Fear, Tension and Stress

Fear, tension and stress in your games... How do you do it?

A lot can be learned from the media we consume, like film, tv and games. How you manage fear and stress in your games can be a great tool to bolster the buy-in your players have in your games.

Fear, tension and stress also relates to other areas such as conflict (both physical and verbal), decisions players might make in calm environments, and obviously to major decision making moments in a campaign or scenario.

Many game systems have mechanical ways of handling a characters stress; Call of Cthulhu has Sanity, D&D has Madness, Kult has Stability, and Alien has literal Stress dice. All these systems have unique ways of introducing themes of fear or stress in a game, but there are ways you as GM can facilitate this and make your games tense.

So how do you do it?

Basic tips

Many times, consequences to player actions can go a long way to increasing a players stress. The higher the price or stakes in a negaotiation can make meeting certain characters memorable. A simple example of this would be meeting the Big Bad Evil Guy in a D&D campaign, or suffering the experience of an Eldritch Beast  and suffering a bout of madness in Call of Cthulhu. Direct responses to threats can be a good way to add moments of tension in your games.

But what about other areas of your game? Critical moments in a campaign are generally easier to make dramatic, but moments of tension can lie in wait around every corner. 

You can shift the atmosphere for your players to say that their characters "feel" various ominous threats or feelings in a scene. It may seem on the nose, but telling players how their characters feel is just another way for you to narratively paint the picture of the scene their in - which can be very important when your players don't have visual cues.

It's always worth studying the media you consume to see how they build tension, and take what works from that and transpose it to your game as best you can. I am huge horror fan, and always been attracted to scarier themes and games, so naturally horror games have a large influence on how I run my TTRPG games. I also come from a creative industries background (game design and tv production), so being able to set up encounters and scenes to leverage storytelling elements and foreshadowing can go a long way to building up stress.

As mentioned, foreshadowing is a great way to build tension. It does what it says on the tin, but to summarise, an ominous threat can put players on the defensive. I recently used a tarot card role-play moment to issue out ominous 'omens' to players about the fate of their characters. Once they drew a card, I would give the omen to the player, note it down, and tie it in later in the game - most often when they were approaching a life or death situation.

Live tools

This may seem simple, but putting on a scary and thematic soundtrack goes a long way to portray a scene without you needing to do any of the work! A happy game may want to have a 'scary soundtrack' for when a party is going adventuring in a rotten, fetid bog. Or maybe a 1920s speakeasy soundtrack is replaced by the creaking and groaning of an abandoned winter cabin where murders took place the night before. Music is a great way to get a tonal shift and help 'frame' your descriptions. For example, in the Curse of Strahd game I am running, when the players fought Baba Lysaga, I played Travis Savoie's Creeping Hut. This ended up timing perfectly when her hut came to life, and the players ultimately fled to save their skin. The Creeping Hut became Baba Lysaga's battle theme as players returned at a later time to eradicate her from Barovia.

On a separate note, using visual cues - even if you are (mostly) using theatre of the mind - can show players exactly where they are/ who they are facing, and can provide an instant response from your players. Setting up your own room on Roll20, or just having pictures stored on your computer/ tablet can be.a quick and easy way to present pictures of a scene or person - both making it easy to show players what they see, and help you with visual queues to describe the scene. I often find or create pictures for key areas of interest, which I feel players find it easier to remember the important areas they are visiting if they can really visualise it. Having portraits or pictures of NPCs and monsters players encounter can also be a good way to evoke tension - especially if an NPC has been a threat to players, or if the monster is hideous. 

Dark moments in light games

One thing to remember is that any game, including the bright and happy ones, can have moments of fear, tension or stress. These tones can help raise the stakes of your fun-loving game to get players even more invested in your plot!

Adding these moments of tension can be done by using the tips above, but maybe keep the details of anything horrible to a minimum is your tone is light and fun. I also find these moments of tension are best to be kept to key moments in your story instead of sustaining them throughout. This avoids your players becoming desensitised to your dramatic moments, but also stops your game becoming too 'heavy'. I've had this experience as a player in another GMs game, where we were bombarded with betrayal for months of games. Instead of these betrayals being dramatic and tense, they became tiresome and frequently diminished the moments of fun and joy we started out playing.

Outro

So how do you handle fear, tension and stress in your games? Do you do serious themed games or do you often run light hearted campaigns? We'd love to see what your side of the story is! So get in touch using the replies below! Thanks for reading, and good gaming to you!

-KJ