Best horror RPG, bar none!

[Matchstick]

The second edition of Chill came out in the early 90's and the setting was about the destruction of that secret society. Basically they removed the secret society backdrop and expanded the classes to include police officers, reporters, scientists, and a whole crop of real world professions that you could play. I believe therre was an adventure (can't remember the name of it to save my life) where the players were thrust into an adventure simply because they were witness to a horrific event.

Even in first edition you didn't have to belong to SAVE. Some games I ran were more "witness to a horrific event" or "wrong place at wrong time" kind of things. SAVE I used in my campaign, as it gave me more of a central theme, and a reason for episodic play.

As with everything, the GM can make all the difference. CoC for me has always been my least favorite game because it seemed that no matter what kind of character you made, you always wound up using the same five or so skills. Objectively though I'm sure that was probably the GM, rather than the game.

 

[lukelightning]

Even in first edition you didn't have to belong to SAVE.

I was convinced that SAVE was actually a force for evil. There was some comment about "agents who leave SAVE don't survive for long..."

 

[Edgewood]

I was convinced that SAVE was actually a force for evil. There was some comment about "agents who leave SAVE don't survive for long..."

It would make a great BBEG if it ran SAVE (a cliche yes, but still makes good old fashioned story telling). that way you could reveal it to the group just when they thought they have rid the world of evil, only to learn they have been the pawns of evil.

 

[jaerdaph]

The original Masque of the Red Death boxed set by Bill Connors, followed very closely by Chill, Mayfair edition.

 

[billd91]

CoC BRP is my favorite version. Brittle characters, declining sanity, I love it. I have always liked the sanity mechanic as a way of tracking the long term effects of stress on a PC.

But this Dread is sounding interesting. I may have to check it out...

 

[Imaro]

I think that a great deal of the appeal of the Cthulhu mythos can be summed up in the following points.

1) The concept that knowing the Truth would drive you insane.
2) Defeat is inevitible, all you can do is delay it.
3) The concepts have largely become Iconic.

The evil in Cthulhu is not the temptation of Satan and the damnation of hell. It is the evil of a human being stepping on an ant meerly because the ant is an annoyance. You are that ant.

END COMMUNICATION

You know what...number 2 is what stole the horror from me when I actually played CoC. It's hopeless and I think after having so many people reaffirm that I couldn't invest in the game. It's like playing a boardgame and knowing your the loser before it starts. You find yourself wondering..."why a do I even care about losing this character."...Just my feelings of course.

Quick Honorable mention: Dark Conspiracy...don't have it anymore, but I remember loving this game.

 

[CharlesRyan]

I've always hated the statement "it's not the game, it's the GM." (While a great GM can make any game good, a good game makes the most out of average GMs.)

But when it comes to horror, I think the atmosphere is so dependent on style of play that the quality of the GM overwhelms game system factors, so now I'm gonna say it: It's not the game, it's the GM. My favorite horror game is CoC, and I've played and run a ton (both BRP and d20) of scary adventures. But I've also played and run equally effective horror adventures in other systems, as varied as GURPS and home-brew Star Wars (back before there was a published game).

I haven't played Dread yet, though I really look forward to it. I think the Jenga mechanic is fascinating, and is a great marraige of mechanics to a desired player response. My read-through of the rules, though, makes it clear to me that it succeeds as written only for a fairly narrow type of game. So while I'm confident I'll really like it, I'm not confident it will become my favorite, bar none.

 

[Pbartender]

I haven't played Dread yet, though I really look forward to it. I think the Jenga mechanic is fascinating, and is a great marraige of mechanics to a desired player response. My read-through of the rules, though, makes it clear to me that it succeeds as written only for a fairly narrow type of game. So while I'm confident I'll really like it, I'm not confident it will become my favorite, bar none.

I don't know... I think it could work well for most any suspense-style scenario (and that can cover a lot of ground), not just Horror. I could, for example, see running a Old West adventure, a Superhero adventure, a Pulp Noir Mystery adventure, or a Cloak & Dagger Spy adventure using the same rules.

I see Dread from a little different point of view... It'd be a great introductory Party Game RPG for people who have no experience with RPGs at all. The rules are reasonably simple, there's no list of numbers for stats, and there's the novelty of the Jenga stack. Hell... You could run a Dread scenario as a fancy game of Clue.

Hrm... now there's another idea for a Gameday game.

 

[GreatLemur]

I really like CoC, both D20 and Chaosium versions (both have their good features). One problem is that people are too familiar with the Cthulhu mythos, which may detract from the game ("I know this thing, it's a deep one..."). If I were to run a CoC game I'd use homebrew monsters, or change their descriptions.

Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing, lately. When little club kids who've never read a word of Lovecraft are carrying around plush Cthulhus dressed as Hunter S. Thompson, the mythos doesn't quite get that vital "fear of the unknown" feeling, anymore. I think you can still run an effective game of Call of Cthulhu, but the best way to do it would probably be to come up with new horrors that your players haven't already read several short stories about.

You know what...number 2 is what stole the horror from me when I actually played CoC. It's hopeless and I think after having so many people reaffirm that I couldn't invest in the game. It's like playing a boardgame and knowing your the loser before it starts. You find yourself wondering..."why a do I even care about losing this character."...Just my feelings of course.

That's an interesting point. I've generally considered the inevitability of death or madness to be a really fun thing about the game--because it sort of frees you to play the way you think your character ought to act, instead of trying to "win".

But, yeah, while that way of looking at the game is fun, I can see how it ain't scary. Hm.

 

[Epidiah Ravachol]

I'm terribly biased towards Dread, but I have a giant soft spot in my heart for Chill. The Mayfair version was my first horror game; you never forget your first. Through that game I was awakened to the idea that role-playing, like a good book or movie, could invoke emotions in its participants. Most of my love was for the writing, though. I found more often than not I was bucking the system (keeping track of the Evil Way Score was incredibly annoying). And even the setting was a little cumbersome. When I ran it, SAVE was very much in shambles and the Unknown was not a unified source for all the world's evil (as vague and, well, unknown the Unknown was, I didn't like the idea of a common well from which these vile waters sprang).

O, but the writing! I could just sit there and read each source book from cover to cover and be happy. So many juicy bits to hook a scenario into. So many tantalizing villains and creepy crawlies. So many dark, unwholesome ideas. And all of them untouched by the Lovecraft or Christian mythos that dominated the scene at the time. (Not that there is anything particularly wrong with either of those, I just found that for me they made bad media for horror and better media for modern fantasy.)

Now I have to go get those books out of storage and see what I can cook up . . .