Do you want to Ask the Angry GM a question? It’s easy to do. Just e-mail your BRIEF question to TheAngryGameMaster@gmail.com and put ASK ANGRY in the subject. And include your name so I can use your proper appellation when making fun of your question, your inability to proofread, your poor understanding of brevity, your name, your personal habits, or your failings as a game master, be they real, imagined, or invented for the express purpose of having something to make fun of. And yes, you should consider that a warning. If you want politeness, go ask the Hippie-Dippie-Sunshine-and-Rainbows-and-Bunny-Farts-GM. If you want the best damned advice about gaming anywhere on the Internet for free, well, you’d better be able to take a few punches. Oh, and remember, this column is written at least two weeks in advance and can only address a fraction of the questions it receives. So, if you have an emergency and you’re under a time constraint, go on Twitter and ask Perkins or Crawford to s$&% something out for you. If you ain’t paying for it, you can have either quality or speed, but you can’t have both. And I only offer quality.

Now, on with this week’s question(s).

Orionox asks:

I want to put an unbeatable creature in my game to drive the players and keep them moving. Something inspired by Resident Evil 3’s Nemesis or Alien: Isolation’s Xenomorph. How would you do this? How would you handle the monster’s movements when the flow of time is fuzzy, like during conversations or while solving a puzzle? How would you handle the encounter when players actually get caught and meet the monster? How would you set it up so the players understand that the creature can’t be f$&%ed with?

Holy mother of f$&%, I love this question. I love this question so much I’m not going to talk about how much editing I had to do to cut out the crap and get to the point. And that includes the three sentences of ego polishing that these questions always start with. “Hi Angry, I love you and everything you write and to prove that, I’m going to cite a whole bunch of things you wrote that suggest that I know this idea is going to be hard to pull off and then tell you how you’re the only one who could probably figure this out.” Yeah, you’re welcome everyone for skipping that bulls$&%.

Actually, I’m going to reference something I cut just to make a point though. Orionox, while he was trying to flatter me unnecessarily into answering his question, pointed out that I have gone on record as saying that intentionally creating a too-powerful foe so that your players can only flee or get killed totally sucks, even if it is for the sake of realism. And I stand by that. Screaming that your dead PCs should have been smart enough to run away from the monster that they couldn’t possibly scratch that YOU forced them to confront to prove a point about how the WORLD DOESN’T LEVEL WITH THE CHARACTERS makes you a grade-A f$&%wit. But that’s not what this is. Not at all. And it’s important to understand the difference.

Orionox, you have a reason for that creature to exist. It’s not just because “the world of D&D doesn’t care about your levels, now f$&% you and start running”. It’s because you want to create a tense horror scenario in which the heroes have to accomplish some other goal while being hunted by something. You don’t want the thing to be unbeatable because you’re a d$&%. You want it to be unbeatable because disempowerment is an important part of the horror genre. And you’re not trying to screw your players. Hell, you’re trying to give your players one hell of an experience. Because, when they escape or defeat the thing or whatever, they sure as hell are going to be high-fiving. After they change their pants. And you are keenly aware of the issues because you want to make sure you’re doing it fairly and giving your players every chance to succeed. That’s a GOOD reason to have a too-powerful monster. Go for it.

I hope it works out for you. Anyway, that’s it for this installment of Ask Angry…

Oh, f$&%. I didn’t actually answer the question. I answered the part of the question I cut out as useless irrelevant crap because it was just looking for validation and Angry don’t do that validation s$&%. Except here, I guess. Fine. You can have some validation. It’s a cool idea and a really cool question.

So, how would I do this? Conceptually anyway. Because I’m not going to write your adventure for you. And if I happen to publish an adventure called Alien vs. Predator vs. Murderhobo on the DM’s Guild, just remember that that will be a totally original thing I invented myself (do not steal).

First, it’s important to establish what the adventure is actually about. And what it isn’t about is Xenosis – which is what I’m calling the monster. I mean, it is. But it isn’t. If the adventure is about defeating the Xenosis, the players will be looking for ways to defeat it. That will lead to disaster. The heroes have to have a goal completely unrelated to Xenosis. Or a series of goals. And, look, I know movies and video games make “survival” the goal. But survival isn’t a goal. It’s a motive. Escape, for example, is a goal. That has a finish line.

So, what are the heroes trying to do? Escape from the dungeon? Rescue someone? Locate something? Investigate something? Whatever the goal is, it has to be important enough to keep them in the dungeon with something that is fully capable of destroying them as easily as it scratches its butt. That’s why most of these stories involve people being trapped somewhere. Otherwise, you have questions like “why do those terrified schoolgirls keep going up the horrible, haunted mountain? Is taking pictures of ghosts really a good enough reason? Are they pants-on-head stupid?”

The next question is whether the heroes will actually defeat or destroy the Xenosis before the end of the adventure. And that’s something that might come up if the Xenosis is related to the main plot and might escape into the larger world. If the heroes disturb an ancient horror while they are on their archaeology field trip and the ancient horror is likely to chase them out of the dungeon and then eat the nearest kingdom, the heroes might feel a mite responsible. But if the Xenosis isn’t really evil or horrible, if it’s just a dangerous animal that happens to live in the dungeon that also has the artifact they need, more the better. Of course, you could gradually shift the goal from “do the thing you came to do” to “you’re going to have to kill that thing somehow,” that’s fine. But you’re going to figure out a way that the heroes can kill the thing and make sure you empower them to do so. That’s a whole other question, though. So, let’s just assume there is a dungeon complex, there is a goal, and there is a terrible monster roaming the dungeon who will wreck the s$%& out of the heroes if they try to fight it.

Structure of the adventure figured out, the next step is to make a few decisions about how to handle the actual monster. And the players. And their interactions. And I have some really good advice, here, but I know it’s going to piss people off. So, let me put a disclaimer here.

Tabletop RPGs are not now – nor have they ever been – about establishing systems to simulate a world. They are instead about creating a satisfying game experience that gives the illusion of taking place in a logically consistent world. I will never understand, for example, why some GMs think that random encounter tables or random weather tables are preferable for any reason other than “rolling on random tables feels more fun than planning every goddamned moment of the game.” Seriously. Imagine two GMs. One GM rolls for random encounters during the party’s travels and runs those encounters and the average trip includes three encounters. The other GM carefully plans between two and four encounters to happen during every trip and runs those. Do the players know the f$&%ing difference? Of course not! Is either approach better for ANY REASON? OF COURSE NOT! Rolling randomly is fun for no other reason than it is. Planning carefully is good because the encounters tend to be smoother. The approaches are different, but they have the same outcome as far as the players are concerned.

With that said, I’m going to tell you that, in this adventure, the PACING and TENSION are far more important than any sort of mechanical system. And fair play is far more important than leaving things up to the whims of the dice. Yeah, I said it. Sometimes, you have to admit that, for the game to be good, you’re going to have to take a tighter hold on the story reins. And if anyone wants to take issue with that, well, that’s why YOU can’t run a cool Alien: Isolation adventure.

Now, it’s going to be hard to put this s$&% in order. Sorry. There’s a lot of jumbled issues here. Hopefully, this will make some kind of sense when I’m done writing it.

First, you have to introduce the Xenosis. You have to introduce it early. And you have to make sure the players can see that it is pretty much the baddest bada$& ever. But, if you want to do the horror right, you also have to build toward it. When the players first arrive on the scene, they should see signs of horrible carnage. They should know something horrible is happening. It could start with things being wrecked and abandoned, then build to some blood stains, screams in the distance, or whatever, and then culminate on a horribly disfigured and dismembered corpse. They need to know something is wrong so they are on their guard. And, if you’re going to allow this adventure to take several sessions, it might be worth it to allow an ENTIRE SESSION to go by of ratcheting tension and non-combat challenges. They have to break down doors, climb over ravines, negotiate traps, solve puzzles, whatever. But what they don’t do is get into any fights. With anything. But they keep finding signs that there is going to be a fight. And they keep expecting it. That gets them pretty f$&%ing on edge.

Eventually, you have to introduce the monster. And you’re going to have to decide what it is that makes it powerful. Assuming you go the horrible monster route, it is probably strong, vicious, and practically invulnerable. And you want the players to see exactly how strong, vicious, and invulnerable it is. So, you have to engineer a scene. A scene they can’t get into.

For example, maybe they are on an upper-level balcony that is all caged in. And as they come along the balcony, they can see some innocent redshirts two floors below them. Suddenly, the Xenosis appears. It bursts from a hallway or teleports in or whatever it does – we’ll come back to that – and they try to fight it, but they get wrecked. Utterly f$&%ing wrecked. You’re going to have to be descriptive as hell here. But description isn’t enough.

See, the players’ default assumption will be that they are a lot more powerful than the redshirts. Sure, the redshirts got destroyed by the monster, but the PCs are big damn heroes. They can take the Xenosis out. You have to make sure they do not walk away with that assumption. And there are two great ways to do that.

First, if the players have fought the redshirts before and struggled with them, they will get pretty disheartened to see the Xenosis take out the redshirts. For example, if the heroes got their a$&es nearly kicked by a Hard to Deadly level encounter with an ogre and then they see the Xenosis one-shot the ogre while shrugging off every attack the ogre levels, they are going to realize that they are f$&%ed. You can even use this with the rising tension portion of the game. Perhaps after not encountering anything but carnage for a while, the heroes end up fighting an ogre. Maybe that’s the climax of the first session, even. The ogre is really tough and powerful and they have to work really hard to take it down. But they win. And they assume the ogre was the monster all along. And then they see the ogre was one of several ogres. And the Xenosis just plowed through one without breaking a sweat.

Second, you want to use the game rules against the players. When you force the players to watch the combat from the balcony, drop them into initiative order and play out the battle between the Xenosis and the redshirts. That way, even if they decide to either walk away or intervene, they have to see at least a few rounds of what’s going on. And you’re going to cheat at the initiative. Roll behind the screen. Don’t roll at all. The redshirts go first. Then the Xenosis. Then each hero goes in the order they roll initiative. Now, you’re going to inflate all the Xenosis’ numbers. After all, it is unbeatable in combat. So, it has an AC of 30. And it has a million zillion hit points. And it has multiattack with three attacks. And it has +15 to attack and does 10d6 damage with each attack.

The redshirts go first. They roll attacks and you announce their totals just like you would for any other combat. You roll the dice and say “let’s see, that’s a 24 to hit… so that’s a miss… the ogre swings the club at the massive beast and catches it hard in its adamantine-scaled flank. Its carapace isn’t even scuffed.” And the players should be upset by the fact that a 24 or whatever doesn’t hit the creature. And the Xenosis takes its turn. Roll the dice and announce the result, again, just like any other battle. “Okay, it rolled an 11, so that’s 26 on the attack roll. Easily hits. Let me see damage. I need more dice. Okay, clatter. That’s 48 damage. It sends the ogre flying with a swing of its massive tail. You can hear bones breaking. And now for its second attack…”

By the time the players actually get a turn, they should be smart enough to not intervene. And, because you have quarantined them from the battle, they can’t intervene if they want to. But now they know the Xenosis’ stats. Enough to know they are f$&%ed in any sort of fight. After that scene, if the idiots decide to fight the thing, they deserve to die.

Now, at that point, the players might be a little… upset. That’s fine. You need to expect a little shock. They might say something like “how are we supposed to kill that?” And, you can say, casually, “you probably can’t. You’d better stay away from it”. Be a little flippant, don’t give any ground, and don’t let them off the hook. They might run away. That’s fine. They fail the adventure. But if you lay on the failure thick enough, you can shame them into going back. Something like “well, you return to town without the Sunsword and you find the undead hordes of the evil lich have already started to ravage the town. You can hear squeals barks and smell the tang of burning fur. The fire-zombies have gotten into the puppy orphanage. The sounds of innocent, adorable puppies who never knew their own mommies burning to death while being devoured by zombies fills the air…”

This is actually a really useful trick in D&D. The non-scripted scripted sequence, I mean, not the puppy orphanage. D&D doesn’t allow you to have cutscenes like video games do. And sometimes, that means your stupid players will agency themselves right out of important information. So, forcing the players to be bystanders AND using the rules can allow you to demonstrate things to the players that will be useful later. For example, later, you might need to establish that the Xenosis is afraid of fire. Not harmed by it, but afraid. So, the heroes might need to be ambushed right near a fire trap and the Xenosis might need to win initiative so that it can blunder into a fire trap before the party gets a turn.

Now, let’s talk about the dungeon itself.

The dungeon is going to have to work as a perfect setting for the sort of cat-and-mouse survival horror you’re trying to set up. And that means, it has to allow the Xenosis to move around pretty freely and to approach suddenly. It has to feel like it has a mastery of the environment, after all. Now, fantasy games don’t allow for things like air vents and I assume you’re not allowing the Xenosis to teleport or pass through walls or anything, so you’re going to have to do the next best thing: a mess of rooms with multiple exits with lots of short hallways between them. But that’s not all.

You’re also going to need to have lots of interactive bits. Big, open rooms just won’t work at all. The rooms are going to need lots of furnishings to provide hiding places. And they will need some other interactive bits. Stuff that can be pushed around or knocked over to create barricades, traps that can be sprung, gates that can be closed to slow the monster down, that kind of thing. To help you create the map, you might consider adopting a theme that suits it. For example, a catacomb or crypt. The sort of mazelike catacomb that you’d find under Rome, you know? With plenty of statues and sarcophagi and pillars and alters and tattered hangings and pots filled with oil and iron gates that can be closed and latched.

You need all of this stuff because the biggest thing you’re going to have to figure out is what the players can do when they are confronted with the monster. Obviously, when the Xenosis arrives, the first thing the party is going to do is scatter into hiding places and conceal themselves. But that only gets them so far. See, when it comes to stealth, you have two choices. You can either make sitting and waiting interesting – and in D&D, you really can’t do that – or you can create decision points. The heroes are going to need ways to distract the monster so they can sneak out of the room or slow it down or trap it momentarily so they can run. They have to be able to DO SOMETHING about the monster. And that means they need lots of potential tools. You can’t just have this exchange:

GM: Suddenly the Xenosis appears in the doorway! What do you do?
Alice: I hide.
Bob: Hide.
Carol: I’m going to, um, hide.
GM: Okay, you all hide. Make Stealth checks. Good. You appear to be hiding. The Xenosis starts to prowl around the room. What do you do?
Alice: I’m going to keep hiding.
Bob: I’m good with continuing to hide. <br<
Carol: Let’s see… I think I’m just going to… umm… I’ll stay hiding.
GM: Okay. Uh oh! The Xenosis is going right for Alice’s hiding place! If it gets too close, it might notice her. What do you do, Alice?
Alice: I… hide really hard.

That sucks. If the heroes can shoot a wall hanging down with an arrow behind the monster and it jumps at the hanging and starts savaging it, Alice can crawl quietly to a new hiding place. And then, slowly, the party can make its way to the door. Or they can wait for the monster to leave.

By the way, you might also consider having redshirts or mooks in the dungeon. Undead that the Xenosis doesn’t pay attention to unless they make noise, for example? And maybe the goblins who got trapped while plundering the tomb – with their ogres – and trying not to get murdered. It depends on how complex you want to make the game. But it can add a really interesting dimension if the party has to engage other foes while evading the Xenosis.

And THAT brings us around to the big part: the monster’s behavior and how to track it. And the one thing you DON’T want to do is to track its position on the map and simulate the chase. Because you want to run a fun game. And the best way to handle it is to take a cue from the way Alien: Isolation’s Xenomorph behaved.

In that game, the Xenomorph had two different artificial intelligence programs operating it. One was basically the brain of the Xenomorph itself. It had senses and reacted to stimuli the way you’d expect. It could see and hear and if it saw or heard something, it would check it out. And if it kept seeing or hearing something in the same vicinity, it would investigate more and more thoroughly. It could also be distracted or tricked or frightened. The Xenomorph never knew exactly where the player was unless the player did something stupid like make noise or shoot at it or step on its tail. Actually, that’s not true. Its tail had no sensory organs. But we’ll come to why that is in a moment.

The other artificial intelligence program was omniscient. It knew where the player was and what the player was doing and what objective the player was pursuing. And it also knew where the Xenomorph was and what the Xenomorph was doing. And it was paying careful attention to things like how freaked out the player was, how far into the game the player had progressed, and how long it had been since the player was last tormented by the Xenomorph. If the game was hitting a lull, that AI would send the Xenomorph a little clue in the form of “you might want to check over in this corner of the map”. The Xenomorph would head in that direction and start poking around. Meanwhile, if the player was frantic and had had multiple encounters recently or was having a lot of trouble, the AI would send the Xenomorph somewhere else on the map. It would lie to give the player a breather. Basically, it was monitoring the tension in the game and managing the pace.

That’s why I started with that whole thing about running a game versus running a simulation. Running a good game involves tricking people into thinking you are running a simulation of something that just happens to always feel just the right amount of awesome or terrible or whatever. Now, the designers of Alien: Isolation talked a lot about how important it was for the Xenomorph to play fair. About how it never teleported, or it never knew exactly where the player was without investigating. But they were building a video game and they had reasons to worry about perceived fairness and also about replayability. You don’t have to worry about any of that stuff. Your players trust you. And you’re only going to run this adventure once. And, also, you can’t turn off your knowledge of the players’ locations anyway. So, here’s what you do:

When the Xenosis is off camera, it basically has two states: nearby and far away. When it is far away, it is in some distant corner of the dungeon and is unlikely to detect the players unless something big and loud happens. Like an explosion. Or screaming. And even if it does detect the players, it will only have a vague sense of where they are. It will start moving in their direction. Alternatively, when it is nearby, anything the players do that would attract attention – breaking down a door, talking above a loud whisper, blundering into a trap, opening a sarcophagus – when it is nearby, those activities MAY draw its attention.

Also, if the players are getting relaxed and complacent, it’s time to move the Xenosis nearby. And if the players are getting their a$&es kicked and need a breather, it’s time to move it far away. You need to monitor the attitude at the table closely.

Once the Xenosis is nearby, if the heroes actually attract its attention, it’s time to drop it on camera. It’s time to put it on the map. Now, you don’t drop it right into the room with the players. You put it in the next room. But you make sure they can hear it or see it. They will think it just wandered in somewhere else and it’s getting close. The point is, they always see or hear it coming. If the monster actually manages to get the drop on them, they will probably get killed. Just like how enemies in Bioshock always miss with their first shot, the Xenosis never notices the players before they notice it.

And that allows you to give the players a decision point. They can try to evade, they can try to hide, whatever. Dice will be rolled and so on. And then you play out the encounter. Maybe the Xenosis stops in the doorway, sniffs around, and then plods off in a different direction. Maybe it starts poking and prodding around the room. Maybe it just passes through and goes in the direction the players wanted to go. Whoops. You COULD come up with some random table for Xenosis behaviors if you need to. But you don’t have to. You can just DECIDE what to do with your GM brain. And you decide based on things like how easy the party has it right now, how close they are to a major objective, whether things have been going too hard, or whether things have been going too easy. Feel free, however, to throw PRETEND dice to fool them into thinking the creature’s behavior is based on some complex algorithm instead of what makes the best game.

Now comes the tricky part. What happens when the Xenosis decides to hang out in the room they are in and investigate. And what happens if the party f$%&’s up and gets noticed while they are trying to hide.

Here’s the thing with stealth in RPGs. It sucks. It’s boring as hell. And with the Xenosis on the scene, it’s also a save or die situation. One f$&% up and the players are dead, right?

This is where you have to be smarter and the Xenosis has to be dumber. In order for stealth to be enjoyable, the players actually have to be able to know right before they are about to be caught and they have to be able to do something about that. In stealth-based video games, there is always a delay between the player drawing attention and the enemy doing something. In fact, there’s usually two. Let’s say there’s an enemy at the end of the hallway and you need to sneak across the hall. You misjudge the timing on his patrol route and you leave cover just as the enemy turns around. What usually happens? Usually, the enemy gives a start and his eyes turn yellow or a question mark happens and there’s a noise or a voice cue. The enemy hasn’t actually seen the player at this point. The enemy is just curious because he thinks he saw something. If the player reacts quickly enough, pulling back into cover, the enemy will say something stupid like “I guess it was just the wind” or “stupid space-cats” and turn back around. If the player is a little slow, the enemy goes into investigation mode. He starts moving toward the place where he saw the thing. Meanwhile, the player can back around the corner and find a better hiding place. Or throw a smoke bomb. Or throw a rock. Or trigger a trap. Or shoot the enemy.

The point is, the player has multiple decision points between “got noticed” and “game over”. And you have to allow that too. The Xenosis has to have states like “poking around” and “curiously investigating” and “actively searching” and “about to pounce”. And those state transitions have to be noticeable and the players have to have chances to deal with it.

Of course, in an RPG, this can be very dangerous. A series of bad die rolls can lead to a character getting shredded by the Xenosis. And you can’t just reload your last quick save. But that’s the price of being a hero. But having multiple chances to recover and having several friends who can provide distractions or throw down darkness or fog cloud spells means the players are never screwed from one bad roll. But you’ve got to break all the stealth rules here and make sure the players have opportunities to recover or react. Otherwise, it’s all just “hide, hide harder, oops, failed Stealth, you’re dead.”

And while we’re on the subject of the monster’s behavior, you also need to think about the ways the players might be able to recover. Is the monster distracted by meat? Will it stop to devour food? Is it afraid of fire? How long does it take to break through steel gates if the players close and lock them? Can the players outrun the monster? See, ultimately, if the heroes do manage to get all the way to “about to pounce,” they need some way to get out of that pounce since they can’t win a fight. And if you want the players to feel like absolute geniuses, you need to telegraph that stuff without outright saying it. Set up an encounter where the Xenosis blunders into a fire trap and then runs off. Later, when Alice the wizard uses burning hands to drive the Xenosis off before Bob gets eaten, she’ll feel like she was smart for paying attention. And if the party doesn’t have fire, let them find some vials of pitch that was used to mummify corpses or something, so they have a fire weapon. Let them kill giant spiders and harvest the meat to use as a distraction after they come upon the Xenosis devouring a giant spider.

I could go on. Holy f$%& could I go on. This is really just a starting point. You could build a great three-session adventure out of this mess. Hell, you could build a megadungeon adventure path out of this. After all, Alien: Isolation did it. But frankly, I can’t. These Ask Angry things are supposed to be short and I’m supposed to get at least two questions out of the way with each one. So, I have to stop. Hopefully you can go from here.

Thanks for the awesome question. Now I will be forever disappointed by every other Ask Angry question ever.

Man, I love thinking through s$&% like this.