As I mentioned at the end of last week, I had a big, scary fight in store for my players. I was really pleased with how it went—it created a session with a totally different feel and pace from the previous one, with about half of it taken up with a single combat encounter, which hit the sweet spot of making the players stressed, but not feeling like they couldn’t win. There are a few things I’d do differently in retrospect, but as my first major combat of the campaign, I’m really pleased.
And more importantly, the big, serious consequences were energising and exciting for the table. Everyone was really amped up afterwards, and several people said it had been one of their favourite sessions so far. It was such a great and important reminder for me that, despite some experiences I’ve had in the past, most players are in this to be challenged and to make decisions that really matter.
It’s this second part I’ve really been thinking about since. I had a conversation over the weekend with some friends who are running long homebrew D&D campaigns, and they both expressed concern about what we might call narrative power creep: the idea that once you’ve run a big, epic storyline, the next one has to be bigger and more epic. Obviously, that’s just how a game progressive levelling system works to some extent, but they were also talking about the sort of personal pride element of wanting to make sure that every idea was more exciting and more dramatic than the last.
I found myself worrying about that a little bit in a different form this session, as I tried to decide whether or not to make Strahd have his first appearance. It’s very early, so even though it’s a plot point suggested by the module, I just wasn’t sure if I needed to build up to him more, save the big reveal to maximise the drama.
But I think part of the trap there, in both their case and mine, was thinking about drama instead of consequences.
I have minimal control over the pacing of the story in a TTRPG. If the characters find some information, then it doesn’t matter how much I wanted it to not show up until later. If they decide to go to someone’s house, then that person is going to have to show up even if I wanted them to get a dramatic entrance in a few sessions. I’m pretty comfortable with this in most games, and don’t tend to plan very far ahead. But Curse of Strahd is a famous horror game; the setting is literally the Domains of Dread. I have to—or at least want to—keep a tighter hold on the tone of the world than I normally would.
Immediately after arriving in Vallaki, one of the PCs took a big swing with defying the local authorities, which was a fantastic and in-character moment, and also inevitably rapidly accelerated events in the town.
Of course I could have just let it slide, just waved it off as a downtime action they did purely for flavour. But that’s how you teach a table that their actions don’t really matter. That freedom from consequences can have a fun side—you can do silly things, you can lean into whatever your version of a power fantasy is—but it eventually saps the story of tension and the players of their motivation to do anything, because no choice that they make makes a difference.
This session really helped me understand that even in a horror-themed game, I can’t worry too much about pacing out the big monster reveals and building up the tension like it would be done in a film. If the players have taken actions that mean they’ve lured Strahd out much earlier than I or they expected, then seeing that consequence is what makes the world scary. The fear can’t come from pacing or perfectly-timed reveals, it has to come from moving through a highly-responsive world, where everything they do creates a ripple, and there are always eyes upon them. Nothing they do is inconsequential.
The Daggerheart-specific part of this is interesting, too. After the big fight, despite using as many Fear moves as seemed reasonable (the stat blocks I used definitely didn’t have enough), I’m left with a nearly-full Fear counter. It seems a bit counter-intuitive that the reward for a big fight should be that things immediately go disastrously wrong, but since it was our first really long fight, I hadn’t quite realised how fast I’d accumulate Fear and thus how fast I needed to be spending it. But I’m also sort of looking forward to dumping a huge mess of big problems on the party as a result of the fight.
It’s made me realise that while there’s value in having better resources for a slow-and-steady Fear spend, like my custom stat blocks last session helped me do, there’s also value first in just letting it build up sometimes and then have things suddenly go really wrong—but also in just letting the dice lead. If I’m suddenly building up Fear faster than I can spend it, then that’s a sign I need to start making things go badly, even if it doesn’t feel like the story moment I would have chosen for that to happen.
I still get thrown by the feeling of double-dipping on rolls with fear: you get to impose a bad consequence or other problem in the moment, just like on a mixed success in other systems, but then you ALSO get this resource to bank to make things worse later. I’m slowly starting to get a feel for what that means in story terms, a world where bad luck just keeps compounding on itself, and when things go badly they just keep going badly for a while… which does describe Barovia pretty well.