Advice on Horror

[Twixman]

Hello. I am interested in running a short little horror adventure for my players. They're a good bunch of roleplayers who gel very well off of eachother. I have never done a horror game before and I think it may be a nice change of pace. I would like advice on how to get players to really feel it, just general advice and what worked for you in the past. I want them to be creeped out, scared and all the way to jumping out of their seat (big goal I know). Any advice, tips and tricks would be greatly appreciated. Thankyou!

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Don't throw monsters at them. Combat is something you can control. Horror is about lack of control. Don't take away their tools, just put them in situations where their tools are useless. And play hooky with the rules. I saw an example someone posted recently of having someone make a fortitude save with a medium to low DC, and then later in the session say that another character sees that character chewing their nails constantly while looking blank. When they say why, refer back to the save. When they say "but I passed it?" say "yeah, and this is the down-graded version if you pass it."

Then they'll spend forever wondering what would have happened if they failed it. You don't have to come up with something, because you can just have the exact same effect if they did fail. You don't even have to come up with a fair reason for why it happened. Horror isn't fair.

Another possible idea: have one of the players replaced by a perfect doppelganger, one who knows the character so well that the player DOESN'T REALISE HE IS ACTUALLY PLAYING A DOPPELGANGER. That one risks pissing of the player though, but yeah.

Environmental stuff is good. Things that aren't mechanical.
If you do have them fight something, don't make it something out of a book. Reskin something. If they don't recognize what they're fighting, they'll never guess it's weaknesses. Another example I saw int he same thread recently was to have a zombie-like creature shamble towards them, but have it actually use the stats of an Orc or something, so it doesn't respond to Undead things.

[fsttesogold]

That was great article and i find a nice game please click this web site.





______________________
More Exciting Content Fifa 14 coins (http://www.fifa-coin.com/) are Waiting For You.

[DM Nate]

There's already some great advice about this topic on this thread here. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?356029-Running-tense-horror-for-experienced-players)

[Raine_Sage]

Seconding the above, combat isn't scary. CoC is a horror game and whenever a monster shows up is always the least scary moment in the game for me because either you die or you beat it there's not really a lot of middle ground.

The fastest way I've seen to get players tense and paranoid is to make the environment they're in hostile in some way. Maybe they're in a flesh cave, or a fetid swamp, or trapped deep underground, but you can't fight back against your environment. You can only try to navigate it as best you can with minimal damage. Another way is to give players an enemy that's clearly above their paygrade and run a stealth mission.

For example having the characters stalked through foggy streets by wraiths, having them duck and hide behind buildings and carts, having the wraiths dissapear through walls so the characters don't know where they'll pop up next. I did this in my game and while the characters were not in any real danger from the wraiths (they would have been a level appropriate challenge had it come to fighting, I just didn't tell them that) but they told me it was one of the most nerve wracking games they'd played.

[Segev]

Players in D&D and the like are used to being Big Damn Heroes. They swoop in, they save the day, they beat the monster, they end the threat, and everybody goes home happy.

There is also, frequently, a sort of sense of fair play from the enemies. Sure, Lord Evilman is torturing peasants in his dark dungeons of doom, and he kidnapped the princess and is besieging the heroes' homeland, but he does those horrible things and it's a race to see if you can stop him. Meanwhile, he has the courtesy to send Obviously Evil (or the occasional misunderstood) enforcer after the party to stop them from stopping him, letting them cleave through hordes of evil with a clear, clean conscience. He provides a visible, tangible, attackable target.

Horror is the inverse of this.

In horror, there's always something untouchable about the enemy. It could be a Cthulian Horror that is unreachable or unbeatably powerful, but it can also simply be that there is no obvious target, or that the target has a (literal) human shield.

Disease makes a good theme in horror precisely because it's not just your body betraying you, but it's indiscriminate and it cannot be reasoned with, talked down, nor (easily) attacked and defeated. Play up the unreliability and long recovery times from medicinal cures, emphasize that time is precious and keep it moving forward, and suddenly the players have uncertain hopes (but not NO hope) and limited resources with which to achieve them in the face of an implacable threat.

If there IS a "Big Bad" behind it, consider having him use the imprisoned innocent peasants as front-line soldiers. Maybe he's using my latest favorite tactic of a Mother Cyst which will let him detonate them to harm the party, or maybe he's just got them chained up in a way that allows him to make the heroes cut through them before they can get to him.

Make the heroes have to choose, like the Green Goblin did to Spiderman.

And yes, environment matters. Keep time moving, as I said, to limit their OOC thinking time. Describe things once, then maybe again if asked...once. Keep your own descriptions of the eerier scenes quiet. Not "hard to hear" quiet, but "hard to hear over any chatter" quiet. If they ask you what you said because they were talking, maybe let them have a Listen check to see if their characters heard it better than they. Repeat it with as much clarity as you feel their Listen result indicates. But no more.

Make sure to spring the consequences loudly, though.

This will likely keep them hanging on what you have to say, and maybe keep them whisper-hushed OOC as well as IC.

[Twixman]

Thankyou very much. Cant wait to inflict these torments on my players. Muhahaha

[Segev]

Oh, and magic jar (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magicJar.htm) is a wonderful spell for a horror villain to use. Ghosts get it for free...

[kyoryu]

Just another vote for what everyone above has said about lack of control/powerlessness.

[Raimun]

A Horror game? I can give you only two pieces of advice:

1) Don't.
2) You sure about that? You better have a good idea.

Horror is the trickiest RPG genre to GM. If you make it just an another dungeon crawl, with monsters and traps, no one will be even a tiny bit creeped out. However, if you do make the action sparse or non-existent but you can't foreshadow things well or create suspense or the story/execution/atmosphere won't otherwise work, all you have left is a RPG where nothing really happens, the characters are just a bunch of average joes, with no taste for adventure and everyone will be just bored. And then they're eaten by a grue so the game can end. The horror.

Despite what some cthulhu-people would make you think, auto-killing the players is not scary. If everyone knows their characters are going to die, where's the uncertainty? Where's the horror? Surely, there are fates worse than death.

Oh, and if you go by mythos-lore and the humanity is largerly insignificant and everyone knows this, how will a certain death scare any player if they already know: 1) They are going to die 2) Their character does not matter.

I know I might sound pessimistic about horror RPGs but I've never really been in a good one.

... and you really can't play a two-fisted, larger than life, sword/gun-toting action hero in a horror game. :smallfrown:

[Winter_Wolf]

Characters are easy to scare, and it's kind of pointless since it's basically the equivalent of a will save. Scare the players and they'll portray their characters as scared probably nine times in ten. I'd advise that you know your players and that they're actually okay with having their fears trotted out and exploited for the sake of a game.

Despite the fact that spiders and most oozes aren't that big of a deal mechanically, put me in a situation where my character has to face either of them, and I'll get real creative about ways to get the hell out of there and/or use the Big Guns to make sure they're dead. To the extent of dropping a fireball at my character's feet to make sure those things burn. And if that doesn't work: acid, cold, sonic, mighty mighty sledgehammers.

[TeChameleon]

In addition to the stuff above (and seconding combat = not scary and environmental hazards) I'll repeat the advice here that I've offered elsewhere.

Part the first: Sound Effects. I don't think I can overstate the usefulness of these for creeping the living hell out of your players, assuming you can pull it off. Creaks just on the edge of hearing, distant chanting (for bonus points, see if you can dig up that soundfile of little kids chanting 'I'm going to kill you'), shuffling noises, suddenly stilled rattles... if you've got some decent sound mixing chops and can time things so that the players are rarely sure that they even heard anything, and you'll have them ready to fall off their chairs when something audible does happen.

b) A simple trick, if you're not entirely sure how to go about restricting player agency so that they feel helpless... bring in a surrogate. Something or someone vulnerable that they would naturally feel inclined to protect. Just be careful not to turn it into an escort mission. Just as an example, perhaps it's a small child that the monsters never attack directly, but who is becoming so utterly terrified by the horrible things around them that... eh, I dunno, their soul is going to shrivel and they'll become the next vessel for some demon or some such.

iii) Something that I would consider the real trick to doing good horror is wrongness. The ghost popping out of the TV in The Ring- we know that things can't come out of the TV like that, so our brain rejects it... and then the character that the ghost was after gets killed, and we're left in a state of cognitive dissonance because something that can't happen... just did. Some of my favourite examples of horror aren't really technically horror at all- they're from the 2005 Dr. Who revival. Watch... well, pretty much anything that Steven Moffat wrote. He does creepy rather well. Blink, the Shadows in the Library, the Empty Child, the Time of Angels, the Snowmen, Asylum of the Daleks would be the ones I'd rate highest for sheer creep-factor, and for those not written by him, the Waters of Mars and Nightmare in Silver (written by Neil Gaiman, no less). If you're already familiar, apologies, and if you're not, eh, give it a try. If none of your players are Whovians, rip Blink off shamelessly and you'll have them falling out of their chairs :3

[Winter_Wolf]

To add, smell isn't something much used, but it's real visceral. I don't believe that many things are all that expensive, like brimstone for example (sulfur). I've yet to know one person who honestly links that smell with anything positive, and all you'd need to do is mention how internals infernals (bloody autocorrect) always carry a brimstone stench at some point and then later on introduce that smell but elect not to mention the devil right away.

Then again I have a pretty sensitive sniffer and I've been exposed to enough vile scents that only the very worst of 'em make me retch (like newborn poo, for example).

[Segev]

I cannot emphasize enough that the "feeling of helplessness" should NOT arise from the numbers on the PCs' stat pages being too small, nor from the numbers on the enemies' stat pages being too large. The sense of futility caused by that is one associated with "the DM has it in for us" and tends to induce, at best, eye-rolling.

The kind of helplessness that strikes in horror needs to stem from something of a "fish out of water" sensation. You are competent under normal circumstances, but something about this circumstance is rendering your competence invalid. You can achieve it with certain kinds of debuffs, too: paralysis is a great one for inducing fear.

However, you can't just put the PCs' in some other entity's power and have it lording it over them. That, again, is "DM is using us as a chew toy" in the minds of the players. This goes back to a point in my last post: don't give them a "face" on which to focus as the threat.

Tie them up and have the villain pacing around them, and the players will get defiant and self-righteous (and probably wait for something to slip for them to exploit).

Tie them up and leave them to die, however, and now the means of escape is not being prevented by a watchful guard. It's in their hands to figure out how. Mindless or instinct-driven threats - particularly those which would be only a mild threat or a nuisance if they were free - suddenly become scary. Not just because of the threat of harm, but because there's the sense of unpredictability combined, dissonantly, with inevitability. It's not a question of whether the rats that are circling at the edge of the torch light come in, but when. Do they gather their rodent courage to sweep into the light? Do they wait for it to dim and get dark so their instinctive fear of being seen by a human is no more?

It also gives the character - and thus the player - some agency. Some hope that he might be able to do something. Incremental somethings which buy him time. Snarling at the rats might work a few times, driving them less far away or for less time each time. The cave filling with water as the tide comes in might let him find a way to first sit up, then work his way to a slightly higher stalagmite, then to start to try to swim. But the cave roof is still there, an inevitable foe. The rats or the fish are still waiting.

His struggle to loosen the ropes becomes all-important. If he could just get free, his power of movement returns and those rats become less of a threat. But he has to get there. And it's hard, and there's an unknown but inevitable time limit.



Invisible foes, too, create this kind of horror. Darkness is a primitive version of it - it's why we have so much fear of the dark - but when we CAN see clearly, and yet cannot see the threat...that gets all the more terrifying, again because of the dissonance. The power-gamer's trick of Invisible Obscuring Mist can actually serve you well, here: if the players use See Invisibility type magics, they now see the fog...and are effectively blinded to even the mundane surroundings.

One way to play up horror is to have the ability to interact (as anything other than a victim) with the source of the horror require a giving up of one's normal faculties. This can devolve into power fantasy if not done delicately, but it still works well for certain kinds of horror. Perhaps the mad can see the invisible things without seeing all things that are invisible, thus the more insane you are, the more clearly you can see the threats. Perhaps the victims of the things can see them more clearly the more victimized they are. So it becomes a "game" of giving up more of oneself to them, possibly including (to borrow from before) a creeping paralysis, until seeing them clearly means you're a quadriplegic...and have to tell the others who can't see them as well what they're doing. And you'd better hope that whoever is assigned to help you isn't taken out, rendering you unable to do anything as the things close in while you watch...


A growing madness can also do a lot for a horror atmosphere, but it's hard to manage. Simply declaring to a PC that his sanity is slipping leads players to playing goofy or nutsoid people, depending on the player's skill, but rarely is horrifying to those players. You have to start messing with their IC senses. Their perceptions. To simulate paranoid schizophrenia, don't tell them they hear voices. Instead, give them listen checks, and describe things that could be there. Sometimes, they even should be real. IF they're listening to a conversation, twist the words a little bit to make it worse for the PC whose hearing it...and then have the consequences be based on what was really being discussed. Have them wake in the middle of the night to find a thief or assassin attacking, even though there isn't one.

If using the "only the mad can see Them" sort of thing, the madness makes it possible to notice Them...but also makes the mad less reliable as observers. They retain the uncertainty of their senses...but in a different way.



Horror is about uncertainty and a sense of helplessness, but it only works if there is hope. Hopelessness, particularly in an RPG, leads to a sense of futility rather than horror. Futility makes people into spectators. You want them to feel they have something to gain as well as something to lose. The best horror makes the gains small but costly - like managing to wriggle a hand free enough from the ropes to be able to reach for that screwdriver - and incrementally work towards escaping the horrific situation. But the horror is closing in, and time is precious. And whether they have all their usual faculties or not, they lack the faculties that would make the solution trivial. And all the while, their foe is faceless. Even if there is "a monster," that monster can't be something with which one can reason, nor can it be something that "wins" by virtue of just being that powerful. There have to be rules of some sort, even if they're obscured, that keep it from just squashing the PCs like bugs. Rules which can be exploited, even if only with difficulty.

Vampires are one of the most sentient and reasonable of horror monsters, but they remain horror rather than futile because their weaknesses are things which can be exploited. But are they enough in the face of their strengths?

But in general, you want your horror to invoke helplessness without futility, and that's done by giving a sense that the helplessness is situational and that there is hope, but that progress is slow and hard-won and may be too slow...but if you can go just a little faster......

[Raimun]

Oh, and one more thing:

Don't even try to attempt horror in D&D or games like that. I guess I thought that goes without saying, so trust me when I say that it's a bad idea.

Legendary heroes eat horror movie monsters for breakfast. Then they'll go looking for a few more encounters.

[DM Nate]

Don't even try to attempt horror in D&D or games like that. I guess I thought that goes without saying, so trust me when I say that it's a bad idea.

I disagree. I've had plenty of success with "horror" in D&D, though I was going more for "creepy" than outright terror. Like you say, however, it takes place outside of the combat, not through it.

[JBPuffin]

I'm just going to mention that the Dr. Who episodes mentioned...yee Gods. There's a actually quite a few creepy things in Dr. Who - the Shadows in the Library, the Weeping Angels, the Mars Things, the F***ing Dolls (oh God, the dolls)...the series is surprisingly good with scary stuff.

Also, make it as little to do with mechanics as you can get away with until EXACTLY the right moment. Seriously, get them worked up about something crazy out of the normal, then hit 'em with a Spot check - they'll freak, maybe just in their heads, but they'll freak.

[DM Nate]

Doctor Who has always been a cutting-edge children's show (and yes, it was originally created as such). As has been stated by fans, it's "never been afraid to show the boogeyman."

[kyoryu]

Agreed that horror isn't just a nasty statblock.

But where (limited) player agency comes into play in a horror game has got to be the *avoidance* of the unstoppable thing. If you're thinking "how do we get away from this thing without dying" you might be playing horror.

If you're thinking "how do we kill it", you're probably not playing horror. You're playing action with horror-inspired enemies.

[TeChameleon]

Huh. Bouncing back to Dr. Who for a second, I realized that I totally forgot to include the one example that got me thinking in the direction of 'wrongness'- in 'The Time of Angels' episode, there's a scene where one character, after it has been established that even staring too long at the monster can trigger problems, starts weeping sand. It's creepier than hell, especially since it's implied that the sand is going to form into another one of the monsters.

Can you imagine the player reaction if one or more of them start, say, vomiting up new monsters piecemeal after being exposed to them? It gives you the whole body horror of the Aliens chestbursters without having to kill off the character in question :smalltongue:

Honestly, I would avoid the 'unstoppable slasher villain' entirely. If players are forced to run away from something with stats, they're going to want to escape, level, and come back and kill it. It seems to be a pretty standard mindset for RPG players, honestly- 'if it has stats, we can kill it'. I'd instead try to maintain tension through the things I already mentioned and one other thing- limited knowledge. If the players have no idea what's going on, and everything they find out just makes it worse, well... :smallbiggrin:

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Run the Silence from doctor who only without ever showing them what's happening in the bits they forget. Have them roll a spot check and then have them moved to another square. Let the players try to figure out where the lost time is going.

[Segev]

Run the Silence from doctor who only without ever showing them what's happening in the bits they forget. Have them roll a spot check and then have them moved to another square. Let the players try to figure out where the lost time is going.

That's hard to do properly, because the players should in theory be controlling the characters' actions during the lost-memory bits. To keep the players from realizing what's happening, the DM would have to control them, which would not jive with what the PCs would have done if the players were controlling them.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Without a previous agreement that the Players would be okay with breaking the normal agreements of who has control over what in the campaign, you'd have to make them short glimpses, no more than a turn, mostly just less than a turn. For example, you tell Thorax the Fighter that Wincerind the Wizard is suddenly looking alarmed and has his arms extended as if to cast a spell. Then let the players act it out. Chances are, the wizard will be surprised and not have any idea what the fighter is talking about, and the fighter will be suspicious that the wizard was possessed or something. Then switch it around so the Wizard catches the Fighter with his mouth open staring over his shoulder and a hand on his sword. Now they know something new and scary is up, but they have no idea what, and because the actions were shorter than a turn and weren't combat, you haven't taken control of the players ACTIONS, only described short role-played reactions to things outside of player knowledge.

If you have greater leeway to take over characters, however... I read a great lets-play of a World of Darkness Mage campaign (which was otherwise concerned with more high-fantasy adventuring and politicking) wherein the characters kept feeling time, up to a few minutes, disappear, and at the end of each one felt a scrying window close. Later, after the mind-wipes were reversed by the one who had done it, they realised it was a powerful mage who was mind-wiping them after keeping an eye on them, and while the window was open, they were even talking and accusing the mage who was scrying on them. The Storyteller kept a log of exactly when and where each incident had happened, even before he had figured out what they were going to be, and then they went back and role-played the incidents in flash-backs.

[Twixman]

Thanks a lot! Much of this worked.
The best scare of the night though was amazing.
Had a slow lead up, they were following a trail of blood and came to a door, covered with satanic ritual sorta stuff. They knew something was behind the door. I used the wood table I had my gear on and scratched at it, they all started to get tense and real quiet... The BOOOM I smashed and shook the table and described the doors bending at the impact. One player screamed, one fell out of her seat the others recoiled and covered their faces. All of them described their characters running.

[DM Nate]

Jump scares are cheap but often the best.

You should post a write-up of the session, though. Sounds amazing.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Nice! Jump scares that you act out are awesome. Sounds like a good session :-)

[ReaderAt2046]

Yet another angle to consider would be something along the lines of the Warded Man scenario. At the beginning of the series, humanity is being hunted by these demons called corelings, which rise from the earth every night to kill anything they can.

The corelings are all but invincible, super-strong, super-fast, and vicious, but they do have limitations. First, sunlight destroys them, so they have to return to the Core every day. Second, they can only rise on natural earth. Worked stone or wood will block them from rising. Third, there are these magical diagrams, called wards, which repel them. Between these two effects, humanity has managed to survive by warding their houses and towns and never going outside the wards at night.

The idea is to give the players a monster that they can't fight, but that they can run or hide from. Scary without being overly lethal.

[Twixman]

Reader, I thought those were the Painted Man books? One of my friends likes them a lot. Might give them a look...
There was more than jump scares. I dont do lots of gore in my games, I prefer it to actually mean something, so when the players came across a room filled with patients strapped to hospital beds in various states of decay, with many still alive, there was some grimacing from the players. Describing the foetid smells worked a lot hehe

[Jeff the Green]

I'm not great at running horror. I tend to send overtly horrible things like child-sized zombies that create anger in the PCs rather than dread. (Which is fine; I just wish I were better at it.) However, I've run across two things that have helped me grow a bit subtler. First, the Dark Saint (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?186362-The-Dark-Saint-PrC-(PEACH)) PrC. I really want to play it at some point, but is much better on an NPC than a PC. Second is this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?282884-List-of-Nightmare-Fuel-Fridge-Horror-Monsters) of nightmare fuel/fridgehorror monsters. (If you click the spoiler in my contribution, you'll see how blunt my "horror" tends to be.)

[Craft (Cheese)]

Lots of good advice in this thread, but there are two things I think are important that are being left out of the discussion so far:

First: The most important part of running a horror campaign is that the players have to come into the session with the appropriate mindset. This is a big deal for all genres, but horror is where it's absolutely most important: If the players are making puns and references, nobody is going to get scared no matter how well you do your job. Make sure all the players are on board with the idea of a horror campaign, and make sure everybody understands that in order for a horror campaign to work it has to be taken seriously.

Second: I think there's an important distinction to be made between something that's scary and something that's spooky. Spooky is exploring a poorly-lit room with the floor covered in blood and viscera and bodies hanging from the ceiling on meat hooks. Scary is the moment where the lights go out and you hear the door suddenly slam behind you, suddenly the chains the bodies were hanging on start rattling against each other, and you hear hundreds of footsteps splashing through the puddles of blood. The secret to properly pacing a horror game (or a horror movie or novel for that matter) is to realize that you actually want the scary moments to be relatively rare. Placing multiple scare moments in close proximity to each other, or making a single scare drag out too long, doesn't compound the effect, it just causes fatigue. Don't try to make everything scary all the time, go for spooky instead. (And even in a horror campaign, you want moments, however brief, where the players can feel safe.)

[Segev]

I'd actually say that you want those moments when the players can feel safe especially in a horror campaign. "Spooky" can also cause fatigue, and more importantly, humans develop an "expectation level" after a while. Providing breathers of safety keeps the spookiness feeling "off" rather than just wearying.

Moreover, by providing those periods of safety as rewards for escaping/overcoming/obviously avoiding the scare moments, it makes the level of reward-expectation take on the appropriate quality. In standard D&D, the Big Heroes beat the Monsters and take their Treasure as a Great Reward. In horror, the survivors elude or temporarily incapacitate the Horror to achieve Breathing Room. Maybe even a chance to recover to where they started in terms of stamina, and certainly a chance - however slim - that they can continue perpetually.

Horror is about attrition, most particularly of mental/emotional reserves, but of physical resources as well. But hopelessness is as lethal to a feeling of tension as action. While horror has to provide a pervasive sense of helplessness to solve the problem, it also must provide a sense that YOU can mitigate the costs to yourself. That YOU can go on. That you still have something to lose and that it is worth fighting for.

Tension arises when you have some choices you can make - however narrow - which influence a chance - however slim - of things going your way. Broken people don't experience nor vicariously induce tension.

[Angelalex242]

Beware of characters that never flee from danger, that have the courage and valor of a Paladin or a Raging Barbarian.

It's difficult to horrify people whose job description includes fighting evil to the death.

Most horror campaigns tend to backfire when my character of great valor's response to the evil monster of doom is 'Smite Evil.'

This is doubly true in Pathfinder, where Smite bypasses all damage reduction, and the Paladin will, in fact, be smiting that evil down, no matter how scary it is.

"Aren't you going to flee?"

"Nay, fiend, your evil stops here!"

"...but its ECL is inappropriate for your level!"

"So long as there is breath in this body, no evil shall escape my sight!"

"You're gonna die."

"A coward dies 1000 deaths, the valiant die but once."

"I'm telling you as a GM that you're gonna DIE!"

"I'm telling you as a Player that Martyrdom is on pages 27 and 28 of the Book of Exalted Deeds. BRING IT."

[DM Nate]

That's why you don't kill him. You polymorph him into a small schoolgirl and have the imps laugh at him. Loss of image can be terrifying too.

[Segev]

Au contraire. You let him try. And you let him die.

Horror only works if those who choose to use what agency they have to make a stand can have their heroic death. If he drives off the monster once, that's fine, too. It makes one of those "We feel safe!" moments. But don't pull your punches. If they whole party is standing firm out of conviction that they can handle it, tear them down one by one. The threat WILL come back, stronger if needs be.

When horror is about evasion and desperate struggle, make sure that standing IS costly.

Let the lynchpin of the party's morale die if he stands and fights a losing battle. Obviously, let the player make a new character, but don't let him remake the same character with a different name. Make him play something different. Maybe something lower-level. Not as a punishment, but simply to drive home the sense of loss at the fall of that hero.

But let him have his heroic death. Maybe it wasn't even futile; maybe it bought time for the others to get away. Or maybe it was, and he was just foolish for staying and dangerous to the others for encouraging them to do the same.


Also, this his horror. Don't be afraid to go for the weakest and most vulnerable. The hero has talked them into standing and fighting! How does this Paladin feel when his exhortation to courage gets the rogue killed?

Horror isn't fair. It's horrific.

[Angelalex242]

Actually...that same Book of Exalted Deeds has a prestige class called Risen Martyr.

Who needs a new character? O:)

(Alternatively, perhaps the monster takes the valiant guy prisoner. This is what Xykon did to O Chul, essentially torturing him for amusement thereafter, for about 100 strips or more. This doesn't mean the valiant guy can't be valiant, however. O Chul stood his ground. Your paladin can too.)

[Craft (Cheese)]

Let the lynchpin of the party's morale die if he stands and fights a losing battle. Obviously, let the player make a new character, but don't let him remake the same character with a different name. Make him play something different. Maybe something lower-level. Not as a punishment, but simply to drive home the sense of loss at the fall of that hero.

This is the part where my advice about making sure the players are on board comes in: Horror can work if the player wants to be the guy who gets the heroic death to buy the rest of the party time to escape, but if the player wants to be the big hero guy who slays the monster, saves the day, and gets the girl, they aren't going to be happy with a heroic death instead.

[kyoryu]

Horror is about attrition, most particularly of mental/emotional reserves, but of physical resources as well. But hopelessness is as lethal to a feeling of tension as action. While horror has to provide a pervasive sense of helplessness to solve the problem, it also must provide a sense that YOU can mitigate the costs to yourself. That YOU can go on. That you still have something to lose and that it is worth fighting for.

Tension arises when you have some choices you can make - however narrow - which influence a chance - however slim - of things going your way. Broken people don't experience nor vicariously induce tension.

To paraphrase:

A heroic game is about killing the bear.
An action game is about running away from the bear.
A horror game is about running away from the bear faster than your buddy.

Sound about right?

[Segev]

To paraphrase:

A heroic game is about killing the bear.
An action game is about running away from the bear.
A horror game is about running away from the bear faster than your buddy.

Sound about right?

Not quite.

A heroic game is about killing the bear.
An action game is about fighting the bear in repeated encounters.
A horror game is about running from the idea of the bear because you lose your friends to it when they stop running.

[ReaderAt2046]

Reader, I thought those were the Painted Man books? One of my friends likes them a lot. Might give them a look...

I believe they're called the Painted Man books in the UK and the Warded Man books in the U.S.

[veti]

Actually...that same Book of Exalted Deeds has a prestige class called Risen Martyr.

Who needs a new character? O:)

To be a Risen Martyr, you need an uncompleted task to focus on. Since it's clear that your overriding priority in life was to "die like a moronhero", you don't qualify, because you've done that.

[Angelalex242]

Nah. The uncompleted task is simply 'protecting the friends I died to save.'

That has a longer shelf life then 'slaying the monster who killed me.'

Seriously, it doesn't take much creativity to get Risen Martyr up and running.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Also you need DM approval for these things. They can simply say "It doesn't fit the theme of my campaign".