Horror Mechanics for Encountering and Escaping the Horror Monster

[Mr. Mask]

This came up in the CoC thread, about fighting monsters being boring in a horror game. This brought me to thinking it'd be better to say:

The monster jumps out and attacks you, your party scatters throughout the abandoned house to try and escape. Because you scattered, the monster is surprised for a turn, trying to work out who to pursue. You come to a library, and can't see another way out. You hear the monster coming. You hide under the desk. The monster rolls, and gets some idea that someone is in the room, and looks around. You miss a chance to escape past them, the monster doubling back and examining the desk. It reaches down, trying to see if anyone is hiding underneath it. You flash it square in the eyes with your flash-light, making it recoil a step, for a priceless instant. You charge for the door, but the monster rolls, and catches your coat. You roll to disentangle yourself from your coat and escape, possibly losing some valuable piece of equipment with it. You then attempt to regroup with your friends before the monster comes back, hoping someone has found some weapon or means to drive the monster off or possibly even kill it.


That's what I think of, when I think of horror combat. A lot of evasion, creating opportunities to escape. Not so much, "wail on the monster till it dies or you do--oh no, X rolled a critical hit." Stealth would be very important to such a system, where a surprise attack can send you or the monster reeling--and in general, it's much easier to wound or surprise the monster so that it's driven off than to actually kill it. A lot of the game would be about trying to avoid encountering the monster all-together, and investigating its nature till you work out a more permanent form of escape, or some way to destroy it by exploiting a weakness in its physiology or behaviour. Oh, and like the example of the coat, it's good to have those tense moments occur where failing a couple of rolls could lead to terrible things, but statistically your chances of surviving that aren't too drastic (of course, if you plan to survive, avoid those situations happening, as you're testing fate).


Can anyone think of a system that accomplishes this sort of thing? I have trouble thinking of a good system for this sort of stun/opportunity mechanic.

[NichG]

Well, how about something like a bidding system, where you can risk greater exposure in order to get away, but it escalates the consequences in the process. It might be a bit too straight-forward and lose the tension of the scene if it were just 'you have a pool of action points' type of thing, so maybe a gimmick you could use would be that you can bid consequences for other people.

For example, if you're investigating some kind of monster, there's a reason why - the monster(s) pose a threat to bystanders you want to protect, etc. So each of those goals are abstract 'characters' in the scene. All the PCs are also characters. Each character has a deck of consequences based on the particulars, but for simplicitly lets just say the consequences come in three varieties (Lv1, Lv2, Lv3) and the composition of the deck determines the lethality/danger level of the monster. A Lv1 consequence might be that someone has a temporary nervous break down or suffers a temporary pain or injury. A Lv2 consequence would be something that might last for a few sessions. A Lv3 consequence is death, soul gets removed, mind gets taken over, etc - stuff that basically ends the character unless they have some way to reduce it. A deck with only Lv3 consequences means that any slip up is instant death, but a monster that likes a chase might just have a single Lv3 consequence in a big deck of Lv1s and Lv2s.

Every time the monster is engaged directly in any way, the monster can force a certain minimum number of draws to happen. This can't be reduced or avoided, but the draws can be shifted around to other people by voluntarily suffering a consequence or allowing something that you are the assigned protector of to suffer a consequence. The person who bids the highest such consequence gets to choose what gets the draws, but they suffer the consequence they bid as well. Once all of the mandatory draws have been dealt with, the characters get an opportunity to escape (which they are not obliged to take, and which itself might have success/failure mechanics or depend on making the right choices or whatever), or may advance whatever plan they have by one step (probably prompting another draw).

The in-game interpretation is basically a version of 'you don't have to outrun the bear, just outrun your slowest companion'. You can throw things under the bus to survive, or sacrifice of yourself to protect things for just a bit longer.

If you want more heroic characters, you could make the consequences more like a hitpoint system, where one Lv3 equals two Lv2s, and one Lv2 equals two Lv1s, and you have a certain number of slots for Lv1s, Lv2s, and Lv3s. As long as you have open slots, you can convert downwards (so instead of dying, you suffer two severe injuries, etc).

[Mr. Mask]

Bidding consequences for other people sounds like a brilliant mechanic. Really helps with that horror movie betrayal thing. You could potentially try to work that into a social metagame, where players can build up in-character grudges against each other, leading them to do dumb stuff. Not sure, but it'd be a possibility.

The cards and consequence levels is also a neat idea. You could still have escape conditions as well, and even roleplaying possibilities for escape (where if for example you have a flashlight, and the monster is sensitive to light, flashing it in its eyes might save you from a situation that would've been your death, as a reward for your creativity). That'd allow for a wide variety of stuff to happen.

One thing I'd get a bit concerned about, is it could make the monsters pretty formulaic. It becomes a puzzle for how to put yourself at the least risk and get the least penalties, rather than a roleplaying experience of, "your torch has gone out, you can hear a Grue approaching....".


with bidding and stunning, I was thinking of something a bit like that. Each time you attempt to injure or distract the monster, you're trying to create an opportunity that allows you to (more) safely do another action, notably escape. However, to prevent stun-locking the beast, the chance of successive stuns would need to get progressively worse. There'd be an element of gambling with what you want to do, and how much you're willing to risk in trying to create that opportunity, versus letting the monster perform some actions uninterrupted. And at times, you might have an opportunity to stun the monster via roleplay or the like which makes it the optimal solution.

[NichG]

Yeah, I was worried about the formulaic aspects too. I think the key thing is to have as much of the way the monsters work be kept out, and the system should concern itself primarily with what the players can do rather than what the monsters can do. The tricky thing is to do that without giving the players things that act like absolute counters precisely because you can't specify things about the monster (since absolute counters remove a lot of tension).

So thats why I was going in the direction of, okay, you have an absolute counter, but choosing to use it is always more costly to your friends and the world in general than if you just let the monster kill you. Of course you'll use it to survive, but then at least you have the tension of not knowing what the cost will be. Maybe one guy at random in the party has a deck stacked entirely with Lv3s but the monster never attacks that guy directly, etc. I feel like there are a couple twists you could pull there, but with mechanics alone you're eventually going to run out.

Maybe the important point is, whatever you use has to be better than freeform. So the mechanics can't just be 'because resolution is needed', but actually because the little bit of understanding the mechanics grant the player (the cost in things becoming more formulaic) actually serve to increase the tension because the player can see how things are going to go and get nervous about it. The jenga tower in Dread is a good example - you know that you can't keep taking blocks out, you know that it gets harder and harder, and that knowledge is more effective to establishing tension than any single pull would be.

[Mr. Mask]

I think the monster can have mechanical components, so long as they aren't too simple or obvious. It has certain defined abilities, and certain parameters would be defined, like how good its senses are for spotting purposes. You can even have data on its armour and toughness, to give you an idea of what can wound or kill it. The thing you want to avoid is making it like 4E, where the monster has two or three very specific attacks or abilities, and can't apply them in creative ways. You also want to make sure your monster is somewhat dynamic--the situation keeps changing as new things are discovered about its abilities, environment, or its behaviour.

[NichG]

I think the monster can have mechanical components, so long as they aren't too simple or obvious. It has certain defined abilities, and certain parameters would be defined, like how good its senses are for spotting purposes. You can even have data on its armour and toughness, to give you an idea of what can wound or kill it. The thing you want to avoid is making it like 4E, where the monster has two or three very specific attacks or abilities, and can't apply them in creative ways. You also want to make sure your monster is somewhat dynamic--the situation keeps changing as new things are discovered about its abilities, environment, or its behaviour.

I think the difference is whether the kinds of mechanical components are something which are pre-defined as part of the system, versus things that the GM decided when constructing that particular monster. It's fine if e.g. the monster always responds consistently in the same way to flashes of bright light, but there shouldn't be something where the players go and read 'all monsters have abilities chosen from this list' or things like that.

Here I'm more concerned with what the players know and are made aware of than however it might work behind the scenes. But ideally, the game should be designed so that behind the scenes things aren't accidentally or prematurely revealed to players.

For example, if players know that all monsters have an HP track and take damage according to a particular formula, they may come to the conclusion that damaging it until it dies is always a feasible, even an intended, option.

[NNescio]

Draw a block from the Jenga Tower. Dread-style. Success on a minor action if you avoid toppling the tower. Horrible death or insanity for your character if you do topple it. Accidental toppling of the tower (such as when reaching over for the bag of cheetos) also count.

[StealthyRobot]

I'm planning on running a horror-like encounter for DnD at some point. I'm creating my own monster for it that uses stealth to quickly pick off enemies (think of the alien from Alien). The group will be sent to investigate disappearnces in swamp, and discover a partially flooded ruins. The hallways are dark, the monsters have a field of darkness around them, They have traits similar to the assassin. They will think there is only one at first, but after killing it and revelling in their success more will come. I might have some creepy backround music playing, to build atmosphere.

[Ionbound]

I think that a blood-bowl esque system of rolling to see if you hit the monster, then rolling against a certain threshold to see whether or not he's stunned. This threshold could be changed, even to give different monsters different degrees of difficulty and could increase based on how many times the monster has been hit successively to prevent stunlock.

[Mr. Mask]

Blood Bowl is a good example of stuns. I can't remember how their mechanics work for it, but I could look into it. You would want the likelihood to vary based off the method of stunning, is the main thought.


Nich: Mm, a list of abilities would be a bad idea. It's rather stifling to creativity. You might have a list of example abilities and module-like samples to be used, but you'd want to encourage creativity.

Having too much of a HP track would be a bad idea. You might be better to go with levels of wounding, where wounding a monster enough to make it leave is one thing, but killing it might be very hard.


NN: Oh, Dread, that's what it was. It's a pretty neat system.

[Grek]

Can anyone think of a system that accomplishes this sort of thing? I have trouble thinking of a good system for this sort of stun/opportunity mechanic.

After Sundown! An WoD-inspired "indie" game written using a shadowrun-esque rules system to let people play as monsters in a masquerade-like setting. The big draws are that A] having a werewolf, a mage and a vampire in the same group doesn't cause any mechanical disparities or setting weirdness, and B] the rules are focused on politicking and chases rather than on D&D style beat-m-upery.

How the chase system works is: the person fleeing declares a stunt to escape at a certain difficulty and then rolls a check against that difficulty. If they make the check, they put some distance between them and the person they're running from. Then, if the person they're running from wants to chase them, they have to match the stunt in order to keep the distance from widening. At any point in the chase, people can "raise the stakes" by declaring more and more difficult stunts. And if someone ever fails a check, they wipe out, often spectacularly, and are out of the chase entirely.

The flashlight-in-the-eyes trick is a stunt declared to move the chase from "close" (ie the monster can touch you) to "short" (ie, it can see, but not touch you) in hopes of eventually losing it long enough to hide, or simply outrunning it entirely.

[Mr. Mask]

That does sound pretty neat. You could add in a semi-failure, where your attempt is partially successful but a complication is thrown your way, like you trip or your jacket gets grabbed, or the monster hears you as you distance yourself, or you get attacked and possibly wounded, etc..

Interestingly, I had a stealth system worked out that's pretty similar to what you describe.