What makes a successful horror game?

[overgeeked]

The question came up on another thread but I thought it was worth breaking off into it's own thread.

By "successful" here I mean that it works as a horror game, not whether it makes money for the company.

So, what do you think? What makes a successful horror game?

 

[John Lloyd1]

I'm not sure why I am interested in the subject, since I don't actually like horror (although I don't mind 'performative' horror like Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Maybe it is because I like FATE which went from saying 'you can't do horror with FATE' to 'here is our horror toolkit'.

I thought I would link to what FATE thinks is needed for a successful horror game:

Chapter 1: Gazing Into The Abyss • Fate Horror Toolkit

 

[dbm]

I think the essence of horror is powerlessness, at least in some context and up to a point.

Call of Cthulhu is, of course, the big dog in the horror space. Characters typically are not very combat capable, and even if they can hold their own against human opposition, the mythos creatures are so dangerous they are still in a very precarious position. So players will regularly fear for their characters lives and instead prioritise sneaking around and hiding rather than direct confrontation. I think that change of perspective is very effective at making the players feel powerless against their opponents.

I think CoC is so successful, however, as it understands that this means characters need to be doing other things beyond combat (which is the focus of many RPG systems) and so characters have lots of skills to employ on other activities around investigation; research; working out what, who, and how things are happening so they can attempt to do something about it. So the players aren’t deprotagonised in general and the system still provides a fun game experience to engage with.

Building on that, the sanity system provides an alternative attrition mechanism to losing hit points, which mechanises dangers other than combat. Seeing non-Euclidean beings and learning Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. That adds in tension to the non-combat parts of the game, which should be most of the table-time given how fragile characters are.

So, from a system point of view, the system makes the players feel their characters are vulnerable, channels their activity but makes that interesting and makes sure the tension remains.

The other factor to CoC’s success is their well regarded campaigns. Horror games are more tricky to create and run for many people, as mysteries or conspiracies in general are harder to create and run IMO. By providing good ‘worked examples’ CoC gets its GMs into a new groove so they can run a very different kind of game to what they (probably) normally run.

Factor X is becoming the most popular RPG in Japan which probably kept the flywheel turning so they could create all those great modules for people to run in the face of not being the most popular genre in the gaming West.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Obviously, the most important thing for a successful horror game is it should make the players miserable. If they are having fun you are doing it wrong.

 

[TheSword]

For me it’s not about powerless so much as it is being out of your depth. You still have agency, but you don’t the full picture to make decisions. Or worse you think one thing is going on, act accordingly and then find out something much worse is the case something you’re not equipped to deal with at that point. You’re out of your depth and that’s where desperation kicks in.

Agency is essential in all TTRPG. The trick making this work in horror genre is to use the flow of information to subvert expectations, expand the PC‘s horizons, and leave the feeling desperate.

I’m planning out a mash up of Pathfinder’s Strange Aeons and Rime of the Frostmaiden where PCs wake up in an asylum surrounded by darkness and an impenetrable blizzard. With precious few resources they make their way through ghouls and doppelgängers to find a place of sanctuary where some inmates have barricaded themselves in a shrine only to find out that they aren’t even safe there when one of those inmates is turned into a doppelgänger by whatever force is affecting the asylum. If they survive and stop that force without turning themselves, they find out that the whole world as far as they can see is blanketed in ice and snow and nowhere that they can reach is what it should be. Queue a dozen different horror scenarios that will lead the party closer to finding an escape… maybe.

 

[TheSword]

Obviously, the most important thing for a successful horror game is it should make the players miserable. If they are having fun you are doing it wrong.

There is often a lot of humour in the horror genre. Comedic moments reduce tension, make people feel human and then cause the horrific elements to have more impact. But I have a feeling you’re talking tongue in cheek.

 

[TheSword]

In D&D 5e games advantage is a killer of horror because it gives confidence and reduces risk. The solution to that is to start with disadvantageous circumstances and make the party work just to get back to normal.

Don’t take away their ability to do things, make it so their ability to do things is the reason they aren’t already dead.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Using your previous comment as a starting point:

You can do horror in most games as long as the rules don’t fight you.

I think you can do it even when the rules do fight you, as Ravenloft even existing through every edition of D&D shows!

The much harder issues imho are:

A) Player buy-in and willingness or even just ability to keep the tone/game on track enough that it can be horrifying.

B) Creating scenarios/adventures which are actually horror, and written well enough that they don't veer into just becoming some other genre, or just plain silly.

C) A DM who can actually evoke the atmosphere well enough for it to work. This isn't necessarily a high bar - I've seen new DMs pull it out first time. But I've seen experienced DMs screw it up, simply because they're too "matter of fact", because they're too focused on detail, or for other related reasons.

And these are interlinked, as well. Like, if we look at Mothership, for example, the rules aren't great, and I'm not actually sure they really do support a horror tone all that well. But what Mothership has is a huge number of genuinely good space horror scenarios/adventures, which are convincing enough that even fairly silly players often get into the tone quite quickly, if the DM can convey the tone convincingly (again, which doesn't require unique expertise or huge experience, but it does require some nuance and thoughtfulness).

I'd say most of the one-shots my main group does have been horror of various kinds, and some short campaigns too, and I've seen very wildly different success levels. Like, I've seen players strongly bought in, but a boring adventure which billed itself as horror but was both not very engaging, and a kind of trite, old-fashioned horror that just wasn't scary (and I kind of doubt was even scary when it was written in the 1980s). Equally I've seen players who weren't bought in at all, just joking around, gradually brought into a state of pretty real horror by the sheer persuasiveness of the adventure and DM (with Mothership's Bloom for example).

I think one important think for the DMs is, you've got to be ready to keep rolling when some horror element fails. Not everything will land every time, and you can't get caught up trying to make an element land when it hasn't. This is true in horror movies and novels too - sometimes Thomas Ligotti just writes a scene that's so gothic it's more funny than disturbing, sometimes the FX in a movie are unconvincing or the editing ruins a potentially a good bit of horror, and so on. But you've got more, so keep going. I saw a Mothership adventure a few months ago nearly derail because the "climactic" horror (or what the DM thought was that) just absolutely didn't land. The players shot it immediately from max range (like 30ft in that case), not even considering engaging with it, and didn't find it very compelling. But the DM did finally get over it and got us back on track and we had a good horror ending and so on.

One other thing actually connected to the same incident is "Don't be a show-off, and don't think you're smarter than the players". The adventure we were running, the person who had written it (not any of us, it was pre-written adventure) had decided they were so, so clever because they'd named the an NPC "Ghost" in Gaelic as their surname (and their full name came up a number of times), and presumably assumed - completely and obviously incorrectly - that the sort of huge detail-oriented nerds who play RPGs would never figure such a thing out, because that would give the game away massively, and make a "maybe" into a "definitely". Obviously we immediately did realize this (specifically, I blurted out "Wait doesn't that mean "evil spirit" in Gaelic or something?" - technically out of character but my PC's surname was Murphy so... and once the cat is out of the bag...). And this is a really common issue - over and over I've seen horror adventures undermined (often only a little but still) by writers dropping unnecessary flourishes like this. Like keep those hints and your ego in check, mate. Drop hints only when you mean to drop hints and it furthers the tone - don't try and show off, don't try and be like "OMG I GOT THIS PAST U" or "THEY WILL NEVER KNOW THIS ONE!". They will know that one. You're talking about people who are often obsessed with trivia and detail and words and etymology and often took odd languages at school/uni!

(This particular adventure also has the issue now that a movie is coming out with that name - the Gaelic word for ghost - as the title, so it's about to become even more obvious.)

Also, if you're writing and selling an adventure and you do put stuff like this - at least call it out to the DM so he change the name if he thinks the players will spot it! The DM didn't know about this little landmine, so he was vexed when we found it.

Don’t take away their ability to do things, make it so their ability to do things is the reason they aren’t already dead.

Yup. This is one thing some Mothership adventures do pretty well - they allow for the fact that the PCs likely have some pretty big guns, probably at least 1-2 combat-capable people in a party of 4, and that a lot of PCs will actually be quite skilled and good at their jobs - but that's the baseline, and the adventure is written on that assumption, so that just keeps your heads above water (in some cases literally!).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think the essence of horror is powerlessness

I don't really agree. And when I think about effective horror adventures it wasn't the ones where we were truly powerless that worked. On the contrary, those often inspired apathy. Like okay fine we're gonna die, nothing we can do about, great, why are we even continuing?

You've gotta have that glimpse of hope, and enough power that you might at least survive stuff. Especially in one-shots and short stuff. Totally overwhelming enemies just make PCs flee. They don't even try and fight them. Why would they? Vulnerable is good, weak-but-with-a-tiny-chance is good, but full-on powerlessness in my experience weakens actual horror because it's too matter-of-fact. Like, obviously we can't fight this big monster, so we just have to avoid or flee the moment it appears. In fact true powerlessness can easily turn horror into farce, as PC go leaping out windows and so on to avoid fighting something.

Re: Sanity, I think the approach Mothership takes with Stress and Panic checks is actually a hell of a lot more effective than Sanity loss, which is often basically meaningless in the exact way HP loss is meaningless until it isn't. Whereas the slow rise of Stress and the inevitable Panic Check failures that will eventually follow are much better at creating tension and nervousness among PCs than Sanity loss, in my experience.

I think CoC is better as a mystery game than a real horror game, per se, and I actually think that's part of the secret of its success - it's got horror themes, but it's not really designed around them - it's designed around solving mysteries, usually which end with you understanding some horrifying scenario and how screwed everyone is, and how the solution is usually to burn something (a book, a mansion, evil cultists).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Oh re: mechanics again, I do think they matter, and like, as an example I'd contrast two mechanics from Mothership - Stress/Panic Checks and Saving Throws.

In Mothership, your Stress start at 2, and mostly only goes up (usually when you fail a check), to a max of 20. Occasionally you'll be called upon to make a Panic Check, which means rolling under your stress on a d20. This is pretty effective - you start out easily making these checks, and it gets more and more likely you're going to fail. That's a good ratcheting tension mechanism, and it works well across a single adventure/one-shot in a way CoC's SAN doesn't.

But Mothership also has saving throws, and these end up so you basically have a 25-35% chance of passing them (in general), and there's absolutely nothing you can do to increase that. So if the entire party makes them, pretty much 3 out of 4 PCs will fail any given save.

But the way the game wants DMs to use them, is essentially as if they were passable and PCs could reasonably be expected to pass them. But they can't be. So you get these stupid-feeling situations where the game and adventure are written as if this was a D&D save, where you probably have an over 50% chance to succeed and might have ways to boost it, but that's just not the case. It also quickly becomes obvious that all the PCs are basically equally bad at all saves, so it's really just random, it's not like the tough marine will probably pass his Body save - the actual chance is barely different to the pencil-necked scientist a lot of the time (the one exception being androids usually pass Fear saves, but at the cost of making everyone else fail them). I feel like this mechanic doesn't really build the horror, and instead tends to feel a bit arbitrary and like, if you're making a save, you already failed it. But again, the writing and suggested way they're used doesn't really fit that. It's like they needed a better mechanism, but just didn't get one.