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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8211766">That is how you feel about it. Horror is a very subjective thing. I don't find games that aim for sombre and serious to be all that horrific. Contrast is useful. Humor and dark humor especially, have a place in horror IMO (how much of that is present in Ravenloft is I think  debatable of course). In fact I think horror movies that incorporate humor are usually more scary to me than ones that are super focused on maintaining a serious horror tone (not always of course, there are lots of things that make horror successful and I wouldn't just reduce it tonal variety). I think there was an element of camp in Ravenloft but in my opinion that actually was important for tonal variety. Maintaining a state of horror all the time doesn't work, you have to have other things in there to contrast it with, especially if you are trying to do it over a long period. Look, I like horror of many varieties (body horror, survival horror, slashers, gothic horror, etc). When it comes to RPGs, I found Ravenloft to be very successful at delivering a classic horror feel (which I think involves a certain amount of camp). It wasn't self parody. It was homage, but that isn't parody. It was still definitely scary. But it is a roleplaying game. If you go in thinking it is always going to be scary, you'll be disappointed (even CoC for all its seriousness, and brilliance, easily slips into slapstick). With Ravenloft it is incredibly atmospheric, and it is well suited to building fear and revealing horror, but if it doesn't happen to be scary, you still have the entertainment of the camp factor. But Ravenloft was quite good at the scares I think because of the ways it got around players normal expectations of things like how powerful a monster might be, how things like the mist operated, and how the nature of these domains made their residents quite hard to contend with. Just a simple flesh golem adventure could be way harder in Ravenloft than in another setting, and the tools and advice in the black box for building up the tension did work. Now you could run Ravenloft in pure camp mode if you wanted to. But that was a choice. But if you don't find it scary, you don't find it scary. That is a personal reaction. It isn't objective. When I started faming I was playing with a group of friends that included horror fans, and we used to rent horror movies after school and watch them all the time. We all disagreed on what movies were really scary. To me the most scary movie I ever saw was the original Nosferatu. For a lot of people that is too corny and silent to be scary. And I get that. But for whatever reason a film like that really horrified me as a kid. Whereas I can watch the exorcist and be extremely entertained and love it but I didn't find it especially scary (it is one of my favorite horror movies, I just don't find myself scared by  it). I get why other people find it scary though.</blockquote>

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