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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9692657" data-attributes="member: 18">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).</blockquote>

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