you would like, Ahmed has no idea I am pitching the game here, I am just a random player he had at a con. Go surprise him with a Kickstarter follow! If you tell him it’s because of Velocitree, he will be bewildered.
Now, during this post, you might have been thinking this all sounds too pat, too easy. How do you kill characters in 5e without going emotionally broke and losing players (I’d call this a ‘bust’ in emotional gambling, when you wager and lose)? Conversely, how do you get OSR players to even care enough about their low-level characters to flinch (I’d call this ‘playing slots’ in emotional gambling, not willing to wager big)? I’ll get to that in Part 3, when I talk about how I and other GMs build landscapes of fear around players.
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