What threats do you throw at your players when you want them to feel properly afraid? Most enemies are just there to be killed, so what do you resort to when you want to strike fear into the hearts of the PCs?
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What threats do you throw at your players when you want them to feel properly afraid?
Taxes
One of my players was supposed to be a Neutral Good character, but I nudged certain events to make him accidently cause a worldwide genocide of untold millions, and now he's on the run from War reparations.
Bunch of people with long spears, so scary, if I was on a horse lol.
How would they even compare to a full on barrage from 200 ENGLISH LONGBOWS?
And that guy on the right, yeah let me just stand out so you can snipe me lol
>How would they even compare to a full on barrage from 200 ENGLISH LONGBOWS?
Pretty well considering the meme bow needed the conditions of Crecy and Angincourt to be as effective as it is believed to be.
Keep in mind one of those two battles was notorious for how many enemies survived, not how many enemies were killed. That alone should kill the medieval machinegun myth.
>Bunch of people with long spears, so scary
The spear is the chosen weapon of infantry units for its simplicity and its effectiveness in massed ranks. So it is that out of the many levied peasants your character charges, one strikes true. One spearhead impales your character's throat.
Your character collapses with no last words but for a pathetic gurgle from a gushing throat.
The law of large numbers is a cruel mistress.
What were you thinking? Did you think yourself invincible just for being a "hero"? Such hubris.
Battles and wars are fought and won not with individual "heroes," but with generals, logistics, tactics, and masses of men.
jesus, anon, this random post has more soul than half the shit I've been playing all year
>posts like this
>people still mald when the calvalry flanks your shitty little infantry formation and runs your pack of undisciplined morons down
NO YOU CAN'T JUST ATTACK US FROM THE REAR OR THE SIDE YOU HAVE TO CHARGE US FROM THE FRONT IT'S NOT FAIR OTHERWISE
>peasant line tries to spear the overpowered protag
>weapons strike true, but fail to pierce the hero's skin
>terrified shrieks abound from the peasant ranks as their weapons shatter in their hands, unable to overcome the damage resistance of their opponent
>chaos rips through their ranks as one after another the peasant line is torn asunder to the rhythmic chant of the fighter's "Great Cleave! Great Cleave!"
>somewhere in nevada, a 400 pound fat frick sweats salty tears as he begins to post a preprogrammed response to the mere thought of a tabletop game he does not like, making sure to consult his flowchart to b***h about literally fricking anything in order to retain his title of "Most Unlikeable Soulless c**t"
Spears are one of the oldest and longest lasting weapon concepts for a very good reason.
... because they are super-cheap and easy to produce, using, when in clinch, even a literal stick for one.
Nothing more, nothing less. And that's also the reason why they are replaced with just about anything else whenever resources and production method allows for it.
Spears outlasted longbows, remaining in military use from about the dawn of tool use to the modern day in the form of bayonets.
Dragons usually. The evil and enjoys torment kind, I make them frick with the players just for a little bit of fun. The players would try to hurt it, but its practically invulnerable. And would retaliate with just enough to frick with the players sense of invulnerability (like tossing one of them all the way out of the scene)
Anything works, but you have to establish its power first. Have an enemy the players struggled against be destroyed by this new threat to show power
A creature (her name was Serena) who was sort of mangled into a Silent Hill centipede esque creature with a porcelain face. Apart from being monstrous and centipedey, she would duplicate the fight into two simultaneous instances. Within each instance, the players could not help their alternate selves except by moving objects around (terrain was constant in both 'timelines'). Serena would pick the more favourable timeline to become real, but of course if she loses in both, the players won.
I'm stealing this.
I already do this.
I want my players scared, not horny.
>I want my players scared, not horny.
Anti tank rail gun that fires in bursts then.
Very nice.
My DMing style is somewhat comical and light hearted so I always try to also demonstrate the deadliness to new players early, level 1 characters are so easy to kill and I allow them to just restart the same character sheet with zero XP as long as they make a few minor changes to the fluff to remind them that it's a new character and their original concept died due to their carelessness.
I firmly believe that the peak D&D condition is a fun game where players are regularly laughing that also has the tension of knowing that death might be waiting to take them in one to three rounds down any given dark corner or if they get too greedy and wander too deep. I try to stimulate the same brain centers as terminally cancer patients who say they experience the greatest thrills ever in completing their bucket list experiences, when they manage to briefly forget that they're doomed - except in D&D it's just your characters not really you.
Neat
I always want my players to be afraid, thats why every combat should be deadly. Its illusion though, since unless players act like idiots they generally won't die.
Last two deaths at my table were completly unnecesary, but players acted with unnecesary bravado, rushed strong enemies and died.
Futanari amazons with power armor and anti tank laser cannons.
Play enemies intelligently. All it takes is for one "frightened" goblin/kobold/bandit or whatever to bait the party into chasing him into a killzone for the survivors to shake off the tendency to run in dick first, every single time.
A homebrew monster I made, a gold golem. Imagine the T-1000, but made of gold, and also if you touch it or if it touches you you have to make a save or become a statue of pyrite. Also when it dies it turns almost entirely into pyrite so killing it isn't even as huge a payday as it should be. Also since it's true form is liquid it can end its turn inside your space or move through spaces. Also it's Large so it can occupy multiple spaces. And it has magic resistance.
I think it's my favorite monster that I've ever homebrewed. I sicc'd one on my players when they were level 10 as a "final boss" of a dungeon they were delving, and it petrified three of them by the time the battle was over. They won, but it left a big enough impression that even a couple of levels later (12th) when they encountered one again that was just standing there motionless, they avoided the room it was in entirely. The room was optional anyway; the only thing in it was the golem itself and it was just me giving them a chance to get 4d6 x 10,000 gold if they wanted.
>kills you in GWM/Sharpshooter
That’s why I’ve only had it show up in narrow spaces.
That's a nifty enemy design, might have to yoink it for a dungeon I have coming up.
I certainly dont throw a bunch of mooks which will die instantly to any AoE.
A single intelligent creature, played well, that persistently pursues the party.
This can range from anything to a fully-fledged villain arriving when they least expect it, a particularly stubborn encounter that keeps coming back, or even just a simple monster that stumbles into becoming a menace for the party.
The most memorable, and fear-inducing instances have always been when the party (and sometimes even you) least expects danger to follow them-- with my favorites being:
>A single Shadow survived an encounter by fleeing into a crack, but continued to return every time the party split up or fought in the dark, never killing anyone but driving the party into a paranoid, light-carrying frenzy as it continued to Hide and retreat after every attack.
and
>A random encounter with an orc and two basilisks flavored as a cursed Gatekeeper and his two faithful, corrupted hounds appearing early in an adventure. And then being rolled as a random encounter again. And again. Every time they heard the howling, they knew they were at risk of Petrification and this undying juggernaut coming after them Pyramid-Head style. The party tried everything they could think of to get rid of him: banishment, burying him in the frozen earth, even incinerating the body with spells.
Anything that can result in permanent loss. Rust monsters for permanent loss of equipment, things with extremely sharp weapons for lermanent loss of limbs, acid for loss of beauty, monsters that drainmlife force for loss of years/time, etc.
This. Players are generally less afraid of straight-up dying, and will not be intimidated by (but will call bullshit on) sudden kills, but if you threaten to take their gear or limbs orliterally anything of perceived value away from them, they will shit their pants.
On of the funniest things I've ever subjected my players to were kaleidoscopic rust monsters. Just rust monsters with some fey-touched template and some advanced template thrown on. Ate the rogue's adamantite dagger and fricked up the paladin's armor beyond repair.
A 3.5 druid or cleric
We play OD&D, largely as written. It's not uncommon to have characters with under 4 hit points. It's not uncommon for characters to die, constantly. Enemies still terrify them, something as simple as an ogre could wipe out most lower parties twice over if the dice go badly.
Nasty baddies that are as lethal as they are sneaky. They could be anywhere at any time, watching and waiting dor the best time to pick one of them off. The players are trapped in an area by natural means, such as a raging blizzard outside. Sure, they could just leave the structure, but it'd be suicide. So they have to explore around to find a means of leaving while being hunted. They're prey. In my own example, anyone who gets got could show back up as though nothing happened and the party would be none the wiser, but the fricker became one of the nasties.
Look at John Carpenter's The Thing, that's what I took heavy inspiration from for one of my games, just without the Lovecraftian body horror themes, then sprinkle on some 30 Days of Night, all in a heavy scifi game.
Afraid or AFRAID?
Afraid, large numbers which they know they cannot outmatch.
AFRAID use an entity which can dole out a fate worse than death. Maybe get an npc to tag along (or just be nearby), and they run into a band of wights which the NPC tries to ambush on his own and gets killed by the wights resulting in his "revival" as a wight's spawn. Or really showing off the attacking power of any enemy via a throwaway character and using powerful, intimidating diction to describe the threat.
Skeleton Legionnaires with a proper Phalanx and tactics
It's our jobs as DMs to make our Adventurers as miserable as possible without killing them to give them hope
CR 10
UDT sniper Vietnam Veteran Master Chief Petty Officer Mickey Mouse.
Armed with Lucky feat, a AWP .300 Win-Mag, Racism(calling elves "knife-ears", etc.) and SEVERE PTSD
A Rust Monster (it steals their hard earned gear)
Energy draning undead (it steals their hard earned levels)
It's not "what's the threat", but "how to present it"
I ran a heavily moddified Shadowrun campaign where the antagonists were reincarnations of the Norse gods. Thor was a bulldozer fright-train and whenever he showed up the party would shit bricks and go into full retreat mode. His establishing character moment was suplexing a 20ft tall mech and blowing it up and the party promptly made a pact to avoid combat with the big guy at all costs
>What threats do you throw at your players when you want them to feel properly afraid?
The DM screen. Let them know you've stopped fudging dice rolls for the sake of the "story".
beholders of course
In a Star Wars game set during the Dark Times/Rebellion era, one of the PCs was a Force sensitive. They were mostly fricking about the Outer Rim, but he openly started abusing telekinesis first to save the group, and then to show off, forgetting that they were supposed to be on a quiet infiltration mission and also forgetting that they hadn’t knocked out the cameras. He made a very poor decision that night. Nothing happened that session. Or next session. He started to get comfortable doing it, thinking it didn’t matter, that he could virtually god mode his way through with the Force, and began using it more.
Right up until a Super Star Destroyer called Executor showed up in orbit looking for the party.
Rust monsters and disenchanters.