This week's installment is from our friends at Storyweaver, and it's a great essay by Ray Duell - a GM discussion on why fear is important and how to wield fear in an RPG to maximum effect; a perfect piece for the season! Ray is a the writer of Transit to Perdition, one of the creepiest adventures many folks have ever played. According the the Storyweaver folks, at cons he is known as "The Master of Suspense." We suspect he knows things man was not meant to know...
The Only Thing You Have To Fear… by Ray Duell
What is it about fear that attracts us? Why do we actually enjoy being scared (in a controlled way)? Many quite well-balanced people are fascinated by the macabre, which is borne out by all the CSI’s and NCIS shows out there at the moment. But understanding fear a bit better can really help you run a horror game that much more visceral.
Fear is a very base emotion, and is one of the prime motivators of our lives. The higher brain functions can override fear, but it never truly goes away. Fear comes from our reptile brains, that very low-level part of the brain that is way more concerned with survival than the right, wrong or consequences of any situation. When something horrible happens to us, often it is our higher thinking that takes a holiday first, and it is our base thinking that is left to make sure we survive. That is why fear is important – it literally means survival. But as all emotions are a tangle, pain close to pleasure and all that, it also happens that fear isn’t that far away from excitement either. We can get scared, and like it. That’s why the horror movie industry has done so well over the years, and why kids tell spooky stories round the camp fire. Hell that’s why we have Halloween in the first place (sorry, the candy is actually secon! dary. If it wasn’t, it’d be called Candy Day or something like that).
So quite a hefty proportion of quite sane people enjoy being creeped out, a little terrified, and left wondering at the seemingly macabre nature of the universe; and there are few better mediums to explore this than a good, solid, horror-themed RPG. Be it Call of Cthulhu, with it’s ancient gods from the outer darkness and ‘things man was never meant to know,’ or like the game I work on, Rapture: The End of Days, where Alien meets The Exorcist, the basis of a good horror RPG is the titillation of fear. Yet a lot of horror RPG’s fall a bit flat, ending up more like DnD than Nightmare on Elm. So what can you do about it?
Think about all the best scary experiences you’ve had. Now I’m talking about ones that scared you and creeped you out (not real life terrible situations, that most people DON’T enjoy). What was it about them that generated this reaction? Sure, when the big bad jumps out, starts shredding people up, that was confronting, but did it generate fear? No. It generated the desire to flee, but fear, fear was over, because you KNEW what it was, and thus had some idea what to do about it (like run the hell away!). Remember back to when you were a kid. You were probably afraid of the dark (I know I was). You didn’t know exactly why, but you were afraid of it. Now you probably know it’s what hides in the dark that’s the problem, and shining some light on it usually helps.
But in the end, it’s when we DON’T KNOW what we are dealing with that the fear gnaws at us. THAT is what you want to use to creep out your players. It is the fear that we generate within our own minds that scares us the most. The unknown brings a plethora of concerns and phobias bubbling to the surface, and they are as individual as we are. That’s how you scare people… you don’t come up with the stuff that scares them most… they do.
In the Rapture games, we use a cycling narration mechanic to describe the scene after the dice is rolled. Some people get really creative when it’s their turn to narrate, often throwing their own fears into the pot (or plot!) to make it even more interesting. If the players aren’t ‘in the mood,’ we like to help by use creepy soundscapes and haunting music, mood lighting and sound effects to get the players ‘into the moment.’ Drip feed them small bits of information. Give them something to investigate. Make things… understandable, but just a little bit wrong. An undercurrent of unease is a great thing to build tension. Short, sharp, terminal surprises can be great (some GM’s like to kill a few characters off early, then let the rest ‘sweat it out’), but don’t overdo them, or it turns back into a DnD hackfest. Keep the focus of the fear illusive, ever present, but not entirely revealed. Once the (surviving) players stumble on the focus of the terror, make sure it makes sense in some sort of perverse logic kind of way. Nothing breaks the fear factor faster than something horrible just appearing for no apparent reason.
Of course it helps if the rules of the game support the horror genre. A madness mechanic is always helpful, such as you find in the various Cthulhu rules sets. Losing your sanity and playing it is half the fun, after all. And if the game also has a fear mechanic built in, well that can play right into the GM’s storyweaving hands! You’ll find both of these in the Rapture: The End of Days Core Rules, plus an experience mechanic that promotes doing the silly things that, in horror movies, gets the characters killed off, one by bloody one.
So you can have fun with fear, but just don’t freak yourself out with it this Halloween, OK?
Get `em scared, folks! It's that time of the year!~ SPF (10-26-2011)
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