Horror RPGs

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
Of a necessity, immersion is always incumbent upon the players. A good GM helps but if the players won't buy in, the GM is hard pressed to achieve whatever effect they are going for. Roleplaying games are largely a consensual activity. I'm sure we've all had the experience of the disruptive player who didn't want to be there and no amount of catering to their demands ever made anything better.
 
Does horror need that player character death be always on the table?

I'm tuning an upcoming horror campaign to be an horror drama kind of thing. The idea is doing it considerably less lethal, so we have more chance to see and play PCs' mental and social deterioration and how those can drive play. Death would still be in the table, of course, but hopefully less frequent.

I always found death the least interesting of failures in RPGs. Could the prospect of character change, be it physical (maimed, scarred, handicapped) or otherwise (mentally altered or traumatized), or of losing things valuable to him (like people, status or ideals) be as effective in this case?

Can this work?
 
Last edited:
Thinking more about it..Imagine there's this dial in place.

To one side of the dial it's drama. Drama needs that lethality be low otherwise you can't develop the PCs, their personal arcs and relationships.

To the other side there's terror/horror which I suspect depends on lethality to some degree, otherwise you can't evoke feelings like dread or fearful anticipation that are associated with it.

Finding a balance here seems the key, in a way to not dilute these contrary aspects too much. Except if there's a way to reconcile them?
 
I'm not necessarily a horror gaming expert, but in my experience the "oh dear, my character is going to die now" is no more a factor in horror than it is cyberpunk or Pendragon. Sure, it can add an edge to the moment and make victories all that sweeter, but nothing about that is specific to horror.

Personally I've found the key driving factors for horror seem to be:

1. It's an aesthetic thing. Some players in horror games don't really expect to feel afraid but they enjoy horror creepy, unsettling atmosphere.It makes some people say "Cool" in the say pew-pew lasers , lost cities, piles of treasure go for others.

2. Horror games are often sought players who more interested in social interaction and playing in civilised settings. The horror the necessary adventure hook for someone who really just wants to play an Oxford professor or a Edwardian butler.
 
If by 'on the table' you mean at least somewhat possible, then yeah, it does, but I'd say the same thing about most RPGs. Dying isnt horrific though, although dying horrifically might be, but only briefly.
 
Death isn’t meant to be interesting. That’s why it’s a penalty, not a reward. Interesting without Death means, yeah the character obviously doesn’t like the things happening to them, but the player is psyched because now comes the Drama, the Tragedy, the Coping, the Revenge, all the OOC meta concerns to propel the narrative, just like nearly every author does to their characters.

If you’re talking about some form of Storygame or Narrative RPG where the question is psychological (Has the PC gone to Hell? Are they crazy? Are they in the Matrix? Are they the victim of someone in like the movie Gaslight?) then there doesn’t need to be Death as a result of what’s occurring, but taking it off the table completely means that something that should be possible for the PC to do or have happen to them can’t happen. As is being discussed in the other thread, at that point you’re leaving RPG territory.
 
Not sure what is going on here. I didn't start this thread. The original post all other responses have vanished leaving my orphanef reponse hanging in mid air.
 
Weird. I started the thread to discuss this point that diverged out of the "Is horror GM-driven?" thread. But apparently it vanished? :shock:

Anyway, here is the OP:

Silva said:
Does horror need that player character death be always on the table?

I'm tuning an upcoming horror campaign to be an horror drama kind of thing. The idea is doing it considerably less lethal, so we have more chance to see and play PCs' mental and social deterioration and how those can drive play. Death would still be in the table, of course, but hopefully less frequent.

I always found death the least interesting of failures in RPGs. Could the prospect of character change, be it physical (maimed, scarred, handicapped) or otherwise (mentally altered or traumatized), or of losing things valuable to him (like people, status or ideals) be as effective in this case?

Can this work?
 
Thinking more about it..Imagine there's this dial in place.

To one side of the dial it's drama. Drama needs that lethality be low otherwise you can't develop the PCs, their personal arcs and relationships.

To the other side there's terror/horror which I suspect depends on lethality to some degree, otherwise you can't evoke feelings like dread or fearful anticipation that are associated with it.

Finding a balance here seems the key, in a way to not dilute these contrary aspects too much. Except if there's a way to reconcile them?
 
I'm not necessarily a horror gaming expert, but in my experience the "oh dear, my character is going to die now" is no more a factor in horror than it is cyberpunk or Pendragon. Sure, it can add an edge to the moment and make victories all that sweeter, but nothing about that is specific to horror.

Personally I've found the key driving factors for horror seem to be:

1. It's an aesthetic thing. Some players in horror games don't really expect to feel afraid but they enjoy horror creepy, unsettling atmosphere.It makes some people say "Cool" in the say pew-pew lasers , lost cities, piles of treasure go for others.

2. Horror games are often sought players who more interested in social interaction and playing in civilised settings. The horror the necessary adventure hook for someone who really just wants to play an Oxford professor or a Edwardian butler.
This is a good point, actually. That horror/terror can be an aesthetic thing and more related to the buildup of a strong and unsetllting atmosphere. I agree.

But where does PC death enters in this equation? Do you think it's a requirement in some way to mantain that atmosphere?
 
It say the risk of character death is not an essential ingrediant, it all about context. If the PC are investigators or exocrcists like in The Entity or Poltergiest (I am sure there are more recent examples) them they can still fail without the PCs being injured but resulting in the NPCs they were trying to help dead, damned or insane. If the player characters are horny campers at Crystal Lake or shopper in Dawn of the Dead, then you'd think PC death would very much be on the table.
 
It say the risk of character death is not an essential ingrediant, it all about context. If the PC are investigators or exocrcists like in The Entity or Poltergiest (I am sure there are more recent examples) them they can still fail without the PCs being injured but resulting in the NPCs they were trying to help dead, damned or insane. If the player characters are horny campers at Crystal Lake or shopper in Dawn of the Dead, then you'd think PC death would very much be on the table.
Makes sense.

I imagine this kind of 'horror drama" I'm aiming for would work like in Kult (more or less), where the game is obviously about terror/horror, and the dangers that result, but at the same time there's an expectation that the characters will live long enough for the group to appreciate their physical and mental and spiritual voyage toward the "truth".
 
An interesting question, a lot of classic horror is as much about madness as it is death, although I think one could argue that the fear of madness is the fear of a loss or death of the self.

In literature and particularly film this fear of madness has been most often featured by a woman protagonist. That is because of the relationship between the woman protagonist and the gothic that I think this trope grows out of.

Examples include Let's Scare Jessica to Death, Images, The Haunting of Julia, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, a lot of giallos and many more films. It is such a common horror trope that Kier-La Janisse wrote a whole, excellent book on the subgenre House of Psychotic Women.

That's not to say there aren't films and stories about men going insane, Polanski's The Tenant and The Shining come to mind.

There's a fair bit of overlap here with the ghost story and haunted house trope.

So I would suggest that it would be possible if one shifted the game from fear of death outright to fear of losing one's mind.

A related and mostly more modern horror trope is body horror, which is closely related in its fear of a loss of control and loss of self. So many examples of course but early Cronenberg is the exemplar with Shivers and Rabid.

So ultimately I'd say almost all horror is still about a fear of death but the manner in which that fear can be manifested doesn't necessarily have to be outright death.
 
Of a necessity, immersion is always incumbent upon the players. A good GM helps but if the players won't buy in, the GM is hard pressed to achieve whatever effect they are going for. Roleplaying games are largely a consensual activity. I'm sure we've all had the experience of the disruptive player who didn't want to be there and no amount of catering to their demands ever made anything better.

Horror is just particularly hard, because even if you've got a whole group who has buy-in (and that's anything but a given even when they're all trying), people's sense of what works in horror can vary considerably, and what will work for one will lay like a dead fish for others).
 
Horror is just particularly hard, because even if you've got a whole group who has buy-in (and that's anything but a given even when they're all trying), people's sense of what works in horror can vary considerably, and what will work for one will lay like a dead fish for others).
Character death needs to be used sparingly because there's nothing like fear of death to activate tactical dungeon mode in players.

True enough, for some the fear of helplessness is the pure stuff, for others it's just annoying and dull. I think supernatural horror has lost a lot of its edge in this rational age, hence the popularity of slasher flicks.

Character death needs to be used sparingly because there's nothing like fear of death to activate tactical dungeon mode in players and nothing kills atmosphere like reducing everything to stats and rules lawyering.
 
Character death needs to be used sparingly because there's nothing like fear of death to activate tactical dungeon mode in players and nothing kills atmosphere like reducing everything to stats and rules lawyering.
Interesting take. Makes sense. Thanks.
 
I picked up SOMA on sale and was surprised at how frightening it was at 3am with headphones on. I WISH tabletop RPGs could approach this level of dread and immersion. Despite being 8 years old at the time of writing, SOMA manages to build a delicious atmosphere of tension without relying on cheap jump scares. You're trapped in a decrepit, collapsing underwater base where some fucked up shit happened. There is no way to fight and, even worse, you cannot move silently! Gameplay involves cautious exploration while tension continues to build. Two thumbs up.
 
he 'loss of self' is tricky in RPG terms as it runs somewhat counter to a vague truism that players are generally in control of their PCs. This is perhaps less true than it used to be, tbu I think that there's some letting go that needs to happen in order for horror to happen well. I don't run straight horror very often (hardly at all really) but almost all my games both fantasy and sci-fi tend to have a pretty significant horror component. This tendency of mine is somewhat more developed on the fantasy side. I tend to index a lot of things that are probably best described as folk horror in my games - so I play on isolation, on a sense of otherness, on a recursive turning back on established cultural whatnots - that sort of thing. Most of my settings have a lot of historical layers, and those layers tend to come closer to the surface once the PCs get out of the city. So a lot of creepy ass villages and villagers, a lot of odd to fucking horrific rites an rituals - often clothed in a patina of folksy bonhomie and the like.

On the sci-fi side it tends to be more straightforward Aliens-style suspense and body horror (although I use body horror a lot in fantasy too).
 
I picked up SOMA on sale and was surprised at how frightening it was at 3am with headphones on. I WISH tabletop RPGs could approach this level of dread and immersion. Despite being 8 years old at the time of writing, SOMA manages to build a delicious atmosphere of tension without relying on cheap jump scares. You're trapped in a decrepit, collapsing underwater base where some fucked up shit happened. There is no way to fight and, even worse, you cannot move silently! Gameplay involves cautious exploration while tension continues to build. Two thumbs up.
SOMA is probably the best sci-fi horror videogame I've played. Thick atmosphere and full of existential dread that lingers with you days after you finish it.

Btw, the author Peter Watts himself played the game and talked about it here: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6953
 
Last edited:
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top