My sister and I should start a podcast because when we get started discussing things it always breaks down into laughter. We talk a lot about gaming, history, current events, and I try to explain different things I have learned over my years playing pen-and-paper games.
Today I was trying to explain why horror games are better done without artificial concepts like insanity rolls, fear checks, bravery checks, or any sort of other rules layer that sits between you and what goes bump in the night.
So you head towards the abandoned farmstead in the dark forest on the hill. The Mayor sent you and your companions here to find out why the families of this area fled their homes and never returned. The clouds hang low in the overcast sky.
And around the farmstead you see arcane symbols, sacrilegious icons, and pentagrams weaved from branches and twigs hanging from trees.
Also hanging from the trees are the carcasses of dozens of dead animals.
Then I told her, "Okay make a fear check, and suffer 1d10 sanity loss! Remember at zero you lose your character forever."
I paused, and she said okay, and then I said, "Did that pull you out of the moment?"
And she saw what I was talking about. The fear should be in the mind of the player, the person experiencing this scene through their character there, and not filtered through a layer of rules where what the player fears the most is losing control of their character through a rule that says they have to.
Fear Mechanics
A lot of games do the fear and sanity mechanics, Alien, Call of Cthulhu, and many more. Other games have fear mechanics added in optional systems, like GURPS, Pathfinder, and others. This isn't to say these games are inferior, but that I prefer the OSR (Old School Revolution) method of creating fear in the mind of the player.
This is the way I like to play, and I feel removing that game mechanic layer lets you tell better stories. Admittedly, it is hard to tell good horror, and finding players that understand how this all works is very tough too. Not many groups and players do it this way, and the more mass-market manner of handling fear and insanity through mechanics is needed to help newer players through how they should act.
There are times I like to settle back and play games with fear mechanics too, when I want that sort of "playing the rules" feeling of working within that rules limitation - more like a game, less like a story. The Alien RPG does a great job with this sort of "rules based fear" and is very enjoyable to play as a board game, but I am not feeling the same sort of fear as I do in an OSR horror game.
It isn't easy telling a good horror story, and in some rules systems death is so hard the players barely ever feel fear. Fear becomes a mechanical process that tells a player, "you lose control of your character" and that is what the player ends up fearing.
Not the strange sounds of labored breathing shaking the floorboards. Not the dark basement where the sounds become stronger. And not the space between the floorboards a human head on a tentacle jumps from and attacks. And again, in some games, the players know the encounter needs to be balanced and they will win regardless, so roll initiative.
The mechanics of the system, and the fear mechanics themselves, remove the player from the story.
Players fear the rules more than they do what is happening in the moment, and that isn't horror.
Advanced Mechanics?
She mentioned, what if the fear score could be gamed so that it improves and you become less and less afraid over repeated encounters? We switched to a fear of spiders for this one, and while "leveling up" a "fear of spiders" disadvantage seems like a fun mechanical answer to the problem, I said this is better done through roleplaying. A player-character is afraid of spiders. They refuse to help the party fight a giant spider. The player is awarded bonus XP at the end of the session for playing in-character, even putting others or themselves at a huge disadvantage.
We don't need rules for that on the player side or the referee side. They get in the way, and this is best left for players to work through and roleplay. This is the fun of shared storytelling and letting players handle this instead of mechanics is more freedom and empowerment for players in their stories.
It was an interesting discussion with her, since we are all so trained to "gamify" everything these days. What do you do to make something fin? Make rules for it! She made a lot of good points on creating a fun system, and her ideas on "buying down" a disadvantage and having that give you special abilities are very cool.
She is a budding gamer designer herself, which makes me endlessly happy.
The OSR as a Theory
But we were talking about two different things. She was trying to come up with rules to make fear mechanics work, I was trying to say we don't need any rules at all. It took a while to communicate the OSR theory of removing rules and only keeping what is needed, and focusing on the roleplaying as the primary driver of interaction and rulings.
In hindsight, I should have introduced her to the OSR theory before the discussion. I do feel this is one of the things we forget when speaking about OSR games to newer players, as a lot of new players to OSR games feel they have to "find the rule for X" when a situation comes up.
In the OSR, a lot of the game is left to the interactions between the referee and players. Want to search for a secret door? Tell me where you are searching and how - no roll needed. In a more modern game, the new player would be asking, "What are the rules for searching and what skill do I need to roll?"
A lot of phone and computer games "train" players to expect a rule, and the OSR concept of "you don't need them" seems alien at first. This is how we started playing these games, and this concept is one of the core principles of OSR games.
We Roleplay It
In the OSR, the player elects to take a fear or phobia as a personality quirk, and roleplays it whenever it comes up. If they roleplay it well and it adds to the story, the referee rewards their roleplaying at the end of the session. If some day they overcome their fear by finally defeating a village-eating spider, give them an XP bonus for conquering that fear and it doesn't come up again. That arc and story is over. Players are free to have new phobias or personality quirks, and the referee rewards good play with XP, treasure, or other rewards.
Same with fear. Everyone is free to come up what their characters do when that head on a tentacle bursts from the floorboards. If a player has their character flee the house screaming because that is what the character would do, putting everyone at a disadvantage, that is great roleplaying. That isn't "hurting the party" in any way, which is what the some gamist gamers would likely say.
This person ruined the combat encounter.
They caused a TPK.
This person sucks as a player.
No, they don't suck. If this is a horror game, having your character act like a character in a horror movie is fair game. It is expected. If a player makes that choice, I would support them. Maybe they end up helping the party in the end when they run outside. Maybe they will be the last one left. Maybe they will hear the sloshing in the well where the heart of the tentacle lies, and get an opportunity to attack the most vulnerable part of the monster - and save the day.
Maybe they will run outside and get mauled off-screen by the werewolf in the woods and never be seen again.
This is horror, after all.
Reverse Rules Interference
What is more important is the story and what the players experience. Yes, there is a loss of control. The character who ran outside? Within a horror game it is perfectly fine for the referee to not tell the player the werewolf killed their character and leave everyone wondering, "What happened to him or her?" It happened so fast even the player controlling the character never knew.
They may find the body later.
They may never.
They likely won't be told how it happened either and are left to figure that out for themselves.
This is different than a more normal game in that the horror genre needs these feelings of fear and uncertainty. Everyone knows what they are signing up for and getting into here, or at least I hope they do. it is harder to do horror with a set of rules that explicitly lays out what the players can and can't do, and what the referee is and is not allowed to do. You get these situations where a horror situation, like the above, comes up, and the player will start arguing rules to say why that did not just happen.
"But I should have gotten a search or sense roll!"
Again, the rules are inserting themselves into the story and getting in the way of the experience, this time from the player's side and using them to invalidate the story and referee's rulings. As a board game, yes, this is fairness built into the rules and what a lot of players expect these days.
As horror and OSR? Ruling everything feels out of place and it distracts from the experience, which is the most important part of the game. Remember, an OSR referee is a neutral party and not playing against anyone. This isn't gotcha, but one person has to be in charge of the game's "secret information" and ruling what happens when player X does Y.
With no rules between X and Y to disrupt that cause and effect.
