Making Horror Horror in 5e

[Oerlaf]

As the Rime of the Frostmaiden showed, the standard rules of D&D are ill-suited for horror campaigns. So I've come to an idea to borrow some ideas from other RPGs and convert them for use in 5e.

First of all: each character must have the Sanity score, so I will use that optional rule in the upcoming Van Richten's adventure.

Sanity is going to be roleplayed pretty as much as Humanity from the World of Darkness. Here is the scale of conversion:


VtM Humanity
5e Sanity


10-8
30-18


7
17-10


6-5
9-8


4
7-4


3-2
3-2
1

1
1


0
0



Stress and Panic borrowed from Mothership RPG

Stress Points.
The primary way you gain Stress Points (SP) is by failing a saving throw. Whenever this happens, you gain 1 SP.

There are a number of other ways to gain SP as well, and the DM is encouraged to come with their own. Here are a few examples.

Certain creatures (such as aberrations or undead), haunts and locations can give you SP just by interacting with them, or seeing them.
Getting knocked unconscious
Going 24 hours without taking a long rest
Going without food or water


Getting rid of SP is a lot like healing from rest. Whenever you take a long rest, you can attempt a Sanity check to relieve your Stress. The DC equals to 5 + your current SP. If you succeed, you relieve 1 SP for every point your check exceeds the DC. For example, if you currently have 10 SP, and your Sanity check is 17, you relieve 7 SP, so your new amount is 3 SP. If another creature gives you therapy by succeeding on a DC 15 Wisdom (Medicine) check during a long rest, you gain advantage on the Sanity check. Once a character receives the therapy, it cannot receive another one for the next 24 hours.

Eventually, stress, damage, and emotional wear and fear will bring you to your breaking point When that happens, there's a chance that you'll lose control and panic.
PANIC
There are two steps in overcoming panic and madness.

Sanity saving throw. You must make a Sanity saving throw with a DC equal to 5 + your current SP. If you fail, your Sanity score decreases by 1, and you panic and move on to step two.
You panic. It is resolved in a form of madness. Your madness level increases by 1, and you immediately suffer the level's effect (as determined by rolling on the Short-Term Madness, Long-Term Madness, or Indefinite Madness table in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, as appropriate). When the effect ends, your madness level doesn’t change. Any time your madness level increases, you suffer the effect of the new level.



If you panic while having level 3 madness, your madness level becomes 1. In this way, you can potentially accumulate multiple forms of madness. If you accumulate a form of madness that you are already suffering from, reroll until a new result is reached. For every level 3 madness you accumulate, you gain a -1 penalty on Sanity checks and Sanity saving throws.

Bouts of short- and long-term madness can be cured as described in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
Madness Level
Level Effect
1 Short-term madness (lasts 1d10 minutes)
2 Long-term madness (lasts 1d10 x 10 minutes)
3 Indefinite madness (lasts until cured)
The DM has a lot of sway here in determining when is a good time to call for a possibility of Panic, but here are a few places where it would definitely be appropriate:

After seeing more than one teammate delve into madness at the same time.
Encountering a strange and horrifying creature for the first time.
Getting hit with a critical hit.
Losing more than half your current hit points in one hit.
Rolling a natural 1 on a saving throw
Seeing another teammate die
When all hope seems lost and death seems certain

[kazaryu]

So this is something ive been curious about for a while. The horror genre.

What is it that people get out of it? And more specifically what are you trying to get out of a 'horror campaign'. Is it the same fear/dread that people experience from horror movies? What exactly are you trying to simulate with your stress/sanity system?

Why did rime of the frostmaiden fall short, in your opinion?

[Chronic]

Usually horror stem from helplessness. Which is why in my opinion 5e does it so poorly, the system is designed with characters being powerful heroes in mind.It doesn't mean it cannot be done tho, just that it's hard.
I've successfully completed a session where the pc were employed to kill a beast terrorising a village. Problem is, heroes or not, the creature is still the apex predator, and seems to regenerate every wound it takes. Once they understood they could not win in a conventional manner, my pc had to be creative to fend the regular attacks of the creature while investigating its origin to find a way to defeat it. Nothing makes a d&d player sweat like a monster he can't kill.

[Segev]

What is your goal with these mechanics?

It looks like you've put thought and work into them to make them help you compels a slide into panic and fear and madness. Do you want to tell your players how frightened or mad their characters are?

Madness ratings work better than fear points, but can still be tricky to make any better than simply being a debuff. Fear ratings just don't work well except as debuffs, the way 5e already handles it.

Horror is about evoking emotion from the audience, not so much about how scared the PCs are. You can use fear and panic as a compulsion, but it won't help the game feel like horror to the player. Losing agency over your PC's actions and losing empathy for his emotions takes a player out of the game.

Using panic - like the Frightened condition - to enforce fear responses can help prevent PCs from acting like action heroes, but that should be used more sparingly in horror than in action movie genre games. It is a garnish to keep the tone steady, not a way to convince the players that things are scary.

The emotion you want in horror, more than outright fear, is disquiet. A sense that you can't trust your surroundings, and that you can't maintain that which keeps you safe. This is why well received horror monsters tend to have ritualistic weaknesses. You cannot keep the sun up all the time, so vampire will always be able to come back the next night. You cannot guarantee utter silence as you live your life (and trying is stressful), so the monsters from A Quiet Place make your life constantly tense.

Madness is a good horror element because it makes you question your own senses and judgment: the ultimate disquiet. Using madness well is more involved than telling players what weird or disturbing behavior their PC has developed. Instead, give players personalized notes to tell them what they perceive. And when they have applicable madnesses, tell them things that aren't true except in their madness.

Did you tell a player two weeks ago he had been replaced by a doppelganger, and have him play the monster until the other PCs figured it out and rescued him? then the PC with paranoia as a madness might get references in his notes of what he sees that offer increasingly convincing evidence that another character or group of characters is a doppelganger. Get him jumping at shadows.

Leave things out or distort them, too, so madness can leave them blindsided as well as wasting resources.

Horror as an emotion is all about betrayal. Not just of the interpersonal kind, but of expectations of how the world works. Of things that keep you safe not doing so reliably, or turning out to be traps. Of wholesome things that are secretly corrupted. Of impossible choices. When dealing with a memory modifying villain, the inability to trust your own memories is a bit horrifying. How much worse to discover that one of those you trust due to his or her eagerness to help and kind disposition is the evil memory modifiers who doesnt know it because part of his coverall was to modify his own memory? Or to discover that YOU did it. Something so terrible that you didn't want to remember doing it, but tragically not knowing who did it guides him to seek a new island.

[SpanielBear]

Sandy Petersen, of Call of Cthulhu fame, made an (in my opinion) utterly excellent tie-in source book for using the Cthulhu mythos in 5e. It includes rules for sanity and corruption, and is really high quality. Can’t recommend enough.

I’ve run Call of Cthulhu a few times. One of the main attractions of playing a horror game, I think, is that the heightened atmosphere and threat makes all your actions and decisions as a player more meaningful. You become more invested. When the tension does break, the release and adrenaline rush is that little bit higher.

To paraphrase the CoC sourcebook a little, the issue with running 5e as a horror game is that player characters are superhuman. In regular Call of Cthulhu all the pc’s are human, 15 hp would be an exceptionally buff character and combat is deadly. In D&D your character could be an armour-plated turtle wizard who can challenge the very gods themselves. So to bring horror back into it, along with the threat that sanity checks represent, there’s a few things you can do:

- Keep it grounded. Horror works best when it infects a “normal” situation. The haunted hotel is creepier than the ancient temple because your players know what a hotel ‘should’ be like, so as a DM you don’t have to work as hard to make the setting uncanny and wrong. Similarly, even in fantasy or sci-fi settings there are activities that feel familiar and safe. Subvert those expectations. Think of the scene in alien when the crew is eating dinner. Now imagine a group of PCs sitting in the tavern, relaxing, when a few tables over an elf begins to choke...

- Death isn’t scary. In 5e, injury and resurrection comes cheap, and your players are designed to fight monsters, not run from them. The threat needs to be realistic, by which I mean the players need to feel genuinely in danger (in game, obviously). Don’t reveal your monsters too early, but show what they can do. Ramp up the description of the threat, the setting. Use status effects- paralysis, domination, blindness. Split the party up and have PCs feel terrified they’re gonna be attacked when they are alone. You want the tension to be at the highest point when the party finally corners the creature/s, and the combat to be a catharsis.

- Make the world meaningful. This ties in to the previous point- the players aren’t going to be scared about the fate of characters they don’t care about, places that are bland and empty. I would strongly recommend working with your players to make characters that fully fit into the world, have ties in it, backstories they created and feel invested in. You want the threat of corruption and insanity to matter, to be meaningful. You want them to care. Similarly, you want NPCs that the players like and care for- if the friendly cleric who has patched them up time after time goes missing, you find the familiar warm and comforting shrine where he works corrupted with a sigil of twisted living wood, oozing blood-red sap- that works much better than if the victim is someone they’ve never met and have no reason to care about.

- Work hard to get your players invested. This starts at session 0; let them know this will be a horror game that needs a certain atmosphere, so they come prepared to approach it expecting that experience. This is a tabletop rp, people are going to crack jokes and laugh at ridiculous dice rolls and that’s great! You want them to have fun. But you also want the kind of players who will respond positively when you ramp up the horror, start building the tension and will buy into that atmosphere you are trying to create.

I’m by no means the best at explaining all this. TL,DR- horror is the result of emotional investment. All the sanity checks, monsters, drama- the purpose of all of that is to increase player engagement. Rules on their own aren’t scary.

[Kane0]

Segev said it much better, but I agree. Having a stat or number or mechanic that says ‘you are scared now’ does not make a horror game work any more than a horror movie or book, its about making the players feel tense and uncertain.
Its hard to accomplish because you cannot simply relay the information to achieve the desired emotional response, in fact providing information (too much or the right kind) is almost a certain way to dispel the illusion that you are otherwise be trying to create.

[noob]

Make the adventure about not encountering the monsters.
They do not know what the monsters are they just know they exists and are crazily dangerous.

That or everything is dangerous: the bricks the house is made from are mimics, the river is continuous streams of oozes, each object is a mimic, the food is in fact a swarm of parasites that disguise hypnotically, the trees are evil killer trees, the colours are colours out of space, the clouds are in fact each made by those kaotri monsters that emits fog and the biggest clouds have the biggest monsters, each and every npc is a succubi or an evil shapeshifted titan, that log over here with a rabbit on top of it is a predatory monster, the ground is in fact a landscape ooze, the moon is an elder evil, the stars are countless glowing ice copies of the shards of pandorym, the air is made of invisible stalkers and so on.
The more you know the more you are in danger and the more you know the more you are worried that what you do not know is ready to hit you.
Also the monster themselves are made of traps and the traps made of smaller traps and so on recursively except at some layers there can be traps made of monsters.

[Angelalex242]

The easiest way to keep horror horror is to make sure any monster you use is at least 10 CR above the actual party level. Even veteran smart players know that fighting a CR 15 monster when they're level 5 is suicide, so they'll probably be somewhat horrified trying to take it on directly.

Or, at higher levels...the CR 10 party might have to be staring at a Balor before they get horrified.

[Kane0]

A game all about *not* fighting the monster(s) could go very well or very poorly, depending on your table. D&D is generally a very combat centric game after all.

[noob]

A game all about *not* fighting the monster(s) could go very well or very poorly, depending on your table. D&D is generally a very combat centric game after all.

You can have fights just not with the monster.
Call of chtulu for example can involve a lot of "Shooting the people that knows stuff so that they can not explain anything to keep your sanity up"
There is a book that explains stuff? Set it on fire.
There is people that wants to do rituals and you can not know whenever it is to keep something banished or to summon something? Shoot them it is likely summoners.

[MaxWilson]

Sandy Mitchel, of Call of Cthulhu fame, made an (in my opinion) utterly excellent tie-in source book for using the Cthulhu mythos in 5e. It includes rules for sanity and corruption, and is really high quality. Can’t recommend enough.

Seconded. Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos For 5E (https://petersengames.com/cthulhu-mythos/) is an outstanding product which somewhat to my surprise manages to make 5E more consequential and scary even without violating 5E norms like "Greater Restoration fixes most problems." Partly it does this by violating other norms like "most poisons and conditions offer a save every round to end them, and often grant immunity for 24 hours after they end", and partly it does it through art and atmosphere, and partly it does it through filling the universe with nightmarish horrors that don't so much threaten to destroy the world as make you wonder how it has managed to not be destroyed so far and whether that was a fluke.

Normal 5E campaigns including WotC adventures treat happiness and prosperity as normal, and adventures are about deviations which briefly threaten this happy equilibrium (and lead to player/DM boredom when the threats cease to be both serious and believable), but a Cthulhu campaign makes you see the gameworld in the opposite light, where happiness and prosperity are precariously won and getting to watch your children grow up and your parents grow old is a hard-won victory, compared to the alternative of having them be:

(1) disintegrated into nothing along with the rest of their planet,

(2) enslaved by pitiless fish-men and used as breeding stock,

(3) paralyzed as living statues and driven into madness, or

(4) disassembled and reassembled into living components in a huge biological machine of unfathomable purpose.

I don't know if all of that is enough to make it a horror game per se, but it certainly makes for a good adventure game with unsettling implications.

@OP, one thing you may like about the Dread rules from Cthulhu 5E is that not only are they heavily consequential (Dread is a cumulative condition like Exhaustion, and higher levels of Dread have long-term effects like a chance of driving you mad), but you can gain Dread from psychological stress, such as the realization that the meat pies you've been eating are probably made from human flesh, that your parents have been planning for years to sacrifice you to their fish-gods, or that someday your entire species and all of your descendants will inevitably vanish from the cosmos and that nothing you can do will prevent it.

[SpanielBear]

Knew I should have checked the name*... I’ve edited my original post.

I think if you get the players caring about the consequences everything else falls into place. The rest is basically set dressing.



(*Ciaphas Cain is a fun and different take on the Warhammer 40k setting, but perhaps not the atmosphere we’re discussing...)

[MaxWilson]

I think if you get the players caring about the consequences everything else falls into place. The rest is basically set dressing.


I agree. People like to focus on mechanics like Sanity / Dread, but those are really just aids to add even more consequences on a per-PC level. The core of the experience is that the universe is a cold, uncaring place which feels no obligation towards you or anything you care about: Y'All Are Not Special/You Can And Will Fail.

It's kind of the opposite of 5E's normal message for players. :)

[DwarfFighter]

So this is something ive been curious about for a while. The horror genre.

What is it that people get out of it? And more specifically what are you trying to get out of a 'horror campaign'. Is it the same fear/dread that people experience from horror movies? What exactly are you trying to simulate with your stress/sanity system?

Why did rime of the frostmaiden fall short, in your opinion?

Horror done right is gets the adrenaline flowing and having your character live through a horror encounter, scenario or campaign can be very rewarding.

I never played the RotFM, and this is the first suggestion I've heard that it wasn't a success. I would speculate that the greatest disconnect of 5e from the horror genre stems from the player character empowerment. Horror when you feel you are losing control, when you feel that fighting is more dangerous than running. When your surroundings are confusing and potentially dangerous. Player characters are built to take control of the situation, and that's anathema to horror.

-DF

[MaxWilson]

Horror done right is gets the adrenaline flowing and having your character live through a horror encounter, scenario or campaign can be very rewarding.

I never played the RotFM, and this is the first suggestion I've heard that it wasn't a success. I would speculate that the greatest disconnect of 5e from the horror genre stems from the player character empowerment. Horror when you feel you are losing control, when you feel that fighting is more dangerous than running. When your surroundings are confusing and potentially dangerous. Player characters are built to take control of the situation, and that's anathema to horror.

-DF

I've run bits and pieces of RotFM that I stole from it, but I'll tell you--if it's supposed to be a horror game I had no idea at all. It plays as more of a Gloomstalker's/Skulker's paradise--the fact that it's always dark just means PCs have tactical advantages. There are some survival elements (have to seek shelter during blizzards; townsfolk are desperate for food so Goodberries give you a lot of leverage) but it doesn't come across at all as horror, and I don't actually see any signs that it's trying to do so. It's just an adventure that happens to be very dark, and my sense of why it's dark was less about horror and more "so we can justify short encounter distances".

RE: <<Player characters are built to take control of the situation>>, that's true to some extent... of the local situation. Player characters are built to take control of what's in front of them, but that's what makes things like Gobogeg (from Sander Peterson's Cthulhu Mythos for 5E) so terrifying... imagine player characters running around the local area trying to warn people in a 1 mile radius to leave the town before anyone has any more nightmares, but then an unlucky roll escalates Gobogeg's influence to 10 miles, and now they have to depopulate all the animals and creatures within 10 miles before the influence escalates to 100 miles, or they have to somehow track down Gobogeg underground and kill it (despite its 60' burrow speed) before it can escape and/or kill them. 5E PCs aren't built for that kind of taking control, the situation starts already out of their control and just gets moreso.

[Grod_The_Giant]

You can have fights just not with the monster.
The key thing to remember with combat in a horror game is that combat is a relief. It means that the game is snapping back into a familiar lane, that mystery and helplessness are getting replaced by concrete rules and abilities.

Because a good horror game is all about the atmosphere. It's about the building tension, the sense of dread and wrongness and vulnerability, and most of all about the unknown. Game mechanics--even stuff like sanity damage--undermine that. Every time you so much as touch a die, it's a reminder that you're playing a game, that you have the ability to accomplish things, that you have power. Seeing a corpse that was forced to eat its own intestines isn't horrific because it might mean sanity damage, it's horrific because holy **** what could have done that to a person?

I've managed to run some decent horror sessions in 5e (and other systems), and that's the key. The players cannot understand what's going on, because reason is the anthesis of fear.

[noob]

The key thing to remember with combat in a horror game is that combat is a relief. It means that the game is snapping back into a familiar lane, that mystery and helplessness are getting replaced by concrete rules and abilities.

Because a good horror game is all about the atmosphere. It's about the building tension, the sense of dread and wrongness and vulnerability, and most of all about the unknown. Game mechanics--even stuff like sanity damage--undermine that. Every time you so much as touch a die, it's a reminder that you're playing a game, that you have the ability to accomplish things, that you have power. Seeing a corpse that was forced to eat its own intestines isn't horrific because it might mean sanity damage, it's horrific because holy **** what could have done that to a person?

I've managed to run some decent horror sessions in 5e (and other systems), and that's the key. The players cannot understand what's going on, because reason is the anthesis of fear.

Then why even use a D20 system if you want to avoid the players picking a dice?
There is a lot of systems that do not involve rolls including the very simple "players tells what they do and the gm says what happens" that could be introduced way faster and not involve the dice.

[kaoskonfety]

Horror in D&D

Step one: Confirm you party wants a horror game; alot of people forget this step, and its not the default assumption for most D&D players. If the players are not interested in being scared, they will not engage with these bits and you'll be playing something more like The Witcher, but still not a horror game.

Step two: Make the monsters *monstrous*. Doing goblins for your low level party? Go watch some Goblin Slayer. Do that at them (based on age of the group and content consent of course, assorted content warnings on Goblin Slayer, its pretty brutal). Goblins aren't some local race with an "evil" label and thinly veiled racism overtones. They are some sort of infestation from another world hell bent on exterminating human lives as cruelly as they can, closer to Alien than to OOTS. Oh... goblins have acid blood... that could be funny.
A simple horrific encounter I had "accidentally" occured when a party of all martials ran into a werewolf, and they had no magic weapons and the fight was in the dark, in the rain, so fire was out, and who buys enough acid to kill a werewolf? They had to drown it in a nearby river, it was brutal. This just compounds as higher level arise if you keep the magic weapons and damage options limited, and sprinkle elemental resistances or immunities around.
Aboeth is a good example that is practically unkillable in a permanent way without a raft of highly specialised knowledge, capable of creating a perfect clone expressly to continue its vendetta even if you do figure out how to keep it dead, with a set of powers that leaves them barely every needing to confront you and quite capable of destroying your life, and quite willing to.
Similarly most infernal critters just reform, somewhere in the vastness of the lower planes, and come back shape shifted into your old home town lover/brother/parents/children, who they ate while you were out and made into a lovely diorama with their bones and skin for you to find after they mess with you for a few days/weeks/years. They live forever and are full of terrible spite. With some time and planning and gaslighting you can leave them too paranoid to trust any ally with only a couple of events.

Ravenloft presents alot of modifications that help too: Resurrection is a BEAST making death a threat again, alot of the transport and divination is kneecapped, monsters have modified weaknesses and strengths to leave the player fumbling for answers and unsure if they can fight X critter/boss man because the CR's are not a know quantity, or indeed if they can actually kill the thing property if at all.

[Unoriginal]

Honestly to me having some kind of "sanity score" removes a lot from the horror, it doesn't enhance it.

Horror is all about presentation. By itself, there's nothing horrific about what is essentially just another HP bar you have to deal with and which will sometime apply other mechanical effects.

Also, Rime of the Frost Maiden isn't quite horror, it's more like a Predator movie where (at least for many of the memorable encounters) you're fighting beings at a disadvantage, there's tension because you never quite know if running is better than fighting, and your surroundings seems to be against you, which make it feel great when you're making the monster bleed.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Then why even use a D20 system if you want to avoid the players picking a dice?
There is a lot of systems that do not involve rolls including the very simple "players tells what they do and the gm says what happens" that could be introduced way faster and not involve the dice.
I know; I wrote one. The only reason I would use any d&d edition for horror would be if it was just the odd one-off session in a longer campaign.

[Waterdeep Merch]

As kaoskonfety says, be sure your players actually want a horror game first. And not just simple trappings like haunted houses and werewolves and Draculas. Horror is about fear and dread, and that means targeting a person's weaknesses and safety zones. If you know one of those people with a litany of triggers, they absolutely should not be invited to a horror game. I have a player in my pool like this, and I've had to make it clear that they aren't invited to any of these games for their sake, not as any kind of snub or punishment.

Get to know your players. Learn what they find creepy, what makes them paranoid, what sort of thoughts can keep them up at night. Ask them pointblank if you need to. Develop your scares on two levels- foreboding and direct. Most of your horror will come from the former. You need to insinuate that the things your players fear are right there, present, just hidden. Imagine the players are a kettle of water- you want to lower them onto the stove and gently turn the dial, bit by bit, increasing the heat. Right when you start to get a rolling boil, turn off the stove and remove from heat. In-game, this means presenting proof that they're actually just paranoid and what they feared isn't true. In a horror film, this is where the victim investigates the strange noise and a cat jumps out instead. Haha, it's just a cat, see? There was never any danger, it was all in your head!

And as soon as they breath a sigh of relief, and their heart goes back to normal- slam that kettle down and crank up the dial to high. The fear is real, it's here, there is no escape! The horror was behind you the whole time, waiting for you to let your guard down. As a DM, you must be absolutely brutal at this phase. You shall show no fear in harming the PC's. Savage them.

Now, this can be incredibly unfair from a player's point of view, and unsatisfying if railroaded as the above. Because they had no real chance to prevent the bad thing, whatever punitive measures you take feel unearned. This is where you earn your supervillain degree- design the fear in such a way that it has to obey certain rules itself, and doesn't just get to hurt the players for free. It's a magnificent trap, and it only works if the players take the bait. This does mean that occasionally the players will bypass or easily defeat your horror. That can seem like a letdown, but this too serves a purpose. It lets the players know you aren't messing around, and that their failures are on their heads. This can increase panic and tension later, making your foreboding that much stronger, and any direct scares that much more terrifying, as they will know that they have messed up and that the consequences are about to be dire.

[noob]

I know; I wrote one. The only reason I would use any d&d edition for horror would be if it was just the odd one-off session in a longer campaign.

The starting point is "an horror campaign" so the original poster wants stuff that does not fit the "odd one off session" case.
If you went and explained to your players "so you wanted a dnd campaign so we will have a dnd campaign but without dice nor dungeons nor dragons and a whole lot of existential horror, the creeping emptiness from witnessing those who witnessed the unknowable without ever being able to witness the unknowable itself and a lot of hiding from things you can not see" maybe they would say "and when do we kick the treasure, kill the door then grab the monster and bring it back home?"
In a one off the answer is "the next session" here the answer would be "not in this entire campaign"

[strangebloke]

Running horror in 5e is all about how you run it. Orcs sitting in 10x10 rooms guarding pies cannot be horrific, no matter how hard you try.

to make something 'horrorific' in 5e, I have three rules

some enemies must be legitimately unbeatable. If the correct answer is always "run at the monster" then this is not a scary story
horror campaigns require death, so horror campaigns should be short and everyone should have a backup character
Enemies must be proactive and unpredictable


This still isn't "horror" as such. It's just suspenseful. But you can't do horror without the above. Here's a quick example of a horror campaign I did a while back.

Haunted House

Any out of combat action taken by the party adds 1 d6 to a pool of "threat die" indicating that the house gets more unwelcome to them as their presence continues
Any disruptive action eg (loudly casting a spell or breaking down a door) alerts the denizens of the house, causing the ghosts and monsters to come out. Threat dice are rolled to determine the severity of the encounter. (higher total = more deadly)
At the highest rollable threat level, a powerful juiced up vampire (the main villain) comes out and does his best to kill a character.
Traps punish the players for moving too quickly.
Certain points force you to roll the threat dice
The final boss encounter can only be unlocked by solving a mystery, which requires lots of time spent on tedious tasks like investigation checks.


This makes every choice filled with tension for the players, even with "heroic" rest rules. Making such an adventure 'horrific' is all in the narration.

[Segev]

An example of horror that could be done in D&D:

An isolated village or new colony has just gotten itself settled after some sort of upheaval (possibly simply "the foundation of the colony"). They're enjoying a bit of idyl, and a lot of couples are forming and being all lovey-dovey and a spate of marriages happen, etc. Lots of hope for the new generation about to be born next spring as winter sets in and they've got their harvest and stores set up.


Then the men start to have nightmares wherein their wives are dead. Their wives reassure them, but it wears on the men.

And one morning, after a hard snow, the wives are all gone. Missing. They're found, dead, buried in the snowfall, a long enough walk from the settlement to be inconvenient but not so far as to be easily forgotten.

A few weeks later, after the funerals, the husbands of those wives are all found, suicided, on their wives' graves.

Another snow later, covering the tragic markers, just near the end of winter, large-bulbed flowers are found growing out of the graves. When they bloom, wailing infants are found inside.

What does the depleted town do, with all these helpless ones to care for, born in such mysterious and tragic circumstances?

[MaxWilson]

An example of horror that could be done in D&D:

An isolated village or new colony has just gotten itself settled after some sort of upheaval (possibly simply "the foundation of the colony"). They're enjoying a bit of idyl, and a lot of couples are forming and being all lovey-dovey and a spate of marriages happen, etc. Lots of hope for the new generation about to be born next spring as winter sets in and they've got their harvest and stores set up.


Then the men start to have nightmares wherein their wives are dead. Their wives reassure them, but it wears on the men.

And one morning, after a hard snow, the wives are all gone. Missing. They're found, dead, buried in the snowfall, a long enough walk from the settlement to be inconvenient but not so far as to be easily forgotten.

A few weeks later, after the funerals, the husbands of those wives are all found, suicided, on their wives' graves.

Another snow later, covering the tragic markers, just near the end of winter, large-bulbed flowers are found growing out of the graves. When they bloom, wailing infants are found inside.

What does the depleted town do, with all these helpless ones to care for, born in such mysterious and tragic circumstances?

Answer: kill them immediately of course, for the XP.

[noob]

Answer: kill them immediately of course, for the XP.

The real mystery is why the village was not on fire and destroyed by raining meteors and running fighters carrying around adamentine battering rams before the villagers could explain their nightmares.
Were the adventurers dumping dex?

[verbatim]

The easiest way to keep horror horror is to make sure any monster you use is at least 10 CR above the actual party level. Even veteran smart players know that fighting a CR 15 monster when they're level 5 is suicide, so they'll probably be somewhat horrified trying to take it on directly.

Or, at higher levels...the CR 10 party might have to be staring at a Balor before they get horrified.

I started DM'ing Out of the Abyss with Sanity Scores of 20 that went down by one on every fail... and eventually ended up switching to this method (significantly above expected monsters by CR) as the more effective means of creating tension.

That being said, my party consisted of several veterans who were very adroit at gauging when they could or couldn't take on challenges significantly above expectation. I get the inclination that a less experienced party would either get TPK'd a lot and quit or get the impression that they were repeatedly being railroaded into running away.

[MrStabby]

Probably about 70% of the actual rules in the PHB are around whether you prevail in hostilities. The essence of D&D in its raw form is that the tension comes from the question about if you will win. Take away the question and the game changes completely.

So if you have an enemy that is actually terrifying, such that you can't fight it then the question is gone.

To me, the essence of making horror work - even approximately, is putting that question back in. The party cant fight the threat, but they can fight its agents. They can beat the agents but will it cost them resources needed to survive the night? Will it cost them time needed to stay ahead of the threat? You prevailed, but did you get the information you needed?

Playing an RPG is about decisions. If you can't make meaningful decisions you are not really playing. To make a decision you need information and agency. This means that as a DM you have to make sure to give players choices - not to just run or to hide, but where to run to or where to hide. On the other hand giving information is hard - the best horror stories involve mystery and keeping the monster hidden but if you hide too much then you take away the element of play around making informed decisions.

Horror works well as a narrative format, like tragedy, because we can feel for the characters and be unable to help them. We see the door left ajar. We see the bloody footprint that the character missed. We see the scene with the empty grave. We can see things and know things that the characters cannot. This duality of perspective - showing the character's ignorance is pretty hard to do in an RPG which puts you at a disadvantage.

Managing information is really important.


If fighting directly is hopeless, then it can cause some game balance issues as well. Class abilities for out of combat become much more important to survive the adventure and some classes are a bit short on those. Your party barbarian trying to quickly skim thae ancient texts to understand some part of the horror hunting them is at a disadvantage, or the fighter looking to investigate the scene of a death to discover what had happened. Honestly, I feel that you could just roll characters with no class and just some proficiencies and stats as abou enough to try and stay ahead of the threat - but at that point is it D&D still?

[Segev]

To me, the essence of making horror work - even approximately, is putting that question back in. The party cant fight the threat, but they can fight its agents. They can beat the agents but will it cost them resources needed to survive the night? Will it cost them time needed to stay ahead of the threat? You prevailed, but did you get the information you needed?

Playing an RPG is about decisions. If you can't make meaningful decisions you are not really playing. To make a decision you need information and agency. This means that as a DM you have to make sure to give players choices - not to just run or to hide, but where to run to or where to hide. On the other hand giving information is hard - the best horror stories involve mystery and keeping the monster hidden but if you hide too much then you take away the element of play around making informed decisions.

This, I think, is a crucial observation. Especially for adapting horror into D&D.

The observation of the relationship to tragedy is good, too; you can use some of the same tools. The "Gwen Stacey Choice" is a tragic one, but horror can be accomplished by making similar but smaller-scale choices necessary...over and over again. It's not so much about letting people die all the time to save others, but it's about having to retreat from one angle (because the Main Horror is just too strong) and having to determine what resources to expend and what to fight to preserve against its agents or against the environment that is between you and safety.

I've not played Five Nights At Freddie's, but my understanding of how it works is that you have a ration of electrical power and a lot of places you have to pay attention to. So your resources are your own human attention and that energy you can use to protect certain areas. The tension arises from the constant need for vigilance and the question of whether you can afford the energy costs here, or if you should risk it. How far can you push the risk before you MUST spend your resource? How much resource can you afford to minimize the amount of attention and precision you need in your timing?

In D&D, the choices might be whether you fight these creatures to secure those resources, or to break through to a safer area...or if you just try to hide here, knowing The Monster is still here and might find you. It might be whether you give some resources to another group - allied or strangers - not knowing whether they'll survive or not nor how much the resources you share will change those odds...and not knowing whether you can spare them. It might be a question of whether it's worth cutting off a limb - with all the horrible dangers that being crippled represent in a high-stakes situation - to escape a trap, or to risk the time it will take to extract it safely (and not know if it will be usable until you get it out) and see whether the horror comes for you while you're still pinned and trying to escape.

[ad_hoc]

Both Rime and CoS are great horror adventures in 5e.

I don't think you need extra rules just a different approach.

Making the game more complicated is not the way.

[Stabbey]

I'm not really much of a horror fan, but I think one aspect of it is about something comfortable turning into something wrong. Horror is when the "rules" you thought you knew get broken.

In a 5e game with experienced players, the players are likely going to be comfortable with the rules. They know the rules, they've used the rules. The rules are comfortable. The rules are a shield. So to make horror more effective, you need to take away the thing which makes them feel safe and comfortable. You need things which seem to break the rules. That makes the players more uneasy and uncertain, and not feeling comfortable.

[Gryndle]

D&D would be a hard system to do real horror in for long. You might be able to pull it off for the very early levels.

Key elements of horror are- being preyed upon by the unknown, a sense of helplessness and dread, and protagonist that significantly unprepared for what they are facing. Usually the threat is also something that they cannot hope to beat in a fight one on one.

Some of that can be done with good story telling and role playing.

But beyond the first few levels of play in D&D you are dealing with characters whose entire schtick is dealing with the unknown and finding ways to beat it or kill it.

I mean, think of Friday the 13th's Jason- he's terrifying in a summer camp full of horny teens. Let him stalk Fort Bragg (home of the Green Beret/Special Forces and 82nd Airborne) or Fort Benning (home of the 75th Ranger Regiment), or Camp Lejeune (Marine Raiders) or any other compound where experienced warriors are found, and Jason is reduced to getting a few bloody kills until the vets realize hat is going on and come up with a plan to trap or vaporize the hockey mask wielding idiot

[DwarfFighter]

RE: <<Player characters are built to take control of the situation>>, that's true to some extent... of the local situation. Player characters are built to take control of what's in front of them, but that's what makes things like Gobogeg (from Sander Peterson's Cthulhu Mythos for 5E) so terrifying... imagine player characters running around the local area trying to warn people in a 1 mile radius to leave the town before anyone has any more nightmares, but then an unlucky roll escalates Gobogeg's influence to 10 miles, and now they have to depopulate all the animals and creatures within 10 miles before the influence escalates to 100 miles, or they have to somehow track down Gobogeg underground and kill it (despite its 60' burrow speed) before it can escape and/or kill them. 5E PCs aren't built for that kind of taking control, the situation starts already out of their control and just gets moreso.

I feel this scenario makes it so the horror isn't about the PC, they're just being carried along with the greater drama as it unfolds. While a feeling of vulnerability and helplessness sure adds to the horror, being powerless and without agency makes for a pretty boring game.

This scenario sounds like it mostly takes the characters' special qualities out of the game. Here all you can do is run around and shout warnings impotently at NPCs as Gobogeg's influence grows. It doesn't matter if you're playing a Dragonborn Warlock or a Halfling Barbarian, you're all equally helpless. When your character's special abilities aren't coming into play it's the same as if you don't have them, and then what's the point of even using 5e as a vehicle? Play farmers and black-smiths in medieval Call of Cthulhu instead, right? :)

-DF

[Thunderous Mojo]

Then why even use a D20 system if you want to avoid the players picking a dice?


d then what's the point of even using 5e as a vehicle? Play farmers and black-smiths in medieval Call of Cthulhu instead, right? :)

D&D is the most popular Tabletop RPG system in the world. I'm presuming that everyone that took the time to post in this thread, has played D&D.
So the answer to "Why use 5e in conjunction with horror themes"...the obvious answer is most RPGers are already playing the game.

Stating that 5e D&D can't handle horror themes, is akin to stating that one can't write a ghost story in mandarin. Game rules are a language that help depict ideas. Language changes over time and concepts are added as required.

If WotC seriously thought that D&D couldn't "handle horror" then Van Richtens Guide to Ravenloft, wouldn't be released in a few days time.

[Segev]

I feel this scenario makes it so the horror isn't about the PC, they're just being carried along with the greater drama as it unfolds. While a feeling of vulnerability and helplessness sure adds to the horror, being powerless and without agency makes for a pretty boring game.

This scenario sounds like it mostly takes the characters' special qualities out of the game. Here all you can do is run around and shout warnings impotently at NPCs as Gobogeg's influence grows. It doesn't matter if you're playing a Dragonborn Warlock or a Halfling Barbarian, you're all equally helpless. When your character's special abilities aren't coming into play it's the same as if you don't have them, and then what's the point of even using 5e as a vehicle? Play farmers and black-smiths in medieval Call of Cthulhu instead, right? :)

-DF

I don't know Gobogeg's details, but just what has been described can make use of faster movement abilities of mounts to cover more ground, of persuasion skills, of investigation and searching skills, of abilities that enable greater communication, of Tongues or of any secret languages that engender trust....

So I do think it would matter what your character is and can do.

[MrStabby]

D&D is the most popular Tabletop RPG system in the world. I'm presuming that everyone that took the time to post in this thread, has played D&D.
So the answer to "Why use 5e in conjunction with horror themes"...the obvious answer is most RPGers are already playing the game.

Stating that 5e D&D can't handle horror themes, is akin to stating that one can't write a ghost story in mandarin. Game rules are a language that help depict ideas. Language changes over time and concepts are added as required.

If WotC seriously thought that D&D couldn't "handle horror" then Van Richtens Guide to Ravenloft, wouldn't be released in a few days time.

I don't think it's that D&D can't do horror, but rather it is bad at it. It is sufficiently bad that it is worth finding a new system that does it better.

You can adapt d&d... no content over 3rd level, a few spells stripped out, removing the combat system. If you do this, as you might do the same for any other system, then there is sufficiently little content left that it easy enough to pick up a new system.

And WotC don't have to think that horror works in 5e to release VRGtR, they just have to convince their customer base that it does. That and, less cynically, have enough other cool content that it is still good value.

[noob]

D&D is the most popular Tabletop RPG system in the world. I'm presuming that everyone that took the time to post in this thread, has played D&D.
So the answer to "Why use 5e in conjunction with horror themes"...the obvious answer is most RPGers are already playing the game.

Stating that 5e D&D can't handle horror themes, is akin to stating that one can't write a ghost story in mandarin. Game rules are a language that help depict ideas. Language changes over time and concepts are added as required.

If WotC seriously thought that D&D couldn't "handle horror" then Van Richtens Guide to Ravenloft, wouldn't be released in a few days time.

Except that if you play 5e and manage to avoid all dice roll it means that you circumvent enough rules for 5e to be "say what you try to do and the gm describes" so you are not using the 5e system at all and you are not actually playing 5e you are playing a simpler rpg while saying you are playing 5e and it can frustrate players who are waiting for a 5e experience.
5E is terribly bad for horror because all the rules in 5e discourages horror: the only horror things in 5e are the monsters themselves(doppelgangers, undead and so on) and a bunch of settings, the rules for fighting the monsters and the rules for the players are bad for horror.
But if you are just grabbing the 5e monsters and places and avoiding carefully all 5e rules then you are not playing any specific edition of dnd because the vast majority of the 5e monsters are common with other editions of dnd and many of the places are also in common with other editions.

So Just consider the possibility of playing a rpg that fits in one line ("say what you try to do and the gm describes") so that the players understand that they should be trying to wave their hands to throw fireballs only when it makes sense instead of saying "this rule here and my level 5 wizard with a silly hat means I should be able to throw one fireball a day" and break immersion.

It is as if you were saying "we should do poetry in the talk, hit with a 99999999 billion tons sword language" you will find yourself using only talking and not the 99999999 billion ton sword as a parallel the dnd 5e system describes the "say what you try to do and the gm describes" part in only 1 paragraph somewhere in the DMG and then describes the 99999999 billion ton sword(rolling dice for doing stuff,fighting and spellcasting) in all the rest of the content and you will not really be using dnd 5e and instead using the rpg dnd 5e is constructed on(which is the "say what you try to do and the gm describes" rpg).

[Segev]

I don't think it's that D&D can't do horror, but rather it is bad at it. It is sufficiently bad that it is worth finding a new system that does it better.

You can adapt d&d... no content over 3rd level, a few spells stripped out, removing the combat system. If you do this, as you might do the same for any other system, then there is sufficiently little content left that it easy enough to pick up a new system.

And WotC don't have to think that horror works in 5e to release VRGtR, they just have to convince their customer base that it does. That and, less cynically, have enough other cool content that it is still good value.
I generally think that the issue is that what makes horror horror is such that D&D is no more or less bad a system than any other could be. The horror comes from something other than mechanics.

I am sure you could build a system to cater to horror, but it will be a lot harder than just making weak PCs and adding sanity or fear scores. A system with a very good social mechanic might do horror better than one without, because the system to manipulate PC behavior by altering the optimization equation but not by changing the player's agency could be used by the horror system as well as the social one.

But the problem is that a lot of attempts at both social mechanics and horror mechanics make the mistake of mind controlling the PC by taking agency away from the player. And that separates player from character, which is the opposite of what you want to do in horror.

Horror is not truly about helplessness. It is about betrayal. On every level. It is about the inability to trust things you NEED to be trustworthy to feel secure.

[MaxWilson]

D&D would be a hard system to do real horror in for long. You might be able to pull it off for the very early levels.

Key elements of horror are- being preyed upon by the unknown, a sense of helplessness and dread, and protagonist that significantly unprepared for what they are facing. Usually the threat is also something that they cannot hope to beat in a fight one on one.

Some of that can be done with good story telling and role playing.

But beyond the first few levels of play in D&D you are dealing with characters whose entire schtick is dealing with the unknown and finding ways to beat it or kill it.

I mean, think of Friday the 13th's Jason- he's terrifying in a summer camp full of horny teens. Let him stalk Fort Bragg (home of the Green Beret/Special Forces and 82nd Airborne) or Fort Benning (home of the 75th Ranger Regiment), or Camp Lejeune (Marine Raiders) or any other compound where experienced warriors are found, and Jason is reduced to getting a few bloody kills until the vets realize hat is going on and come up with a plan to trap or vaporize the hockey mask wielding idiot

Just like the Colonial Marines did to the aliens, right?

I don't think low level is the only time PCs can be caught unprepared. I'd love to see 20th level PCs go up against something that breaks the rules they're used to, like a bunch of Quori in a Combat As War setting (because the Quori can possess anyone, including said 20th level PCs) when the players have been playing Combat As Sport for fifteen months. Or Hastur from the Cthulhu 5E book--he breaks the rules in a way that will discomfit players and leave 20th level PCs shocked and confused, or dead.


I feel this scenario makes it so the horror isn't about the PC, they're just being carried along with the greater drama as it unfolds. While a feeling of vulnerability and helplessness sure adds to the horror, being powerless and without agency makes for a pretty boring game.

This scenario sounds like it mostly takes the characters' special qualities out of the game. Here all you can do is run around and shout warnings impotently at NPCs as Gobogeg's influence grows. It doesn't matter if you're playing a Dragonborn Warlock or a Halfling Barbarian, you're all equally helpless. When your character's special abilities aren't coming into play it's the same as if you don't have them, and then what's the point of even using 5e as a vehicle? Play farmers and black-smiths in medieval Call of Cthulhu instead, right? :)

-DF

Well, it depends. Some special abilities might be useful (can you summon Earth Elementals to go searching? Are you very good at persuading people to flee? Can you depopulate the area with a Storm of Vengeance? Do you have a fast burrow speed and good combat abilities?), but as with most sandboxes, the focus is going to be on player decisions (can you deduce where it is hiding? can you find an artifact that will help?) and not PC special abilities per se, except as they aid those player decisions. The DM may have opportunities prepared for you, but they're certainly not going to conveniently arrange for Gobogeg to blindly attack you in a straight-up boss fight which resolves the whole years-long armageddon threat in eighteen seconds of battle. You can fail, and if you do, or if you don't do anything, then the world as you know it is doomed and the whole campaign ends. (And Gobogeg isn't the only thing out there--at the same time you may be dealing with Ithaqua-spawned cannibalistic Windwalkers, and abominations created by Abhoth or the daelkyr, etc.)

If the sense that you can fail and everything you know and love might be doomed turns you off, don't play horror games.

[Unoriginal]

I think it's important to note that while D&D isn't pure horror, horror is still part of D&D's DNA.

That is to say, the tools of horror are part of D&D, and using them when thematically appropriate adds spice to the events. The horror elements also help contrast and highlight the characters' heroic qualities, or help create a "darkest hour" moment for the PCs to overcome and grow from.

[DwarfFighter]

I mean, think of Friday the 13th's Jason- he's terrifying in a summer camp full of horny teens. Let him stalk Fort Bragg (home of the Green Beret/Special Forces and 82nd Airborne) or Fort Benning (home of the 75th Ranger Regiment), or Camp Lejeune (Marine Raiders) or any other compound where experienced warriors are found, and Jason is reduced to getting a few bloody kills until the vets realize hat is going on and come up with a plan to trap or vaporize the hockey mask wielding idiot

Isn't Jason vs. the Marines the exact plot of Jason X (2001)?

-DF

[DwarfFighter]

Well, it depends. Some special abilities might be useful (can you summon Earth Elementals to go searching? Are you very good at persuading people to flee? Can you depopulate the area with a Storm of Vengeance?

Doesn't that just swing the pendulum back to the other side? If the PCs have tools at the ready that can solve the whole issue, instead of "Well, this is pointless, we've got no way of dealing with this!" to "My elementals will sweep the area and evacuate the commoners! ...Hm, that was easy. Anyone for a cup of tea?"

-DF

[MaxWilson]

Doesn't that just swing the pendulum back to the other side? If the PCs have tools at the ready that can solve the whole issue, instead of "Well, this is pointless, we've got no way of dealing with this!" to "My elementals will sweep the area and evacuate the commoners! ...Hm, that was easy. Anyone for a cup of tea?"

-DF

You're creating a false dichotomy for yourself here. Just because PCs can, theoretically, have abilities that let them easily triumph in a particular straightforward fight, doesn't mean they will.

There's a huge excluded middle you're pretending doesn't exist, and the fact that failure has horrific consequences for the gameworld means that even if you do manage to curbstomp a particular Elder Influence, you still cannot be confident your children will live to adulthood.

[SpanielBear]

Not to mention, high level play is notoriously hard to balance no matter what type of fifth edition game you are running. It’s reasonable to have that as a critique of the system, but I don’t think it shows that the horror genre is uniquely challenging to implement within it.

[Segev]

Just because you have elementals who can help you spread the word doesn't mean that they can solve the entire problem. They're a tool, just like any other, enabling game moves that make your abilities relevant. There's still, presumably, a lot to do.

If this elder horror is defeated by an active neighborhood watch using a telephone tree, it's not that much of a threat.

[Waterdeep Merch]

Considering the best horror game I can think of uses a children's board game as it's basis, the idea that D&D can't hack it is ludicrous. It's a lot harder as the DMG proscribes, but adapting things is very simple. You just need to make sure things are dangerous, that's it. Combat should feel like your character could die at any time (even if this isn't really true). Things with lasting consequences should be threatened and occur with some frequency. There are things you could ban or change to facilitate this better than vanilla 5e (healing rules, a paladin's lay on hands, the restoration spells), but the necessities for adequate horror are there simply in that there can be consequences.

This is going to be the hang up for a lot of would-be horror DM's- there is no ruleset that can make up for the only thing you actually need, which all comes down to how well you, the DM, can get into your players' minds and terrify them.

[noob]

Considering the best horror game I can think of uses a children's board game as it's basis, the idea that D&D can't hack it is ludicrous. It's a lot harder as the DMG proscribes, but adapting things is very simple. You just need to make sure things are dangerous, that's it. Combat should feel like your character could die at any time (even if this isn't really true). Things with lasting consequences should be threatened and occur with some frequency. There are things you could ban or change to facilitate this better than vanilla 5e (healing rules, a paladin's lay on hands, the restoration spells), but the necessities for adequate horror are there simply in that there can be consequences.

This is going to be the hang up for a lot of would-be horror DM's- there is no ruleset that can make up for the only thing you actually need, which all comes down to how well you, the DM, can get into your players' minds and terrify them.

I know games where you can encounter odds you have no way to succeed in defeating or which are nearly undefeatable and it does not scares me not even sightly.
Insufficient power and getting killed or risking to be killed is not horror in itself.

[Kurt Kurageous]

Good horror doesn't rattle characters, it rattles the players. Focus there, rather than on a mechanic that says, "Ok, now you're scared." Because unless the player is, the character won't be, no matter what dice say.

There are many flavors of horror. The richer flavors are harder to pull off than a jump-scare, but even a jump-scare can be problematic at a table/screen. The DM has to get the acting part right, and we all don't have that talent. I used to (or so I thought) when I was a teenager. I know I don't now.

Sidebar: IMHO, what made RotFM not so horrific is that 6th grade approach it took. Clearly a bad thing is happening, but that's what heroes are for, to stop the bad thing. In the end, it felt like a fanfest for Ythrin (or however its spelled) and seemed to assume everyone cared very much about this really old thing that has been the Xanadu/El Dorado on FR forever. Eight part puzzle? Not my cup o tea. Auril feels more like a moustache-twirling villain with every step you take towards the showdown. What made RotFM awful is it's tendency to force-change alignments and impose involuntary personality changes on the characters. In CoS, there's a quid pro quo thing going on. RotFM, you touch the wrong thing and miss a single save and you need a greater restoration spell to get back to the character you built. YMMD.

You'd be better running CoS with a "YMCA runs a haunted house" feel. Campy, then suddenly horrifying as things do things to other things. Watching madness > suffering madness in terms of entertainment. The "make em care about an NPC then kill them horribly" cliche is still pretty reliable, albeit predictable.

Come to think of it, both have a similar flaw. Its hard to figure out why both BBEGs delay in squashing any threat that forms in their realm. Strahd is more observant, but once the party dares step foot in BBEG's base, it's the same thing all over again.

[Joe the Rat]

Good horror doesn't rattle characters, it rattles the players. Focus there, rather than on a mechanic that says, "Ok, now you're scared." Because unless the player is, the character won't be, no matter what dice say.
This is why I contend that Dread is the best Horror RPG system ever*. It puts the tension on the players, which then carries to the characters. Don't. Touch. The. Table.

You really need to have a sense of your players, and what will ratchet up the tension. It's really going to be a meta-element - strangeness of the atmosphere, fear of the unknown, the occasional jump scare, blood packet fusillade, or body horror, and too much eye contact. Otherwise you need to play it Camp. I can't run horror. I can't run serious enough. I can surprise, disgust or shock, but I can't make the kind of tension of suspense needed.

* - If you want to simulate the Jenga tower on a D20, an idea would be something like a DOOM die. Start at 1, and advance by one anytime the players roll a D20. If the die number is below the Doom number AND the total roll a failure, Something Bad Happens. Counter resets after Something Bad Happens. Given the roll of combat in D&D, I'd suspend this rule for combat situations. You probably ought to exempt knowledge rolls from this as well.

[Waterdeep Merch]

This is why I contend that Dread is the best Horror RPG system ever*. It puts the tension on the players, which then carries to the characters. Don't. Touch. The. Table.

You really need to have a sense of your players, and what will ratchet up the tension. It's really going to be a meta-element - strangeness of the atmosphere, fear of the unknown, the occasional jump scare, blood packet fusillade, or body horror, and too much eye contact. Otherwise you need to play it Camp. I can't run horror. I can't run serious enough. I can surprise, disgust or shock, but I can't make the kind of tension of suspense needed.

* - If you want to simulate the Jenga tower on a D20, an idea would be something like a DOOM die. Start at 1, and advance by one anytime the players roll a D20. If the die number is below the Doom number AND the total roll a failure, Something Bad Happens. Counter resets after Something Bad Happens. Given the roll of combat in D&D, I'd suspend this rule for combat situations. You probably ought to exempt knowledge rolls from this as well.

Bonus points for name dropping the system I was hinting at. Dread's best quality is how simple it is. I've effectively run it for people with zero TTRPG experience and scared the crap out of them. Everyone gets it immediately and it causes anxiety in a way that's hard to emulate with numbers and dice.

I've also seen Dread run by others where it wasn't really scary, despite having such a fantastic mechanism for building physical tension. Anyone that's properly read the Dread rulebook could probably tell you why, given that most of the page count isn't dedicated to playing Jenga, but on setting up and delivering a frightening experience. That quality is so much more vital than any rules ever could be. You could make tic tac toe terrifying with the right mindset. It's why big budget horror has a tendency to flop, too- fear isn't a special effect.

The Dread rulebook has some great recommendations for anyone that wants to run a horror game, regardless of system, and I wholeheartedly recommend reading it. VRGtR has some decent advice in their genres section too, but it's comparatively bare bones and can only really set you in the right direction. For the best possible advice, read some scary stories and take note of when and how you feel fear. What causes it? How do they manage it without visual effects or jump scares? And when does it simply not work? Worry about mechanics after you have your answer.