Horror Mechanics in RPGs.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

What games have you read that handled fear and insanity well? How do you integrate these elements into your own designs?

The cardinal rule for most games, electronic and non, is to avoid taking control away from the players. We want to play, not watch our tokens sit around or do stupid things. This is why I tend to avoid war games with Command and Control elements - I want to see tanks bravely storming the Prokhorovka, not have a bunch of cardboard cut-outs ignore me due to "radio malfunction". If we wanted non-interactive story-telling, we could watch a movie.

Going back to my earliest days of role-playing, the Horror Factor rules from Rifts were pretty much universally ignored. Sure, by all means these we some of the simplest fear rules I've seen (roll to save, if not, then miss your first turn, and act normally from there-after.) but it didn't seem right. Our characters were a collection of Demon Hunters, Power Armor equipped mercenaries, drugged-up UberSoldats, dimension hopping mages, and the like - being spooked just didn't really fit the profiles.

As such, I really don't have rules that force actions on players.

Of course, a different option would be to rather than prevent actions, to apply modifiers to actions in adverse conditions. But of course, if the player's are in a tense moment, you don't want to break the flow by starting to argue over -5 vs -4 and doing math.

I'd argue we could try positive reinforcement, and give players a reward for acting scared/running - but what is a sufficient motivation to partake such actions?

In D&B at least, I try to include less about horror in the encounter - adrenaline counts for a lot at that point. However, recovery of expendable resources requires finding safety and creature comforts, so the after affects are more prominent.

Insanity is hard to handle well, and all to often gets used as an excuse for daffy-duck style behavior rather than Hannibal Lector. Despite the fact that it should be prevelant in some of my settings, I don't include rules for mental illness in my games.. HyperFoil Gates in XenoExodous have odd effects, and in D&B, you go from a Post-Cyberpunk all the world is wired to barely any electricity while surrounded by flesh-eating horrors and aliens.

[Sanglorian]

The elegant aspects of work well in this situation. They can be invoked, tagged or compelled.

Invoking means using an aspect to your advantage. Johnny Cash invokes his Crazy aspect all the time in the movie Rocknrolla. This costs a Fate point.

Tagging means using someone or something else's aspect to your advantage. If you're fighting, negotiating or otherwise dealing with a Terrified or Neurotic person, you can exploit that. This costs a Fate point - give it to the person you're tagging.

Compelling means restricting someone's options based on their aspect. For example, John in Revolutionary Road may want to be nice, but if he accepts a Fate point he is compelled to be cruel and rude.

Aspects can be selected, or they can be granted under certain circumstances.

[talysman]

I wrote a series of blog posts, mostly in response to , suggesting some things to do in place of standard sanity mechanics:





These aremostly aimed at D&D, although they're adaptable to other games. In principle, I have nothing against "sanity points", but most of them go too far, like the GURPS Horror Fear Check or CoC's sanity mechanics. You might want to check out Jared Sorensen's UnSpeakable (a free InSpectres supplement.)

[kumakami]

I debate the issue some have with call, the hold point of the game is tentative sanity. The heavy handed nature of its mechanics are done on purpose. For my money its one of the best.

To be honest, being a clinical manic-depressive, the only true way to represent mental disorder is to take away some or most control of the character when such issue occur. Fear, anxiety, compulsion, and reality lose are all states of lost control, you no longer have rational thought. A failure to fight a phobia results is irrational action in real life. So in many ways there are no go ways to place them rule wise.

[misterecho]

I feel the CoC heavy handedness works well, provided the GM uses it wisely. If you go lip-smacking mental everytime you cast candle communication, well the GM is being over zealous.

in our sessions we spend 80% of the time investigating, Your sanity is only tested when you encounter something horrible.

It's only right the player loses some control while the character is going into temporary insanity, otherwise it wouldn't be insanity if you can decide what to do.

[Kinslayer]

I have always rather thought that CoC's sanity rules were a bit much. However, given my relatively minor experience with that game, I am perfectly willing to cede the point that those rules work just right for that game.

As I stated on another thread, I am of two minds about terror/sanity mechanics. One one hand game systems should support their genres. On the other, I intensely dislike game systems that try to forcefully tell me what is going on in my character's head.

SLA Industries had a simple little mechanic that wasn't too bad. That game also prefaced the appropriate section of the rules with guides to what makes something scary or not. One of a character's attributes was called 'Cool'. If a fear rating exceeded a character's Cool, subtract Cool from the fear rating and add it to 2D10 (the most common dice roll in that system). The result was then looked up on a chart. Considering that only the most heinous of horrors involved a roll at all (and really, what adventurer wouldn't max out a stat called 'Cool'?) this was not at all excessive. Most of the effects of a botched roll only meant your character was stunned. Panic, psychological scarring, and such didn't happen except with low Cool, high fear rating, and a terrible roll. Cool could be reduced by the higher levels of the chart; it could also be increased at the lowest level. That is, repeat exposure to traumatic events could harden your character.

The Buttons of Imagination's Toybox could work as incentive, rather than forced actions, for fear or insanity. Buttons are things that seem detrimental, and are used to enhance roleplaying. If I recall correctly, you get an experience point if you use one of your Buttons. For example, a character could buy a Button for arachnophobia after a nasty dungeon crawl. The next time the troupe enters a cobwebbed room, the arachnophobe panics a little and starts stuttering as he is dragged into the room by the other pc's. This earns an experience point. Or, the character could ignore the cobwebs--and the phobia--and soldier on. It's entirely up to the player. Notice earlier I said "buy a Button." As Buttons are XP generators, they are voluntarily purchased by the player, rather than forced upon the character by the GM. It's a way of investing those XP into the character in a non-mechanical way (instead of, say, buying up a skill) that encourages roleplaying while still aiding the character on a metagame level. Though Buttons are much broader than only fear and insanity, they are still brilliant in their execution.

Though Midian is something of a horror game, there are no rules for fear. Penalties due to intimidation are as close as it gets for pc's. For NPC's--most notably on the battlefield--a series of failed Willpower checks can cause a unit to scatter and run. Otherwise I handle the entire spectrum of fear in a purely roleplaying fashion. When I want to scare the pc's, I can. Most of the time though, I let them be Big Brave Adventurers. That makes the horror that happens to them later that much worse. I never really found rules I like for horror and insanity, so never included them in the game.

I doubt I ever will add any, for much the same reasons Chainsaw Aardvark mentioned at the top of this thread. Part of it is a genre thing. Horror could be campy Buffy or Hammer Film stuff. It could be the more Ravenloft-ish terror, played straight. It could instead be splatterpunk and cat-scares, with things that go bump in the dice. As I have a sick dark mind, I could dive into true nightmare fuel--like unborn infants eating their way out of their mothers--and inflict actual emotional trauma on my players. But none of those are really the flavour of Midian. It's more M than Dracula, more Blade Runner than Nightmare on Elm Street. In keeping with the rather Noir tones of the game, I keep the mood dimly lit rather than suddenly crypt-dark. I'm not sure that actual mechanics would work well. Guidelines for setting tone and mood, certainly, but not necessarily dice rolls or SAN points.

I rather like the points Talysman made on his blog about describing the effects from the character's point of view. I alluded to something similar in the aforementioned previous thread. This would work well for a game such as Midian that gets at the heart of a character. As opposed to a game more like OD&D where the physical action effects of the Fear spell is more appropriate. By describing things as they appear to the character--including goading them, acting as a voice inside their head, etc.--it feels more like the character is afflicted with a problem, rather than the inflicting a restriction on the player.