Horror at the gaming table, part 1: Why doesn't it work?
I've been reflecting recently that I've never really played a horror RPG that felt like horror. That's led me to consider what the horror genre is, what makes it feel like horror, and why that's hard to translate into an RPG.
What is horror?
I think Wikipedia's entry on horror gives a description I can live with:
"Horror fiction is, broadly, fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle, or horrify the audience. Historically, the cause of the 'horror' experience has often been the intrusion of an evil -- or, occasionally, misunderstood -- supernatural element into everyday human experience. Since the 1960s, any work of fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, or exceptionally suspenseful or frightening theme has come to be called 'horror'."
One of the problems with genre descriptions is that it's impossible for them to be really accurate. It's impossible to sum up a single good film or book in a few sentences, much less sum up a genre. And authors and directors are constantly trying to work outside the box of the genre, to add and blend and surprise, muddying the waters further. Still, I think the definition above is a helpful generalization. And it plays in to the problems I'm talking about in translating horror to the RPG.
I think just about every point in this description makes it very hard to borrow from the horror fiction experience at the game table. I'll also bring up a couple of problems not covered by this description.
Scare, unsettle, or horrify
The first point here may be the biggest challenge. "Horror fiction is, broadly, fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle, or horrify the audience." I don't think any other genre is defined by sheer emotion in such a fundamental way. Fantasy and science fiction are deeply tied to awe and wonder, but I don't think it's quite as fundamental as the experience of being scared, unsettled, or horrified is to the genre of horror.
At the gaming table, it's very difficult to engage a group of friends (who are often looking more for a social experience than a full-on literary catharsis) in an emotional experience. It's hard to nail down an unsettling tone when the players are making Monty Python jokes.
Evil gets the supernatural, we get the everyday
Horror fiction is characterized by "the intrusion of an evil -- or, occasionally, misunderstood -- supernatural element into everyday human experience." That is, evil gets the cool powers, and the good guys who get intruded upon are normal joes. That's not a popular position in a roleplaying game.
Robin Laws has a theory: "Roleplaying is fantasy shopping for guys. That is, men would, as a group, be more interested in shopping if a) it meant never having to leave the house and b) they were shopping for super-powers." In horror fiction, the good guys don't get the part of the catalog that has the powers in it, but the bad guys do. Try selling that to your party.
But I think there's a little more to it than that. In horror, it's essential that the protagonists start out not really knowing what they're up against, what their antagonist is capable of. In essence, the players don't get to know all of the rules. But an RPG is a game, after all, and playing a game when you only know part of the rules can be a very frustrating experience. That's different from a frightening experience.
Everyday human experience
"Historically, the cause of the 'horror' experience has often been the intrusion of an evil -- or, occasionally, misunderstood -- supernatural element into everyday human experience." For roleplayers, the idea of an evil supernatural element is perfectly comfortable. It's the latter part, the intrusion into everyday human experience, that is extremely common in horror, but hard to capture in roleplaying.
In horror fiction, the evil intrudes on the protagonist while she showers, sleeps, dreams, watches TV, works late at the office. Worse yet, the evil intrudes on the protagonist while she's alone. More on the alone part later, but the intrusion into everyday life is a big part of horror fiction. Certainly not every horror movie is set entirely in the protagonist's home or other everyday setting, but I think it's safe to say that just about every horror movie has at least one key scene in which the evil intrudes on the protagonist's everyday life.
Most other genres, at least those traditionally associated with roleplaying, revolve around adventure. The protagonist goes forth face the antagonist, leaving behind home and family (which has its own particular significance) to do what needs to be done. The horror protagonist has no such luxury. The evil intrudes on the protagonist in the very place where she lives, and threatens the things she holds dear much more insidiously. I have a theories about why this is a core difference between horror and traditional hero's-journey-style storytelling, but I'm not trying to explain why this difference exists here... I'm just pointing out that it does exist.
In roleplaying, home is a very difficult place to threaten the protagonist. Horror depends on the protagonist behaving in a certain way in her home, but a player is going to play it very differently, knowing that if a scene is being described it must be significant. Imagine this scene:
GM: You're at home alone that evening. It's been a hard day, climbing shelves in the library to research the murky history of the town and chasing down mysterious strangers, so you're relaxing in front of the TV with a beer. Suddenly, the power goes out! The room is almost totally dark, except for a little light coming in the window from the neighbor's house. What do you do?
Player: I go get my gun, fire up the generator that powers the state-of-the-art security system I installed last week, and check the monitors for signs of danger. When I'm sure it's safe, I leave the house, get in my car, and drive over to Dave's house. On the way over, I use my cell phone to call all of the other members of the party and tell them to meet us there.
GM: Don't you want to go into the basement to check the circuit breaker?
Player: No. Hell no.
When a protagonist is in her own home, she isn't expecting the evil. But the player, who knows she's "on camera," knows that something bad is going to happen. Indeed, trying to play this scene the way it would play out in horror fiction would be nearly impossible in an RPG format. As the tension in the room is gradually cranked up -- and tension is what we're shooting for in horror -- it's harder and harder to get the player to do the "right" thing (which is in fact the wrong thing). That dovetails nicely into my next couple of points.
Suspenseful
"Since the 1960s, any work of fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, or exceptionally suspenseful or frightening theme has come to be called 'horror'." Much of this is easy to translate into an RPG. Morbid, gruesome, and surreal are, I think, elements that are present in horror RPGs I've experienced. Check, check, and check. Suspense is much harder.
Suspense is the audience's sense of looming danger. It's most often sustained in horror fiction by giving the audience cues that the protagonist doesn't actually have. The audience knows, when we see the protagonist shot with an unsteady camera through a window, the music starts to get creepy, and the protagonist is just sitting there watching TV with a beer in her hand, something is going to happen. And we know the protagonist isn't going to be driving that action... the evil is going to be initiating it. The protagonist, not knowing what the audience knows, is going to make wrong decisions when the power goes out, deepening the sense of looming danger.
The experience of yelling "Don't open that door!" at the screen as the music swells is so fundamental to horror movies that it's a cliché. That sense of helplessness while watching as someone else unknowingly steps into danger is a visceral human reaction. It's a key way that suspense is constructed in horror fiction.
In an RPG, we don't have an audience awareness separate from the protagonist's awareness. So the protagonist knows she's on camera when the power goes out. The player knows that her character wouldn't be on camera if the power went out because she plugged in that old heater in the bedroom.
And an RPG is, after all, a game. An intellectual exercise, one in which it's very hard to get players not to try to optimize their positions. The traditional urge for RPG players is to choose actions that are most likely to lead to survival. And what makes RPGs unique is that players get to control their characters. But the conventions of horror fiction practically demand otherwise.
So alone
Wikipedia's description of horror doesn't point out that protagonists are rarely in a group. But roleplayers are usually in small parties of four or five.
I think this is because, in fact, fiction rarely depicts protagonists working in such groups. Even in fantasy fiction, a classic group of adventurers is a relative rarity. If a story has more than one protagonist, they work together separately, after the same goals but rarely doing critical plot actions in the same place at the same time.
In most genres, it's fairly easy to overlook this in order to make a workable RPG in which the players share screen time to keep things from being boring. But I think this is where horror differs from most genres. In horror, aloneness is a way to establish vulnerability, and vulnerability is important to establishing that sense of looming danger.
RPG players, though, work in packs, and if they spend all of their time isolated, members of a group of traditional size will be bored a whole lot.
Worse yet, a horror story that does portray a group often pares away its protagonists one by one. As the evil kills off protagonists, the stakes are raised and the last protagonist standing is more vulnerable than ever, another way to crank up the suspense. In board games, this kind of player elimination is unpopular, and it works even worse in an RPG.
The devil in the details
I think the most critical part of horror wasn't mentioned at all in the Wikipedia description. Where that description says "any work of fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, or exceptionally suspenseful or frightening theme has come to be called 'horror,'" I would replace the word "theme" with "tone."
Tone is more crucial to horror than theme. Ghostbusters and Frighteners both have horror themes, but they are both clearly comedies. Alien and Night of the Living Dead, on the other hand, have science fiction themes, but feel much more like horror. That's tone.
It's almost impossible to really describe all of the ways that tone is expressed in fiction, but I think horror fiction in particular often conveys its tone through elaborate, often subtle detail.
In film, tone-rich details can be depicted very efficiently, without dwelling on them. A shelf of carefully preserved animal skulls, moldering wallpaper, a tiny doll made of sticks tied together with thread... these are all pictures worth a thousand words. On film, they can be shown and absorbed in a fraction of the time it takes me to say the words, much less describe them in any detail.
In literature, time pressures don't even exist. A setting can be described at length if need be, with all of its small details.
In an RPG, time is of the essence. It's hard to spend any time on "insignificant" details whose purpose is to establish tone. As any GM knows, players will all too often latch on to details that are only thrown in for color, and ignore the real clues. The best a GM can do is throw out a few quick descriptors -- maybe three quick details about a room -- before the players start wanting to drive the action. There's not much time to really develop an image.
Why so negative?
It seems like I'm arguing that horror roleplaying is impossible. And yet some of the most popular and successful RPGs published are horror. So how can I possibly be right?
This little essay has been a process of outlining what I see as the challenges of making horror roleplaying work like horror fiction. I have a lot more to say about horror and roleplaying, and in part 2 I'll consider ways to change up a game, and make the impossible possible.
And horrifying.
In the meantime, feel free to suggest solutions or argue with my points. I've been making generalizations here, and I know it. The real goal is to identify the hurdles, to figure out how to get over them.