While looking for something else entirely on Google, I stumbled across this old thread. My first thought as I was scanning through it was, "Why didn't I post in this thread?" Of course, later on, it turns out that I did.
And then, it looks like I went away for the Thanksgiving break and never actually responded to a direct question asked to me! (Let me point out for the record, that I was
not temp-banned, as alluded to by Dinkeldog in this thread. I don't know who that was, but it wasn't me.)
I know, I know, seven
years too late? Who's going to care? But it bugged me, so I'm going to answer anyway. In the intervening seven years, my opinion has matured and evolved somewhat... although not really significantly changed.
The question is, what is more effective as horror: House of 1,000 Corpses, or A History of Violence? Scream, or Natural Born Killers? What is more HORRIFIC?
The former adhere to the tropes of horror and people walk in and have fun and scream and walk out and continue their day. The latter are other genres with elements of horror that surprise, shock, and deeply affect the individuals. The former play with genre law and adhere to genre tropes. They're safe, so to speak. They obey the rules and play nice with others. The latter, however, are horrifying, because they don't.
Well, that misses the point (even if you agree that the movies are horrific, rather than simply gratuitous. I'd claim that the former is certainly just gratuitous and not horrific at all in any real meaningful sense.) I'm not talking about a comparison of splatterpunk and violent social commentary. Both of those movies delivered what they promised. They weren't something that masqueraded as something else. They didn't pull a bait and switch on their audience by looking like they were going to be run of the mill dramas and then unleashing completely unexpected horrific violence, or whatever.
The main thrust of my point was that playing D&D and getting it to be horrific is
mostly difficult because your audience, i.e., the players, probably don't expect that. And if you try to run D&D with horror elements, many--maybe even most--D&D players will be frustrated and annoyed by the game not adhering to their genre expectations. They won't feel like you cleverly sucked them in to a horror moment, and thrilled them with your cunning, they'll feel like you betrayed them by not offering the experience that they expected.
It's hard enough to engender a any really visceral scare or uneasiness in an RPG setting as it is, in our culture which is largely desensitized to the things that used to scare us when everyone's on board to begin with. When they're not, yeah--you might disturb some of your gamers, but they're unlikely to appreciate the experience. Even when trying to run horror games with a sympathetic audience, I find that games are rarely very horrible. Con-games of Cthulhu, for instance, always have the expectation that characters are going to go insane and/or die. So rather than that being horrible, it's played as a kind of fun thing to see who's going to go down in flames first (or most dramatically) with often the players deliberately killing off their own characters. Other horror games (including most Cthulhu and White Wolf games I've been part of) tend to be guided tours of horror tropes--the Disneyfication of horror, if you will. Vampires or Deep Ones are little more than animatronic thrills that you experience while riding around in a ride car. They don't even make you jump, much less make you feel
real fear.
The challenges of running a successful game that's scary are quite substantial as it is, even when you've lined everything up to be in your favor ahead of time. Can it be done, even if you don't? Even if you're playing stock D&D? Sure, but why would you want to make things that difficult for yourself? That's not cleverness, that's masochism.
Ah, yes, because they are so different.
How does the system make horror in D&D an upstream battle?
They are very different. D&D is an upstream battle for a horror tone because it's so ingrained mechanically with the expectations that it's high fantasy and that the players are expected to "win." If they don't--say you play in a more old school mold where player death is frequent--they expect to roll up new characters and re-approach the problem with better preparation and better tactical acumen, and
then win. Part of it is subconscious--the expectations of most players when you say the words "D&D"--but part of it is the incongruity of the tone of the mechanics vs. the tone that you're trying to reach that's more horrific.
Let me give a little context. I don't particularly think it's clever to make D&D horrific. I think seeing the D&D rules as sacrosanct and inviolable is, in fact, kinda silly. I don't even really
like the inherent assumptions of D&D very much, to be perfectly honest. But... I've made my peace with the d20 system, and mostly only play variants of it these days. There's a lot of reasons for this, but the two most prominent ones are familiarity (both by myself and any potential players that I know of within easy reach) and the mountain of compatible material that I have that I don't need to convert, wing it with, or otherwise work harder at to use, because hey--it's
already compatible. So almost all of my gaming is done in d20. But D&D specifically has a tone that is
not my preferred one for fantasy that I run. In fantasy, I long ago turned my face away from the high fantasy mode of superficial Tolkien clones and wandered back again in the fields of sword & sorcery. And, like much of the fantasy novel reading market, I find that I independently kind of joined the zeitgeist of turning towards darker, low magic, grim and gritty fantasy of sorts from there, which seemed like a kind of obvious evolution in taste, at least to me. Maybe not as much as some (I find Joe Abercrombie to be gratuitous, for instance, and therefore eye-roll worthy rather than entertaining) but I definitely want my fantasy to be at
least as dark and "horror enriched" as a Dresden Files novel. Maybe more. Now, granted, Harry Dresden is a relatively high magic, heroic figure himself--but keep in mind that I hold out Dresden as a minimum, not necessarily as ideal. I prefer my games to be solidly fantasy--secondary world and all that--but with a tone and paradigm that's more like Call of Cthulhu rather than D&D.
And like I said earlier, I don't really want WFRP because I
want specifically to use d20. Plus, I love homebrewing too much to use someone else's setting, and the Warhammer roleplaying game is pretty well integrated to the setting in many respects. I
could just do that and I'm sure it would work well, but I don't wanna. Same thing with Savage Worlds, or GURPS, or any other system. I just don't want to use them. And it's my position that there's no need to.
Anyway, my rather long-winded point is that there is quite a bit of difference between D&D and other d20 Games. Or, at least, there can be. As my houserules have matured and evolved over time (since chiming into this thread the first time around, at least) I've occasionally gone back and forth between a heavily modified D&D base, and something else. Consider these two scenarios, which are among two that I've considered as "canonical" options for approaching my homebrew setting:
1) D&D 3.5, with E6 and a sanity mechanic of your choice (I prefer the Madness rules from the d20 Freeport book as shorter, more simple, more "native" to d20, yet just as full-bodied in play as the Cthulhu rules.) This still yields a game that's fairly high magic and heroic, although less so than D&D without E6 and Sanity, of course.
2) d20 Modern, ignore skills and feats that are obviously too "modern" to be applicable (a surprisingly trivially easy change to implement) also with E6 and Sanity. There are various campaign models in the book; I prefer the "Shadow Chasers" one. Optionally, you could use
d20 Past and the "Shadow Stalkers" campaign model, but it's really exactly the same thing, with just two new advanced classes added to the mix.
As I played around with option
#1 , I found I had to disallow most of the classes. Anything with a spell-casting progression had to go. Anything with a lot of supernatural abilites had to go. Almost all of the races didn't fit. The setting implied by the rules, even with these house-rules was too disparate from
my setting. And the tone was completely wrong.
Because I didn't want players to be limited to creating human barbarians, fighter and rogues only, I ended up having to scour splatbooks and third party books for a few more options, and keep a running list of what was OK and what wasn't (curiously--or maybe not--most of the material in the d20 Freeport book, again, made the cut.)
To get the tone I wanted with D&D, I had to make really extensive and after a while tedious to maintain changes to the system. To get the tone I wanted with other d20 games, including d20 Modern, which is what I prefer now, I had only minimal houserules that can be referenced on a single sheet of paper.
Most of the rules that I prefer include seriously limiting advancement, the complete truncation of high level (and even much of mid-level, which is completely incompatible in tone with my vision for my setting) and serious changes to the way magic works, including the removal of almost all of the standard D&D magic--which, let's face it, is most of the character classes.
