I happen to love horror RPGs of all sorts. Top 5 tips, you say?
1. Atmosphere - Appropriate background music, lighting, props, playing after sunset, etc. Do everything you can to set the mood.
2. Descriptions - Don't tell your players how their characters react but provide evocative descriptions that evoke the emotions from the players. Horror roleplaying isn't about scaring the characters, its about scaring the players.
3. Anticipation - Draw out the tension as much as possible. Example: Gulthias from Heart of Nightfang Spire toys with player characters throughout the adventure, always staying one step ahead of them thanks to scrying and minions.
4. Vulnerability - This one is tricky because many players don't like the "traditional" methods of making their characters vulnerable, like getting their gear stolen. Still, find ways to make characters vulnerable (without bludgeoning the point).
5. Enticement - The true key to horror is to make the players want to be involved and scared. This one is hard to define and hard to pull off as it is essentially providing a lure, a bait by which the player characters actively want to be in a situation they would find horrific. Why is the vampire so compelling? Because it is a metaphor for immortality. Find what the player characters want and lure them in with it.
Game mechanics aren't necessary for horror, but, it is a challenging genre to DM. First and foremost, your players need to consent to exploring the horror genre...it can't be forced or coerced.
Great post, TY Quentin. I love being able to speak with DM's and players who have more or dofferent experience than my own.
The last part of your post, about players wanting to explore a horrible genre, that is why I mix standard adventure tropes with horror in a sandbox environment. They never have to go into the tomb, but oh, imagine the wealth!
I'm always up to hear someone elses experiences. If you could just list your top 5 tips for GM's who want to do horror that would be great. I like horror but there's always something new to learn about DM'ing. Do you vblog on youtube at all?
The first thing is that you can't force a horror campaign on your players. If your players are smoking weed and listening to Bob Marley during your horror campaign, it's not going to work. If they're fooling around with their Picachu figurines and showing each other Sponge Bob pictures during the session, your horror campaign will fail.
Other than that, I think it's more important to get your players scared than getting them to pretend that their character is scared.
The mood and storytelling are very important but Monkey pretty much covered that aspect. I would also add:
1) Get your players emotionally attached to their characters. It's the same tricks you use to give life to a character in a non-horror setting. Use the same NPCs and landmarks often, let the PCs have property and employees, have the players be at the center of the plot once in a while, make sure the PCs have their own agendas, etc... All of these work.
2) The game needs to be deadly but not too deadly. I've seen many horror campaigns fail miserably because permanent character death happens too often. The last thing you want is your players to come with a couple of backup characters. Your players need to know that if they're cautious, their beloved character will survive. That doesn't mean you can't toy with them, quite the contrary. But if the players play their cards right, all the PCs should survive.
Man, the more I hear about 4e the more I think that I must try that game. I don't like the miniature's level complexity to combat in a role-playing game. But everything else about that system seems awesome.
It has it's ups and downs. As has been demonstrated by the general response (edition wars, ect...), your mileage may vary. For me, there were lots of great concepts and several interesting methods of implementation that I liked. However, the presentation was often difficult, which may turn some people off right from the get go.
More specificly for running Horror games, or any specific genre game, really, is to get the whole group on board from the very start. Make sure everyone knows the type (if not specific plot points) of the game you are running and they are playing. Some people will always hate mechanics that usurp player control of character, be they fear effects, charms, domination, motivation breaking through torture, alignment, or virtue ratings. Other players are more fluid, and some don't care either way. Communication and mutual respect are very important elements.
Also, the previous tips for Horror RPGS from our resident Monkey are very good.
I have an answer for you, it may even be the truth.
It has it's ups and downs. As has been demonstrated by the general response (edition wars, ect...), your mileage may vary. For me, there were lots of great concepts and several interesting methods of implementation that I liked. However, the presentation was often difficult, which may turn some people off right from the get go.
Communication and mutual respect are very important elements.
Also, the previous tips for Horror RPGS from our resident Monkey are very good.
Yeah, I am cutting and pasting a lot of this thread as we go. There have been some really great and insightful posts. Its nice when even though people don't see eye to eye they can share technique and ideas that make the game better.
Re. DM's usurping emotional control of characters: It seems that people either do not care or they do not like it. So for myself as a DM I am going to draw a hard line there, The PC is the only one who can say how a character feels. The world as presented to the PC's can be tough, constant damage, negative reactions from NPC's, effects that limit movement or remove powers from PC's; all this stuff can be frustrating for a player to deal with.
As a DM one is obliged to present the world as it is written, sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's hard. Within that there is the desire to balance excitment and tempo of the game, also present information relating to the story, and to occasionally just confound or attack the players because its fun. Yes I know some people are going to bristle at that last bit, but it happens, we may as well figure out how to deal with it.
With all that angst and conundrum at the disposal of the DM the player needs to have a strong framework to interact with the game world. A well defined set of abilities that are guaranteed to work. Players need this frame in order to prevent character emotions and reactions from bleeding back to the player.
DM's usurping emotional control of characters: It seems that people either do not care or they do not like it. So for myself as a DM I am going to draw a hard line there, The PC is the only one who can say how a character feels. The world as presented to the PC's can be tough, constant damage, negative reactions from NPC's, effects that limit movement or remove powers from PC's; all this stuff can be frustrating for a player to deal with.
I believe that there are already rules that instruct the Player on how their character feels. It's called Charmed, or Frightened, or Taunted (which I personally detest, but that's off topic). While some players may really hate it, it is part of the rules.
You have a really good idea that would be excellent for a Horror Module. It takes the notion of the abstract HP and uses it to it's fullest extent, as well as softening up the PCs without breaking the tension with a bunch of semi-random combats. It obviously needs some tweeking, but I would encourage you to continue with the idea.
I love running horror games. I can run a horror game in my sleep with both hands behind my back and covered in snakes. That happened, once. Less fun than you'd imagine.
The key to running a horror game is to realize what horror actually is. If you take the genre trappings of horror and wrap them around an action adventure game like DnD, it will be an awkward fit. Ravenloft (through I love it and worshipped at the alter of the Kargatane for years) only ever worked well in the first few levels of play, because more often than not it relied on the atmosphere rather than any structural innovations.
Horror is, quite simply, the sensation that comes when the world ceases to function the way you thought it did. I differentiate it from the more common 'terror', which is the fear or threat of impending physical or psychological harm. Horror is often existential, while terror is visceral. You could call successful horror a dark mystery, where the revelation is unwelcome, opens more questions than it answers, and preferably puts your entire party in danger.
So here's my handy-dandy guide to running horror RPGs (as it pertains to D&D) in brief:
1. Build a social net around the characters. Because horror depends on subverting the world view, you have to establish a 'way it is' early on, and keep establishing that. I have each player design 2-4 NPC with a direct link to their character, along with a few locations. Then I link the NPCs to each other with secrets, hidden agendas, and personal ties.
1a. When a character acts against one of these NPCs, think of it as a 'tug' on the network of connections. Seemingly unrelated NPCs will get involved and it gives the players the impression of something big moving behind the scenes.
2. Once you've established the setting (as you would in any game, I suspect), sprinkle those connections with weirdness. For God's sake, don't stat things out here. You're attempting to hint at vistas of the unknown, and if the PCs figure out that so and so who has x HP and can do Y three times a day is behind it all, you can bet your sweet aunt bettie that they'll be dropping in to visit them in no time flat. Oh, and the more innocuous or essential the NPC, the more strangeness you should wrap around them. Weirdness begs for an answer, and thats where you lay your traps.
Example: My alchemist has a sweetheart in the aristocracy. One day, I realize that no one ever calls her by the same name twice. Or her handmaid covers all the mirrors when she walks by.
3. Visit the most lively awfulness upon them. Listen, no one is quaking in their boots from Cthulhu or Dracula anymore. You have to bring a whole new realm of messed-up to the game table. I cannot speak highly enough of the Book of Unremitting Horror, by Pelgrane Press. The creatures in there would stand out even in a world as fantastical as the Forgotten Realms.
4. Things can always get worse. I don't mean in a Dragonball Z sense, where the big bad gets more powerful each time the players level up, I mean that things will go wrong for the PCs. Victories could backfire, enemies outthink them, and everything has a price. The greater the victory, the greater the price. They must know what the price might be going in. Let them back out, or fail.
5. Let the PCs wander into their own doom. They'll do it. When things get weird, they'll dig into the story, and when the weird things turn their focus on them, they'll have no one to blame but themselves. Of course, if you have players who like being railroaded, this won't work at all. But not much will.
6. Don't be so serious all the time. Have a couple sessions of straight up goblin killing, or political maneuvering. People adapt to pressure, or they get so stressed out they lose interest. To keep the horror fresh it has to be like a game of Russian Roullette where the players just *have* to keep pulling the trigger, even though they know that eventually they'll tug on the wrong thread. But its the times when the gun goes *click* that convince them to move forward.
Another (tricky) element of horror is loss of control. A friend of mine did a horror campaign and introduced a child monster with no morals or sense of danger, and the ability to exert compulsions on the party. It wasn't (obviously) evil, so we decided to endure its whims in the hopes of curing it. The GM used it's compulsion ability exactly twice: once to say 'come play with me', and once to railroad the players into a dungeon. That thing unnerved everyone because it could take away our control over our characters at any time. As Verdegris says, some players don't like that loss of control, but the threat of it is pretty interesting.
At the same time, the child's mother constantly controlled our actions by pulling a Leeroy Jenkins on every darkened corner. No one was afraid of her; we tried to stuff her into a sack. That goes back to that stuff about anticipation - we were afraid of a potential threat, but an actual threat was little more than a nuisance.
One scary thing about the classic vampire or werewolf is their immunity to damage. In game terms, the players' primary means of controlling their environment is killing it. Introduce an obstacle that they can't kill, and you take away a form of player control. I've fought monsters like this in video games. A ghost that ignores damage, a troll that heals too fast, or gremlins that spawn faster than you can kill them - I tried fighting them, but I always had to back off and try something else, and sometimes that something else was "if you see this, run".
You have to give fair warning on this. I'm used to games where running away is an acceptable option, so I thought nothing of it when I dropped an unkillable yet mostly harmless monster on my players without warning. I told my players their first two attacks were ineffective and they nearly rage quit, and an experienced GM nearby assumed I had been corrupted by power. Gotta give at least as much warning as you would a SoD. Fortunately, in the horror genre fair warning is an opportunity to build anticipation.
One thing that doesn't scare: random encounters. Going back to my friend's game, she wanted to recreate the tension of a certain video game, so she had skeletons and demons pop out from circles of red light everywhere we went. It may have been scary in that one game, but in the D&D world, random encounters are more of a nuisance than a source of fear. She had skeletons and demons and stranger things pop out of nowhere, and our biggest response was "What's that? Well, stab a few times, that usually works". Definitely a case of less action is better.
Man, the more I hear about 4e the more I think that I must try that game. I don't like the miniature's level complexity to combat in a role-playing game. But everything else about that system seems awesome.
It has it's ups and downs. As has been demonstrated by the general response (edition wars, ect...), your mileage may vary.
I don't think you know what an edition war is. There hasn't been one in this thread. Going back to older editions for ideas and/or comparing editions is not enough qualify.
I don't think you know what an edition war is. There hasn't been one in this thread. Going back to older editions for ideas and/or comparing editions is not enough qualify.
Not this thread... not even this board for the worst of it... I've seen edition warring. I more meant it as a caveat to the Bluespruce that as it is a contentious edition over all, there are likely to be elements that are not always going to be peaches and creame. I would rather someone be pleasantly surprised than let down.
I have an answer for you, it may even be the truth.
I don't think you know what an edition war is. There hasn't been one in this thread. Going back to older editions for ideas and/or comparing editions is not enough qualify.
Not this thread... not even this board for the worst of it... I've seen edition warring. I more meant it as a caveat to the Bluespruce that as it is a contentious edition over all, there are likely to be elements that are not always going to be peaches and creame. I would rather someone be pleasantly surprised than let down.
