Emotions are the sort of thing RPGs tend to leave to the roleplaying side of gaming. Your character is mad/happy/in love? Great, play them like that. There’s one exception, though: fear. There’s all kinds of rules out there for how to mechanically handle fear: saves, skill checks, deteriorating sanity, GM fiat, and more. With all this mechanical support, roleplaying fear is often taken out of players’ hands. Fear becomes an obstacle, something that prevents them from doing what they want. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Fear can be an exciting, memorable, and fun part of a game. All it takes is enthusiasm, creativity, and understanding between everyone at the table.
Fear sucks for characters, but that doesn’t mean it should suck for players. Getting over that cognitive hurdle can be tricky for players and GMs who have spent years viewing fear as a bad thing, but it helps to look at a terrified character as just another chance to add depth and entertain. The easiest way to do that? Detail. When the eldritch abomination corners Bob and Joe in an office and Joe fails his fear save (or your system’s equivalent), describe it! Consider the following:
GM: Okay, so the corners of the room each somehow appear to be greater than 180 degrees, and a tentacle just smashed through the air vent. Fear checks!
Joe: [fails check] Alright, I scream, scramble on top of the nearest desk, and high-knee it to the far wall, and start kicking and clawing at it. I know it’s cinderblock, but Joe’s not in his right mind right now.
Bob: [passes check] I grab Joe and start shaking him, “Pull yourself together, man, I thought you were a cop! You’re going to get us both killed!” Then I’ll fire off a couple rounds at the tentacle.
Much more engaging than, “Well, all I can do is move full speed away, so I go to the far wall, your turn,” and “Looks like I’ve got to fight it alone, so I’ll spend my action to attack.” See, all those roleplaying tips you’ve heard still apply when your character has to do something you don’t particularly want them to. How they do whatever is they’re doing is just as important as what they’re doing, especially when they don’t have much choice where the “what” is concerned.
Don’t think of mechanical limitations imposed by fear as punishments. Instead, treat them like instructions from the director of your character’s movie, narrowing the focus of your performance. For that matter, since you know your character better than anyone, feel free to volunteer fear. It’s easy to treat PCs as hardened, experienced adventurers, especially since they’re often pitched that way. But does your fresh-from-the-academy, level 2 wizard really have the guts to calmly fight off a rampaging troll? Maybe monsters are fairly common in your medieval fantasy setting, but bears are fairly common in North America, and most folks aren’t going handle their first encounter with one with the same casual attitude the average PC does.
So, when faced with something your character might reasonably be frightened by, play it up! Even if you haven’t failed a fear check, you can describe your wizard as cowering, frantically shrieking magic words and flailing through somatic spell components. In some situations, you may even want to subject your character to a fear check. It’s probably not something you should do terribly often, but if your fighter’s history consists entirely of human opponents in urban fight clubs, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for him to freak out if the men he just killed began to rise from the ground under a necromancer’s control. Give him a fear check, or even skip it altogether and slap a penalty on his rolls (DnD 5E’s disadvantage mechanic and FFG Star Wars’s Setback dice are perfect for this sort of thing). Add some good, detailed roleplaying, and instead of Undead Church Encounter 1b, you have “that time Ulric the Mighty wet himself in front of the whole party and four novice nuns.”
All this advice, like anything in gaming, is contingent upon your group. The best way to play is the way that’s the most fun for everyone. But if you’d like to try embracing fear as a roleplaying challenge in addition to a mechanical one, here’s a few final tips.
For players: Go with it. A lot of new gamers feel awkward trying to roleplay, but even experienced players can feel out of their element portraying their character in such a compromised position. But there’s a lot of fun to be had in that direction, and you don’t have to be playing a horror game or take your character into full-on Scooby-Doo mode to enjoy it. Give it a try, and you might even bring the rest of the table on board with you.
For GMs: Don’t punish fear. If you’ve got a player who does a great job roleplaying their terrified PC, especially if they did so voluntarily, don’t punish them for it. Remember, fear usually takes control away from players, so giving them lots of freedom within that smaller box is important. “Well, you decided you couldn’t fight back, so the tree demon engulfs and devours you,” is not conducive to fun. “The party barely fights off the tree demon without Ulric’s help, and now Prince Lumberjack is very suspicious of your willingness and ability to help with the tree demon infestation,” adds a new wrinkle to the plot and another interesting roleplaying avenue as ramifications of Ulric’s cowardice.
And that’s it! As always, the goal of gaming is to have fun. The easiest way to have fun is to do your best to enjoy every aspect of the game, even if it means your 6’5” Trandoshan bounty hunter spends a few rounds as a wailing ninny. Do it enough, and you might even start to look forward to fear. You’ll be happy, comfortable, relaxed. Blissfully unaware of the shadow slowly spreading across the floor behind you….
Thad Kanupp
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