Landscapes of Fear: Part 3

Let’s talk about fear of failure and player investment, in both traditional and OSR games. 

This was originally intended to be one post on building landscapes of fear around players in adventure games.  I, uh, underestimated the size of this topic in my head, so this is now a series. 

Part 1 laid out different ways that fear of monsters could affect the society of a fantasy world, setting the broader stage. If NPCs fear, the players will too.  

Part 2 discussed why fear is an easy shortcut to player engagement in adventure games: fear is not just for horror games. 

There are various tricks to make PCs afraid in adventure games.  For me, they boil down to four things:

1– Make them care about failing. (today’s post)

Traditional games need more threat (and death) to create caring. 

OSR games need quick, unique character creation to foster caring.

2) Make them feel threatened, without stealing agency: foreshadow danger and foreground dangerous choices. 

3) Surprise them, spiral events out of their control.

4) Allow them to fail, and to survive to succeed one day.

Okay that’s the idea in a nutshell. Keep reading if you want the longer version.  

It’s not horror: fear in adventure games

I wrote this series before doing research on what others have said about fear in RPGs, and then edited each post afterwards.  Existing advice on how to run horror RPGs is solid (see the Alexandrian’s “Running Horror”) and parallels what I say here.  

But horror games are distinct: it takes a different set of tricks to use fear as a tool in an adventure game where dread is not built into the game rules or culture.  The first difference is emotional engagement: non-horror adventure games have their own unique challenges in that regard.

Trick #1: Make them care about failing

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”

—Nelson Mandela

“Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose”

—’Me and Bobby McGee’, Kris Kristofferson

Few like to fail.  Death is a form of failure in RPGs, but there are many others.  You can fail to defeat evil, fail to save others, fail to learn, fail to grow, fail to achieve any number of goals. Knight at the Opera has a really good post about the different ways in which players can fail, short of death.  

It is only human to desire to insulate ourselves from failure: experiencing it is often not fun, especially if it is all we have as a takeaway.  After all, RPGs are emotional gambling, and going broke sucks.

Two relatively distinct play-cultures have emerged in adventure games as a response to this desire.  In the first, in traditional games like DnD 5e and PF2e, the risk of failure has been minimized.  Creating a character is a major time investment.  Total Party Kills (TPKs) are a failure state, ending campaigns.  As a result, PCs are powerful and players in general expect that encounters will be level-appropriate—keeping them challenged, but ‘safe’.  There are countless traditional adventures with carefully calibrated dangers.  

In this traditional play culture, players care from the start about their characters, and by extension, their characters failing–they identify with them, and want to succeed.  Getting them to care more about the game world is just gravy: you already have the potatoes.  The only problem here is that players expect their heroes to survive and win, so they are not really ever afraid of failing.  This problem grows as characters level; it’s truly hard to kill a 5th level PC in 5e without smashing them against impossible odds.  Even players new to the game quickly figure their superheroic status out–they often default to fighting enemies, rather than running away.  

In the second play culture, what I will call the OSR, failure risks remain high, level-appropriate encounters are not guaranteed, and no one is a super-hero (not until very high levels anyway, which few reach).  Player death is expected, and so character creation is rapid, to get sidelined players right back into the game.  

The main drawback of this approach is that, for most people (Murkdice excepted), the lower personal investment into their PCs (at least early on) lowers their fear of failing.  If they die or get injured or cursed, they can always quickly roll up another PC. Instead of minimizing risk, they have instead minimized the sting of failure, like Red talking to the parole board in Shawshank Redemption:

Now, there are RPGs out there with a long character creation process and a high risk of death (Cyberpunk 2020, Burning Wheel, Traveller, and so on), and loving them takes a certain…commitment?  Hey we all find our own fun, and honestly dying during character creation (Traveller) sounds hilarious.

But focusing on these two play cultures, the first needs more fear of failure.  If a PC dies, GMs risk “going bust” in emotional gambling, maybe even losing a player.  The stakes are too high.  The second needs more caring about failure.  GMs risk players “playing slots” in emotional gambling, never investing and laughing it off.  The stakes are too low.  So if you want them to live in a landscape of fear where every choice matters, victory is hard-won, and all the sweeter for it?  You need two different things.  

When the solution is death: traditional games

To conjure fear in traditional games, the solution is both simple and hard to pull off.  It’s easy to state: stop doing level appropriate encounters all of the time to avoid the risk of PC death. Eventually a powerful monster will kill a PC–resurrect them ASAP, make it expensive in some way (money, favors, a quest), and in the meantime they can play a random NPC ally, or as a helpful ghost who can attack undead and scout ahead.  Don’t let them sit on the sidelines.

Other kinds of failure (loss of money, evil wins, and so on) can occur in traditional systems, but even there it can be challenging to defeat a party in combat without killing a PC, or to stymie over-powered utility spells that make obstacles a snap. More on that later in this series.

With this approach, PC death and failure is more an out-of-game emotional challenge than an in-game challenge.  I have an entire homebrew ruleset on how I pull this trick off in my weekly 5e game, and that’s an upcoming post on death (to avoid even more mission creep in this series).  But even in the absence of homebrew, spells and scrolls of Raise Dead explicitly exist to promote this kind of play!  The key is managing player expectations for death at the outset, respecting their choices, and clearly communicating danger.   Just pull the level-appropriate band-aid off, and your game will be 10x better.

When the solution is life: OSR games

To evoke more fear in OSR games, quickly make each character unique and cool, from the get-go.  Not shilling here, but that’s why I homebrewed quirks and feats to create unique characters quickly for my Shadowdark one-shots (I am trying to convert my 5e group to SD, we will see if it works).  Pirate Borg does something similar with tons of excellent tables to quickly roll flavorful traits and gear for new PCs.  In the Dark Sun setting, I like that each player has a random wild talent, and love the mutations in Vaults of Vaarn and other post-apocalyptic games.  

In all of these set ups, if you die, you don’t get to play that quirky, unique character again.  They will be dead and gone, which makes them worth fearing for.  

This solution comes with a caveat, one that affects many OSR games with quick character generation tables.  If it’s too easy to roll up a unique PC, then player investment in their new homunculus is still limited–you have moved from “oh well” to “aw, shucks” when they kick the bucket.  There are two possible solutions I have seen.  

One is to make insta-characters very detailed, combining powers with flavor so they feel uniquely badass and distinct each time. You can see a progression towards this approach in Chris McDowell’s Bastion-verse series, from arcana in Into the Odd, to failed careers in Electric Bastionland, to uniquely powerful Knights in Mythic Bastionland.  This is also a theme in games like Pirate Borg that have random starting classes, powers, and traits (although picking your class/powers is a common house rule that lowers character uniqueness).

The second solution is to do standard character creation (preferably in a system with lots of great chargen tables), and ALSO ask each player to add one unique thing about their PC.  This idea is swiped wholesale from 13th Age, and their SRD lays it out better than I could: something unique in their story, not a mechanical advantage.  Each PC is special.

I use this add-on rule in every OSR game I run, and it works well.  I pair it with games that roll up unique characters (Pirate Borg, my hack of Shadowdark, etc.), turning that dial up one more notch, for instant character investment.  

Fear is the mind killer

As I wrote at the start, failure encompasses more than death: PCs should care about failing their quests, about getting cursed, about random NPCs and pet donkeys and undead parrots.  But all of these other fears are supported and enhanced by an underlying fear of character loss.  Mortality is the first, easy step on the road to fear.