Best Horror Role Playing Game

[MGibster]

There was Night Shift, a game that came out almost the same time as the original Vampire, and was also a “you play the monster” game. Production values and writing put it more in what I call a “fast food” category of rpgs, but it was still fun.

If you mean Nightlife, which also came out in 1991, I owned it but never played it. I'm not too proud to admit I bought it partly because of the salacious cover. 1991 was a very different time.

I would have liked Vaesen if my players had embraced the "figure it out before you try to end it." They didn't try hard enough to figure out the monsters and so failed two of them horrendously. They weren't having fun.

I've encountered this problem in a few other horror games as well. In the very first game of Vaesen I ran, the player characters find out Castle Gyllencreutz is haunted and one of them seriously lobbied the others to just burn the place down before they even looked into it. Thankfully the others decided they wanted to play the game for more than thirty minutes. I had a player react the same way to the Corbitt house in a Call of Cthulhu scenario. "You want to burn down this house you were hired to investigate? The house that's in a densly packed neighborhood made up of other wooden houses?"

Every game needs player buy in, but nothing kills the vibe of a horror game quicker than players who don't get want to engage. I've seen Call of Cthulhu games stymied with players too afraid to read books or explore musty attics for fear of losing their sanity or coming to physical harm. Uh, to their characters I mean. Yeah, their characters. Not the players.

Just a note that in some respects all three editions were pretty different in the kind of experience they provided, even if they had similar premises.

Chill was another game I never played though a friend of mine owned it. He described a creature in the game that could only be killed by blowing on a flute carved the the heart of a particular type of tree that was a certain age. I think the flute had to be carved in the moonlight or something too.

 

[Sir Brennen]

If you mean Nightlife, which also came out in 1991, I owned it but never played it. I'm not too proud to admit I bought it partly because of the salacious cover. 1991 was a very different time.

Doh! You’re right. Updated my original post. I do remember it embracing what it called “splatter-punk” style, reflecting a lot of the horror literature and movies of the late 80’s, especially of the urban ilk. That includes the style of video box covers, which the game cover reflects as a product of its time, for better or worse.

 

[overgeeked]

Every game needs player buy in, but nothing kills the vibe of a horror game quicker than players who don't get want to engage. I've seen Call of Cthulhu games stymied with players too afraid to read books or explore musty attics for fear of losing their sanity or coming to physical harm. Uh, to their characters I mean. Yeah, their characters. Not the players.

Exactly. When the players actively avoid the horror it's the biggest clue that they aren't actually interested in playing a horror game.

Luckily some modern games will incentivize engaging with the horror. Like Mothership. Your stress becomes your XP. So the more you engage with the game and with the horror, the quicker you advance. It's such a simple little thing it's surprising it's not more common.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Sorry if this has been mentioned...I didn't read the whole thread...but I just got an email from Free League about their new game:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jnohr/fomoria?mc_cid=f588b63190&mc_eid=7a75ed4cf8

I'm a fan of pretty much anything Free League.

 

[aramis erak]

Chill was another game I never played though a friend of mine owned it. He described a creature in the game that could only be killed by blowing on a flute carved the the heart of a particular type of tree that was a certain age. I think the flute had to be carved in the moonlight or something too.

Chill was decent for a one shot, but replace the monsters with commies and you have an 80's spy game. The edition I have/played is a straightforward percentile system, but with leveled skills in several discrete levels with large jumps... no advancing a percentlie by a point through use.

I also forgot to mention that I've got and have read Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic. It's a standard TriTac hyper detailed nightmare to run... the novels are great, the game was too complex for my Hero/RM/SM tastes. Hell, I even ran ALIENS Adventure Game (The Phoenix Command Light one)... but TriTac just was too much.

Anyone mention Night's Edge yet? That's the Cyberpunk 2020 3rd Party horror supplement.

Oh, and there also is the other parts of the Eden Studios tetrology of Horror-Lite: Buffy, Angel, Army of Darkness, and Ghosts of Albion. Plus their "full unisystem" offerings of Witchcraft and All Flesh Must Be Eaten. Terra Primate can go horror if one wants, it's a suggestion in the core... but it's not the core intent.

 

[MGibster]

Exactly. When the players actively avoid the horror it's the biggest clue that they aren't actually interested in playing a horror game.

I have a theory that sometimes players are more interested in beating the scenario than they are playing it. Instead of playing through the scenario, they try to outwit the author by breaking the scenario. "Oooh, I bet this NPC is going to betray us even though they've given us no reason to believe this is the case!" It happens with non-horror games as well.

Anyone mention Night's Edge yet? That's the Cyberpunk 2020 3rd Party horror supplement.

I barely remember it's existence. We played a lot of Cyberpunk back then, but nobody I knew had any interest in mixing vampires and other supernatural critters into the setting. Otherwise we would have played Shadowrun.

Oh, and there also is the other parts of the Eden Studios tetrology of Horror-Lite: Buffy, Angel, Army of Darkness, and Ghosts of Albion. Plus their "full unisystem" offerings of Witchcraft and All Flesh Must Be Eaten. Terra Primate can go horror if one wants, it's a suggestion in the core... but it's not the core intent.

These were all good games. I remember how excited I was to get AFMBE back in the late 1990s. The great thing about AFMBE was their broad definition of zombie and how you could create your own for whatever scenario you wanted to run. I miss Eden Studios.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I have a theory that sometimes players are more interested in beating the scenario than they are playing it. Instead of playing through the scenario, they try to outwit the author by breaking the scenario.

"Yup."

 

[Thomas Shey]

Chill was decent for a one shot, but replace the monsters with commies and you have an 80's spy game. The edition I have/played is a straightforward percentile system, but with leveled skills in several discrete levels with large jumps... no advancing a percentlie by a point through use.

That sounds like second edition.

I also forgot to mention that I've got and have read Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic. It's a standard TriTac hyper detailed nightmare to run... the novels are great, the game was too complex for my Hero/RM/SM tastes. Hell, I even ran ALIENS Adventure Game (The Phoenix Command Light one)... but TriTac just was too much.

There's a reason TriTac games are one of the commonest ones to be run with other systems--clever conceits and sometimes good world building, but my gods the system...

Anyone mention Night's Edge yet? That's the Cyberpunk 2020 3rd Party horror supplement.

Oh, and there also is the other parts of the Eden Studios tetrology of Horror-Lite: Buffy, Angel, Army of Darkness, and Ghosts of Albion. Plus their "full unisystem" offerings of Witchcraft and All Flesh Must Be Eaten. Terra Primate can go horror if one wants, it's a suggestion in the core... but it's not the core intent.

You can argue that Witchcraft isn't a horror game proper, but that's because pretty much all urban fantasy leans in to horror to some extent or another.