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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9693346" data-attributes="member: 6671663">The idea that mechanics don’t matter much to horror is a product of the fact that many gamers have never seen many mechanics that have a significant positive effect. So I’ll point at some that do. (The yellow bar at the bottom is a pop-up table of contents.)[URL unfurl="true"]https://fate-srd.com/fate-horror-toolkit[/URL]Sometimes it’s very simple. Chapter 5 introduces a fifth standard outcome, Failure With Style, which gives doomed characters a compensatory advantage they can use to keep things interesting, along with a typical clock for overall doom and an additional aspect for each character, Book of Scars, for tracking accumulating consequences. Sometimes it’s more complicated. Chapter 3 gets into the internal consequences of horror. It explains why using clinical language is bad and subjective, experiential language is good, using conditions to give weight to coping methods and the troubles they make, turning the overall goriness of a scene into an antagonist all its own, a Fate-based approach to the risk of hardening that Unknown Armies and Delta Green capture so well, and like that. Chapter 6 has some my favorite rules ever, covering communities of survivors. It’s got straightforward handling of consumable resources that lead to interesting choices, and just brilliant handling of the ways survivors get whittled down. (No, I didn’t write them <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />) Players can redirect various sorts of harm from their characters to NPCs, with various constraints and consequences, so that the PCs will tend to end up the last ones standing, but with various sorts of tolls taken. Chapter 8 is another piece of brilliance, focusing on feminine horror. It’s got a special pool of horror points, feminine horror aspects, a run-down of kinds of horror story that (almost always) feature female protagonists and the aspects and conditions associated with them, and a lot of good advice for players and GMs. Other games that make the mechanics matter…well, I already mentioned Unknown Armies and Delta Green. You could do worse than just seeing what John Tynes and Dennis Detwiller are up to. Kult did some neat things, and Kult: Divinity Lost does more. Free League has several games that  each do neat things to support the style of play they’re after. Savage Worlds has some great genre-supporting settings like Day after Ragnarok; other Fate books like Fate of Cthulhu offer nifty resources, too. Gradually the pool of games thst help players and GMs play better grows.</blockquote>

Verification