Are "High-Powered" and "Horror" compatible?

[Mgellis]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

I'm sorry, but:
400 CP =! horror

I'd say it's more that if the characters are at 400 points, you might need different monsters than you would when they were at 150 points.

400 points will make vampire hunting a lot easier, but it does not mean you will automatically win and survive. A GM can always make the monsters tougher or more numerous (a horde of 50-point Deep Ones is going to be a headache for pretty much anyone, no matter how many points they have).

And even if the characters are not in danger, you can still freak them out or scare them. (Monsters that can shapeshift or possess others are really good for this.) Or put people they care about in danger.

I agree it may be more of a challenge to do high-powered horror, but I'd also say that it doesn't matter how many points your character has; there are plenty of ways for a good GM to scare them.

Later edit: also good for scaring anyone regardless of point value...monsters that can invade someone's dreams, cause unsettling hallucinations, make them hear voices, or otherwise mess with their perceptions, faith in reality, etc. Also useful are monsters that start off seeming like one thing that is NOT a monster (e.g., it's a kitten!) but gradually the heroes peel back the layers and discover something else, something terribly wrong, underneath.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Mgellis

I'd say it's more that if the characters are at 400 points, you might need different monsters than you would when they were at 150 points.

Let me offer a hard core example of this.

In my campaign Sovereignty, the PCs were a team of supers built on 1500 points, recruited by NATO as a first strike force to deal with outlaw sovereigns—supers powerful enough to threaten a national government singlehanded. There were five team members: Concussion, the team leader, a psionic force manipulator; Lyra, a formerly fallen angel earning her way back to heaven; Morpheus, a telepath with emergency telekinetics; Nemesis, a classic brick; and Shifter, a teleporting, shapeshifting dragon with a magic sword. Early on they went up against Koshmara, a sovereign of Russian origin with dream-focused psionics and extreme skills in psy-ops. In the fight that resulted, they killed her.

Well, they thought they killed her. Morpheus had a compartmentalized mind; Koshmara was able to project herself into one of his compartments when her body was destroyed, and conceal herself there, manipulating his behavior toward disruption of the team.

He found this out later on, after a different adventure resulted in his learning the true name of God, which gave him the power to control God's actions. He didn't think that it was safe for him to have this power, and set up a ritual in which he would call up God and tell God to delete the knowledge from his mind. And THAT is when Koshmara struck, after he called up God, trying to take control of his mind to make him order God to create her a new body and implant the knowledge of God's name in that brain. So there he was, in a desperate struggle against an enemy living inside his own mind—an enemy more powerful than he was. I think I could say that I managed to scare the hell out of him.

In retrospect, the one thing I wish I had thought of was to give him a series of nightmares about his youth in the 1930s, when he was part of German military intelligence, and his telepathic powers made him aware of what the Nazis were doing. That would have made for even more horrific scenes and given a better reason for the character to be unstable.

Bill Stoddard

[Randyman]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

I'm sorry, but:
400 CP =! horror

Horror != helpless PCs, either.

[Phil Masters]

All of which is leaving aside the option of what I call "motif horror", too.

A game with vampires and werewolves and acidic mobile blobs may not be horrific at all, really. It may just be fairly normal supers or dungeon fantasy, with some slightly more garish and interesting furniture. But the furniture comes with the word "horror" attached as a standard tag. So some people will call that game "horror", even if other people wince at the lack of actual horrific content.

Discussion of the extent to which this occurs outside of RPGs, and that some (maybe even much) horror becomes a rather peculiar form of pulp wish-fulfilment fiction, is probably best left to other forums.

[Mark Skarr]

It all depends on how those 400 points are spent.

Sure, if you’ve got 400 points spent on Unfazeable, Injury Tolerance, and some hefty Innate Attacks, then the character probably views horror with a detached amusement. But, if you’ve got 400 points spent on healing abilities and sensory improvements and not a whit spent on offensive or defensive advantages, then you’d be pretty easy to terrify.

A 400 point super soldier is not really someone you expect to put in a horror campaign. Sure, you can do it (I’ve got a party of 750 point supers I’m doing horror to right now), but it’s easier to do it to people with fewer combat abilities. But, a 400 point Navy SEAL, with no exotic abilities should be pretty terrified by the dead coming back to life or the concept of battling an ancient evil from before time and space. The individual horror moments would still be terrifying, just, at the end, when they know what needs to be done, they’ll be much more likely to succeed carrying the plan out.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

Sure, if you’ve got 400 points spent on Unfazeable, Injury Tolerance, and some hefty Innate Attacks, then the character probably views horror with a detached amusement. But, if you’ve got 400 points spent on healing abilities and sensory improvements and not a whit spent on offensive or defensive advantages, then you’d be pretty easy to terrify.

And if those 400 points are spent on suitably supernatural traits, you might open up a whole new "What have I became?" sort of horror.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by RyanW

And if those 400 points are spent on suitably supernatural traits, you might open up a whole new "What have I became?" sort of horror.

Well, yeah. And if you still have your humanity at that point, you unlease the virus made to destroy the taint you've inflicted upon humanity, killing yourself.

Sorry. Been in that game. Saved the world from myself.

[DAT]

To the direct question, I would say yes.

The key is to let the players build (and run for a short time) ultra competent 400+ point characters. They should then be able to walk over "normal" opponents for the first couple/few encounters. Once the PCs have a feel for how 'good' they are, then you hit them with the horror. You as the GM, have to teach the players that, no matter how powerful the PCs are, the "horror" can take them out.

A good movie example of this is the beginning of Predator, where the small team of commandos take out 10+ times their own number of enemy soldiers; but then the unknown horror starts taking the commando out (killing them in a very graphic manner) one at a time.

[Not another shrubbery]

High-powered is compatible with both terror AND horror, though the former might take a little more work to elicit. Horror, the sense of revulsion that usually (but not always) follows terror in fiction, can work as a motif regardless of game power levels.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Fortunately I am single. Thank you for giving recommending a book NOT to read after the service if I ever get married.

It's a whole new kind of coyote ugly.