Horror at the gaming table, part 2: How do you make it work?
A month ago I wrote about how and why the feel of horror fiction is tough to capture in a horror RPG. It felt a bit like I was trying to explain that good horror roleplaying is impossible, but that's not really true. I'm the sort of guy who likes to outline the problem before I go looking for a solution, and that's really what I was doing.
To achieve effective horror roleplaying, I'm considering mostly two main strategies:
- Adopt a narrative structure that works well in an RPG, even if it compromises the feel of horror fiction.
- Create mechanical support for the narrative structures that resemble horror fiction in your RPG.
The best of horror roleplaying
If Wikipedia's list of RPGs by genre is anything to go by, horror is the third most popular genre in the medium, behind fantasy and scifi. That sounds about right.
Or does it? There are two horror RPGs that I think are arguably the most important RPGs ever made, outside of the world's most popular RPG. That claim might be hard to defend against serious challenges (Star Wars and Shadowrun come to mind in the scifi genre), but I stand by my claim, at least, that the horror games Call of Cthulhu and World of Darkness are among the most important landmarks on the RPG landscape. Not bad for a genre that I've argued is essentially incompatible with roleplaying.
Call of Cthulhu: investigative horror
In Call of Cthulhu, the horrors faced are so unassailably powerful that the protagonists wouldn't stand a chance of surviving against them. So they learn, a little at a time, about horrible things that happened to other people who faced the Great Evil Enemy, whatever squamous, otherworldly thing it is. Perhaps, at the end of their investigation, they manage to learn how they can prevent the Great Evil Enemy from manifesting, or banish it for a short while. And perhaps they will face some of its servants (that is, cultists) as they get closer. But, in general, suspense is gradually built up and the stakes are established by introducing the audience/players to the horrible nature of what they will be facing as they draw ever closer to the final confrontation.
This is not a normal structure in horror fiction. It's not unheard of, though. The Ring uses essentially the same structure, for very similar reasons -- contact with the enemy is fatal. And, obviously, stories (by many authors) of the Cthulhu Mythos are also structured like Call of Cthulhu adventures.
Obviously, it works very well in an RPG. Many, many gamers remember CoC games as among their best. And, I think, very rightly so. CoC might not be faithful to most horror fiction, but it's a structure that taps into real suspense in a way that works really well with roleplaying. And, in general, it preserves a lot of the feel of horror fiction. As a tweak to the genre to make it more compatible with roleplaying, I declare it to be highly successful and effective.
World of Darkness: horror inside out
World of Darkness takes a very different tack. The protagonists in the game are the traditional antagonists of horror fiction, vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts. This addresses primarily one problem in horror roleplaying, the mismatch between the mortal protagonist and the supernatural evil enemy. The players get access to cool supernatural powers.
In the WoD games, the horror can supposedly be very psychological and personal, but it bears little resemblance to most horror fiction. Again, there are exceptions that prove the rule -- the vampire novels of Anne Rice, of course -- but WoD ain't anything like your typical horror movie.
I'm not convinced that, in practice, the WoD games do much of a job of providing any horror experience at all. My experiences with WoD have been more like superheroes in horror trappings. That's not a bad experience, but I've rarely felt the buzz of feeling vulnerable, or any unusual sensation of suspense. WoD makes such a drastic change to the structure of horror that it can hardly be considered horror at all.
Duplicating the structure of horror
I have several ideas floating around in my head about what you could do, mechanically, at the gaming table to make horror work. None of these are very thoroughly thought out... so this is just kind of an idea shotgun.
Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice
All good drama, I think, and even comedy, is about sacrifice. Protagonists sacrifice things to earn something important, or must sacrifice something to atone for a stain of corruption. I think that might be the essence of storytelling. Mechanically, this isn't built into the traditional roleplaying. Like a lot of aspects of storytelling, I think it's something that doesn't necessarily need to be built into the mechanics (I think "storytelling doesn't need to be built into the mechanics" might be my core criticism of many indy RPGs, but that's another blog entry).
In horror, though, I argue that sacrifice should be mechanical. Why? It should be painful. It should mean something to the game. And it should be inevitable. Whether the protagonist is sacrificing their body, their mental stability, their security... I think horror demands sacrifice after sacrifice from the protagonist, and a good mechanical system could make that feel properly painful.
I also think that whatever the protagonist sacrifices, it starts at zero. Mathematically, it doesn't matter, but psychologically it's important to establish that the protagonist isn't, say, physically overblown, a Stallone or Schwarzenegger, who is ground down to a desperate (normal) state by escalating injuries. It's important to horror that the protagonist be normal, average, baseline. What they have to give up (what is taken from them) hurts more, because they're not starting with abundance.
Lose the dice
Horror needs suspense. And dice just aren't suspenseful. karjack, in a comment to Part 1, recalled a tale in which the GM used cards to bring in suspense. It's a good RPG anecdote... go read it. An indy horror RPG called Dread requires a Jenga play with every skill check; wrecking the tower means in-game disaster. Both these methods have something in common... they both spell inevitable doom.
Because I dislike the idea of player elimination in an RPG, I'm not sure what "doom" equals. But perhaps....
Don't eliminate players... turn them
Imagine a structure that's essentially competitive. There isn't really a GM, but one player starts as the evil. The evil can't be destroyed, but it inevitably forces players to tap into a suspense-based mechanism to survive. Eventually, a protagonist dies... and the player becomes part of the evil.
Then the cycle starts over, until there's only one player/protagonist left alive. Of course, the protagonist almost always wins in horror (an intriguingly bright twist to a quintessentially dark genre, but outside the scope of where I'm headed), so there would have to be some mechanism for making the last man standing powerful enough to face down all of the other players combined. Perhaps the antagonist players have limited resources that they have to split amongst themselves, but which they can't spend fast enough when there are too many of them? I don't know.
But I like that idea.
Reward players for hurting their own characters
In traditional RPGs, players are essentially trying not to let their characters get hurt. But, in horror, hurt is what it's all about. As the audience, we want to see the hurt... or at least the strong suggestion that hurt could rain down at any time.
In traditional RPGs, getting hurt is a punishment. But what if, in a horror game, it's a reward? It is, after all, the goal... to watch our protagonists go through hell. Perhaps a gambling-style mechanism, where players have to spend their characters' physical well-being, mental well-being, safety, whatever, in order to win some kind of important victory point.
Horror Rules uses a mechanic called "stupid things" to encourage players to do... well, stupid things. In my experience with Horror Rules, the adventure was dangerous enough, without us trying to hurt ourselves. So I'm not sure it worked super well. At least I haven't seen it work super well. I probably haven't played enough Horror Rules.
It's a tough one. It's hard to figure out reward and punishment systems that are so at odds with the traditional RPG, but I think it gets to the core of why RPGs and horror don't play nice... the motivation systems are pointed in opposite directions.
One protagonist, many antagonist/players
What if you turned the traditional RPG structure inside out? What if your protagonist is an NPC, the players represent the evil, and it's their job to threaten and torture the protagonist?
I think that'd be crazy fun, that's what.
The hard part is to make a game out of that. Rules. Might make a better card or board game than an RPG, really.
Hm. Have to think on that.
Rules are the real problem
I think one of the hard parts about thinking up rules for the horror genre is that horror is based largely on novelty. We react fearfully to the unknown, and it's awfully hard to write a set of rules that codifies originality.
How can you write a set of rules that works equally well for a zombie story, a Japanese ghost story, a serial killer story, a dream-invading, hand-full-of-knives guy story, a giant-bugs-attacking-the-city story? The structure, and the quantity and mortality of the antagonists, may be too variable to be encompassed by a set of rules that applies directly to the story structure.
And yet traditional RPGs encompass highly varied antagonists as a matter of course.
Back to the first strategy: start traditional, but horrorfy it
In a comment to my last post, gwyd described taking advantage of a situation that arose in a fantasy game, an opportunity to seriously bear down hard with some suspense and horrory goodness. It's another good anecdote... go read that one, too.
Which brings me full circle. Perhaps the real secret to running a horror RPG has nothing to do with setting up rules that let you duplicate the structure of a horror story. Perhaps it's all about using the same old traditional, D&D-type gaming structure we've all known and loved for years, but being willing to get dark.
Fill your game with horror trappings, collect a GM's mental toolkit full of horror tactics, and be willing to get ruthless when you see the opportunity. Surround yourself with players who want to embrace sensations of horror, helplessness, disgust, and let the good times roll.
Roll credits
I don't know what conclusions I came to there. I don't know what my next horror game is going to be like, if I ever manage to run one. But I've crystallized some thoughts that have been gnawing on my brains for a while. And maybe I've inspired some GM out there in the intertubes to try to really scare their players.
We can only hope.