D&D General Unprofessional spoilers: it's not like it was hard to figure out but still...

[Chaltab]

Personally, I think Curse of Strahd is at its best as heroic fantasy with horror trappings.

And this is why. I agree that the sense of control (or lack thereof) is key to making it horror. But, not feeling like you’re in control of whether your character lives or dies makes for a poor D&D playing experience in my opinion. To each their own of course, but personally I want my players to feel in control of their characters’ fates, even in an ostensibly horror-flavored campaign. Ideally a Ravenloft campaign should endeavor to walk the fine line between horror and fantasy, playing with the notion that whatever control you may have is tenuous at best. But, in my experience when the players feel like they’ve lost control, they struggle to maintain investment, and that’s when a game can spiral into chaos.

Yeah. There's a sliding scale of tension vs apathy. If the players feel like they're one mistake away from death, you're golden. But if they feel like failure is the only possible outcome then you risk tension being replaced by boredom and disinterest.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Personally, I think Curse of Strahd is at its best as heroic fantasy with horror trappings.

And this is why. I agree that the sense of control (or lack thereof) is key to making it horror. But, not feeling like you’re in control of whether your character lives or dies makes for a poor D&D playing experience in my opinion. To each their own of course, but personally I want my players to feel in control of their characters’ fates, even in an ostensibly horror-flavored campaign. Ideally a Ravenloft campaign should endeavor to walk the fine line between horror and fantasy, playing with the notion that whatever control you may have is tenuous at best. But, in my experience when the players feel like they’ve lost control, they struggle to maintain investment, and that’s when a game can spiral into chaos.

I don’t think horror needs to remove agency from its protagonists. At the end of Dracula, the party piece together the clues, hunt down and destroy the vampire. But in D&D what I think works best is when the players piece together the clues about what happened in the past. Because what the imagination can come up with is always much worse than I can describe.

 

[Charlaquin]

I don’t think horror needs to remove agency from its protagonists. At the end of Dracula, the party piece together the clues, hunt down and destroy the vampire.

Well, yes, but Dracula is famously a novel that’s better remembered for the original (at the time) way it was told, than for being a particularly well-written story. Not to say that you can’t have a good horror story where the protagonists are victorious over the source of the horror. But, I do think that a feeling of lack of control is an important element.