Oooh, that.

Oooh, that.

Originally shared by Jesse Burneko

Another post on horror gaming.

Poking around at various corners of the internet, I'm really seeing this notion that "horror" kind of happens as transmission from GM to Player.  Ultimately, the characters don't really matter.  What matters is the GM has cooked up a bit of mind-fuckery targeted and the players experience horror by discovering it.  The characters are just the proxy by which the real players reveal this transmission.

This is why so many horror games are so mechanically boring.  The mechanics there are for... "whatever"... decide if you can jump over a pot hole, I guess.  And that makes total sense under this "transmission" assumption of horror.  What REALLY matters is content be that the GM's own content or the setting/line developers content.  It's all about dreaming up horrific stuff for the players to learn about.

It's a fundamentally consumer oriented approach.  The result is, just reading the setting/adventure material should have just as much impact as actually playing it.  (Yes, yes, that's a bit unfair).

Vincent Baker pointed out in a thread on Story Games that he designed Murderous Ghosts to work the other way around.  That the player tells the GM what scares them.  This is a really interesting approach but it doesn't quite go far enough.  Even in Murderous Ghosts were dealing largely with the PC as an uninvolved observer discovering a terrible situation.  Those of you who know my gaming preferences know this isn't nearly close and personal enough.

So, I've been thinking a lot about how to design a better horror game.  (I've been thinking about this for a LONG, LONG, LONG time but my clarity on it and my goals have gotten a lot clearer in just the last year or so).  There are quite a few pillars of thought that are sort of "triangulate" into the target zone.

I've noticed an odd trend among old guard Forge/Story Games members.  A lot of them have actually taken a step backward.  There's a resurgence of interest in the OSR, basic fantasy dungeoneerring in general, and core mechanics that focus on simply what the characters are doing moment to moment.

I believe this is a reaction to a design school that got increasingly constrained in an effort to create perfectly repeatable game experience around very specific narrative/genre patterns.  This designer really likes disaster flicks and so here's a game that will walk you through the exact beats of a disaster flick, so that everything happens in the order it's supposed to happen and everything turns out the way you expect it would given this is a disaster flick.

When thinking about my ideal horror game I don't want this.  I don't want this.  I don't want to make things so structured that it's just a machine that takes players in one side and churns out a beat-for-beat experience on the other.  Players, should be able to "just play their characters."

However, that doesn't mean that we throw up our arms and just go play Labyrinth Lord or Trail of Cthulhu because the game should "just get out of the way." and "system doesn't really matter."  My brain keeps going back to a very particular moment I had while playing a Burning Wheel game.

I had created a pretty evil sorcerer character who was on the verge of a crisis of faith.  He wanted to be better.  That's what his Beliefs were about.  So I chose life paths appropriate to that.  And there came this moment where I realized I was mechanically very good at bullying people and not very good at compassionate argument.  Burning Wheel also makes it clear just how hard it is to learn something new through its improvement mechanics.

So there I was looking right at the heart of my character's conflict on the character sheet and in the mechanics.  I could either get what I wanted by the old, familiar and comfortable methods of violence and terror OR I could really fight for that change I had written my Beliefs about and it was going to be a genuine struggle.  The game was not going to give it to me for free and no one at the table had the power to just "decide" that I had earned it.  The game itself laid down that gauntlet.

But what's important is that it had laid down that gauntlet in a very subtle way.  It was the result of several moving pieces: Beliefs, Lifepaths, Skill & Improvement.  Nothing the game's structure said, "Now is the time you confront this.",  "Now is the time we decide this.", "Now is the time we reflect on that.." and so on.

Burning Wheel let's me, "just play my character" and then lays the consequences of that before me.

And that's the experience I want in a horror game.  I want the players trapped in a pentagram of indirect moving pieces that lay bare the awfulness of their situation, a situation partially of their own making because the horror at hand is of personal relevance to their characters, not just an unexplored silo for them to crack open and see what's inside.