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Unpopular Opinion?: D&D is a terrible venue for horror
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<blockquote data-quote="Kurotowa" data-source="post: 8099751" data-attributes="member: 27957"><p>I'm reminded of the tale of the round robin writing circle attempted by a number of pulp writers back in the 1930s. These were collaborative writing exercises where an author would write one chapter in a story and then pass in on to the next person in sequence. Well, this particular circle attempt included both HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. So you had a story where the protagonist ended one chapter cowering as a terrible monster beat on the door and then began the next chapter by summoning his grit, grabbing a chair, and clobbering the heck out of the monster.</p><p></p><p>The implicit genre assumptions D&D is built on are a lot closer to Howard than Lovecraft. That while there are great and terrible monsters out there they all have a fatal allergy to being stabbed repeatedly with a sword, even if you sometimes need a <em>magic</em> sword if you want to be efficient in your stabbing. There's a good argument for the essence of horror being powerlessness, and modern D&D is all about becoming powerful heroes who can defeat monsters and work their will upon the world. That while setbacks or defeats are possible, the PCs are never powerless victims of forces entirely beyond them.</p><p></p><p>You can do scares in D&D. The Monster Manual is full of scary things, especially if the DM sets the scenario right. But they're the scares of campfire stories, of the things that go bump in the night, not really horror as the genre is generally understood. And that's fine. D&D is not a neutral clean slate for telling every sort of story. It's a game engine for telling D&D stories, and if you want a horror RPG there's other games that specialize in that.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Kurotowa, post: 8099751, member: 27957"] I'm reminded of the tale of the round robin writing circle attempted by a number of pulp writers back in the 1930s. These were collaborative writing exercises where an author would write one chapter in a story and then pass in on to the next person in sequence. Well, this particular circle attempt included both HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. So you had a story where the protagonist ended one chapter cowering as a terrible monster beat on the door and then began the next chapter by summoning his grit, grabbing a chair, and clobbering the heck out of the monster. The implicit genre assumptions D&D is built on are a lot closer to Howard than Lovecraft. That while there are great and terrible monsters out there they all have a fatal allergy to being stabbed repeatedly with a sword, even if you sometimes need a [I]magic[/I] sword if you want to be efficient in your stabbing. There's a good argument for the essence of horror being powerlessness, and modern D&D is all about becoming powerful heroes who can defeat monsters and work their will upon the world. That while setbacks or defeats are possible, the PCs are never powerless victims of forces entirely beyond them. You can do scares in D&D. The Monster Manual is full of scary things, especially if the DM sets the scenario right. But they're the scares of campfire stories, of the things that go bump in the night, not really horror as the genre is generally understood. And that's fine. D&D is not a neutral clean slate for telling every sort of story. It's a game engine for telling D&D stories, and if you want a horror RPG there's other games that specialize in that. [/QUOTE]
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