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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dbm" data-source="post: 9692624" data-attributes="member: 8014">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.</blockquote>

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