Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8101866" data-attributes="member: 16814">It is -- the system does no work at all to enable horror.  Any horror you bring to the table is, at best, orthogonal to the system and often in spite of it.  You can do it, but 5e doesn't help at all.I disagree that the only thing you have to do is show that you can do system agnostic horror in 5e to prove 5e works against horror.  Setting mood lighting and having a good soundtrack or using a creepy voice are all system agnostic things that you can do that don't at all show 5e isn't bad at horror.  The only measure of 5e being bad a horror is to look at when you use the system -- does it enable, not matter, or fight against what you're trying to do.  You point to two specific spells as inhibition to horror, and I rather disagree with your choices.  Being able to detect evil can be a great enabler of horror, or it could cut against it, depending on what tropes you're trying to enact in the game. Teleport is a better example because it does short circuit horror tropes that require the PC to be in danger and unable to easily escape.  To me, one of the biggest problems in the spell section against horror are the attack spells, in general, alongside healing spells.  These enable PCs to actively confront and fight horrors or mitigate encounters with horrors.  Even if you're working a deep psychological horror, or one that impacts bystanders and allies, the ability to fight effectively is empowering and that cuts against a number of horror tropes.  Usually, in horror, to be able to fight effectively against the horror requires that the protagonists have already made a costly sacrifice or two.  Combat spells are things you already know, which means, for those tropes to work, you have to modify the game so that they don't work as well, either by changing how spells work or specifically adding resistances to the things that are doing the horror.  And you're still saddles with the granular combat engine.I wonder if those that think that 5e is good for horror have much experience with other systems with a more narrative bent that tend to do horror pretty well.  Not doing horror well isn't a knock against 5e -- it wasn't built to do so, and you can work around it with effort, so it's not that big of a deal.</blockquote>

Verification