D&D General Unpopular Opinion?: D&D is a terrible venue for horror

[TheSword]

The mechanics in each game that have just been provided (Hunger, sanity etc) may be useful for creating a horror setting. However there is one thing to consider... those games are just not as robust or fun to play long term. The hayday of Vampire is far, far behind it and numerous people have said they enjoy Cthulhu for a one off or two but it becomes tiresome in a long term campaign (of course there will always be exceptions). The problem is those games just aren’t as robust, hence their reduced popularity. Pointing out isolated rules don’t help if the overall game isn’t as enjoyable to play.

I canvassed my gaming group as a straw poll tonight. They wholeheartedly agreed. This group includes several vampire players and at least one person who plays Cthulhu.

Anyway the goal posts of this discussion have changed so much now that it’s kinda pointless.

—> 5 is terrible at horror games. don’t do it, it can’t be done!!!!

—> Horror requires imminent risk of player death, weak PCs and no magic

—> Oh wait, PCs can be competent but they can’t develop.

—> Oh wait they can develop but the rules don’t go above and beyond to specifically support horror.

—> Oh wait the rules can specifically support horror but that changes the game to not be 5e.

—> Well of course D&D can do horror... other systems just do it better (names lots of substantially less popular systems)

 

[MGibster]

The mechanics in each game that have just been provided (Hunger, sanity etc) may be useful for creating a horror setting. However there is one thing to consider... those games are just not as robust or fun to play long term.

The opening post of this thread made the bold claim that D&D is a terrible venue for horror. What does it matter if D&D is more popular or more fun to play in the long term? That doesn't make it better for horror.

The hayday of Vampire is far, far behind it and numerous people have said they enjoy Cthulhu for a one off or two but it becomes tiresome in a long term campaign (of course there will always be exceptions). The problem is those games just aren’t as robust, hence their reduced popularity. Pointing out isolated rules don’t help if the overall game isn’t as enjoyable to play.

None of this has anything to do with whether or not D&D is a good venue for a horror game.

I canvassed my gaming group as a straw poll tonight. They wholeheartedly agreed. This group includes several vampire players and at least one person who plays Cthulhu.

I actually prefer shorter campaigns for horror games myself. What that has to do with the topic at hand is anybody's guess though.

 

[Rechan]

Forgive me for not reading the last 13 pages. But as someone who is planning a 4e Survival Horror game, I have opinions.

10 months ago I was on both sides of this issue. I was seriously jonsing to run a horror game, but hit a wall. There are systems out there that do horror REALLY WELL, but because I don't have a dedicated group (RL or otherwise), I could not find anyone willing to play anything not D&D/PF. I had a long thread here of banging my head against a wall because I wanted to run a game with powerless PCs who ran from danger, rather than fought, and that was just the antithesis of D&D. The posters here really fought me on that, and I had to concede it really was trying to shove a round peg into a square hole, and abandoned the idea.

Now I am back at it. What I'm going to do is an entirely different tact. Rather than the system reinforce the horror, rather than take the power away from the PCs, it is purely what the players imagine. It is the "Horror of what you cannot unsee". Of what your character will become. The characters are going to be trapped in a mega-dungeon that's been sucked into the Far Realms, so normal encounters are going to look like John Carpenter's The Thing. Then there's the Lovecraftian mind-screwery.

The players will start with no equipment. This is intended to make them scavenge and struggle; fighting phasing insects with a shard of glass or a table leg as their only defense, until they can find some decent equipment. But the real actual powerful things are going to mess with them. "Magical items/weapons" that are going to exact a toll; making a bone sword burst from their wrist, and then their body begins to harden into a carapce, functioning as armor and sword. A "gristle gun", a lamprey latched to their arm that will spit teeth as a ranged weapon, but it must feed on enemy's flesh to create its ammo.

Encounters like a monster that is just a stretched skin across a stick-figure frame--until it "swallows" a PC, wrapping itself around them like a suit of living power armor, and begins using the PC's abilities against the group as it sucks them dry. So once they beat the current abomination into a bloody paste, they will ask themselves "What fresh hell is next?" And that's not touching on the fragmented minds and other elements of psychic wickedness they'll encounter.

For instance taking an extended rest, I've got this bit of text ready for the first time the characters fall asleep. "You are flying. You land in a pool of blood; your blood. The blood crystalizes around you and you are a fly trapped in crimson amber, your beautiful insignificance art for any to see. You see yourself as the fly, and you also know that you are bacteria in the gut of a frog, being eaten by a squid, in an aquarium on the top floor of a house made of bones, on an isle of graves. That island is the pupil of a giant eye. It blinks, the eyelid a crashing wave of screams that drowns all in a sea of discordant agony. The tides rise and wipe existance away, and then the ocean dissolves...leaving...silence..."

But one of the most important things, one thing that kept popping up in the thread I linked to: players have to be aware of it from the start. They are buying into a horror game, aware of what they are getting into, rather than expecting Middle Earth and getting Silent Hill. I am fully advertising the game as survival horror, and making reference to a lot of the inspirations.

Ultimately, will the game be Scary? Will the players even be creeped out, or say "WTF man"? I don't know. That's just the tone and aesthetic I'm going for. The players could be like me, and simply find everything I've described COOL and FUN.

 

[Rechan]

And more of a general point...

When it comes to movies, and games, etc, part of what I really love is simply the creepy. The sound of laughter in an empty house. The tinkle of a music box in a dark room. The reflection in the mirror moving by itself. A clown on a swingset at midnight. It is the thing that raises the hairs on your neck, because you sense a threat is around the corner, but you aren't sure exactly what's next.

That does not require a system. It doesn't matter what my character can do.

I could be playing Beowolf or John Wick and finding the same doll everywhere I go is going to unnerve me. Because I find that creepy.

 

[Helldritch]

Man, that is pretty far from a standard D&D game. Finding D&D players for this kind of game is going to be hard. Not everyone is into Hellraiser type of scenari.

Beyond the Supernatural from Palladium games might be better suited. So would Cthulhu. I successfully did horror in D&D in the past but it was not for a very long time or for a full campaign (save CoS, if you count Gothic horror in a fantasy environment as true horrer genre).

True horror campaign rarely last very long. The theme and the required squishyness of horror bound characters do not lend itself well to characters' survival. A mega dungeon such as the one you describe will not be forgiving of mistakes. I would really go for an other system but its your choice.

 

[Rechan]

Horror isn't standard D&D, so. Good thing it's online.

As I said, I'd much rather play other systems. Been there, tried that. So now I'm going with where the players are.

 

[TheSword]

The opening post of this thread made the bold claim that D&D is a terrible venue for horror. What does it matter if D&D is more popular or more fun to play in the long term? That doesn't make it better for horror.



None of this has anything to do with whether or not D&D is a good venue for a horror game.



I actually prefer shorter campaigns for horror games myself. What that has to do with the topic at hand is anybody's guess though.

How good or bad a system is at replicating something is always going to be a question of degrees, it is a personal opinion and is relative. Therefore the rebuttal of comparisons with other systems the earlier poster made are absolutely relevant.

Anyone can put together a one off or a couple of sessions in any system and any theme. I would suggest sustainability and the desire to go back to the table is a good measure of how effective the system is in any genre. We ran Curse of Strahd for a year and a bit, going from level 1 to level 12. Can you see how I would be unimpressed when someone says D&D isn’t up to the task when they ran a 3 session Cthulhu game and it was so much better but never got any further? I should say at this point, I have no particularly beef in with Call of Cthulhu or Modiphius, I’m sure it can be a fun game with many loyal adherents.

 

[Helldritch]

How good or bad a system is at replicating something is always going to be a question of degrees, it is a personal opinion and is relative. Therefore the rebuttal of comparisons with other systems the earlier poster made are absolutely relevant.

Anyone can put together a one off or a couple of sessions in any system and any theme. I would suggest sustainability and the desire to go back to the table is a good measure of how effective the system is in any genre. We ran Curse of Strahd for a year and a bit, going from level 1 to level 12. Can you see how I would be unimpressed when someone says D&D isn’t up to the task when they ran a 3 session Cthulhu game and it was so much better but never got any further?

If you consider CoS as a full horror genre, I must disagree. It does have a horror theme, but, as the characters become stronger, the horror feel starts to erode fast. Especially if the get their hands on the sunsword or even the symbol of Ravenkind.

I am one of those that say that D&D can do horror. But a full campaign? It can be done, but not on a regular basis and it takes a lot of work to pull it off. It is certainly not something an inexperienced DM will be able to sustain. But for a few sessions it will work quite fine.

As for other systems. I ran a full horror campaign in BTS for a year and a half and it worked smoothingly. I played a Cthulhu campaign in the 80s and it went on for almost two years (we all ended up in a psychiatric hospital screaming maddly about monsters in the oceans...) but we had a blast. Our CoS lasted about 7 months each (I have two groups). Both groups succeeded but with a lot of difficulty. Horror was there but not at every step of the adventures. It was more episodic horror than a full blown horror genre. But the stress was there. I used Strahd to the best of his abilities and though both groups succeeded, only 5 characters out of twelve survived their final encounter with Strahd. (Three death in one group, two in the other).

So yes D&D can do horror. But not on a regular basis.

 

[Scott Christian]

Spinning off one of the Rime of the Frostmaiden threads, I feel like it is worth discussing: I think that D&D is an absolutely terrible game for trying to create a sense of horror in play. The only time it is even remotely possible is at low levels where PC competence and survivability are very low (the cutoff depends on the edition), and even then it is a specific "I'm going to get killed" sort of tension rather than actual horror. Mechanically, the only way to induce horror in D&D is to break the standard rules (instant death instead of HP loss, for example, or something like domination that represents a loss of control). Ultimately, PCs are too competent and the mechanics too codified for real fear to creep in. And, on a different horror scale, D&D characters generally don't have enough to lose, emotionally, for personal horror to mean much.

Now, I think D&D makes great use of horrific elements -- gross monsters with scary abilities and frightening imagery. But those things don't make D&D horror any more than they made Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies horror.

It is all how the players choose to respond. Any scary campfire story can be made into laughs if the audience chooses to interrupt and break the mood. Any horror film, no matter how disturbing, can be made into a comedy if people watching choose to play Mystery Science Theater. The same is true for any RPG.

I once played an NPC in my friend's Hero Quest game, a game completely designed for kids. His wife was playing with her two kids. Apparently, she had nightmares that night. She was "in the moment," just like her kids. There was no gory violence, no disturbing images. But there was mood, and mood is everything.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

D&D was designed to be a dungeon-crawler. That is its speciality. Adding horror is possible, but not too easy in the higher levels. D&D is about fighting monsters and horror games are about how to survive and even to try stop the monsters before being too late to save innocent lives. Horror games usually are about investigation, and D&D is to be a wargame within dungeons instead to try discover where or who is the monster.

Obsidian Apocalypse is a good example of horror setting by a 3PP, or Shadow over Vathak.

The key is the players should notice is better to avoid the monsters than fighting in direct attacks.

It is not only fear to be hurt or killed but fear to be infected, tainted or cursed, or fear about losing self-control and then doing something you will regret seriousl, or fear about the temptation to accept a tainted gift knowing this will help to survive once, but later you will suffer the consequences.


Sometimes horror is about you can't save everybody, at least not without a lot of help, for example a resistance group against a empire ruled by vampires or other men-eater monsters.

The horror seinen hakaiju by Singo Hondo is a good example of how even most powerful heroes can, or al least should, feel fear, because authors always can create a worse monster.