How do you handle hallucinations in your game?
Do you even have hallucinations in your game?
How often does it come up?
Do you treat NPC hallucinations and PC hallucinations differently?
Do you rely on players role-playing their hallucinations, or do you actively deceive the players whose characters are hallucinating?
How do you handle mixed reactions? (some PCs hallucinating, others not.)
I sometimes believe I have hallucinations, when my players engage in some convoluted plan...
ReplyDeletebut, really, it's up to the player to roleplay what's happening to his pc, I usally just use the mechanical approach (Random table rolls like the spell confusion, or negative modifiers or something). And it happens not often... not once in the running campaign, I think.
Do you even have hallucinations in your game?
ReplyDeleteYes.
How often does it come up?
Rarely. But I just happen to be developing an adventure in which hallucinations are the main effect of the main problem.
Do you treat NPC hallucinations and PC hallucinations differently?
Yes. I roleplay NPC hallucinations but...
Do you rely on players role-playing their hallucinations, or do you actively deceive the players whose characters are hallucinating?
I actively deceive the players whose characters are hallucinating.
How do you handle mixed reactions? (some PCs hallucinating, others not.)
I describe whatever each character sees to each player separately. As much as possible, I try to make it hard to figure out what's a hallucination and what's real.
Same as Ed.
ReplyDeleteDeceiving a player works better if he's the only one who can see the hallucination.
It also works better if you describe the hallucenogenic effect as opening his perception to something that is really there. For example, a monster that appears and attacks him, but which nobody else sees, might just be a special form of Invisibility. In description I refrain from giving details that make it clear whether or not the thing is a hallucination. For example, avoid mentioning that there is no blood coming from the hallucinating PC. Also treat the encounter as you treat any regular one: have everyone roll for Initiative, if they attack the place where the monster seems to be, roll and say "it didn't feel like you connected to anything." or even have them roll their damage!
"It also works better if you describe the hallucenogenic effect as opening his perception to something that is really there."
ReplyDeleteExcellent idea! It gave me this idea:
Have the player of the character who's going to hallucinate make whatever sort of die roll you use for 'perception' rolls, or whatever. Then, whatever they roll, say something like "Excellent roll! You see..."
Yeah you need to totally fake them out using table-procedures.
ReplyDeleteAnother example is when someone searches, or checks for traps, I say something along the lines of "you didn't find any traps" which leaves them wondering if they succeeded at the roll and there are no traps, or failed and there is a trap (or failed and there wasn't a trap anyway).