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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaculata" data-source="post: 6891071" data-attributes="member: 6801286">I'm familiar with the Five Nights at Freddies series, but I think you are confusing a sanity system with suspenseful story telling. The sanity system is not going to to provide scary situations or suspense for you. That is not what it is meant to do. It is just there for role playing purposes, to add a mechanical effect along side the suspense that is already in the story.But I do understand what you are talking about in terms of loss of control, and I actually made a pretty detailed study of this phenomenon for a video game that I'm designing. Fear in a game is often a combination of not knowing all the rules and feeling a bit out of control, and yet feeling completely responsible for the outcome. Its a paradox in a way. You are in control, and yet you are not. And the more familiar the setting of the story, and the more familiar the situations, the more likely it is to creep you out. For example, a creepy old house or forest is a familiar and relatable setting. A massive space station, full of horrible monsters, less so. That doesn't mean that you can't make a space station scary, but you have to draw on other relatable fears to do it.I often refer to this as "estrangement". You can easily lose suspense if you confront your players with situations that they cannot identify with, or which seem to be trying too hard to be scary. Suspense has to build gradually, and cannot be forced through sheer shock and gimmicks. That is why a video game that has blood covered walls and piles of dead bodies is not all that scary. But on the other hand, one where you are wandering around in a relatable location, and know that you might not be alone, IS scary. Take for example the game Slender. You are totally in control of your character, as you wander through a relatable environment (a forest), and yet you are being chased by an invisible entity (invisible because you are not allowed to look at it, and because most of the time you don't know where it is), and you have no control where this entity may show up. There's the anticipation of the shock of running into him, but there's also the terror of feeling hunted by something you cannot see. Not everyone will be scared by this, but you have a relatable environment and situation.There are many kinds of fear that you can aim for in a table top role playing game. The idea of being chased is but one of many options, but there's also the fear of exploring a dangerous area, dealing with an unknown threat, or pure horror of awful things. One of the things Call of Cthulhu tries to do, is to take away the idea that you can simply fight these threats. Sure, there are weapon rules, and monsters can take damage. But an encounter with any monster always costs you sanity, plus you will very likely lose. So running is usually the better option.I'll provide an example from one of my D20 Call of Cthulhu games, to give you a better idea of how this works. And like I said, its not the sanity system that creates the fear. Its all in the storytelling.So as you can see, in this example the suspense comes purely from the story telling, the music, and sound effects. The sanity system is there to remind the players that their characters are not emotionless beings, and that there is a reason not to expose their characters to hideous things, unless it is really important. My players often describe ways in which they try to avoid sanity damage. By for example looking the other way as they move through a room. So that is what I as a DM want out of a good sanity system.</blockquote>

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