Sort of...
When it comes to the rules in our games, we’ve established that we like to have them around in general. They help fairly determine when your character actually succeeds and fails at a given task, without an appeal to a DM’s personal judgment. They serve as neutral arbiters for important tasks your character is going to perform. They are also just fun in and of themselves.
But what tasks are important or fun enough to require rules? And what tasks are better served with judgment calls, or player-based decision making?
To a huge degree, this depends on the emotional goals of the game. A game that is designed around an “action” style of exciting battles, tense moments, and dramatic scenes is going to have different goals – and thus different mechanics – than a game that is designed around a more “survival” style of slow attrition, creeping dread, and fear of the unknown.
In fact, it is worth examining how various other games have arrived at one of these big styles in order to tease out why we have some rules, but not others, in certain games.
THREE ELEMENTS OF “SURVIVAL HORROR”
It’s always a little difficult to talk about genres. Rarely do our creations fall comfortably into one exclusive camp cleanly. There is overlap, cross-pollination, bleed, shift, and growth, all of which can subtly or dramatically alter the genre a thing is placed into.
It is with that caveat that I introduce a genre of videogame that perhaps most closely matches the “survival” style of D&D gameplay: survival horror.
Let us see if this sounds familiar: your character is vulnerable. Their HP is dwindling. They’re out of spells. The next combat may be your last. You are far away from civilization, far away from the friendly faces of the village – too far to be able to go back. There’s too much darkness between you and there, and you might not have the resources to get through it. The monsters are hunting you, hungry for your suffering, and it is all you can do to remain one step ahead of them, relying on your ingenuity and your quick thinking to eke out a victory, to avoid them for a few more moments while you think this through. Areas that seems safe conceal traps or creatures that would like nothing more than to kill you.
These elements of tension, anxiety, fear, surprise…these are the same emotional goals realized in a classic “survival horror” game, and examining how these games cultivate this experience can be useful in seeing how classic D&D games work in parallel.
Limited Resources
In a typical survival horror game, your inventory is limited. You don’t have enough ammo to shoot everything, and you don’t have enough healing to just barrel through, so you are forced to make clever use of your few available resources, to use them to the greatest effect.
This has two direct parallels in D&D: the availability of spells, and the limits of HP. In a typical old-school survival-style game, the spellcasters have severely curtailed magical resources (often just a handful of spells), and the warriors must cope with an HP regeneration rate so slow that it becomes impractical to use. So over the course of the adventuring day, your spell resources dwindle and your HP fall and defeat looms large in your mind: will you make it?
The trade-off for limited spells is likely to be powerful spells. They are methods to end encounters, not just conjuror’s tricks. If you MUST resort to one of your very few bits of magic, it should be effective enough to clear the room…of course, there’s more than one room…
Because human beings are quite loss averse, the gradual reduction of limited resources inspires anxienty, tension, and fear. There is a very real danger of your party not making it out of this dungeon alive, and this is reinforced with every successful goblin attack, every carefully chosen knock spell. Your resources dwindle, and by themselves your HP and your spell slots will not get you through this.
More modern styles of D&D replenish HP quickly (via wands or surges), and have far greater spell reliability (wands, again, or at-will or encounter spells), reducing these elements of tension. If you want to feel like your power is dwindling quickly against an enemy that keeps coming, you’re not going to want encounter spells or wands of cure light wounds: the PC’s won’t feel as pressured or as tense.
Isolation
A typical survival horror game tends to put you in a location far away from civilization. Somewhere abandoned, mysterious, and distant, where few people willingly go. The game fills the world with zombies and bogeymen, but you remain alone, without recourse to anyone else. You are in the wilderness, there is no help, no one is coming to save you.
In D&D, the dungeon itself is the environment where this is realized. Far from home, filled with menace, not a safe spot in sight, the dungeon is a place where the only things that can hear you scream are the things that would love to hear you scream some more. The wilderness parallels this, too: a place where no help is forthcoming.
It is notable that in D&D, the isolation is often less complete – and less disruptive – than in a survival horror game. At the very least, you have the rest of the party with you, and typically you aren’t surprised to be suddenly caught in the wilderness. Rather, D&D characters seek out that wilderness, in order to confront it. They go into places where they will be isolated. That’s part of what makes them heroic characters: they confront that fear of being separate from everyone else each time they set out on an expedition.
The bit of psychology this fires on is our social nature and our need for security and comfort and others who understand. A D&D adventuring party is isolated from society, fundamentally at risk, without any creature comforts, and with no one outside of the group able to understand what they go through. A sort of camaraderie develops in shared suffering there, hundreds of miles from safety, but it doesn’t extend to those who weren’t there, who weren’t part of the experience. D&D parties, if not individual D&D characters, are isolated people.
One of the mechanics that works against a feeling of isolation is a sort of independent heroism in the PC’s. If the party members actually don’t need any NPC’s around, because the NPC’s do nothing useful for them, then there’s little feeling of isolation when they’re out in the wilderness. If the party can find food, craft items, heal their wounds, and easily get a full night’s sleep, all without talking to anyone else, this element is weakened. Even some spells and effects in early D&D (like Create Food) hurt this element of “dungeon survival” style, though many of them were fairly high level.
Avoid Encounters
The idea here is that, due to your low resources, you never quite have enough to simply shoot your way through an enemy group and heal when the wave has passed. If you try that, you will fail, because you will run out of bullets and you will run out of healing and the enemies will still be coming. A typical survival horror game has you employing stealth and puzzle-solving to avoid many enemies, reducing the number of things you must ultimately confront.
In D&D, “survival” play often came to this, utilizing the rogue’s ability to hide and move silently, and the wizard’s ability to charm as essential for avoiding encounters you wouldn’t otherwise want to engage in. More than that, simply choosing your rooms carefully, prodding things with a 10 foot pole, making the right choice at a hallway split, or other displays of skill, luck, and faith, all played an essential role in simply avoiding enemies.
Here, the idea is that avoiding encounters is actually one of the successful things your character can do. To talk a group of ogres out of attacking or to sneak past some orc guardians or to fly over an amassed army is considered a great success, a clever gameplay tactic. Because encounters will always drain more resources than you’ll get back from them, having an encounter where you need to use a spell or where you get hit is, on some level, a bit of a failure. If you can get into the treasure vault, get the gold, and get out, without having to encounter one solitary creature, that’s a successful dungeon run.
Games that prohibit their abilities from avoiding encounters outright (such as the nerfs to non-combat magic in 4e) deprive players of that reward, making it obviously something bad, rather than clearly something good.
LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT?
Each of those three elements above, at different time in D&D’s history, have been areas of dispute. Though they work together to create an environment of tension and dread, and though these are desired goals for some players, they aren’t goals for everyone.
Are they goals for you? How do you employ these three elements in your game? Or how do you AVOID using them? Let me know down in the comments!
