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Adventurers aren’t usually afraid of facing their foes inDungeons & Dragons, but sometimes they might face something so terrifying, that even the mightiest heroes feel the urge to flee. To represent this, the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide includes details on how to manage fear, and what mental stress that can cause.
These guidelines aren’t for every single encounter; in fact, they might not even fit your campaign at all. But if you’re looking to make a session all about delving into the Shadowfell, or worse, the Far Realm, then you will need an appropriate system to explore how the characters might feel in these environments.
Fear Effects
The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide recommends a very simple way of dealing with characters feeling fear:applying the frightened condition.Said condition makes charactersunable to get close to the source of their fear, as well as having adisadvantage on D20 testsfor the duration.
There is often aWisdom saving throwinvolved in feeling fear, and characters tend to be able torepeat the save at the end of their turns, as they try to muster up the courage to face whatever is in front of them. The difficulty of the rolldepends on the context, as well as thepast experiences of each character.
For example, one of the hardest checks shown in the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide isfacing a portal to the Abyss, buta warlock with a demonic patron would reasonably be unfazedby the sight. You should alwayscheck with your playersif adding fear effects is something everyone would be comfortable with, as well as check if it wouldmake sense to begin with in your setting.
Adding Fear Effects
If you have a session themed around horror, you couldadd additional effects to the frightened conditionto keep players on their toes. If you do so,the encounters shouldn’t be incredibly difficult, since the challenge is already raised by the fear the characters feel.
The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide has three examples of how the frightened condition could be enhanced:
Since all these effectsdepend on being under the Frightened condition, characters with high Wisdom will oftenavoid suffering themmost of the time. If you have a party filled with clerics and druids, keep in mind that they might not even interact with fear the way you expect them to.
Mental Stress Effects
The 2014 version of the Dungeon Master’s Guideincluded a section on madness, the different kinds of effects that afflicted creatures would suffer, and how to decide them.Those effects are mostly gonein the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide, replaced withshorter rules about mental stress.
The difference between being frightened and being mentally stressed is that the former isa primal response, while the latter can happen whenfaced with something disturbingfor a set period. A brave charactermight not feel fearwhen facing an eldritch horror, but they might still havelasting effects on their mindafter the encounter.
Representing Mental Stress
Suffering a spike in mental stress is likehaving our brains under attack, and D&D already has a type of damage to represent that:psychic damage. Here are some example situations from the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide that could lead to mental stress, as well as a sample difficulty challenge and how much damage it would deal.
10
1d6
15
3d6
20
9d6
The saving throw for these effectsis normally Wisdom, but you can make it beany of the mental Ability Scoresdepending on the context. A recommended rule is thatthe character uses their highest mental Scorefor the save, since the brain uses whatever defense mechanisms it has to avoid being damaged.
Prolonged Effects
Just like madness in 2014,mental stress can have prolonged effects, but there isn’t a large D100 table for you to choose the effect. Instead, it is recommended thatyou create them based on the context of the campaign, always making sure that players agree to them as well.
The Calm Emotions spell can be used to suppress the effects of all mental stress effects, but it doesn’t completely cure them.
