Scare Tactics
November 1st, 2010
Last time, on Dark Designs: It was Horror Week, and our intrepid hero had gotten off to a rocky start, being quickly sidetracked into a discussion of why people enjoyed horror games, movies, and similar media. He eventually realized that he was supposed to talk about game design at some point, however, and managed to navigate his way back on-course by using the fact that game mechanics encourage and discourage certain moods, feelings and behaviors, to return the topic at hand to be about both horror and game design. This led to the bold and controversial claim that the d20 system isn’t naturally suited to horror, and in many ways actually works against the genre. This, in turn, finally led to our hero beginning to deliver on his promise to discuss running horror games, and the goal of his quest was finally in sight. Unfortunately, just when he had finally gotten to the meat of his article it was cut tragically short, his promises left bitterly unfulfilled. Now, in order to complete his quest, he must start anew, properly devoting an article to tips and tricks for running horror games. But will he be able to resist the siren’s call of the no doubt dozens of side-topics which lie in wait along his path? Can he hold true to his goal, delivering insightful and on-topic advice without straying into unrelated—or downright silly—subject matter? Stay tuned to find out!
Hello, everyone. If last week’s column left you wanting more, then you’re in luck, because today I’m finally going to give some advice on running horror games. Honest. Don’t believe me? Well, just keep reading, ‘cause I’m about to put my words where my mouth is…or keyboard…typing fingers? Forget it.
As I mentioned last week, one of the major goals in running a horror game is to evoke a sense of helplessness in your players. There’s a lot going on in that sentence, so let’s take some time to deconstruct it before moving on.
Firstly, I believe that the most important part of that sentence to examine for the purposes of this article is “one of the major goals in running a horror game is to evoke a sense…” A good DM will always have, as one of his or her goals, causing his or her players to feel something. At its heart, DMing is a lot like any other entertainment position: you want to create and share with others a story, setting, place, or what have you, which will entertain your audience. This requires evoking emotions. If you don’t get an emotional response from your players, you just aren’t as good a DM as you could be. Of course, depending on what kind of game you’re playing, and what kind of story/setting/place/etc. you want to share, you are trying to evoke different things. In horror games, evoking visceral, gut feelings is probably more important than just about any other kind of game (with, perhaps, the possible exception of a tragedy, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone who goes out of their way to roleplay tragedy, rather, I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone who goes out of their way to roleplay high tragedy. Lots of people roleplay gothic tragedy, though they tend to gravitate toward World of Darkness games over d20 games.).
This is because horror, as a genre, tends to be incredibly hit-or-miss, and it all comes down to emotional response. If you can engage your audience, and get them to feel the fear, and terror, and overwhelming insignificance in the face of greater threats, then you’ve basically done your job. Congratulations, pat yourself on the back. If you don’t, though, then the whole thing kind of falls flat. It’s as though your monster had a visible zipper, or something. At the end of the day, there are few things more pathetic and sad than a horror villain who can’t scare people. So, unless you want to evoke pity from your audience (and more likely you’ll be evoking awkwardness and indifference, by the way), it’s really, really important that you make sure to get the right kind of emotional punch into your game.
So, we know that emotion is important. Great. Now what? Which emotions? Well, do you remember when I said I had several things to talk about in that previous sentence, way back there? Turns out I have some more to say. There, I claim that the emotion you want to evoke is helplessness. This may strike some of you as an odd choice. After all, it’s a horror game, so, shouldn’t the emotion we’re trying to evoke be, I don’t know, a synonym of horror, or something?
To be honest, no. Let’s be realistic: unless you’ve got access to real live illusion magic (I suppose conjuration, evocation, or necromancy would also probably work, in increasing order of how incredibly mean that would be to your players), you’re never going to give your players a panic attack, cause them to wet their pants, or make them run from the room screaming. You won’t make their teeth chatter, and you almost certainly won’t give them nightmares. Why not? Because everyone knows going in that the game isn’t real. In fact, it’s pretty hard to get confused on the point, when most groups’ best visual representation is a handful of 1” tall pieces of plastic on a grid-mat (pro-tip: humans are incredibly visually-oriented).
Honestly, as far as immersion is concerned, you will never be able to compete with mediums like television, movies, or even stage performances. And it’s not like they really aim to scare people, when they do horror movies (horror fans, by all means, flood my inbox with evidence and arguments to the contrary, but I’m pretty sure I’m right about this). What they do, instead, is aim to startle people. And they do this well. And, for a cheap trick, it does most of the work that actually scaring people would do. But it’s not the same thing. If you like, you could try startling your players by jumping up at dramatic moments and raising your voice to a shout, but, honestly, I don’t recommend it. And I’m speaking from experience here. It’s incredibly embarrassing and it’s just not very effective, which, of course, only makes it more intimidating. And bear in mind, I’m a pretty big guy (over 6’ in height) so I have a bit of an edge when it comes to startling people.
With real terror well out of the range of possibility, there are luckily a number of other emotions one can fall back on when running a horror game. The other feeling typically played on in other horror media is anxiety or tension. This can be a great way to run a horror game, and in ideal circumstances it would probably be the route I would recommend. My own personal experience, however, indicates that it’s a very difficult road to travel, because it requires fighting your players’ natural instincts.
What am I talking about? Well, you see, tension and anxiety have this way of making people uncomfortable (funny that: making people uncomfortable makes them uncomfortable. Who’da thunk?). So, when faced with a tense or anxious situation at the table, many players have a gut reaction to try to “lighten the mood” and make the tension go away by cracking those awkward, ice-breaker kind of jokes. This doesn’t just apply to people who didn’t want to be playing a horror game in the first place, and still want to know why we couldn’t have just been playing a nice, safe game of Faery’s Tale, or similar (and before you ask, no, I’m not trying to shill for Faery’s Tale or anything. I occasionally mention things because I feel they’re an appropriate fit and relevant to what I’m talking about. Look forward to a Mark Rosewater reference later on: he’s always relevant).
Speaking of Mark, it was from his column that I really crystallized the concept that it’s not a good idea (It’s design lesson #10 in the link I provided, though that’s hardly the only place he talks about it. In fact, it’s not even the article I wanted to link to, but somehow I couldn’t manage to track that one down). It’s one of those things that you might know, but you never really spend that much time thinking about. The short version? Don’t fight human nature—at least, not as a game designer, and not as a DM. You’re almost certainly going to fail, and, even if you don’t, the victory will be so hollow you’ll feel like you lost. In fact, you will have lost, because your audience won’t be having fun, and that was sort of the point, wasn’t it?
So, terror is impossible, and tension is self-defeating. What does that leaves us with? What’s the next feeling in line that is going to give us the most emotional bang for our buck? I would say helplessness: the feeling that they are opposed by overwhelming forces, and are at those forces’ mercy. Unfortunately, d20 rules don’t lend themselves very well to this sort of feeling (in fact, roleplaying games in general are rarely superb for this sort of thing—bear in mind that this is a very difficult tightrope to walk, because helplessness can very quickly turn to frustration, and even outright anger, if you mishandle the situation. In very rare circumstances it can be fun to be helpless. In most others it is very much not). Which brings us out of the world of theory and into the world of practice (I hope. If this article manages to weasel away from me again I swear by all my dark and necromantic magics…).
#1: Attack the players somewhere besides their hit points. Players don’t mind taking damage now and then. They expect it. They’re comfortable with it. The only way to make them uncomfortable with it is to increase the amount of damage you’re doing, and that’s not really a genre issue, so much as it is a “not playing fair” issue, and your players will (rightly, in my mind) be somewhat upset at you. So how do you get at them? Threaten the things they love. Towns, NPCs, magic items, titles and privileges, it’s all fair game. Find out what’s dear to your players and threaten to take it away from them. Believe me, players who won’t bat an eye at taking on a balor at level 14 will scramble like chickens with their heads cut off to protect their adopted orphan NPC from goblins.
#2: I said attack, not destroy. Sure, at some point you’ll probably want to actually take away something the players are attached to in order to show that you (or your bad guy, or whatever) mean business, but whenever possible, give your players a fair opportunity to save whatever it is you’re going after. Your players are putting their faith in you when they develop an emotional attachment to something in your game. If they feel like you’re abusing that trust (say, by using your all-access pass to their emotions to repeatedly hurt them over and over by destroying everything they grow attached to), then they will revoke that trust, lose their attachment to your game, and ultimately you won’t be able to evoke the emotional response that was supposed to be making things fun, remember? Besides, as long as your players understand that the threat is real, threatening is going to have all the same effect as actually following through, as well as letting the players feel good about themselves if they succeed. (For those of you wondering why you’re letting the players succeed when we’re supposed to be making them feel helpless, have a cookie. We want players to feel helpless. We don’t want them to actually be helpless. Not only does that defeat the purpose of it being a game, it isn’t fun for, well, anybody, really.)
#3: Never let them see its face. By this I mean that, as anyone who is a fan of horror as a genre is aware, the unknown is always more scary than the known. You want to know the most powerful D&D monster? No, it’s not any of those level 50 deity stat-blocks from Deities and Demigods. Nope, you won’t find it in the Epic Level Handbook, either. The Immortals Handbook? Really? Please, don’t mention that book around me. And, besides, you’re still wrong. The most powerful D&D monster is Planescape’s Lady of Pain. Why? Because she doesn’t have any stats. She can’t be beaten or killed. There’s no save against her abilities. She is above the rules, beyond the system. And, in addition to her flavor, it is this ineffability that makes her so terrifying. Once your players know that they’re fighting a troll, or a lich, or whatever you’ve decided to throw at them, it loses its mystique and that sense of the unknown, and immediately becomes less fearsome. The longer you can keep the mystery alive, the more they’ll stay on their toes.
#4: Create goals other than killing the monster. The most simple and effective goal perhaps being “escape with your life.” The difficulty here is that most modern players are so ingrained to simply kill stuff and take its loot that it can take a bit of pushing and prodding before your players get the hint that this a monster they should be running from. It usually helps immensely to spend some time with some in-character foreshadowing, where NPCs or similar sources of information let the players know in no uncertain terms that whatever they’re going to face is, in fact, big and bad (though not too much time, lest you risk turning your game into a fan-fic).
#5: Keep them trapped. This technique, sometimes referred to as the “closed circuit” effect, involves putting the PCs in a situation where, though they are able to get away from the monster temporarily, they can’t immediately escape in any kind of permanent way. Islands are popular for this, especially if combined with bad weather, but there are any number of simple excuses to keep the PCs from going very far. Just make sure that it’s a believable reason, and doesn’t feel too much like a crutch: the last thing you want to do is strain your players’ suspension of disbelief because you couldn’t think of a good way to keep them in town (here’s a hint: the whole town is under quarantine by royal decree, for unknown reasons that the PCs quickly begin to suspect are related to the strange incidents which have been happening…).
And that’s all for today. Join me next week. In the meantime, don’t be afraid to face your fears…or something like that.