Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Got Evil?

What makes a good horror movie a great horror movie is not the monster itself, but the suspense leading up to the inevitable appearance of the monster.

The same can be said about a great session of roleplaying.

Example 1:
The players are just arriving at the house for Sunday night's session. While the lovely and talented hostess is clearing off space to play, the gamemaster is bringing forth a shoebox full of miniature creatures and arranging a huge pile of dice behind the gamemaster screen. He sometimes looks up, looks back at his game notes, and laughs like a maniac.
Example 2:
One of the players phones the gamemaster the night before game night and invites him and his lovely and talented wife to come over and watch a movie or two. The gamemaster declines, saying he still needs to finish painting three more demons.
Example 3:
The players have wised up to the gamemaster's antics. Nobody in their right mind would expect a party of second level adventurers to survive a fight with ten ghouls or a rooom full of giant spiders and a grey ooze. So, the party has made it through the dungeon, faught giant spiders, oozes, gelatinous cubes, zombies, and even a giant toad. They're nearly out of healing potions, and they come to the ubiquitous door at the end of the last unexplored corridor. The paladin tries to detect evil. The GM informs the paladin that he detects so much evil that his nose bleeds..... and the adventurers learn soon enough that the worst kind of bluff is the one that turns out to be true.

S&W skeletons

Don't bother counting. There's fifty skeletons. Luckily though, our party of 2nd level adventurers had a few hirelings and a dozen or so bottles of oil. All the player-characters made it out alive, though our hireling berserker went down.

Should not there be a sign at the entrance of the room posted by the fire marshal regarding maximum occupancy?


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I swear, I nearly had a bowel movement in my pants when he brought all those skeletons out.