D&D General Horror is hard

[AlViking]

That missed the mark though.

• Twd characters do not easily recover from injury and fatigue - The same is not true of PC's
• Twd characters have actual dietary needs not met through little more than photosynthesis - PCs?.... Not do much.
• Twd characters need a safe place to rest and engage in any sort of civilization activity like growing crops in a greenhouse or something. - the PCs.... Lol, civilization can burn because they don't actually need anything from it past starting gear
• Twd characters have social needs for sanity - that doesn't really map well to gameplay though
• Twd characters very much want to recover some of the collapsed civilization like electricity running water refrigeration AC etc - PCs previously could sub in magic item churn expectations and similar as an analog but not anymore.
• In Ted the characters mostly stay out of bombed cities and stay far from the massive herds even when doing otherwise would dramatically simplify things if it were an option - those threats don't map well to gameplay at all because the risk is effectively "avoid it or rocks fall everyone dies"

All of the other people are in the same boat on those kinds of things & that's why they choose to be dangerous. It's hard to sell that same boat not enough resources idea when the PCs don't need any of those resources or even the boat. You also get the occasional episode or couple scenes showing details into how those groups are handling their issues but that doesn't really work out in gameplay either

Those things put it in the survival genre, not horror. You can still do that in D&D, it's not that hard, you just need to limit magic items and options for short and long rests. A lot of people aren't interested in playing that style of game though.

 

[Byrd]

... I've had an encounter with weird tall long-limbed, greenish black-eyed THINGS creeping up on the PCs' camp in the middle of the night go from "holy crap, what are these things?" to visible sighs of relief when I put a Troll mini on the table. You can still have mechanics, but if the players don't know what the hell the thing is, they lack that sense of the KNOWN which detracts from horror. As long as the threat's capabilities and danger level are mysterious, suspense and horror are easier.

Whistles innocently.

 

[Special Unicorn]

I don't know about that. While I agree that failure is a big issue and death is a usual fail state, there are other possibilities: Loss of agency. Non-Lethal body horror. Just living with the consequences of the actions made of their own free will.

Sure, there are lot of non combat fail states, but how well do they work within the context of D&D?

 

[Remathilis]

Sure, there are lot of non combat fail states, but how well do they work within the context of D&D?

That's up to you and your players. If your players are orphaned murderhobos, horror was never going to work with them anyway.

 

[Mannahnin]

But a lot of horror is about people who are ostensibly high level, fully equipped heroes who have trouble despite having every advantage. In Alien (and a similar Mothership game), the characters are backed by science and tech well beyond our own and still struggle. In Dracula (and many similar Victorian-style RPGs), the characters are high class, wealthy, and have the best manpower and medicine that money can buy and still struggle. In Call of Cthulhu the players have guns, state-of-the art travel and forensics, and still struggle.

Equipped, but not high level. They have resources, but the horror relies on them still being fragile, vulnerable humans. They don't have a bunch of hit points.

 

[Mannahnin]

Whistles innocently.
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Yup. Years ago I saw someone argue in favor of unpainted minis and tokens as making the players rely more on imagination, and I buy it now.

I like the aesthetics of nice painted figures (I have hundreds), but if I want mystery and fear, flat featureless tokens and my verbal descriptions serve better.

 

[Byrd]

Yup. Years ago I saw someone argue in favor of unpainted minis and tokens as making the players rely more on imagination, and I buy it now.

I like the aesthetics of nice painted figures (I have hundreds), but if I want mystery and fear, flat featureless tokens and my verbal descriptions serve better.

I like minis.
I will spend a good bit of time painting a mini or two for my PC's.

The more important an NPC, the more likely I will use a 3D mini, and even some paint.
(It helps indicate their place in the game world. Most of the time.)

I'm not above assigning a random number to a token, to add uncertainty.
(Is that 1 of 3? Where are the other two? Are there others, or just this one, labeled "3".)

 

[500 Toads]

If I were going to run a horror campaign, I'd rather run it in Delta Green (if eldritch horror is permissible) or Twilight 2000 (for a strictly mundane campaign). Both of them have plenty of reasons to put characters in situations where a significant part of the horror is the terrible things that the characters do. In the former, even in campaigns where the characters theoretically have a lot of agency (which isn't all of them; in particular, Impossible Landscapes and God's Teeth both challenge this at their very core), the demands of the "mission" may result in players deciding for instance that their characters need to severely harm people that don't really deserve it in any conventional sense. In the latter, the high lethality, the ambiguity, the distrust of strangers, and the scarcity of resources may have players agonizing over every interaction between their characters and those who may just be people in need, et cetera.

The other major reason is that the horror and bleakness is a conceit of those systems, and that the players have agreed to it if they are in those systems at all. Unless they're going in really, really blind about what those are about, the players aren't expecting to be knights in shining armor saving the day and having everyone sing their praises; fear and darkness are built in.

 

[Piperken]

...And maybe some general tips on how to avoid them...

I am not a horror fan. I don't watch horror films with frequency. I don't actively seek out horror stories if I happen to visit a book shop. I do like horror. That said:

• In a trad/neo-trad game (like D&D), players need to be "in," on providing grist for you. Their characters need to express vulnerabilities according to their characters' leanings. i.e. not be perfect. So, if their character is self-interested e.g. I'm out for me; then they ought to be self-serving and selfish in their decisions. If they're careful and make plans, maybe the player purposefully takes too long, or hesitate in being decisive. This is a bit of showing what cards you have to others, and is helpful.
• If there is enough time to do so, the table runner needs to really try to get to know the characters and to a lesser extent, their players. What are their motivations? What do they fear? Do they have insecurities? Some of this could be discoverable during a Session 0 or the like, but the table runner and everyone can pick up a lot about these (including the player of that character) after a situation or two has occurred. If a game is explicitly about horror, good players will note these details and leverage them e.g. Oh, my character noticed this character tends to get wound up when they're yelled at, and then make unwise, awful decisions, to the delight of my character. They'll try to do that again later.
• What is often more impactful as horror is the simple, every day and plain spoken, not the overwrought. It is the neighbor you knew well for twenty years, only for you to wake up one morning because police discovered they had trapped multiple people alive between the walls of their house for that amount of time.
• Reimagining common staples. Again, lean towards the simple. Avoid the burden of creating something original. A gelatinous cube that lies in wait in a watery sewer to consume people beneath a fantasy city? Absolutely expected. A gelatinous cube mysteriously disappearing office workers in a modern building (sometimes, it likes to rest inside the water cooler)? Now, that's interesting.

 

[tetrasodium]

Those things put it in the survival genre, not horror. You can still do that in D&D, it's not that hard, you just need to limit magic items and options for short and long rests. A lot of people aren't interested in playing that style of game though.

That sounds a lot like an admission about how a series that explores how profound trauma, constant terror, and the collapse of societal rules impact human identity and morality descend into PTSD & survival horror is probably not a great example for any sort of horror in a ttrpg just because it happens to have zombies. I dunno about you & the GM's you've met but I think it's safe to say thatPHD's aren't writing books analyzing the psychological aspects of our campaigns.... seems a few steps beyond next level GM'ing skill to invoke it as a target for the GM when the system can't be bothered to support the GM on any sort of survival themes plausible risk of death ongoing material needs fpr PCs & so on.

If it were a good target for GM's with such a deeply emotional gameplay I wouldn't need to say that love's pain has no save SR:no no attack roll & auto succeeds regardless of distance or planar differences because such a spell is in the same book at mind rape but don't need to mention the book name after namedropping that one