I’m back from Gamehole Con 2023 and thinking hard about horror in roleplaying games. Earlier this fall I had the pleasure of trying out Ten Candles, and at Gamehole Con I ran Mothership, Old-School Essentials, Shadowdark, and I finally played Vaesen after a year or so of trying to get into a game of it. Add the Halloween season on top of all that, and I’ve got some thoughts to share on horror in tabletop games.
Art by Chris Cold
“Running a horror scenario relies on soft skills: listening, empathy, communication, and judgment. Weighed against these skills, a game’s resolution mechanics have comparatively little impact on a horror experience.”
Can Rules Create Feelings?
Horror games are my favorite. I love to be scared and I love scaring other people (if that’s what they want). Getting lost in the tension and dread is a high I chase constantly, with each experience making it harder to do again. I want to go into a horror game with assurance that I’ll get that.
Reading the Mothership Warden’s Operation Manual (Kickstarter edition) I came across this passage (emphasis added):
Actually scaring your players, like they might get scared watching a horror film or playing a video game is an incredibly rare thing. It is not a measure of a successful game night. Most of the time, your players will simply want to have fun in a horror setting. This means they want to play characters who feel afraid, while they the players just sit back eating chips and rolling dice. Sometimes you’ll have players who love to be scared and get really into it. If that’s the case, enjoy it! But don’t feel bad if it doesn’t happen every week. Instead focus on keeping the tension escalating.
When I read this my jaw kind of dropped. It’s right. Which is frustrating to me, but has also been true of all my games. People play horror games with me, but they don’t usually want to be scared—they don’t want what I want out of the session.
As GM advice it’s insightful, and ultimately freeing to someone running horror games. Just because we want different things from a session doesn’t mean those things are incompatible. It’s more worthwhile to focus on tension and mood, because the game mechanics can’t create feelings (like fear, for example). A human can try, but it takes more than just applying rules.
A similar point was brought up in the Collabs Without Permission review of the RPG Dread (this review is long and brilliant; I highly recommend it):
Why is it so important that the system supports your fun? Why don’t we celebrate players succeeding without the help of a rulebook?… The phrase “D&D 5e is bad at horror” echoes all of the people who try to persuade 5e fans to play indie games… The only problem is it’s not true, and some 5e fans know that because they’ve likely felt all kinds of emotions and told all kinds of stories in D&D, so it ends up sounding like you’re asking them to trade in a game that does everything for a game that does one thing.
…I’m not saying horror systems don’t exist, or that horror is impossible at the table… System is not the primary determining factor of a gaming experience. It’s the players (and their investment in the game) that is far more important than any other factor.
In the review, Vi emphasizes that scenarios are capable of creating horror. It’s a useful distinction, because scenarios contain narratives and characters to which the players’ investment can cling. And, crucially, running a scenario relies on soft skills: listening, empathy, communication, and judgment. Weighed against these skills, a game’s resolution mechanics have comparatively little impact on a horror experience.
WHAT DOES HORROR REQUIRE?
So what's horror? Does system matter when we want to run a good horror game?
The way I see it, true horror usually has the following:
Protagonists who lose power rather than gain it
A threat reflecting the protagonist’s “Shadow” (or central flaw/contradiction/desire)
A setting that obscures the heroes' perception
Dread, which I usually define as the fear of knowing something
These elements can be reinforced with rules, but it’s worth pointing out that they’re mostly narrative rather than procedural. In that way, they line up with Vi’s point above that it’s wiser to credit scenarios than rules with inspiring horror. My favorite horror games all have one simple conceit for accomplishing a sense of rising tension, and leave the rest up to the GM’s soft skills. After all, as Mothership writer Sean McCoy postulates, a skilled GM can sometimes scare players, but most of the players would rather eat snacks and enjoy the horror imagery from the security of a comfy chair.
Let’s look more closely at how Mothership handles the rising tension.
In Mothership, your character has Stats, a Class, Skills, and Equipment that provide some capability in dangerous scenarios. You also get Saves, which defend you against the unexpected. But arguably the most critical rules of the game are related to Stress and Panic.
Stress builds over the course of a session of Mothership, since you gain it whenever you fail a roll. And Stress makes your Panic checks harder to pass. They set you up to lose your control later on in a given scenario. This is a great example of a mechanic that supports the horror points we laid out above!
Similarly, Cthulhu Dark (one of my absolute favorite rules-light games) uses the rising Insight score to measure a character’s understanding of the true horrific nature of their circumstances. When it reaches 6, the character is somehow lost or removed from the story, and the group narrates that climax together.
It’s fairly well known that I run a lot of horror in D&D fifth edition, specifically as part of the Darkplane setting. I’ve found the advice from Wes Schneider and Justin Alexander very useful in running D&D horror.
Whatever game you’re planning to run, I’ve got a few big tips for maximizing the sense of dread at the table:
Make sure players buy in and have safety tools
Get players to care about NPCs and each other
Keep rules streamlined
Avoid higher tiers/levels/capability
Build slow tension toward a release
Obscure the PCs’ senses and understanding
PLAYER INVESTMENT
Make sure you establish safety and consider a form of session zero to discuss the game before it starts. The horror genre more than any other requires players to buy in, and any player who's not on board for an immersive game of overwhelming threats and doomed heroes can inadvertently deflate that for others.
It won’t matter what system you’re using if the players aren’t on board for a serious horror game. No rules can force that to work.
Somehow get your players to care about NPCs and each other. They need to care about something, otherwise they won't fear it being harmed. Horror devolves into humor when we don't care.
The best advice I’ve ever gotten on how to endear NPCs to the players was from the brilliant designer Eric Menge. He said, “Let players witness the NPC suffering. Show them going through heartache, and players will start to care.”
STAY RULES LIGHT
You want to immerse everyone in the story. Don't spend unnecessary time on rules.
The more rules you have in play, the more likely they are to become an obstacle to the pace and players’ investment in the story. For that reason, I wouldn't recommend high levels in games like D&D when you’re running horror. Minimize tracking if it slows the pace. Reconsider anything that focuses on character “build.”
To the same end, make sure you use narration first and rules jargon second. The players should do the same. Describe what your action looks like, and then if you need to clarify any mechanics do that afterward. For best results, every player should support the storytelling.
Build Tension
Build slow tension toward a release at the end of the session. Some games have a mechanism that helps with this, like Mothership’s Stress or Cthulhu Dark’s Insight, but it’s not strictly necessary. You can accomplish the same effect with narrative tension and rising stakes. I’d recommend keeping any combat to a minimum in the first half of a given session. Let exploration and social pillars guide the bulk of play. Combat is a release: don't waste that moment by going there too early.
OBSCURE SENSES AND UNDERSTANDING
Games often involve strategic choices made with reliable information. But horror requires us to obscure that information to create dread. How do we make information frightening? Obviously, we don't want the players to know the exact stats of what they're fighting. Pitting a standard troll against seasoned D&D players is rarely scary, because the tension and mystery of that puzzle is gone.
Instead, we make monsters obscure or homebrewed. We reflavor everything. Imperfect meta-information is key.
Additionally, to create a sense of dread (which, again, is a fear of knowing), we need to subvert and surprise players when they engage with the exploration pillar. They should be required to explore, but often feel fear or regret when they find answers. Importantly we want to achieve this without simply punishing them. Infuse dreadful truths into the nature and history of the setting. Don’t just play “gotcha.”
HORROR AND DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
As Vi points out in the Dread review, there’s a lot of discussion about whether or not D&D is good for horror games. I usually hear someone say “D&D isn't made to do horror” (as if the design intent trumps what’s actually happening at my table). “It can be forced to do horror with some tinkering,” they say, “but it's not the best tool for the job.”
I think probably the most convincing line of that argument connects to the first tenet of horror I listed at the beginning of this article: loss of power. Characters in horror stories are often helpless, disempowered, and spiral out of control—whereas in D&D there’s a set curve of power growth. We don’t associate the game with disempowerment.
It’s important to note that D&D does usually emphasize the powerlessness of entering the dungeon. Players have features and abilities that make them exceptional, but they’re less capable in the dangerous locales of the adventure than they are in a cozy village or castle. It’s a relative loss of power.
Similarly, Ripley and the marines in Aliens are capable people you'd want for a dangerous mission. They're only weak compared to the xenomorph. The horror comes into play when they enter its environment and give up their advantages. There are plenty of horror examples in which heroes fight off some threats, while being ultimately powerless against the Final Evil. In other words, PCs don't have to be shrieking naked teenagers to fit the genre.
Personally, I do prefer horror where the Evil wins. That's hard to do in any roleplaying game unless players are totally bought into the idea. When I hear folks talk about death as a “feel-bad” experience that needs to be mitigated, I always think of how untrue that is in horror games. The assumption that bad things happening to characters inherently ruins the fun isn’t true in horror games where the whole thing is about immersing yourself in a character and caring deeply about them, but also knowing that they will likely die or be driven mad. There’s a real skill in allowing yourself as a player to invest in a PC that might suffer without becoming flippant or thinking of the character as staff or resources to manage.
But there's lots of horror (most of the works of Stephen King, for example) in which the good guys do overcome the Evil. Who says IT isn't horror? Heroes venture underground to confront an overwhelming monster that reflects the story’s deeper themes. Sounds like D&D.
So if power can be relative, threats can vary in lethality, and protagonists can triumph, D&D starts to look like a perfectly acceptable game for horror. It certainly has huge Gothic horror influences baked right in, from crypts to demons to giant wolves.
What confuses this is the fairly large number of existing rules distractions: positioning, action options, distance measurements, magic items, and more. In themselves, these elements don’t destroy danger, but they get the table talking about rules and character builds and all kinds of things that kill the tension. When framed this way, it seems obvious that the solution is to reduce the amount of distracting rules.
The Basic Rules are sitting right here. It’s surprisingly easy to refocus the game on its simple core and run a scenario that invites horror. Remember that everything outside those rules is optional and should be scrutinized before it’s added to the game.
In short, the absence of system can often be more important to horror than specific rules or design intent. Listening and communicating deliberately will get you just as far as Stress mechanics.
If you’re interested in how D&D can handle horror, you can pick up my free horror adventure Winter Child or watch the six-part actual play series Blood of My Blood that I ran on Ghostlight RPGs:
