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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8255842">One of the things I find with horror too is it is about openness to the experience. I have had groups where it happens once or twice a campaign, but I have also had groups where it happens almost every week. One thing I will say is, as hokey as it seems, room atmosphere can matter a lot. Campfire stories are often scary because you are in dark woods around a fire. Some of the old advice about dimming the lights, can go a long way. I remember one of my most successful Ravenloft groups was held at a friends' house who lived by the water in an old creaky new england house. To me it felt like running a game inside a wooden ship for some reason. And he had a fireplace. So those sessions were just real easy to build mood with. However some of our sessions were at another guys house, where he had a great game room. But the atmosphere tended to be more casual and definitely noticed it was harder to build that atmosphere in that environment (the games were still fun, bad as my GMing probably was at the time, but not as scary I think) But openness can go a long way too. I think we've all been in an audience where we were open to being scared by a movie and thus it was able to scare us (provided it actually brought the horror). But we've probably all also had the experience where we put more mental armor on and closed ourselves to being scared (what I would call "laugh mode" with horror). I think when you are running a horror RPG you really need to sense what the attitude and mood of the players are in this respect. Sometimes it is going to be popcorn and jokes, sometimes it is going to be scary. I think you can definitely pull it off. And one of the things it takes as a GM is sensing when the mood is right for a scare (and also having a bag of tricks you built up over time from experience). I thought a lot of the advice in the old Ravenloft books were pretty good on that front (some got into stuff I wouldn't do these days: stuff that railroads and doesn't give the players a fair shake). I remember Monte Cook's d20 Cthulhu having some good advise too. I never ran ORRORSH for TORG but I played it and was always curious what kind of advice the book gave because my friend who ran it did  great job (he was also a horror movie nut so that might have helped).</blockquote>

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