jdrakeh said:
You're specifically selling High Fantasy horror as the intellectually superior alternative to Low-Fantasy horror, which you've more or less pigeon-holed as being the domain of talentless, lazy, morons
No. Don't mischaracterise my arguments. The sole comment I ever made on the matter was that I was tired of seeing people "solve" the "problem" of doing horror in D&D games by changing the D&D rules to produce a lower-powered, lower-magic, lower-fantasy, lower-whatever world, when I don't think that's necessary.
I
like low fantasy, and I
like nearly every style of horror story invented by human minds. I just happen to think it's more clever to write horror stories to D&D's style rather than change D&D's style for horror.
[quote[What's truly ironic is that you keep mentioning that not all horror relies on the protagonists being at a disadvantage... but you have yet to provide any examples of this kind of horror.[/quote]
Well, okay. Let me be explicit.
Most iterations of low-fantasy, low-powered D&D, especially those produced in order to tell horror stories, involve removing some of the capabilities of the typical D&D character. Some restrict the game to low levels; some remove magic altogether; some remove certain kinds of spells; some ban clerics and paladins; some remove healing; and so on, and so forth.
These are all perfectly acceptable solutions to the perceived "problem" of using D&D to tell horror stories.
I don't consider circumventing PCs' power to
act in a given situation to be similar to the above methods of depowering D&D. Threatening loved ones is a longstanding traditional way to strike fear into the hearts of even the most powerful people, for instance. In D&D, characters - especially high-level characters - have many resources and methods for protecting those they care about. Nothing, however, is foolproof.
There are kinds of horror stories which render even the most powerful people helpless by operating on them in ways completely alien to their experience. The analogy in D&D actually requires altering metagame principles - for instance, that solutions to all problems exist, and the PCs have a chance of finding them.
I think this stems from certain historical accretions to the game - to use a poor analogy, no-one complains about the nigh-inevitable moral degeneration of characters in
Vampire: the Requiem. This is largely because you're signing up for that sort of thing when you start to play! D&D, by contrast, is supposed to be a game of heroic fantasy; remove the assumption of heroic tales - a metagame principle - without altering the rules one whit, and suddenly all sorts of assumptions in the game start to fall over.
In a standard D&D game, a PC afflicted with a curse of some sort is expected to be able to deal with it; there are spells and the like to deal with such things. Why should this assumption - that effort can deal with all problems and that there's a way to do so - prevail in a horror story? There are effects in the game which can only be dealt with via
wish and
miracle - without the assumption of heroic narratives, there's no reason to suggest that a category of effects that nothing of the sort can deal with should exist. Examples of curses that can only be broken by the fulfillment of a prophecy abound in literature; why not import them to a horror game?
I guess it just impresses me more when writers and game designers face up to the limitations of the game system they're working with and figure out how to circumvent them, not change them. Altering the play balance of D&D for lower power levels and lower fantasy is no mean feat, and I respect anyone who achieves it; personally, though, if I want
that kind of horror story I'll play a different game, and try to be clever in a different way when doing horror in D&D.