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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 8101676" data-attributes="member: 17607">I agree with pretty much all Remathilis's points, particularly when it comes to the old AD&D Ravenloft setting.At the same time, I'm not explicitly disagreeing with this statement:But I'd point out that the things we consider 'horror' with competent protagonists explicitly make it so the protagonists can't use their competence to succeed. For example, the movie Predator features a number of very competent, special-forces caliber protagonists. The horror in that movie, insofar as it exists, is in the protagonists realizing that the creature that's hunting them is better at their competence than they are; the characters haven't been rendered incompetent, but the monster is so much better at their competence than they are that they're not that much different from being "gormless teenagers wandering the woods".The problem of doing this kind of thing in D&D is that, if you give your PCs a Perception check to notice the Predator, one of them could roll a 20, and if that happens and you say that they don't notice the creature anyway, your players will rightly call bullsh*t -- that's not how the rules of the game are supposed to work. You really couldn't do a Predator-style horror story in D&D, because either the characters can learn to become as powerful as the monster without going up more than one level, at which point it's reasonable to ask why they couldn't have done what they did before they went up the level, or the story becomes basically a mystery story where the PCs have to figure out why the monster seems able to get around their defenses and precautions and learn to counter those abilities, as arguably the movie itself does, changing from being a horror story at the beginning to a mystery story at the middle, all with the trappings of action-adventure sprinkled in for flavor. This is basically why Curse of Strahd isn't a horror module, but a mystery module -- learn Strahd's history, find the McGuffins that will let you defeat him, then defeat him.You can do that kind of story in Call of Cthulhu, though, and it's not just because CoC has a Sanity mechanic, but it's because of what that mechanic represents -- learning about the things that the monster does that aren't part of the PCs worldview, which slowly warps them and, ultimately, will turn them into the monster that hunts them if they pursue that knowledge too far. In a Predator story, it might be becoming the kind of hyper-predator that will now view other highly-trained humans as the 'most dangerous game', while in a Curse of Strahd story, it might mean having to compromise your humanity so much that you become a monster yourself in order to defeat Strahd, and the decision over whether or not to actually do that becomes the true climax of the adventure, not the actual final battle with Strahd himself. You could build that kind of adventure using the D&D rules, but unless you tweak the rules and assumptions of the game and get your players to buy into those changes, you're still not going to run a horror story, because your players might just decide 'naw, I'm just going to take the Crossbow Expert feat and modify my crossbow to fire wooden stakes, and we can beat Strahd that way'. You might want to tell Bram Stoker's Dracula, but the mechanics of D&D ensure you'll only end up telling Steven Sommers's Van Helsing.And yes, not all horror is cosmic horror -- but all horror does revolve around fear: fear of the unknown, fear of loss of control, fear that what you thought you know turns out to be untrue and that the things you think are important prove to be irrelevant. Cosmic horror hits those notes harder than other genres of horror, but every horror genre deals to some degree with those things that we fear. I can't put it any better than HP Lovecraft himself, from the opening paragraph of "Supernatural Horror in Literature":"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to uplift the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism."Or in other words, if the good guys win, it wasn't a horror story.--Pauper</blockquote>

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