Great thread! I just got back from DragonCon and we gave an entire panel on this!
I think to really get to the nitty-gritty of it, we have to understand was horror
is. Horror is a slow and unrelenting revelation. A terrible realization. For example, if you walk into your house and set down your stuff, that's what you would expect. But what if, after you set down your stuff, you look around and see papers scattered everywhere? Then you look and find chairs knocked over. You call out for your wife, but there's not answer. Then, you walk up to the bedroom and hear the shower running. You see a long red trail of something dribbling towards the shower.
That moment in which you put two and two together, that space in which you come to an awful conclusion...that is horror.
So, in terms of roleplaying games, I think horror is best achieved when the PCs are allowed to put the pieces of the puzzle together and the result is horrifying.
I
And don't underestimate the ability of mechanical issues to illicit a fear response. Players really do fear level drain--more than just the loss of hit points or some other consumable resource, level drain takes some element of control of the character away from the player.
I have to respectfully disagree with this. I feel that if you are relying on something like level drain or ability drain to scare your players, then it creates a "false" scare. The players become anxious not because of the environment you set up, but because they are about to lose hard-earned stuff for their character. You may create anxiety, but you will not create horror. And more importantly, the players are liable to be anxious about a game mechanic. Not about what is happening in the game itself.
I would argue that no amount of fluff will make a game with few (or non-existant) consequences horrific, given that the players know they will never face any real, substantial, threat from a brush with danger or, at least, that they will always be able to recover from such a run in with minimal effort.
I think I see where you are going - but I disagree. I've scared people with fluff in crowded, well-lit convention rooms.
Eliciting a genuine fear response from a player requires that the player be made to believe that things they value are threatened or placed in danger. Their PC is the obvious target for such danger, as it typically represents the largest emotional investment of the player in the context of a given game. In this instance, if a player feels that their character is truly in danger and the rules of a game support this reality, fear is an easy emotion to elicit. The less perceived danger, the less fear.
We may be talking past each other, but I think you can scare the players, without physical threat, by challenging a PC's worldview. Think about the classic ghost story. Most people I know and have ever met know at least one good ghost story. When they tell that ghost story, it's pretty freaky. I can get freaked out by a good ghost story even if I'm in my front lawn in the middle of the day. And why? There's nothing threatening me in the story, right?
The thing about a ghost story is that is challenges our perceptions of the world and how it functions. You knock a glass off a table, it falls. If it starts floating, that's very disconcerting to us. Because it challenges our perception of how the world should function.
So, to scare PCs, I rarely need to actually threaten either their characters or the players themselves with physical harm. It find it much more effective to threaten their worldviews. For example, I ran a module once, where ethereal beings were slowly devouring the PCs subconscious thoughts. The result was that the PCs were starting to have vivid hallucinations. They started hearing chewing sounds all of the time. Then, they felt like something was always watching them from behind. Finally, one of the PCs started hearing a whisking sound, like rope dusting the ground. Finally, one of the PCs turned around and saw a little girl behind him, skipping rope. She stopped skipping and looked up at him saying, "They're going to eat you mister. They're going to eat you, eat you, eat you." And then she was gone.
It really freaked all of the players out. Now, there was no actual physical threat to either the players or the characters. But there were serious challenges to their worldview.
