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Old 12-06-2019, 06:35 AM   #41
Kromm
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Default Re: Best Fictional Settings for GURPS Horror [Horror]

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Originally Posted by RogerBW View Post

Yes… but if they tend as a result to get competent, then it's not really horror in the same way any more.
I've messed around with horror gaming a lot over the years, on both sides of the GM's screen, and your remark mirrors my experience.

In my experience, one-shots and mini-campaigns tend to pull off true horror best. A single horror adventure in an ongoing non-horror campaign – especially early in such a campaign, and particularly as the first adventure – works next-best. Stringing together a series of such one-shots, mini-campaigns, and adventures that feature the same PCs, who earn whatever the system hands out as prizes (in GURPS, character points), is inevitably a path out of the horror genre. That path can lead to different places: the monster-slayers/supernatural action subgenre if the protagonists grow inured to fear, and accumulate mundane skills and weapons; the occult supers subgenre if the heroes learn magic, experience psychic awakening, become "good vampires," or whatever; the dark fantasy subgenre if the PC already commanded supernatural power; and so on.

I realize that for many gamers, all of those subgenres (and more besides) still fall at least loosely under the rubric of the horror genre, but I have a painful time with that myself. I think you can append as many adjectives as you like – "dark," "occult," "psychological," "supernatural," etc. – to a genre label like "action," "fantasy," or "supers" – but that doesn't transform said label to "horror." You've left horror behind once you've enabled the PCs as action, hack 'n' slash, or super heroes. This isn't perforce the case in comics, films, and novels that use those labels, all of which can remain horror by single-author fiat. It is the case in RPGs, where by virtue of gamers wanting to accumulate and exploit abilities and hardware, there's a profound genre shift. As soon as the players stop shaking, huddling, startling, and digging their fingernails into the tabletop, horror has left the gaming table.

Distilled down and put another way: Comics, films, and novels have a clear creator/public divide that makes horror work well. RPGs do not; the GM may be the lead author, but the players are contributing authors and also the public consuming the fiction, and so know too much and have too much agency for the story to remain horror for long.

I think it's fine to call a campaign or even a game system something that has the word "horror" in its title or subtitle, but the word doesn't make the genre. When I ran a campaign with awakened psychic powers that led to horrible murders, basements full of horrific genetic-engineering catastrophes, evil aliens replacing people, and the like, I didn't expect the players to experience horror even if their alter-egos did. And when I described it to people, I used the term "dark sci-fi," not "horror."
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Old 12-06-2019, 07:11 AM   #42
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Default Re: Best Fictional Settings for GURPS Horror [Horror]

Cosmic horror should work regardless of PC power levels, but I know that a lot of players will call foul when faced with cosmic powers. On occasion though, a clever use of non-cosmic powers can result in horrific situations. For example:

Acid Cloud: Corrosive Attack 2d (Accuracy, +10, +50%; Area Effect 10, +500%; Enhanced Duration, 1000×, +120%; Homing, +50%; Increased Range, 1000x, +90%; No Signature, +20%; Persistent, +40%; Selective Area, +20%; Selectivity, +10%) [200]

With the above attack, you have a character that deals 20,000 dice of corrosive damage over the course of nearly three hours to a square mile of area. That is sufficient to utterly destroy a small town or large encampment, especially since the people in the center will likely not have enough time to escape before they die. That could be a dramatic start to a horror campaign, letting the players play characters caught in such an acid storm.

Last edited by AlexanderHowl; 12-06-2019 at 07:14 AM.
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Old 12-06-2019, 07:40 AM   #43
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Default Re: Best Fictional Settings for GURPS Horror [Horror]

The problem with anything that can be given game stats is that gamers who are "gamist" by nature will ruin the horror for everyone, even those who are ready to buy in and play along. I'm talking about people who look at nuclear weapons or the Death Star or comic-book Galactus or movie Thanos and muse, "I wonder how many dice that does?", followed by, "I want to do that." You can't horrify gamers like that – with cosmic powers or anything else – because they always "see the Matrix." We had this in 1976 with Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes and in 1980 with Deities and Demigods . . . "How many Hit Points does the god have, and what are its saving throws?" I'm afraid it's here to stay.

The solution is threefold:
1. Game with gamers who are willing to buy in and play along.

2. When horror leaves the gaming table, be ready either to end the campaign or to proclaim it to be no longer horror and never look back (i.e., stop trying to make it horror again).

3. Never – ever, no matter what – no really, did I stutter? – give stats to anything you want to be truly horrific. Have it happen by fiat and just let the players deal with it. If they genuinely respect point #1 above, there won't be any complaints.
This is why I've always been resistant to introducing stuff that works like point #3 into GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: That's a series, and a genre, for gamist gamers who don't respect #1 for horror, only for hack 'n' slash . . . and by definition, buying into hack 'n' slash conventions means #3 withers and dies, because there, the god is supposed to have HP and the heroes are destined to have a fighting chance against everything. Thus, #2 pertains before the campaign even begins, so if you're proceeding to run a game, it can't be a horror game.
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Old 12-06-2019, 07:51 AM   #44
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Default Re: Best Fictional Settings for GURPS Horror [Horror]

I should add that I know there are GMs and even game designers who have a personal crusade to make gamers "grow up," "be mature," "respect genre conventions," blah, blah, blah. I'm not one of those people and in fact find the whole idea offensive – it's our hobby's version of forced conversion, conversion therapy, brainwashing, whatever. Games are games, and arguably the "gamist" stance isn't just a legitimate one, but the most natural one. Not everybody wants to immerse themselves beyond the level of the stats and dice . . . and that's fine. Not everybody roleplays the little battleship, race car, or top hat in Monopoly, either, or bothers to name (or even think about) the drivers and gunners of their Car Wars vehicles.

But that means accepting that horror gaming isn't a high return-on-investment activity. All you can do is hedge your portfolio. I think choosing the right setting is a necessary step in that regard, but not a sufficient one. Sufficiency demands those three things in my previous post.
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Old 12-06-2019, 08:24 AM   #45
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Default Re: Best Fictional Settings for GURPS Horror [Horror]

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The solution is threefold:
1. Game with gamers who are willing to buy in and play along.

2. When horror leaves the gaming table, be ready either to end the campaign or to proclaim it to be no longer horror and never look back (i.e., stop trying to make it horror again).

3. Never – ever, no matter what – no really, did I stutter? – give stats to anything you want to be truly horrific. Have it happen by fiat and just let the players deal with it. If they genuinely respect point #1 above, there won't be any complaints.
#3 is a large part of the reason why gods in my games will never get actual stats unless the game is about playing or becoming gods (which could be interesting) - that, and my fear that someone will start a 'this god should beat that god' argument (significant in the Five Earths setting in my .sig, since the gods there are mostly from RL religions, but a problem in any setting with active 'real' gods).
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Old 12-06-2019, 08:30 AM   #46
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Default Re: Best Fictional Settings for GURPS Horror [Horror]

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#3 is a large part of the reason why gods in my games will never get actual stats unless the game is about playing or becoming gods (which could be interesting) - that, and my fear that someone will start a 'this god should beat that god' argument (significant in the Five Earths setting in my .sig, since the gods there are mostly from RL religions, but a problem in any setting with active 'real' gods).
Agreed on all counts.

When I've involved actual gods in my campaigns, I've made them ineffable by having things happen that neither the heroes nor the players could explain or understand – often exactly the opposite of the expected, or some non sequitur or Dadaist madness. Those playing clerics got the fun job of explaining this to their allies . . . that was their big roleplaying challenge. I knew I had done my job when the players started to fear the game sessions where the world was touched by the divine, because those were the ones that would muddy plots, confuse players, and provoke comments like "What drugs are you on?" Bowerick Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was an influence, to be sure.

I think horror demands much of the same.

The similarities extend to the whole "My god can beat up your god!" silliness. As soon as the players are asking whether vampire can beat werewolves, or who would win a fight between Frankenstein's monster and the Golem of Prague, the campaign has jumped the shark as horror, though it might live on as something else. And the same goes for Odin vs. Zeus or whatever.
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Old 12-06-2019, 11:54 AM   #47
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Default Re: Best Fictional Settings for GURPS Horror [Horror]

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I should add that I know there are GMs and even game designers who have a personal crusade to make gamers "grow up," "be mature," "respect genre conventions," blah, blah, blah. I'm not one of those people and in fact find the whole idea offensive – it's our hobby's version of forced conversion, conversion therapy, brainwashing, whatever.
Been there and I get that, but these days I perceive that situation differently. By my experience, it's not usually arrogance that fuels that situation, it's a communication failure which is in turn masking a difference in understanding of what the whole point of the game is. Unfortunately, it's a gulf of understanding that may often be completely unbridgeable, though; better communication will merely make the game impossible.

There are a lot of reasons why people volunteer to GM, but I don't think that "Creating a rich shared narrative with complex characters" is actually a bad one. And for someone who defines that as their objective, what they find themselves being asked to do, by some players, looks a lot like "Facilitating a simplistic power fantasy". At which point, the correct thing to do is of course to ask politely "Do you actually want to play in the game that I want to run?" But that's not always easy because of social reasons (geek social fallacies and all the rest of it), so -- communications failure. And the solution that too many GMs fall back on is to try and persuade the players in question that they do want to play in the other sort of game, really, if they'd just give it a chance...

Nor is this all that arrogant an idea, honestly. Most of us who've been playing RPGs for a few years have had our tastes shift, one way or another, over that time. The idea of a gamer who started with class-and-level dungeon plundering, but then discovered an alternative (Traveller or Call of Cthulhu or Vampire or even, you know, GURPS), which they did actually turn out to prefer, is absolutely commonplace. So a GM who thinks that they can shift their players' tastes, if they just handle things right, is hardly being unreasonable.
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Old 12-06-2019, 03:48 PM   #48
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Default Re: Best Fictional Settings for GURPS Horror [Horror]

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There are a lot of reasons why people volunteer to GM, but I don't think that "Creating a rich shared narrative with complex characters" is actually a bad one. And for someone who defines that as their objective, what they find themselves being asked to do, by some players, looks a lot like "Facilitating a simplistic power fantasy". At which point, the correct thing to do is of course to ask politely "Do you actually want to play in the game that I want to run?" But that's not always easy because of social reasons (geek social fallacies and all the rest of it), so -- communications failure. And the solution that too many GMs fall back on is to try and persuade the players in question that they do want to play in the other sort of game, really, if they'd just give it a chance...
I think we actually agree. I'm not against trying; I'm against crusading, whence my choice of words. There comes a point when, if there are five gamers in town and you're the only one who doesn't want the power fantasy or whatever, you're plain out of luck. The best you can usually do is not volunteer to GM.

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Nor is this all that arrogant an idea, honestly. Most of us who've been playing RPGs for a few years have had our tastes shift, one way or another, over that time. The idea of a gamer who started with class-and-level dungeon plundering, but then discovered an alternative (Traveller or Call of Cthulhu or Vampire or even, you know, GURPS), which they did actually turn out to prefer, is absolutely commonplace. So a GM who thinks that they can shift their players' tastes, if they just handle things right, is hardly being unreasonable.
To be clear, I'm not a gamist kind of gamer at all. I tend to frustrate people like that with my acting, right down to changing my voice and thinking in character rather than in terms of what gives the most plusses. When I'm the GM, I do try to offer a gentle nudge in my preferred direction. But with the passage of time I've regained an appreciation for dice-and-stats gaming, too . . . my life often has enough drama and complexity, and sometimes I just want to heft a fistful of dice and stab a dragon in the liver with as many unfair bonuses as possible.

I consider it akin to my general preference for a good wine or well-crafted cocktail from the not-very-cheap end of the spectrum not precluding appreciating a basic pint with my friends.
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Old 12-07-2019, 11:11 AM   #49
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Default Re: Best Fictional Settings for GURPS Horror [Horror]

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Anyway, the whole "a game of personal horror" thing wasn't how Vampire was played often or at all in my fairly long experience in a few cities.
You needed better STs and fellow Players... because, Authorial Intent very much was the lay of the land in almost every Storyteller game I've ever been in (sit-down p-n-p games, not LARPs. LARPs are their own beast because you have less control over the Player base).

In fact, it's from Werewolf: the Apocalypse that I take my cues for proper horror. The premise of WtA is that you will eventually fail and the Wyrm will eventually win, you cannot stop this, all you can do is heroically die fighting. It isn't about 'lack of control' (as you put it) but about inability to fix everything, or even most things.

Or rather I think they are two facets of the same idea, just coming at it from opposite directions. You 'lament' when PCs gain too many tools, too much capacity to solve all the problems; I solve this by making problems beyond their capacity to effectively solve. Town's on fire just as the first winter's snows fall? Sure, they can eventually douse every fire saving most buildings (shelter), or they can save most everyone trapped by fire, or they can save most of the necessary food and drink supplies. Going for one objective means worse outcomes in the others.

And if the Players have the tools to solve all three, you just need to up the difficulty setting and the consequences of failure. I mean, PCs will fail all on their own without you even needing to cheat half the time.

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Yes, I think that game could have some ongoing horror in it if the gaming group were mature enough to handle things that way. But in practice it seems to degenerate into unchecked Diablerie, high-Ego Abominations, etc. because a lot of storytellers prefer to allow that rather than lose their group. These same people tend not to throw in credible threats, or if they do, they're distinctly tactical and not horrific in character.
Stop including those people in your games. If those are the only gamers in town... maybe understand that larger cities have a vastly easier time solving this dilemma.


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For me, a necessary feature of horror gaming is that the players experience a visceral reaction: they huddle closer together, they turn up the lights, they startle when the pizza guy rings, they're stunned into speechlessness when something awful happens in the game world.
That's a game I'm not going to play in. Don't get me wrong, I've been in games where people described this as happening to them, but I remained one level detached. But I've also played in a few games where the mood of the game did affect, and it was distinctly not enjoyable.

But then you and I come at roleplaying from different directions. You enjoy what I call "method roleplaying". You like to feel what the character feels, think what they think, speak as they would.

Inversely I act. :P

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This is special, perhaps unique, to the horror genre. Most genre labels talk not about emotions or feelings, but about abilities...
And this is where your "Death of the Author" falls flat. The Storyteller system (at least the first couple of editions, I've been out of the loop for a decade), were very much about emotions, feelings, etc. They may not have always been run that way, the system could easily lend itself 'super-heroic monsters' rp, the setting was not designed with that intent.

Anymore than DF is intended for complex social encounters or in town politics. But it happens, and claims that "Kromm is dead, we do it the way we want, and if he doesn't like it he can come down from his frosty hold and deal with it!" doesn't mean you intended for Boardroom and Curia at the DF table.

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These are ones where things will happen to the heroes regardless of the players' choices, and where power either isn't available or doesn't matter.
Yes, but (as you bring up later) if Players haven't bought into your point #1, actively work to subvert #2, and disdain #3, then regardless of setting, system, etc, you can't run anything but whatever the Players have decided you're running.

And this goes in the opposite direction, if you sit down to run DF or MH and your Players want heroic diplomatic fantasy Banestorm or Horror, you're boned.


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Stringing together a series of such one-shots, mini-campaigns, and adventures that feature the same PCs, who earn whatever the system hands out as prizes (in GURPS, character points), is inevitably a path out of the horror genre.
I disagree. But you have to have Player buyin, and you have to have a determined end point. You have to a 'goal' or destination for the campaign in sight and you can't meander from the path too much.

I've run successful horror games, but they always had a 10-15 session termination point on the horizon. I agree though, if you want a multi-year sprawling, meandering 'horror' game, you are likely to end up running some flavor of MH or Action. It can still have horror elements and incorporate horror sessions and arcs, but the overall genre has left the "and the monsters inevitably win" horror setting. I guess it could always come back to that at the end, but I've never heard of the 10+ year long horror campaign that stayed horror for it's entire run.

I guess you could run a Storyteller setting where the PCs all become the monsters... but that shifts into 'disturbing power fantasy' rather than horror territory IMO.

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RPGs do not; the GM may be the lead author, but the players are contributing authors and also the public consuming the fiction, and so know too much and have too much agency for the story to remain horror for long.
I disagree. But again, 'buyin'. I the Players want to write the same thing, then it's all good.

Quote:
I didn't expect the players to experience horror even if their alter-egos did.
And there's the difference between us. I don't expect (though it happens all the time) the Players to experience genuine dread, fear, love, rage, pride, etc over the events in game, because I'm not affected* when I play. So I don't require it.



* Rarely am I affected. The two times I was it was unpleasant, they were unpleasant experiences (a depressing game that made me depressed, and a game that turned far too adversarial between PCs and crossed into real life).


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The problem with anything that can be given game stats is that gamers who are "gamist" by nature will ruin the horror for everyone, even those who are ready to buy in and play along.
Stop inviting those Players to your horror games?

That's how I handle it. Granted, I haven't run horror in over twenty years so... but it's how I handle my games. If the Player isn't a good fit to the game, they don't need to come back. Of course, I live in a bustling metropolis, so I have a large pool of Players to connect with. Things might be different if I still lived in Middle Podunkistan with only 7 other gamers, all of whom were 'power fantasy gamers'.

Okay. there'd be no difference as all I run these days is DF, but you understand what I mean.

Quote:
3. Never – ever, no matter what – no really, did I stutter? – give stats to anything you want to be truly horrific.
So... the way I run most games...

Okay, that's not exactly true. I picked up GURPS Basic thirty-one years saw the 'generic mook character', you know the one, minimalist stats, no Ads or Disads, like two skills? I saw that and said to myself, "Self, this is how all NPCs should look." And I've never gone back. I've even gone a step further and if it isn't written down, it's still a flexible attribute (who am I kidding, even written down attributes are fluid if necessary).
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Old 12-07-2019, 12:21 PM   #50
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Default Re: Best Fictional Settings for GURPS Horror [Horror]

In general, I avoid providing enemies that I have not stated up. At the very least, it means that I am consistent in using them. Does this mean that there is a greater likelihood that the players will kill the enemy? Perhaps, but that really depends on them having the proper tools.

For example, let us say that you have an enemy with ST 14, DX 14, IQ 10, HT 14, Ambidexterity, Combat Reflexes, Craftiness 4, Luck, Signature Gear (A Pair of Very Fine Balanced Long Knives), Stalker 4, Knife (DX+10), and Stealth (DX+10). For 276-288 CP (depending on the TL), you have a great candidate for a stealth killer for a horror game without any cinematic, exotic, or supernatural abilities. They are capable of running at stealth with an effective skill of 19 and can attack their enemies throats with DWA (Knife) at an effective skill of 16. With each successful attack, they will do an average of 16 damage to the throat, meaning that they will deal major wounds. A very scary threat despite having a stat line.
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