Increases the paranoia in the party

>player does an action
>look worried as you start to roll dice
>look at numbers and sigh in relief
>"Alright, go ahead"

>Playing Curse of Strahd
>PCs settle down for camp.
>Ask them to roll Perception.
>They all fail.
>Pass them all notes that say "You were not bitten"
>Watch them shit themselves and try and figure out who was.

I do this pretty much every other door or chest. It got to the point when they stopped being cautious, until they actually ran into a mimic.

Currently in the game I'm running, I've pulled the paladin setting equivalent character aside so many times, abd given him so much corruption for he misguided dealings with evil entities that whenever something bad starts happening the party immediately suspects him. I usually take this moment to pull him aside for no reason.

This shit doesn't make you look clever. It makes you look like you ripped ass and you think no one heard it but everyone fucking heard it you disgusting motherfucker.

What's this a reply to?

You Monster!

By any chance, to you offer training session ?

If you want tips for Horror, it's all about subversion. Keep your players on their toes. If they think that something is safe because they've done it several times, turn it on them.

Horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin. They consist of two stories, one to set up expectation, and a second that subverts that expectation.

Another funny thing I did what psychologically condition my players. Because horror needs light to contrast with it, I will play one particular somber yet hopeful track during a moment of tranquility or good. Because they had that association of this being a moment of good, I'm planning on doing one of two things: Have the thing that inspires hope turn out to be something vile, or cut out the music abruptly before a surprise for extra "oh shit" factor.

>DM, apropos of nothing: What's everyone's Con score?
>Players: [uneasily say numbers]
>DM: Alright... Carry on.
Pic related.

very nice
i want to join your game

>Rolls dice every once in a while for no reason
>Just do it to obscure when I actually roll for something important
>Keep my players at the edge of their seat at all times

I love being GM specifically for stuff like this

Very insightful, thanks user.
People say i'm kinda good at comedy, guess i should try to add some soul crushing horror from time to time, or just a mild sense of unease for beginners.

Once again, it's all about contrast. If you are too tone heavy and don't have variety, it will just be canceled out as signal noise.

To have sad moment, you have to have a few happy moments, to have scary moments you have to have funny moments. And remember to describe a lot of details like smells and how things feel, but not too much. The real horror is letting their mind fill in the gaps with what they think is scariest. Don't call a ghoul a ghoul, say it's a pale man with it's long tongue dragging behind it as it runs towards you. Hint at it's arrival by saying they smell rot and ammonia.

Give 'em hell, user.

Not the user you are replying to

I enjoy doing a lot of descriptions whenever I run horror, and then repeating said descriptions again at a later time while altering something. If the players catch on they tend to get really unnerved. If nothing else, just repeating descriptions can put them on edge, as they are expecting me to jumpscare them with something.

A classic is a painting that changes from something mundane to something more disturbing.

Agreeing with anons here, plus, rule zero for me is always describing what characters see/hear/feel instead of what there is. It should kinda go without saying because it seems obvious, but I had multiple GMs who didn't "get" it.

You can make even DnD spooky like this, I shit you not. You'd have to condition players (especially DnD players; especially players you don't know well) first, by showing them that running is always an option and the world doesn't scale to their level etc. Then when you say things like "You think you see a movement to the left, but when you turn there's nothing but darkness" it will make their buttholes clench. With enough investment even a goblin ambush at night will be horrifying to a party without darkvision.

I actually did this in two ways to one of my players who was getting a bit too big for his britches and detracting from tone.

They were in the death house and he cast sacred flame at the creepy painting, and a breeze blew it out, and with a successful perception roll he noticed the mother still had a look of disdain, but instead of looking at the baby she was looking at him now.

Same player investigated the bookshelves in the next room, and decided to look at some poetry. With his roll he noticed one of the stanzas didn't fit the rest of the poem. It said "Don't look out the window".

He got someone else to look for him, but all they saw was fog. Then he looked and he say a gaunt face mouthing words. With his roll he could make out the words "Gut you", "Cut", "Hang" and "Chains".

Later they had to take a rest after getting wrecked, and had to sleep in a child's tomb. They all had nightmares about being hanged up by chains and having robed figures slice into their bellies so their entrails fell unto a debased altar, except for him. He had sleep paralysis, and say the face slowly approaching him for eight hours.

What he doesn't know is that he's going to meet the person who has that face. The players will see Rahadin, but to him, I'll say "You see a man who has The Face. You hear screaming inside your head."
Incentivizing running is hard for me to do. You got any tips?

>Rahadin
>Curse of Strahd
I have yet to encounter a moment like this in my playthrough of it, but yours sounds really fun. I'd love to see how you ran your campaign.

>Incentivizing running
First of all, just tell your players straight away that you don't expect them to win all the encounters they might get into. If they're going to try to attack something dangerous, they might get their ass handed to them.

I also did a trick multiple times, and it worked in like 5/6 cases. As a session zero I did a flashback from characters' past, where I created an unwinnable (in combat at least; we're talking DnD) because when I play other systems I play with a group that has over 20 years of tabletop experience and don't need any extra incentives to run away from things situation for one of them, and the character had to solve it in a clever way. I gave them subtle hints every time like "By the way they hold their makeshift spears and by the confused look on their faces you realize that those militiamen are no match for you in a single combat, but there's twelve of them and you don't think you can take all of them at the same time. They hesitate, perhaps waiting for you to say something."

In most cases all players recognized that it's supposed to be a hard combat encounter that they can "bypass" (video game logic in muh tabletops that must be gently cured with clever GMing). In that particular case the fighter player asked me, unsure if he's doing it right "Can I roll to persuade them?" I told him that he didn't need to roll, he could just talk to them. It turned out that the militiamen weren't bad guys etc. etc., they talked and the scene ended peacefully. Another example from another game was with a rogue running away after stealing shit. The player asked me if he could fight the guards. I said "Yes, but you're pretty sure that outrunning them would be easier".

It worked because for the players it was a "safe zone" of sorts (their past that already happened, so they couldn't die). The time it didn't work the guards just beat up the character and he escaped jail later, which just added to his background.

Seconded. I played Strahd, I met Rahadin, I don't recall any such house or set of circumstances so I'd love to hear more about how you iterated on it.

I wish I had a group. I want to GM horror so badly.

Most of the stuff I add is made up. One of my players has DMed CoS twice, so he's a less active player and mostly there to hang with the group.

I tend to think about ways to connect things for my players, so there's more of a Checkov's Gun scenario where an item appears more and more frequently and is thus more powerful to the story.

Another thing I do is I've made a psychological profile of most if not all of my players and I've figured different scenarios that can scare them the most. For example, in my IRL group (Currently DMing on the online one, about to DM CoS when my IRL group is done with this game), one particular guys stand out. He's kind of a cocky guy that thinks of things in terms of control. He doesn't drink because he says he doesn't like not being in control, and when listening to piano doesn't appreciate the music as much as he appreciates the mastery behind the music, on think of it as him playing. The obvious way to scare him would be to put him in a situation beyond his control (perhaps possession or lycanthopy) and have his struggle to not do something. The issue with this approach is trying to maintain horror without making it pure frustration.
This is pretty good. Thank you, user.

>[...] and towards the center of the garden there's a gazebo

>arby's
/sp/ says hi

fuck that im out

Is it wrong to roll dice behind the screen just to make your players nervous?

No, but it might get old fast if they realize what's going on.