You’re the GM. The player characters set off after the big bad… unaware that the BB knows where they live. Now you have a choice: when the PCs return, do they find a warning note on the door? Or is their home ashes and their family dead? How hard do you go?
This is a tricky challenge that TTRPG folks will know well. In general terms, the problem is this: when you’re a Game Master with responsibility for the whole world around the player characters, how do you decide when to be cruel and when to be kind?
In the new FiveEvil Splinter we share our answer – and I’ll spoiler it in this post.
The foundation technique in GMing is using what follows. The players knock on the door, the NPC inside says “who’s there”. It’s easy and effective, you can go a long way just following the domino chain! But it doesn’t give you everything you need to be a GM. You have to reach further.
Before long, there’ll be a moment in your game where it isn’t immediately obvious what follows. All sorts of things could happen next! The Big Bad knows where they live, and they could use this information in all sorts of ways. There are many things that follow! The GM needs a different technique.
There are a bunch of other arrows in the GMing quiver: What would be most exciting? What would be funniest? What would develop a dramatic arc? What would be an appropriate karmic reward? What would send a message to the players about what genre we’re playing in? They all do the job!
In a light adventure game, cruel and kind will both take you to interesting places and you can bounce around this challenge with ease. However, when the stakes are high, like in a horror game? Those arrows start feeling pretty heavy. Making this kind of choice over and over is a burden.
Part of horror is about inflicting traumatic experiences on the characters, making them suffer in ways they can’t shrug off, even straight up killing them. Sometimes, it’s all up to you. How do you decide when to cruelly inflict some awful event, and when to spare the pain?
In FiveEvil we deal with that with a Doom Check. The Doom Check is a GM tool to use whenever they need to know how things work out. It takes away the burden and responsibility. The dice roll will tell you when to be kind, and when to be vicious.
You just make a raw d20 roll and compare the result to the current Intensity DC. (Remember Intensity? That’s the overall badness of the situation.) If you beat it, phew, bad things don’t happen. If you miss it, watch out. And if you *really* miss it – then something REALLY bad happens.
Because Intensity shifts during a scenario, you get a nice effect: when things are relaxed and normal, stuff more or less goes your way. Chill and happy vibes! But as Intensity steps up, then fate itself starts turning against you, and Doom is ever closer.
What I love about the Doom check is how flexible it is. When I’m GMing horror, it feels great to turn over this uncertainty to the dice, so I never need to second guess myself: am I being too mean/too soft? And the dice always deliver a few surprises that push my creativity along new paths.
I mean, the Doom check is basically just a wandering monster check from the dawn of role-playing games, right? Just generalised so you can use it anywhere. A wandering doom check.
The Doom check is described in FiveEvil Splinter Four, free to download right now. The included free scenario shows some examples of the Doom Check in action. (Also, a creepy old lady! Everyone loves a creepy old lady!) https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/495664/fiveevil-splinters
