D&D General Horror is hard

[Seramus]

On the one hand, I absolutely love the Horror genre and consider it tons of fun. The trappings, the descriptive elements, the tropes, and even the cinematography that goes into framing horror scenes. It makes me smile, and I genuinely enjoy my time in any good Horror setting.

On the other hand, what I feel is never fear. I fear working my whole life and not keeping up with inflation, having nothing of value after all my sacrifices. I fear the people I love getting some horrible medical condition they cannot pay for, that leaves them with agonizing pain for the rest of their life. My fears are just not anything you would find in a D&D game.

And that's fine. I like horror. I can't even fully explain why I like it, I just do! It gives me positive feelings. So I keep on running horror games and playing in horror games, never actually feeling anything like fear.

 

[AlViking]

You choose a series that goes wayyyyy beyond that when it comes to people as the real enemy. "Only look at season 1 maybe season 2 when the Governor',s people start showing their hand with far more power than Rick and them" id hardly s useful for comparison for a seven season series that explores their powerbase in more than one serious viewer discretion warning episodes with multiple spinoffs .

My point was that monsters typically considered horror tropes may be scary at the start, long term they are not. Horror can work in relatively small doses, it loses a bit of it's luster in a long term campaign. You can have horror trappings like Curse of Strahd but eventually it turns into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy the Vampire slayer was fun, it wasn't (with a few exceptions) horror.

It has nothing to do with killing PCs and there is no reason to put those particular roller skates on the gowopost and your comment even shows how far from the plot 5e has stakes it's flag. If the dm needs to "double tap" a PC to kill them it's not a plausible threat, it's the gm executing s PC before one of the many bonus action heals can reset things with zero hit to party efficacy. Hell there was even an adventure from wutc where a mind flayer could only lay eggs in a PC if the player agrees.

I was responding to the goalposts I thought you had established - that killing PCs was nigh on impossible. DMs are less likely to accidentally kill a PC in 5.x but if it makes sense for the monster to kill the PC, it's not hard.

 

[Seramus]

I was responding to the goalposts I thought you had established - that killing PCs was nigh on impossible. DMs are less likely to accidentally kill a PC in 5.x but if it makes sense for the monster to kill the PC, it's not hard.

Agreed. I don't run an overly lethal game, but absolutely have the tools to slaughter my party. In fact, I'm far more guilty of lightly fudging things and having a monster with narrative reason to finish off a downed PC (drag them off, start eating them, etc) attack someone still standing, instead.

I don't consider this light fudging to be a bad thing. None of us have the time to "fully" scout out enemy fortifications and make detailed plans. We're only here for 4-6 hours a session, and there's a decent push to keep the game moving forward. So I don't punish stupid tactics to the full extent that a highly intelligent (or ravenous) enemy would.

 

[tetrasodium]

My point was that monsters typically considered horror tropes may be scary at the start, long term they are not. Horror can work in relatively small doses, it loses a bit of it's luster in a long term campaign. You can have horror trappings like Curse of Strahd but eventually it turns into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy the Vampire slayer was fun, it wasn't (with a few exceptions) horror.

But we aren't talking about scriptwriting storyboarding or novel writing, d&d does none of those. The nerve wracking nail biting element in d&d are things like rust monsters mind flayer wights ghasts wraiths who in the party carries what and question like "can we as a party carry that thing we'd really like to carry to get the treasure we feel like we need" because those were difficult choices and extremely credible risks up until 5e. I would not be particularly impacted by a speeding ticket, but the risk is plausible enough that it affects how I drive, the same likely applies to a large percentage of posters and d&d players.

I was responding to the goalposts I thought you had established - that killing PCs was nigh on impossible. DMs are less likely to accidentally kill a PC in 5.x but if it makes sense for the monster to kill the PC, it's not hard.

You might very much need to go back and refresh your memory of the discussion chain that started with you saying GM's should look at a series with viewer discretion warnings for "intense psychological distress" for humans as the real threat and me saying that d&d5e can't even come within sight of the horizon where that exists even if it was appropriate for a ttrpg. If you can't even accept that a show with warnings for"intense psychological distress" might be an inappropriate target for the gm running almost any system without trying to extend & quibble over individual reasons whythe system can't handle the targey, there's probably not much reason to continue talking about the target you suggested that GM's aim for to make up for the weight d&d's design no longer carries on mechanical levels.

Because of that design it can't even handle gravity of mere risk when the system is built for [spoiler["this kind of gameplay"]

[/Spoiler]
I may have mentioned the impact of overly generous overly certain recovery, but I was not the one to bring up killing PCs, please do not attribute that strawman to me just because 5e chose to remove every other risk from adventuring. Saying that PC death is now implausible has nothing to do with the gm killing PCs by that gm going out of their way to "double tap" PCs they execute. If the DM needs to "double tap" a PC for PC death to become plausible, the plausible concern is "will the dm double tap my PC and can they?"Not how plausible any other risk of adventuring is.

 

[Scott Christian]

Horror has a lot to do with word choice. And unless you are crafting very specific scenes with clear and horror driven imagery, it is hard to create. Of course, music, player buy-in, and a mechanical threat are all relevant. But it all starts with the foreshadowing and then eventual description of the scene.

And even when everything is perfect, it still only works sometimes.

 

[MGibster]

If you can't even accept that a show with warnings for"intense psychological distress" might be an inappropriate target for the gm running almost any system without trying to extend & quibble over individual reasons whythe system can't handle the targey, there's probably not much reason to continue talking about the target you suggested that GM's aim for to make up for the weight d&d's design no longer carries on mechanical levels.

I think an episode of The Sandman had a content warning for self-harm and smoking, so I tend to take those content warnings with a grain of salt. But let's talk about what is and isn't appropriate for a table top roleplaying game for one moment. Delta Green features a cult called the Skoptsi that engages in the mutilation of its own members as well as the most heinous of child abuse. (What's scary is they based this cult on the real life Skoptsy from 19th century.) The Ennie gold for long form adventure was awarded to God's Teeth, a campaign for Delta Green that featured the Skoptsy and dealt with topics such as the cycle of abuse. There's Bluebeard's Bride which came out in 2017 and is all about misogyny and domestic abuse.

Even family friendly D&D has Curse of Strahd for 5th edition D&D which includes genocide, domestic abuse, stalking, child trafficking, drug & alcohol abuse, a child bride, cannibalism, the murder of children, and I'm sure I'm missing several other unpleasantries.

I'm going to humbly suggest that a show with warnings for "intense psychological distress" might very well be appropriate for a table top RPG. It might not be acceptable for your table, and that's completely cool, but that doesn't mean it isn't appropriate for someone's table. You might argue it isn't appropriate for D&D, but as other games deal with them I'm hard pressed to think they're wholly inappropriate for TTPRGs.

 

[500 Toads]

nods

I do think that Dungeons & Dragons in general does expect the player characters to remain heroic and steadfast in the face of such horror, which helps. That's one line that something like Delta Green crosses, where agents may find themselves considering committing terrible acts for a variety of reasons -- dealing with unnatural contagion, for instance, where an unwilling victim of an unnatural threat may become a vector of it; or in order to maintain secrecy.

Dungeons & Dragons might have adventurers fighting undead horrors, encountering the aftermath of horrific attacks, and what-not... but the adventurers remain heroes. Delta Green might have agents being ordered to kill a child whom they've identified as likely the progeny of a Deep One, or massacre the audience of an adaptation of The King in Yellow.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Me, personally, I think the best horror campaigns are on the shorter side rather than a longer campaign.

I tend to run long (2+ years) campaigns, and I find that switching between genres is the best way to keep it interesting. Horror one week, heroic fantasy the next, science fiction the next, and so on.

 

[Autumnal]

The key to truly scary horror is only having your wits to survive regardless of the type of horror. Otherwise, it's just another D&D undead encounter.

I really disagree this. I think….

Pure slasher, horror, maybe.

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.

The issue in those settings is that the horror-thing (whatever it is) plays by a different set of rules that finds ways to subvert the characters advantages. But critically, the characters still have those advantages, and the horror-thing absolutely must play by some set of rules. This allows the type of narrative where the players are powerful but still forced to be creative. And the enemy isn't easy to take down, but also follows a logic that allows a meaningful conclusion (as opposed to an invulnerable monster that pops up for jump scares in Act 1 and inexplicably dies to the plot in Act 3).

…all of this. Very much so.

I've seen it formulated that Horror stories/games don't have heroes, they have victims.

Hard disagreement. Stories like “The Dunwich Horror” s go ow us heroes applying high tech and magic to confront the horror, and winning, albeit it at some cost. John Csrpenter’s Vsmpires is about a group of vampire hunters who are even more geared out, as is Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. The Mummy and Aliens show us people who weren’t prepared for monster hunting and pay a big price for it, but really and in the end the survivors prevail thanks to heat and smarts. And so on.

Either one requires active buy-in from the players. If they're sabotaging the mood or will get too frustrated and push back when they're getting their butts kicked or NPCs they care about are getting maimed and suffering, the whole thing will just be an exercise in frustration.

So much agreement. I wouldn’t try running horror without buyin from players, showing them relevant movies and artwork and talking about it. Are they prepared to play characters who will be up against opposition their normal tools don’t do much to? Will they take some time to build up ties to places and people around them, and for some of those to suffer and perish? I return, I commit myself to playing fair within genre rules - no cheap kills, no everybody dying unless we’re all good at that, no nihilistic collapse into futility because D&D isn’t a game I don’t want to use for that. Plenty of discussion of boundaries and kinds of limits, and so on.

Then, if everyone wants it, off we go.

I think horror should target PCs and not players.
It’s more easy to make players play along with the horror scenarios than to try to force them to have a horrific emotion.

Yes. I have too much trauma baggage myself to ever, ever want to try to manipulate players that way. It’s the characters that are going into trouble, not the players.

The Fate Horror Toolkit is online and has a lot of good system-independent advice, and some rules but that’d be easy to adapt or just use as is. I contributed to it, but I wouldn’t really recommend the part I did for D&D play, so this isn’t self-promotion.

Fate Horror Toolkit

fate-srd.com

 

[tetrasodium]

I think an episode of The Sandman had a content warning for self-harm and smoking, so I tend to take those content warnings with a grain of salt. But let's talk about what is and isn't appropriate for a table top roleplaying game for one moment. Delta Green features a cult called the Skoptsi that engages in the mutilation of its own members as well as the most heinous of child abuse. (What's scary is they based this cult on the real life Skoptsy from 19th century.) The Ennie gold for long form adventure was awarded to God's Teeth, a campaign for Delta Green that featured the Skoptsy and dealt with topics such as the cycle of abuse. There's Bluebeard's Bride which came out in 2017 and is all about misogyny and domestic abuse.

Even family friendly D&D has Curse of Strahd for 5th edition D&D which includes genocide, domestic abuse, stalking, child trafficking, drug & alcohol abuse, a child bride, cannibalism, the murder of children, and I'm sure I'm missing several other unpleasantries.

I'm going to humbly suggest that a show with warnings for "intense psychological distress" might very well be appropriate for a table top RPG. It might not be acceptable for your table, and that's completely cool, but that doesn't mean it isn't appropriate for someone's table. You might argue it isn't appropriate for D&D, but as other games deal with them I'm hard pressed to think they're wholly inappropriate for TTPRGs.

That goes back to the list I made at the start in post 32 and the many many ways 5e mechanically undermines using the sorts of struggles and motivating concerns that drove the people suck narrative in fiction by severing and my PC is a person that has relevant needs from it. When you sever those needs the PCs are no longer part of that "people" group.

Cults doing evil no good stuff is big standard d&d going all the way back. The weird "undermining mechanics don't matter, you can make it work as the gm. Look at this tv series that did it over seven plus seasons where all of the characters slowly develop various forms of emotional trauma from the ways people suck and so that" is new