My advice whenever we start a new campaign is to make characters who are interested in engaging with the premise of the campaign. If we're playing D&D, your character needs to be motivated to adventure. Maybe they just want treasure, maybe they're do gooders, or maybe they're trying to gain the love of a lady, but no matter what they have some reason to adventure even if there's a chance some troll caves their skull in.
And, again, this is why D&D as horror is pretty hard too. But, since the PC's are PC's and the "heroes" of the story, sending them into the haunted house is rewarded by the system. If you nope out and don't stay in the haunted house, you don't gain any experience nor receive any treasure. Those are two pretty big carrots for entering the house. And, particularly later era D&D, the system generally tells you that while you might die, it's not generally going to happen. You should survive and move on to the next haunted house in most play.
There is nothing more frustrating than a player who just refuses to pick up the obvious bread crumbs, especially when they do it for "role play" reasons. In a recent game, a new player to the group held up the game for about half an hour by stubbornly insisting that his character wouldn't do the obvious thing to make the party trust him and agree to let him join - I set it all up, and then he was all like, "nope, my character is mysterious and doesn't give reasons for what he does."
If "what my character would do" is not participate in the group, the group should leave the character behind and let the player consider whether he should make a character that fits better into adventuring parties.
I've run into this problem to. During my last East Texas University game, a PC wakes up to find an underaged girl dressed in odd clothing in hi dorm room (nothing untoward). The PC pretends to be asleep, and when she exited he got up, made sure his door was locked, and just went back to sleep. It was a constant thing with the player and it started to tick the other players off as well. I ended up ending the campaign because it was thoroughly unpleasant and my group had a big shift in members.
Tragedy doesn't mean fail at everything all the time. If the PCs go into the haunted house succeed like a normal but then discover after coming out that a loved NPC has been killed and the PC could've/would've prevented it if they didn't go into the haunted house it will still be very much a tragedy, especially if by choosing not to go and clear the haunted house some other equally bad thing happens so tragedy is unavoidable.
That looks more like a GM presented a "GOTCHA!" scenario than tragedy. It invalidates player choice and characters making bad choices is at the heart of classic tragedy.
It's unfair and unfun for the players, and technically not a tragedy, since the outcome was not caused by a personality flaw of the character.
This. a tragedy MUST be avoidable. And if it's avoidable, then we can assume that players will probably avoid it.
