Should questions include System/Setting in title if tagged with system/setting?
This one I include in edit-summaries enough that my browser autocompletes "n" with "no need to include system in title if tagged, see $meta_link for further explanation."
Wow. Someone's lurking fast =D
@Trish This is intriguing. (The Hall of Fame idea.) Any further thoughts?
I'm a new DM playing Lost Mine of Phandelver with two other adults and our kids, two 11-year-olds. We started with the pre-generated characters; I'm playing the Dwarf cleric as an NPC.
One of the kids is very interested and wants to create their own character: a Dragonborn ranger with a snake for...
@nitsua60 I appreciate the urge but I'm skeptical that stack meta is a good place for such a thing.
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Aether: A Heroic Fantasy RPG by EldritchCrow. A card-based Fantasy TTRPG all about choosing your fate and deciding what heroism means to you.
Equinox: A Storytelling Game for 1-6 Players by Edaureen Muhamad Nor. Using Tarot cards, six-sided dice and your imagination, create and explore a fae world of turmoil and adventure!
The Yorkshire Museum shared on twitter a silk cap "imported to York from Iran by #Viking traders"
@AncientSwordRage Link doesn't seem to work. It links to something that seems to be about x-men. I've identified that it goes to the question with that question number.
Hmm. Horror in RPGs is typically associated with the sacrifice of player agency in some capacity: leaning into helplessness both works at a table, and introduces hiccups into play, particularly when a player or multiple players don't find that loss of control welcome.
Something I think about often is how to conduct player safety during horror games. Do safety tools necessarily undercut horror elements?
I think about this when trying to design stories and supporting minisystems that both lean into horror elements, and which are available and accessible to a wide range of people.
By all counts, most horror-alike stories I've played almost definitionally have to pick their players. The players must be people who are comfortable sitting with the kinds of horror those games create. The game is, by its nature, inflexible, because story-level flexibility and adaptation to player needs is perceived as undercutting the horror. The safety tools for those games tend to assume that players won't run into specific problems at all, and often ignore them.
I would argue that you would need buy-in no matter what to run a successful horror game: the players need to accept that they're getting themselves into a situation where they will be partially helpless, or it's not going to work.
If there's not agreement that this is horror, you run the risk of people trying to turn it into something else: straight fantasy, a comedy, etc.
@Slate I have a lot of thoughts about this, particularly because some of the best horror games I've read/played/run defy that "common wisdom" entirely.
I'd love to hear your experiences! I definitely think this is mostly a question of managing group expectations, and not something inherent about the safety of stories. I tend to think (almost) any story can be safe with careful consent and supporting empathy.
Yes, and I think there's a very common misunderstanding that being able to withdraw consent at any time somehow invalidates the horror, but you can walk out of a horror movie whenever you like too.
But also regarding "group expectations" I think there's a lot of communication problems --even in conversations like this one-- about what "horror" means for everyone involved. Because it's an almost uselessly broad term if it's not given some kind of qualifiers.
Safety tools also encourage people to try it in the first place - I would never have picked up a Goosebumps if I didn't know I could close the book and put it back on the shelf whenever I wanted. (I did close it and put it back on the shelf, if that matters)
@bobble This has actually happened more than once in games I've played. It's turned out okay, in that the group generally felt comfortable rolling with the new story, but they didn't turn out the way people had hoped. For one reason or another, groups I've played in have struggled to get horror elements to 'stick'.
(And that's not necessarily a problem. In all those cases I've taken it as a sign the elements weren't a good fit for the group's comfort.)
@BESW Definitely agrees with my experiences too, re: ambiguity of 'horror', and that particular misunderstanding.
There's SO MUCH to talk about regarding horror in gaming with regards to agency, consent, and expectations, it's almost impossible to know where to start.
I'll start with some specifics about horror systems. Systems like Lovecraftesque put all the agency in the hands of the players. They define a shape the story will take and then provide a structure to tell it which gives complete control to the group in clearly distributed packages that get shared around the table as the game progresses.
Games like Call of Cthulhu largely rely on failed rolls and inevitable loss of agency to "sanity damage" mechanics which turn PCs in to NPCs, and that's the default mode assumed by a lot of people and systems. But frankly it's just another version of "death is the most boring outcome."
Even Cthulhu Confidential turns lethal and NPC-ify-ing situations into "this will happen at the end of the adventure if you don't do something about it before then" dread.
I'd classify We Forest Three as horror, and it's a one-person game! Hard to lose agency there. It's about what parts of your identity you will let go in order to achieve your goal, and whether that will be enough.
Hmm. To me, those kinds of systems aren't really what is meant by 'horror', a lot of the time. Or, they attempt to avoid the problem by making it a number. But that doesn't align historically with what people often mean by 'horror' - fungible horror is a far outlier, genre-wise.
Well, that last one is a good example.
Lovecraftian horror in RPG form really struggles with being anything other than a number on a page, ime. (My experience is limited because it's not really appealing to me in that format.)
Aye. Lovecraftesque and Cthulhu Confidential succeed, I think, because they avoid the numbers.
Lovecraftesque doesn't have any numbers at all, and Cthulhu Confidential uses numbers to resolve actions but the outcomes are often purely narrative, stacking conditions and contexts and pressures on the PC which force him to make difficult choices about what problems to prioritize fixing.
What I'm talking about when I mean "horror" is the kind of thing that escapes the page - how atmosphere, risk, agency, story, success, loss, mood, etc. interact, and not necessarily what gets written in the mechanics or inscribed on a sheet. Or, incidentally, derives its horror from another setting also described as "horror."
I'm really under-exposed to Mythos horror because it's just not for me.
If it has Lovecraft or Cthulhu or adjacent ideas as a part of it, or as part of its inspiration setting, mechanics, etc, I instantaneously lose all interest. (Same goes for things like SCP.) That's just me, not a criticism of the subgenre. So I am really underinformed about how that subgenre informs the whole.
And sometimes it comes down to presentation. After all, horror movies are often comedy with a different aesthetic; a lot of horror games use common tension-building mechanics found in pulp adventure games, but with different aesthetics that create a different feeling in the players.
@Slate Honestly same, but they're so ubiquitous that I mine them for tools to use for my own means because it's easy pickings.
So I guess the next step is for you to tell us what horror games you do play. Bluebeard's Bride? Lacuna Apostasy? Trophy Dark? This Person Should Not Exist? The Hunted? Suburban Consumption of the Monstrous?
@Slate Are you familiar with the term "magic circle" in the context of gaming and virtual worlds?
> All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the 'consecrated spot' cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary wo…
What you're describing as horror is the experience of having the magic circle expand beyond what is expected or traditional.
Which would mean my game Walkies With Grim is horror, and I can't argue with that; I included a ritual to banish the dog in case he didn't go willingly.
Basically the magic circle is the space in which the magic happens. When we play a card game where the goal is to lose all your cards, the magic circle is the power which keeps us from just throwing down the cards and saying "I win!"
> In a very basic sense, the magic circle of a game is where the game takes place. To play a game means entering into a magic circle, or perhaps creating one as a game begins. (Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, 2003)
You're describing horror as the experience of having the rules of the game (the suspension of disbelief for the story) extend beyond the expected limits of the circle. I'm guessing you're thinking of how House of Leaves creates uncertainty and anxiety about how much of its world bleeds into our own, even after you've stopped reading it.
@Slate Which is hilarious to me because of how many people think I wrote it for kids.
The suspension of disbelief that House of Leaves creates in you as you read it, expands outside the text.
Well, bar the fact that I haven't thought about House of Leaves in many years - sure, I suppose. But I think that's only the way I'd frame it at the interface. I wouldn't say I experience it that way.
The Walls Will Swallow You by Will Uhl. A psychological horror micro-RPG inspired by House of Leaves, Pan’s Labyrinth, and more traditional horror staples.
Like, there isn't a clear moment where we step from 'outside the game' to 'inside the game,' and there isn't a clear moment where the reverse happens. Even in settings where I've experienced it as a deliberate communal junction, the transitions on either side are blurry. When inside, one is not free of the outside; when outside, one is not free of the inside.
Put another way, the magic circle always exists, and when we step into a game it shrinks, but never forgets that it can encompass everything we do, both in and out of the game.
So as a player, the way I experience it is that it's required to hold both the game and reality in one's head at the same time, even when they disagree.
Bearing all that in mind, what do you mean by "horror" is the kind of thing that escapes the page? You have just described the very experience of gaming as inherently page-escaping, so a question that comes to mind is, is there a distinction which marks a game as non-horror?
Well, to clarify, what I mean by that is that 'horror' is not present in the kind of thing that can be written down in mechanics and numbers, not that 'horror' is anything that is not written down in mechanics and numbers.
My question still stands, because you've described a quality of horror (albeit negatively), and then described every game as containing that quality, so I'm still left without a sense of what horror is for you.
Not totally sure what you mean? A lot of the genre of horror uses numbers to express that horror. All I mean is that, to me, if horror is there, it isn't because of the mechanical representation, but because of something else.
But, I'm thinkin' bout it, but I'm a bit at a loss for how to describe it.
It's the "something else" I'm asking for, and "I don't know" is a very reasonable answer.
Personally, I regard horror in multiple ways, depending on various factors of circumstance at the time. Core to it is probably a feeling, or group of feelings, that a game can invoke. And I totally agree that it requires a conflagration of atmosphere, risk, mood, and so on, to create.
Horror, for me, boils down to some kind of deliberately sought-after discomfort. The nature of the discomfort and the manner of seeking vary wildly depending on person, group, and mood. Often the discomfort is felt in the characters rather than the players, without any goal of seeking bleed to create "real" feelings at the table but rather the goal is to be convinced in the characters' discomfort as plausible.
And you're absolutely right that games like Call of Cthulhu which rely mostly on "sanity score goes down" mechanics, don't seem effective at that for me. Games like Cthulhu Dark which use numbers as a pacing mechanism and a story prompt, are more effective at creating plausible, engaging depictions of discomfort because the numbers aren't telling me a thing is scary.
They're helping me make the story paced in a way similar to effective narrative pacing for scary stories, which makes the discomfort more plausible by building up to it slowly, with interspersed points of tension-and-release to keep from oversaturating the narrative with a single feeling.
Hmm, let's roll with your definition, it's the closest I've seen, I think. The natural question that follows is, "how do you make discomfort safe at the table?"
(This gets us into the theory of horror storytelling, which often breaks it apart into three types: dread at something approaching, terror at a sudden brief revelation, and the gore of prolonged exposure to something difficult to endure. The ratios of these three elements defines the kind of horror, and the pacing of them shapes the experience.)
@Slate This is an excellent question! And the answer at its simplest is what we discussed at first.
We set expectations: what kind of discomfort are we seeking and who will experience it?
We also make sure there are ways to change the expectations if the needs shift during play, or to point out that the expectations aren't being met. And the open door just-walk-out policy is as crucial here as anywhere.
"Who will experience the discomfort" is, I think, core to your original question, which suggested that the default assumption is the experiencer is the player.
If the character, but not the player, is experiencing the discomfort, that changes the landscape a lot.
But if the player is the experiencer, that still doesn't mean a loss of agency is required. I think horror GMs should take notes from haunted houses: the participant is moving under their own power, voluntarily going from room to room because they want to be made uncomfortable, and every actor in the house knows that if the distress stops being fun everyone stops and gets that person out immediately.
If the player is at the table to be discomforted, then they're probably willing to collaborate on it. As bobble said, horror RP is one of the most delicate atmospheres to float and the easiest to sink: the buy-in needed to make it work should mean that a loss of agency is unnecessary unless that's specifically the kind of discomfort the players are asking for.
(And if the players do want to be uncomfortable because they don't have as much control over what's happening as they usually do, that's fine and cool! You still need the safety tools, just like how in stage fighting the person being hit is always in control of the motion or in BDSM the person being controlled is always able to take control.)
One last side note: sometimes "if the number goes up more I will lose my character" is enough to make the discomfort that qualifies for that player as horror. Or "the GM is describing an aesthetic that reminds me of horror stories" can do the same for certain people. For those folks, numbers and setting are enough to make it horror. And then there's horror-adjacent play which uses the trappings of horror without attempting to create plausible discomfort, because the aesthetic itself is enjoyed in its own right; these are often *called* horror for lack of a better term.
@BESW I've just been reading so far, but I'm curious where this breakdown originates from (mainly as I'd like to know more). I'm more used to splitting horror and terror into two related genres/styles. I'm coming from a film viewing perspective, but a film can be both horror (suspense, dread, unknown) and terror (gore, action, surprise). To me horror is when you the established rules/expectations are broken but needn't be done suddenly and you can't do anything about it...
Terror is then when you might get a sudden surprise or an oppressive pervasive feeling of dread but it's not hidden, it's actively present.
Alien (first film) is mostly horror (suspense from seeing the eggs, the jockey, establishing that things might not be as they seem) and Aliens (second film) is terror (Xenomorph is established, some terror comes from the ticking clock while Ripley tries to convince everyone how serious this situation is... It's not that you don't know when the conflict will arise but that it's inevitable.
Both films have both, but each focus more heavily on one thing than the other
The Thing is where you see both flipping back and forth, which is why it's probably one of my favourite films.
> The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath aga…
I got my concept of it from Nightmares of Mine (1999) by Kenneth Hite for Rolemaster.
I also use Hite's GURPS Horror (1987) as a reference, mostly because it's something I could actually buy a physical copy of for less than a hundred dollars. A lot of the ideas in Nightmares of Mine are expressed in some form in GURPS Horror.
He also talks about elements of horror like "isolation," "uncertainty" and "the unnatural," and you'll notice that "uncertainty" and "the unnatural" can map pretty easily onto "dread" and "gore," or in King's language "the Horror" and "the Gross-out."
@AncientSwordRage Right, so this is where I think the "three ingredients in a recipe" approach to dread/terror/horror works really well. A story (film, game, whatever) that only uses one of the ingredients is going to be tedious. The Thing is a great example. It's mostly dread, with moments of terror, and occasional long special effects shots of gore.
And Alien/Aliens is a great comparison pair! They have the same ingredients but measure them out in different quantities.
In Nightmares of Mine Hite talks about different paradigms or perspectives for horror. The dread/terror/gore trifecta is from his concept horror defined by intent. Horror intends to scare and these are the kinds of scares it wields.
He also describes horror as defined by content, in which we define horror by what is scary. He lists a lot of common examples, including The Ghost, The Omen, The Serial Killer, and so on.
Pretty much any game with "Lovecraft" or "Cthulhu" in the title is telegraphing that its content is The Horror From Beyond, and we can be moderately confident that it will not prioritize terror over dread or gore in its ratio of scares.
Part of designing effective horror is understanding that the human brain and body adapt very quickly to new situations. Give us a steady diet of jump scares, or nasty imagery, or grinding tension, and we oversaturate, acclimate, and stop responding.
Alternating scare types helps keep us from burning out, but effective horror also gives us restful moments to return to a baseline and recover so we're ready to be scared again.
One reason I say that horror is just comedy in a different aesthetic is that both genres need similar pacing. A good comedy film will have slow builds, sudden reveals, and long drawn-out moments, as well as calm beats to let us recover before we laugh again.
Oh, and "horror is when the established rules/expectations are broken" is also a common definition of comedy.
"Horror as content" is... tricky, because a lot of content that we consider horror has non-horror applications, and some of the most effective horror is about creating horror feelings from subjects we don't normally think of that way.
Marjane Satrapi said that when she was writing Persepolis it would have been very easy to make it a sad book. It's easy to make the reader feel sad by showing sad things, but she decided that the easiness was precisely why it wasn't a good idea. If she could make people laugh, that would be a stronger emotional connection. It would create stronger empathy (rather than just pity).
We have limited vocabulary to label all the different categories, but having multiple lenses is helpful to get a clearer picture of what we're studying.
Like, I'm inclined to use the word "pulp" to describe what you're categorizing as "terror" but that word is already applied to so many different things as to be nearly useless, I shouldn't saddle it with another meaning.
So, the origin is in publishing and it describes a rough paper used to print books that were written fast, printed in low-quality bulk, sold cheap, and not expected to last.
And the word transferred to the kind of content those books usually contained: bombastic, lascivious, violent, sensational.
That's sorta the thing; it's got no genre per se. Pulp is "Weasels Ripped My Flesh!" and "Reefer Madness!" and "I Was Bigfoot's Love Slave!" but it's also Charles Dickens and HG Wells and Philip K. Dick.
Pulp is a tone, more than a content.
But then it got spun off into being used for specific genres like cowboy adventures ("Hell For Breakfast"), sex thrillers ("Illicit Love Is Sweet But Bloody"), scifi ("Space Family Robinson") or all of the above ("Virgin Planet").
And now it means all of that and none of it.
(BTW, I have made up NONE of these titles, though some of them are magazine cover pitches rather than titles of the stories themselves.)
@BESW Cthulhu Dark came to mind for me at this point reading the transcript too. @Slate describes that horror isn't because of the mechanical representation but because of something else — in cthulhu dark, that something else is the story, plus a sense of dread that is generated by the convergence of some mechanics.
Game mechanics converging to generate an experience is a great source of player emotion. I can experience terror in dark souls through the convergence of having a lot of souls (something I don't want to risk), a safe point right nearby (somewhere I want to reach), and considerable danger between it and me (some enemies).
This creates something emergent that comes from the combination of the game's sense of progress and its sources of risk.
Horror movies also generate emotions in us the same way: the scene is not the horror, the scene combined with everything else that's been happening including the mounting tension I've been feeling for the last hour is the horror. It's emergent from something not found in any specific unit.
So in Cthulhu Dark, the game cultivates a sense of dread and hopelessness that you don't notice until it's already there. You're extremely competent, but you still have limitations you just cannot surpass because you are merely human.
There is a number, but the number is not This Is How Scared You Should Be — heck, the number is expected to nearly max out for some people only halfway through the story before it's reached its scariest point. The number doing that though triggers a new phase in which we begin working against our own best interests and destroying evidence and knowledge that could help us progress.
The game creates something emergent between our desires, the things we're risking in the story if we pursue them (our character, and in a way our agency, insofar as we would be left helpless and unable to do anything at all to affect the story if our character leaves it), and then creates a situation in which we'll want to make those risks and do uncomfortable things to stay in the game, whether that's risking sanity or destroying the very evidence we came here looking for.
There are many effects in D&D 5e which reduce a target's maximum hit points. Take for example, the Vampire's bite which contains the following rider:
The target's hit point maximum is reduced by an amount equal to the necrotic damage taken.
This phrasing is relatively easy to understand and is ...
@BESW I described it in Discord earlier as "distortion of the familiar", but "perversion" might be a better word.
For instance, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared isn't horror because it has gore. It's horror because it takes something familiar - a cute, innocent children's show - and distorts it into something else that is incongruous and wrong.
Speaking for myself here, though, not anyone else.
That's one of the useful tools of horror: the "not quite right"-ness creates a sense of unease can be applied in layers.
Just like comedy has a lot of apparently universal origins—subverting expectations being an especially common one—horror has its possible ingredients.
Although I find Hite's dread/terror/gore tools very useful, his work on content is much less helpful to me because he's talking about a very narrow spectrum of horror (mostly Gothic, Mythic, and Monster) within a specific, narrow, but prevalent cultural context.
That is: while "not quite right" or "transgression" or "distortion" are common horror elements, exactly what we think qualifies varies widely by personal and cultural context as well as the kind of story being told.
Aye. That's why I quantified that I was speaking for myself - that "not quite right" / building dread is much more effective at getting me personally to shiver than most other things.
For instance, I asked for horror video game recommendations a few months. Almost none of the games suggested were horror in my personal definition; they relied on gore, or zombies, etc. More terror or disgust than dread.
There's a whole subgenre of "terrible things happening in Perfectly Ordinary White Suburbia" horror which is now almost entirely the realm of satire, but for at least a decade was played very very straight (no pun intended, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge) because its target audience was the people living in those Perfectly Normal(tm) homes.
Or, my personal favorite: The Phantom of the Opera, who started out as pulp horror (xenophobia, serial killers, forbidden love, orientalism, supernatural debunking, Secret Love Life Of Actors And Nobility) and fifty years later was a joke milked by low-budget comedy stage shows before being revived as a Tragic Romance musical event.
The other element that I associate with horror is a lack of autonomy - where you think you're making decisions, but in the end your decisions don't matter. I don't know how that'd work in a TTRPG though, without completely destroying player agency.
If the character is experiencing the discomfort then we can easily remove the character's agency without impinging on the player's.
If, on the other hand, the player is experiencing the discomfort and wants that to include a loss of agency, well... there are ways to do that which are rewarding, especially in the specific sense of "making decisions which don't matter" you're talking about.
That's a "journey not destination" approach to play which isn't hard to embrace.
If you make decisions and at the end it turns out they don't matter, you've still gone on the journey.
ttfn
In "A Penny For My Thoughts" you spend the entire session helping each other reconstruct suppressed memories. And then each of you chooses whether or not to forget them again.
Dog Eat Dog, a game about the systemic nature of colonialism, has multiple possible endings based on the players' actions... but none of them are satisfying.
In my experience, it's useful to pay attention to specifically the parts of horror I respond well to, and the parts I don't, so when I wind up in a conversation about horror I can talk specifically about those as part of a larger palette.
Also, people seek out horror for many different reasons.
I know some people who seek out horror so they can confront anxieties or traumas in a bounded, controlled space. Others like horror because it's the only 'genre' of media they've found that deals with things that are important to them. One of the reasons I like horror is the intimacy of sharing what makes you uncomfortable.
Still other people are just in it for the chemical and emotional thrill ride of the experience.
@BESW This looks interesting. From what I found about it, you could turn this into either horror or comedy very easily, going back to the discussion about horror and comedy sharing elements.
@Mithical Aye. There's a specific drift for Mythos-style horror, but the default experience is... well, you're reconstructing suppressed memories and they're suppressed for a reason.
@Catofdoom2 Was it the watery visage of Mary Mastrantoni that did it for you? because when I saw that I was like, "you all better go back to the surface".
@KorvinStarmast That's just a "whenever you cast" effect, right? If I had "whenever you cast a spell, take 1 damage" I would only take 1 damage when I cast acid arrow or flaming sphere.
@Catofdoom2 I couldn't say for myself, but it sounds good?
@doppelgreener not sure if my mind is blank because I am trying to think about it or my dehydration, but I cannot think of a single thing about horror that I respond well to...
@Phoenices Mike's playing a druid who we transitioned to a "Circle of the Stars" sub class recently ~ I like to discuss features with him ahead of time.
Should questions include System/Setting in title if tagged with system/setting?
This one I include in edit-summaries enough that my browser autocompletes "n" with "no need to include system in title if tagged, see $meta_link for further explanation."
There are many effects in D&D 5e which reduce a target's maximum hit points. Take for example, the Vampire's bite which contains the following rider:
The target's hit point maximum is reduced by an amount equal to the necrotic damage taken.
This phrasing is relatively easy to understand and is ...
