Helping your players forget that it's 'just a game'

[Nomadic]

I found this little gem on a thread that was asking about how to make your players die on the inside. I thought that it had even better use as hate fuel to make them despise the BBEG and to want to end them to the point that it is actually affecting them (not just their characters). I have expounded upon it to really evoke the feelings from it.

[spoiler=warning:graphic material]

Have a cute little girl join up with the party for whatever reason. Perhaps she's lost, perhaps something else. Make sure that you describe in exacting detail her features, from her little cloak that her grandma made for her right up to her cute as a button giggle. Anyhow, whatever the case the party ends up taking her on. Every night that they stay camping out on the road make a secret roll for the watchman on duty to see if he stays awake. If he does, great. If not, the next morning the group wakes up.

The watchman quickly realizes that he dozed off, just in time to view a grizzly scene. The little girls body is nailed to a tree by her hands and feet, completely naked. It is obvious that she was slashed and burned and bled out for hours before she died, the only reason she made no sounds that could of alerted the group appears to be because the first thing the assailant did was knock her out long enough to sew her mouth shut. The party can see the residual relief in her remaining eye, almost as if she welcomed death gladly when it finally came.

Drawn on the ground beneath her feet is a symbol the group quickly recognizes as the mark of an enemy they have been hunting for some time. Next to the symbol is a small strip of parchment, it says simply "Your vigilance is laughable, I was able to merrily have my way with your little runt while you did nothing but snore. Next time perhaps I will have my way with one of you.".

If that doesn't drive your players to want to rip out the BBEGs still beating heart and beat him with it till it stops beating, than said players have no soul. So then to the point at hand, do you have any gems stashed away for evoking real feelings in your players? Not only rage and hate. Fear, paranoia, joy, and anything else is fine too. The idea behind them is mainly to enmesh your players deeper in your game.

[LordVreeg]

are you kidding?
I'm still ducking flung erasers in the Igbarians for what I did to their first incarnation as the Grey Legion.  When they let loose the Antroo Vampyre, I had it track them back to Igbar instead of kikll them on the spot...it let them think they had gotten away (it was a little weakenned at the time).  But the grouip kept catching glimpses of something out of the corner of their eye of somthing trailing them.
It took 5 of the group PC's, who are now Uncompyre's under it's sway.  I took their characters and made them part of the enemy.

Years earlier, Pious Pilfer, a character of one of the earlier players, was running a keep in wilderness territory.  The Keep was named Jared's keep, named after Pious' dog, a white snowhound.
Morator and Yero (in the employ of Heliopolis) kidneaped the dog, and Pious and his friends tried to rescue it.  I won't bore anyone with too many details, except they went to the Giantclan Silverworth's main hall.  Pious first knew he was on the right track when he found one of the paws of his dog nailed to the huge outside door. [spoiler=ugg] they found other pieces later on.  to create emotion, sometimes you have to make evil really evil. [/spoiler]
You want to see enraged?  Don't fuck with the PC's dog.

It is also important to create value in the PC's relationships, and not to telegraph this.  One of my earliest PCs, Palimar Devensheld, runs the Alternative school of Magic in Igbar.  This is a character who played off and on through years of gametime, whose character has gained and lost many times.  He is married to Samria, and they have a child, Salimar Samriadaughter.
Salimar, his child, was kidnapped when she was 2.  Palimar and his allies went through many travails before they found she had been actually taken to the House of Earth.  They finally got her back...but due to the time diffferential, she was 14 years old and barely knew them when she returned.  She had gone through her own hell and was very ungrateful and blaming to her parents for leaving her there for so long, and worse, the missed much of her childhood and such.  This is not so much a story of blinding hate as creating relationships and real emotion.  Which is the key here.  Creating real emotion, which = immersion, one of the 3 major goals.
[spoiler=Samria] The alt school of magic is one big intertwining soap opera.  Really created by a PC, it has been a major part of Igbar for almost 7 game years (and 24 real years).
Salimar Earthward Samriadaughter is an NPC that comes and goes, and barely escaped the Antroo Vampyre when that creature took the stronghold of the Grey Legion.  She is missing right now.
This has made Samria totally turn away from Palimar, and Samria is actually screwing around with Cyriel (Cabana Boy, we call him) of the New Legion.  Palimar is never in town, as he is actually looking for Salimar.[/spoiler]

God, I could go on for hours.  There have been noble last stands allowing the rest of the party escape ( a mute artist/knight of the Order of Stenron named Nighttimer comes to mind), marriages and relationships involving PCs, incredible friendships...again, it is not horror or anger that is acting by itself, it is emotional immersion.  A GM has to be the leader here, he must feel for and with the PCs and NPCs.  The actions of the NPCs should spring fully formed from the GM's meld with that NPCs person.  

Well, before I forget I am at work, I am going to mention the stalwart Steel Isle group, and their run-in with the Witches of Vexcherilli Swamp.  An NPC named Toden lost his arm in the battle with a were, and I can tell you that the PC's have a slow-burning fire burning right now on that one...    

[TheMeanestGuest]

In response to Nomadic, I'm not sure if I would feel comfortable playing in a game that involves the violation and grisly murder of little girls.

Just saying.

[SDragon]

In response to Nomadic, I'm not sure if I would feel comfortable playing in a game that involves the violation and grisly murder of little girls.

Just saying.

Don't you play MAID? :p

[Kindling]

Lots of people have been killed in very grisly ways in the game I'm running, but none of them have had any real attachment for the PCs... the Weapon Master's entire family has vanished, presumed dead, but he was only close to them in theory, as they had spent very little in-game time together, so although the character presumably felt their loss quite acutely, the player was quite detached.

The one instance of real emotional involvement has, oddly, come from a mercenary the PCs took prisoner. The Weapon Master and an Executioner who joined up for that one session brutally killed the merc's partner in front of him, so he really despised the PCs. However, for some reason, be it his hopeless plight, his broken Common, or his (apparently) humorous name, the Thief became dead set on winning him over to their side... of course this did not work, and the poor guy escaped the first time he was left to his own devices, and will return, having speed-levelled, to exact revenge for his mate's murder... bwahahaha... but yeah, the point is, for some reason I haven't quite fathomed, the Thief's player developed an almost instant attachment to the character.

[TheMeanestGuest]

Don't you play MAID? :p

I don't play maid.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

If that doesn't drive your players to want to rip out the BBEGs still beating heart and beat him with it till it stops beating, than said players have no soul.

Or they've gone numb from having disturbing imagery shoved down their throats by everyone from a method-describing-GM to the guy who writes those TV crime dramas.

I stopped hating the people who do that sort of thing after a while.  They're so common I feel like the disturbing imagery is a part of nature, like a plague.  I can't hate nature.  I can only either avoid it or embrace it.

[Mason]

I think the de-sensitizing of people is well under way. I live in America, and it seems like we are suckers for this sort of thing. Just look at that whole slew of Saw movies, Final Destination etc. I think the term was torture-porn.

Personally, I don't think I would use anything of this sort in a game. At least not the murder/rape of children. That's a little over the top. Your trying to invoke a certain emotion from the players...get a little creative.

  What I would like to see is a return to the days of Hitchcock Presents or Twilight Zone. (on TV and in Gaming , especially video games, it all went down-hill from mortal Kombat)
 
 But I suppose it is ultimately up to what the gaming group feels comfortable with.

[Nomadic]

But I suppose it is ultimately up to what the gaming group feels comfortable with.

Most certainly, I'd never use something like that on TMG. I'd totally whip it out on a group of vreegs though, complete with exacting detail. The point isn't the details of the way she was murdered. The point is that all the details combined with here view as something pure causes the group utter revulsion and hate towards the person that did it to her. But again it depends on the group in question as to whether you should pull out something like that.

As to what SCMP said, I'm not a DM that throws stuff like this at people all the time, in fact I only rarely do so. Which is why even my most desensitized players generally get some shock and anger out of it, it wasn't expected at all and so it lets some of their buried revulsion shine through. What I do do is use alot of emotion evoking stuff in general to help them forget that it's just a game, which is a great way to nurture roleplay.

Something I did actually do one time was that a pc died who hadn't wanted to die. It was a really epic death (all him, I just went along with everything and added some extra touches) but he wanted to keep using his character since he liked roleplaying his attitude. It was that attitude that got the group so attached to his character and there was much anger and sadness when he passed. So I talked with him about it in private and we made a plan. In the end the group ended up continuing on with their quest through the dungeon to find the source of power that was corrupting the land above. They found it, they also found a skeleton holding a fancy sword. The warrior of the bunch thought "sweet a better sword" and picked it up without a thought. And then it spoke to him. It had been an ancestral blade owned by the "skeleton". I just modified the story a bit so that at the owners death the soul had fled. When the PC died his soul and had been drawn to the available space and bonded with it, having not wanted to yet leave the mortal realm. Anyhow when they figured out what happened they were ecstatic, one of them actually whooped in real life, it was pretty awesome. They did finally destroy the power source and had quite a few other adventures. The final one culminated with the PC sword and his wielder staying behind to hold off a load of abominations attempting to reach the surface world while the rest of the group collapsed the entrance behind them. I told in exacting details their final moments and last stand. The group wanted a statue erected because of that and so I put one in the local town square. Now that was awesome.

[Ishmayl-Retired]

Please keep this thread on topic and do not reply or respond to events that happened earlier today in this thread.  
Thanks
- The O.C.

[beejazz]

That whole scene in the OP probably isn't something I'd do in one of my games for a handful of reasons.

1) When my players get close with NPCs, they don't have any special fondness for the helpless peasant family or what have you. Odds are, they'd find someone else to dump the little girl on before going back to risking life and limb on an hourly basis.

2) It doesn't make sense to keep a little girl with the party. They put her at risk by keeping her around.

3) The mechanical basis for this is save-or-die. And you wouldn't likely roll it at all under normal circumstances. And the PCs can make no decisions that will affect the outcome. Sure it's random... except for the part where you keep rolling until they fail. (even normal save or die effects can be avoided by not confronting the monster/wizard/trap, whereas players have to sleep) I know we're supposed to be "taking them out of the game," but the whole meaningful decisions affecting the outcome of events is a huge part of why I'm playing an RPG and not reading a book.


So yeah... I play rough, and I'm not above putting beloved NPCs at risk (or killing them off)... I just really really don't think this is the way to go about it.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

I'm of two minds. I kind of see the merit of the OP, but I also kind of agree with beejaz. And as TMG indicates, you have to be careful with the type of players and the type of game you want.

You pull the stunt in the OP, it will forever color the rest of the campaign. No one will ever see it as the same again. So be sure your players want a change in that direction before you risk screwing up something good.

[Nomadic]

Of course, horror and things that are pulled out of the PCs control are always things you have to be careful about. If done right though they are some of the most effective tools you can use to drive roleplay. But horror isn't the focus of the thread, just an example. Do any of you have any other tools you've found for evoking feelings of fear, joy, paranoia, etc in your players themselves?

[LordVreeg]

Of course, horror and things that are pulled out of the PCs control are always things you have to be careful about. If done right though they are some of the most effective tools you can use to drive roleplay. But horror isn't the focus of the thread, just an example. Do any of you have any other tools you've found for evoking feelings of fear, joy, paranoia, etc in your players themselves?

That was kind of my (obviously lost and poorly communicated) post above; that when the players experience honest emotion in tha game, you have achieved immersion.  Which  = WIN.

[Nomadic]

So then throwing this out there. As an antithesis to anger has anybody successfully managed to inspire elation in their players? If so, how?