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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6602285" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've never tried to GM serious horror.To me, the key to fun CoC play is a terrific GM who takes control of the over-arching situation, but who also buys in and plays along as the players start emoting and acting on their PCs' gradual descent into madness. For this sort of play, the 4e character sheet has about 10x the necessary mechanical information. (This relates to what [MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION] posted not very far upthread.)I don't know much about horror play that trades on player agency, but it must exist (what is Trail of Cthulhu for, otherwise?).I think 4e does suspense well. Here are <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?299440-Exploration-scenarios-my-experiment-last-Sunday" target="_blank">two</a> <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?309950-Actual-play-my-first-quot-social-only-quot-session" target="_blank">links</a> to actual play posts from my 4e game: the first is suspense in the mode of exploration, and the second suspense in the mode of social interaction. Suspense tends to happen on the non-combat side of the game, and so isn't necessarily leveraging all of the game's mechanics (which are at least moderately inclined towards the combat side) - though as the reports I've linked to illustrate, there is frequently opportunity for players to bring those resources to bear in non-combat contexts.Manbercat is correct here, in my view. I'll say a little bit about it from my own experience.The use of HS as an ablative resource for out-of-combat resolution is expressly flagged, with a bit of discussion, in the 4e DMG. There is more discussion and mechanical advice in the DMG2. In an early session of my game (maybe the fifth or sixth), the paladin of the Raven Queen was fighting a wight. The player asked if he could speak a prayer (Religion check) to get some sort of advantage against said wight. I offered a wager: if the check was successful, combat advantage; if it failed, psychic damage as the paladin's heart sinks because his mistress has not heard him. Similar sorts of trade-offs have been part of the game ever since. Because 4e gives players much more control over their hit point status than does AD&D, the use of hp/HS as a resource in the way Manbearcat describes isn't so much the GM punishing the players, but rather providing them with decision points.The first time that I remember making an extended rest's availability depend upon the outcome of a skill challenge is a couple of sessions after what I've just described. This is not discussed in the rulebooks (as best I recall), but is a pretty natural outgrowth of the game's mechanical structure and GMing advice. I think this is further confirmed by the fact that multiple 4e GMs have hit upon it independently.The players can see what is going on in these situations, and make their choices about resource use accordingly. The extreme transparency of 4e's resolution, resource suites and pacing dynamics is a big help in this respect.To give a very rough analogy: in a Gygaxian dungeon crawl, the players (i) know their PCs will be safe if they make it out of the dungeon, but (ii) know that they won't just be gifted a path out of the dungeon; they have to actually achieve this. So they plan around it. It's not a "gotcha" from the GM, but a transparent part of the game (and feeds into the wandering monster mechanics, the trap avoidance mechanics, the pursuit mechanics, etc).4e tends to default to a different fictional backdrop (a world rather than a dungeon), and so the resolution system is different (skill challenge rather than clever mapping and skilled dungeon crawling), but the transparency and the role of the GM as a referee is comparable when you look at it from a high-level perspective.</blockquote>

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