Fear Factory
October 25th, 2010
Hello, and welcome to Horror Week! As you can probably guess, all of this week’s articles will be devoted to the genre of teeth-rattling, mind-wrenching terror, and Things That Go Bump in the Night, and today is no exception, as we talk about the most horrifying topic of all: boring lectures! Oh no, is that a chalkboard?! OooOOOooOOO!!!
In all seriousness, though, consider this a warning: this article contains not only discussion of probability, it also dabbles enough in neuropsychology for the word “serotonin” to pop up (though, admittedly, only just). If you get enough of that kind of thing at school (or work, or whatever) you might just want to skim this one, or skip it altogether. I’ll be back on Thursday with some fun stuff for Foursaken Feature.
Now then, on to the article. I’d like to spend some time talking about how to run a horror game. Since most of you play with Pathfinder rules (or so I can only assume, seeing as, after all, that’s primarily what we deal with, and I don’t know what brings you to our site if not the content. It certainly isn’t our snazzy banner.), horror games may be one of the most difficult kinds of games for you to run. I’ll get into why in a minute, but first, let me take a moment to examine why anyone would want to play a horror game in the first place.
In a nutshell, people like to be scared. There, that was easy, back to the article, right? What? You’re not just going to take my word for it that people like to be scared? All right, well, let’s go into a little more detail, then. Feel free to stop me if I get too technical for you. You see, there are actually multiple schools of thought on the theory, and I just happen to have been a psychology major in college, so this is a matter of some small interest to me.
Anyway, as I said, there are multiple schools of thought on the subject, but personally, I’m pretty sure that it can all be chalked up to brain chemistry. As anyone who’s ever been in a stressful or exciting situation knows, adrenaline is a pretty potent drug. And we manufacture it ourselves, to boot, right there in or brains. Everyone’s heard about thrill-seekers and “adrenaline junkies,” and frankly the term is far more literal than you might imagine: adrenaline really can have profound effects on a person, and create effects very much like a high. It’s been a little while since my biopsych classes, but I’d wager my skeletal minions that serotonin is involved somehow.
Whatever the case, our brains may be very sophisticated in a lot of ways, but in others they are downright thick. When you go out to see a scary movie, or ride a roller coaster, or go bungee-jumping, or what have you, you trick your brain into flooding you with sweet, sweet adrenaline, because it thinks that you’re in a dangerous situation and will need that boost in order to survive (not that any part of your brain is consciously sitting around thinking anything like that, or that it has its own unique personality distinct from, ah, you. I always hated it when professors would talk about natural phenomena as though they were sentient).
Done right, a horror game can also get you access to that “fix” of adrenaline. Not, I imagine, on the same level as bungee-jumping might, but it’s also enjoyable on other levels, and has a much lower risk of accidental death (though, lethality rates skyrocket when you get between a gamer and his cheetos).
So, now we know why you might want to do a horror game (I suppose I could have just cut out all those paragraphs by mentioning how close it is to Halloween, as that’s usually more than reason enough for a splash of horror at the local gaming group, but that’s neither here nor there). The question is how you go about it. Before long, you will come to one inescapable conclusion:
Pathfinder (and 3.5... and 4th edition, for that matter) is not a very good engine to run a horror game on. For those of you who don’t dabble in design, let me see if I can explain, because I’m sure you’re wondering if that’s some kind of typo. I assure you it’s not. You see, the mechanics of a system have the power to influence the way the game is played, and, if the game is well-crafted, can promote or discourage certain playstyles. For a very, very simple example of how this works, let’s examine the d20 as a means of randomizing success.
When you roll a d20, you have an equal probability of rolling any number from 1 to 20. This means that you’re just as likely to roll a natural 20 as you are a natural 1, or a 17, or a 4, or a 10. The odds are the same. By comparison to, say, 3d6, this produces a much greater variance in results, making exceptionally high and low rolls more likely, and creating a more wild and erratic feel, with chance being a greater factor in any given action (typically).
Obviously, again, this is a very simple example. Suffice it to say that, at the end of the day, modern editions of Dungeons and Dragons have a lot of design in them specifically built to promote a certain kind of playstyle. And that playstyle is a sort of fantasy with large doses of action and derring-do. Not only does the game base all its reward systems around fighting (XP and gold are gained primarily through killing things, with any other source being an afterthought in the rulebooks, though admittedly not in the minds of every DM), but, after the first few levels, it produces characters who are far above average and, frankly, know it. Even your average 10th level wizard can take more than a few stab wounds to the face without being in any kind of medical danger (before you write me with angry letters about how hit points are abstract and don’t necessarily reflect wounds, you and I both know that that simply isn’t how it plays out at most game tables).
Unfortunately for horror-enthusiast-D&D-players, that kind of playstyle is basically antithetical to what you want in a horror game. To promote good horror, the audience (read: players) needs to feel small and helpless, overwhelmed by the forces around them and ultimately out of control. Try impressing those feelings on your average D&D group, however, and they’re just going to feel like you’re abusing your position as DM and going on a power trip. They’ll complain about how it’s unfair for you to throw them up against “monsters of that CR,” or how having a monster that can’t be killed or stopped is “railroading.” And, of course they’re right.
This isn’t to say that you can’t run a horror game in D&D without being an unfair, railroading jerk. Far from it. But the first thing you have to understand with a horror game is that you really need a willing audience in order for it to work. Anyone with much D&D experience is probably used to playing the game a certain way—after all, when the game itself encourages you to think of yourself as the biggest, baddest, toughest guy in the duchy, and that you should have a fair chance at killing (in an almost literal sense, thanks to the CR system) any creature you meet, it’s really not fair to suddenly thrust the player into a situation where the goal shifts from “total triumph” to “escape with your life.”
The lesson here is that, when you decide to run a horror campaign (or one-shot, or adventure within a greater campaign, or whatever) spend a little time to talk to your group about it. Ask them what they think about playing in the horror genre. You may find that your group members don’t like the idea, whether it’s because they feel uncomfortable with that sort of thing (everyone knows someone who gets a little too worked up around scary movies), because they prefer a different genre (including the kind of sword-and-sorcery that typically accompanies D&D games), or for another reason altogether. If horror isn’t something your group really wants to do, I can assure you that no matter how good a job you do as a DM your campaign just isn’t going to end well. While you’re at it, be sure to talk about the group’s expectations for just what “horror” means, and if anyone has any lines they want to draw about places not to go—for example, just because you know one of your players is arachnophobic doesn’t mean you should consider yourself to have free license to use that as part of the game’s “horror” element. He might not appreciate that.
I’m going to leave the matter here for now, but tune in next week, when I’ll finally break down and actually offer some advice for how to inject a little horror into a game of D&D without tearing your hair out trying to fight the system (I promise). In the meantime, don’t be afraid to let a little terror into your life.