Archive for October, 2011

As the last post on Horror Week, let’s get into some GM talk. It’s all good and well to design a horror game — really, it’s fun! — but the heart of the horror game is the same as in any game: the performance.  The playing. The GMing. And my Cardinal Rule of Horror: Cheat.

Horror, more than other games, is about the emotional beats impressed on you by others. In a traditionally structured RPG, that’s the GM impressing the beats of anxiety, dread, fear, hope, etc. on the players. Since that’s job #1, you need to use any means necessary to pull that off, even if it’s something that has nothing to do with the game. Here’s a goodie bag of tricks. (Like any goodie bag on Halloween, some of these will be sweet and some will be sour, so handle with care.)

Atmosphere tricks like mood lighting & music are often cited, and they’re total cheats. Awesome cheats, since they aren’t about the game providing mood, but the surrounding environment.

The mechanics of the game can also be a cheat if they’re tied to the more primitive part of the brain. Dread’s use of Jenga causes anxiety because of Jenga, which is a total cheat. But it’s a great cheat! That’s why people love Dread. Similarly, making resources tangible goes a long way toward provoking anxiety when they’re taken away, more so than abstract numbers reducing. When I ran D&D, everyone had their hit points out as poker chips, and I would reach across when they were hit as the Hand of Death. It was great. (And for my NPCs, all numbers on paper they couldn’t see, so they couldn’t do it back.)

Hidden information in games that don’t call for it is a great cheat. Hide hit points & sanity.

Make hidden rolls for things like perception checks, or when dealing with what foes do to the characters. Roll at times when it’s not needed. Roll more dice that you need to, just for that disturbing clatter of dice. Hell, you can even get really trippy, and have the facial reaction you’re projecting also random with the rest of the roll. Chessex makes facial expression dice that are great for this. (Yes, I am in fact telling you to lie with your facial expressions.)

Shorten the roll boxes to keep the emotional beats of discordant mechanics from taking hold of the game. One of the reasons that sanity in Call of Cthulhu works despite it construction is that it’s a really short roll beat with no fiddle, so you can push in hard with whatever other emotions are there and take the reigns riding out of that. Hell, handwave rules when you need to.[1]

Be discordant. Create expectations and then violate them. The world in a horror story cheats from the perspective of the real world (though the good ones keep to their own  internal, unknown consistency. Or intentionally done, a la Lovecraft).

Get physical. Scare the player by suddenly shaking the game, and use that beat to weave the fictional fear.

Whatever it takes to create and sustain the right emotional beats for the moment is fair game. You might not view some of these as cheats, of course, but depending on the game, these are. Depending on your gaming group or the folks at your con game table, these are. And just like in any performance, audience[2] matters. More than in other genres, you step into the role of the magician, and the audience is looking forward to you manipulating and misdirecting them for their amusement.[3]

Happy Halloween, friends!

- Ryan

[1] Later I get to talk about why this is a horrible idea most of the time. :) But it’s a horrible idea I employ often in horror.

[2] Just happens that this audience also are your co-creators. I’m sure I have some people wincing at my use of this word, but it feels apt in a GMed horror game.

[3] Remember: not all emotional manipulation is negative. We consume stories & get romantically involved for that ride.

More Horror Week! Now that we have the beginning of a foundation for talking about emotional beats, let’s talk about one of the darlings of horror gaming: Call of Cthulhu‘s Sanity system.

I’m only been a RPG player since 1995, so Call of Cthulhu predates my history with the hobby. Still, I know the history well enough to say the following: Call of Cthulhu blew minds when it came out. The idea that your sanity was something that could be assaulted, that you were fighting a two-front war against the horrible unknown — trying to survive both physically and psychologically to finish the task and fight another day — was a new, amazing thing. (And I should also say that I’ve had fun playing Call of Cthulhu with some really great Keepers, including CoC advocate Kenneth Hite[1].)

Today, we see it as another hit point mechanic, and one that isn’t particularly interesting, but that’s what happens when anything is exposed to enough time and we watch over advancement pass something by. At the time, it was novel. It changed gaming. And it should be respected for that.

But now that we have a more advanced understanding of gaming and see different experiences, the sanity system is flat. It’s a standing hit point mechanic where the triggers and consequences around it have a different color. Here’s an outline of old-school hit point systems:

• Something assaults you, causing “damage”
• You may or may not roll to mitigate the damage, depending on the system
• If you’ve taken sufficient damage, you lose control of your character either temporarily or permanently
• If not, you might still take some form of penalty forward (a.k.a. the death spiral)

There is nothing particularly tense or scary about that, when all the inputs involved are known.

Call of Cthulhu is a sign of its time, a very detail-rich setting with loads of gameable material. So we know things like how much Sanity loss the The King in Yellow does 1d3/1d6 (for those who aren’t familiar, that’s 1d3 sanity loss if you make your sanity check, 1d6 otherwise). If you see a book, you as a player know that it’ll cost some range of Sanity. You look at the current Sanity on your sheet and figure you can risk it, so you describe picking up the book and reading it.

Let’s look at the emotional beats (refer to my chart from yesterday’s post):

Expo in: “I pick up and read the book.” {I know this is going to cost me Sanity loss, that’s how the game works. I can risk or spend this amount for information. Beat: superiority/calculation}

Roll A: GM calls for the roll against current Sanity, which the character has at 60. Minimal rational footprint, no change in the beat.[2]

Roll B: Roll! {Potential slight inclusion of hope or dread if the dice take more than a second to roll, like if they roll of the table. Otherwise, nill.}

Here, I’ll branch into two paths, failure & success.

Path 1-Roll C: Look at the roll. 64! Full sanity loss gonna happen. {Beat: failure/defeat/gamble loss}

Path 1-Expo out: The GM has one of those gleeful grins and describes the sense of horror in the moment, the player rolls with it. {No inclusion of a dread beat, as due to Roll C and the tropes of Lovecraft gaming, this is expected. Furthered the beat of defeat.}

Path 2-Roll C: Look at the roll. 32! Only partial sanity loss. {Beat: triumph/gamble won. Exactly the wrong beat for this moment.}

Path 2-Expo out: The GM describes the sense of horror in the moment, the player rolls with it. {No inclusion of a dread _or_ relief beat, as due to Roll C and the tropes of Lovecraft gaming, this is expected.}

I’ll bet dollars to donuts that these beats were very different in the early days of Call of Cthulhu, when the tropes were fresher and the mechanic still carried with is a sense of novelty and wonder. Keep in mind that external emotional beats do influence the game, so a game that blows your mind will punctuate the emotional beats it intends to produce — especially if you’re also looking to celebrate the genre you’re playing.

When Sanity is known and calculable, people will calculate & weigh risk. Ideally, the players don’t know what will trigger sanity loss or the amount of sanity loss threatened, but in reality — and we have to live in reality when dealing with the psychology of gamers — they do. Even if you invent something whole cloth, upon contact with it, those become known with exposure. Say you have a haunted house game, and some of the doors speak to you in an ancient tongue when touch the doorknobs.

The players may be on the lookout for books and the like as sanity loss vectors, so when someone touches the doorknob to the attic, that’s a surprise when you say “Roll sanity.”

Suddenly, everyone at the table feels a dread emotional beat, because that came out of nowhere from their perspective. And that’s hot, as any horror GM will tell you.

But then comes the additional information that gives the players context for risk management: the sanity loss. Say the door is a common 1d6/1. The first person to touch a doorknob succeeds, only losing 1 point. The dread feeling is now replaced by a really fascinating beat, the emotional reward from knowledge acquisition — the same thing we get when we surf Wikipedia for hours for seemingly no reason.[link]

From there, you now have risk management. The first character, the metaphorical canary in the coal mine, has shown everyone else something about the world. Now they’ll do stuff like try to touch the doorknob with gloves on, or create apparatuses to open doors without touching them, etc.

Let’s move on from critique to fiddling.

These would be dread beats if the risk was incalculable. So how do you do that, while changing the system as little as possible? Hide the information. Don’t show the player’s current sanity, or show the loss in each moment. Present consequences with little apparent rhyme or reason. Let’s look at the hypothetical door example, but with the players not knowing their current sanity rating or anything else.

Expo in: Player says “With my gun drawn, I open the attic door.” GM: “Oh, you touch the doorknob…” {beat: confidence/comfort in this specific moment, possible dread about the _next_ beat rather than this one.}

Roll A: “…Roll Sanity” {Beat: dread}

Roll B: Player rolls dice. {Beat: dread/hope}

Again, we’ll take two branches here, failure & success. In both cases, Roll C is going to be a long box with multiple beats.

Path 1-Roll C: Player not knowing what the dice mean, but having to be the agent of the randomness, says the result and looks at the GM. {Beat: hope/dread.}

The GM shakes his head, notes down sanity loss on his hidden sheet… (Beat: hope dashed, all dread all the time}

Path 1-Expo out: …and starts writing something down on an index card. The silence fills the room. {Beat: jesus fuck dread}

The GM hands the card to the player, who reads it. The players look at his reaction. {Beat: continue the dread}

The card tells the player: “You hear screams, dreadful screams, from inside your mind. A language you can _almost_ make out. Hey, is that your mother’s voice? Isn’t she dead? Describe how you lose your shit and get all incomprehensible.” {Beat: horror at revelation, dread for other players at facial reaction.}

Player describes. GM grins, turns to the others, and says “What do you do?” {Beat: dread & horror at the unknown}

Path 2-Roll C: Player not knowing what the dice mean, but having to be the agent of the randomness, says the result and looks at the GM. {Beat: hope/dread.}

The GM says “Okay, you keep yourself together”, notes down sanity loss on his hidden sheet… (Beat: hope, but with some upcoming dread}

Path 2-Expo out: …and starts writing something down on an index card. The silence fills the room. {Beat: continues, with more dread than hope, but not as intense as if failed}

The card would be different at the end, allowing the character to keep agency. While still being shaken.

I’ll admit that I’m cheating here a bit, but going into further detail than I did for the Call of Cthulhu example, but the hidden information gives the GM more tools to craft those emotional beats. The secret notes thing is a common Cthulhu trope, so all that could easily be used in the above beat — just not as well, when the players have all the arithmetic context for the result in their minds.

To be entirely fair, there is nothing new in what I’m saying. This has been a common criticism of Call of Cthulhu for a long time, and hidden information is old technology. The reason I wanted to write this today was to link these old ideas to discussion on emotional beats, because I think that backs up things people have talked about regarding horror games for years.

Horror Week ends on Monday, Halloween. For that post, I’ll share with you my Cardinal Rule of Horror Games. (And as always, I don’t post on the weekends, so I’ll see you Monday!)

- Ryan

(The problem with writing about a game I haven’t played in over a year while not near my library to look it up is the dread that I’m misremembering the mechanics. Emotional beat: dread!)

[1] Ken asserts that Call of Cthulhu is the best RPG, and so this post could look like I’m picking a fight with him. But if we judge CoC not on today’s merits but on the merits of when it came out, he’s totally right. Same with me & Unknown Armies. At the time, it was the best RPG, and in my mind it still is, even though you could do a similar post deconstructing how UA uses outdated tech. I’ll cop to that.

[2] I think I may have found that neutral thing I said I wasn’t sure exists. If you don’t have a decision to make and the interpretation is quick and _able to be pre-calculated by the player prior to the roll_, then it carries forward whatever emotional beat held before. That last part is key, because it means that it was already merged into the Expo In beat if the roll was expected. (Okay, maybe it’s not neutral, per se, but non-impacting.)

For my third post on Horror Week, I’ll get deeper into something we’ve only been talking about on the surface: the twin steams of rational & emotional output. Role-playing games are thing we do to craft story or celebrate an idea or IP or to enjoy triumph — all things that are emotional at their core. The rules themselves tend to be expressed and executed as a series of rational actions — do this, then this, then if X do Y, etc. — but we feel emotional beats based on what we’re doing together at the table — holy shit I’m scared, man I’m frustrated, yay I won.

These are intertwined. Hell, let’s go with a visual. (Warning: this post will be light on examples, because it’s pretty long as-is. As a result, I’m not sure if it will make sense to people who aren’t me. Please comment with questions!)

Map of mechanical & emotional beats

On the Rational Brain side, we see the linear expression of the game. There’s some exposition & interaction, then we get to a point where decision mechanics like a roll come into play. You do the pre-roll analysis & fiddling, then you roll, then you do post-roll fiddling & interpretation. Once you’re got that processed, you’re back into exposition & interaction influenced by those steps, until a decision mechanic comes back into play.

Like I said, linear. That’s how our books tend to express the rules (when they don’t suck). That’s how we tell the stories about our games. But our brains don’t work in discrete chunks, which is actually part of why we love playing these games. Different forms of game, from telling stories to playing with dice, blend together to one stream of emotional beats. We feel the vastness of our games. They contain multitudes.[1]

On the Emotional Brain side, we have the emotional beats we’re feeling at that moment. They’re all simple (though if you explain them with a rational context, as we often do, they sound complex; that’s a lie), things like: excitement, fear, anger, satisfaction, hope, dread, triumph, defeat, boredom, confusion, irritation, intrigue, superiority, and so on. If you can express it in one word[2], it’s simple enough to be an emotional beat.

The emotional beats in exposition are all about the table dynamic. Whatever was going on in the fiction as we’re experiencing it, as well as the social dynamic at the table, will feed into the next piece of the rational flow: the mechanics. But unlike our rational participation, the emotional beats don’t stop when a new one starts. It lingers, blending with the beats that are about to happen. That’s why on my chart it looks like a cascade with the gradient — blending, baby!

When designing a game, you may have an intended series of emotional beats you want out of the game, especially with those that surround your mechanics. Like, for a Alien-style horror game, I want the game to support & produce beats like fear, dread, isolation, triumph, regret, hope, and so on. For most of these, I’ll rely on the GM & table to produce, but I need to make sure my mechanics don’t trash that.

Going into the first Roll box, the players will still be riding on whatever emotional beat they’re feeling. That’s awesome! That’s what makes the game go! (And why playstorming is sometimes too quick to detect such subtleties.)

If your goal is to prolong an emotional beat throughout your mechanical iteration, for each of the Roll boxes you want to either:

• Have that part of your game produce a compatible emotional beat
  (like handing the baton in a relay race to another strong runner)
• Have that part of the game produce a neutral emotional beat
  (which so far I’ve found to be nearly impossible)
• Have it be as short as possible, so whatever emotional beat it produces does not overwrite the emotional beat from the exposition & interaction
  (so that it’s only a small bump in the road, and if the previous beat was strong enough it’ll only mildly slow down)
• Have it use more natural language than math
  (which allows the continued injection of a prior beat)
• Have it incorporate a significant tactile component
  (which contacts our emotional brains on a deeper level than just words or numbers. Great example: Dread.)

If one of those Roll boxes has a tendency to output a toxic emotional beat, one that ruins the flow of the game, then either the mechanic is wrong in general or wrong for the game you’re playing. My comment yesterday about Gumshoe being wrong for horror is because I have seen & have heard others talk about how in the post-roll analysis, the Roll C box, regret is a common output regardless of success or failure. (Not that that’s how people talk about it. They say things like “Yeah, I really hate it when wasted points on a roll that succeeded without them.” or other natural language bits.)

Why GURPS was great for horror back in the day was because the Roll A box was both short & used natural language: “Jumping the the fire escape? Roll Acrobatics!” There were no decisions beyond that. Roll B was quick, just roll 3d6, add them, and see if they’re equal/under your skill (plus or minus some modifier, which I generally never said, so people would do some math to say “…made by 3″ or “fuck, missed by 2″). Roll C was also super short, because the mechanical-to-fiction output was just binary: did you succeed? did you fail? Bam

Now, ideally Roll C will create a spike of new emotional output — triumph or dread in the case of a binary output in a horror game. That new emotional beat, mixed with the emotional beat from the Expo In part, ideally get merged together to give you something to ride on in Expo Out. When those emotional beats clash, or when the new emotional beat triggers something rather unintended, then you have a problem.

Granted, most of the time, this is a table issue, not a mechanic design issue. But if the problem is repeated often enough, it’s likely that the mechanics need looking at to see if there’s a way to reduce how often the wrong beat is produced.[3]

(Incidentally, when we say “a good GM can save a bad game,” this is what we’re talking about. A good GM can push emotional beats during mechanical parts by continuing interactions, and can work to shorten mechanic parts that are particularly toxic to a desired emotion. Ever see someone just hand wave a rule because it gets in the way of excitement and action? Yeah, that. Ever see a shift in engagement techniques in Expo Out to cover for a limp feeling during the Roll boxes? Exactly.)

This is how I judge a horror game — not on whether it has monsters in it, because that’s easy, but on if it pushes & outputs reliably the right emotional beats or gets out of the way[4] or the table crafting those beats. (Granted, I judge the former stronger than the latter, but I’ll take what I can get.)

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you why many sanity systems fail in this regard.[5]

- Ryan

(This is a really dense idea, and I feel like I just scrapped the iceberg on a massive topic. But hopefully it’s a reasonable enough start.)

[1] I could not resist.

[2] Particularly in German.

[3] Or cop out by calling it an “advanced RPG” or whatever. That’s also an option I’ve seen done.

[4] By the way, having short Roll A/B/C boxes is typically what we mean by saying “The system got out of the way of our fun.”

[5] Because I’m totally not spoiling for a fight. Nooooooo.

Yesterday, I started off Horror Week with a discussion about dice mechanics in horror games. There were some comments about how to do a variant on Fate that would work, which got a “it won’t work” reply from me. Today, I’ll talk about why it doesn’t work for horror, because on the surface it seems like a good idea.

Alan said (among other things):

For Fate you could front-load the expenditure of fate points and only allow for the +1/+2 bonus, never the reroll. But I suspect this will lead to further, hard to predict ramifications.

This is a “how badly do you want it” mechanic, much like Gumshoe‘s General Abilities mechanic. And for horror, these are toxic.

Imagine if you will the following hypothetical slice of a game session:

GM: Okay, so you turn into the alley, with the horror behind you. Shit! The alley is a dead end. There’s a fire escape along one of the buildings that’s secured, and a large & rather full garbage bin nearby. What do you do?

Player: Could I reach the fire escape from the garbage bin?

GM: You could try.

Player: I totally do!

GM: Roll Athletics.

Player: Okay, so I have four points in Athletics. How many should I spend…

And now all the tension in that moment is deflated, thanks to shifting from tense narration to an abstract economic game. It’s a decision point that moves from the lizard brain into the rational brain, due to the fact that it gets into intangible numbers rather than natural language and requires something we humans are good at doing: wishing to keep what we have and worrying about loss & risk. In that regard, the mini-economic game is interesting, but it’s a very different game from “dear god I feel dread” that a horror game need to survive.

Likely outcomes:

Player: I’ll spend two points. [Rolls] Barely succeeded!

GM: Sweet! You leap to the fire escape in time!

That’s the good outcome.

Player: I’ll spend two points. [Rolls] Missed by two! Crap! I should have spend them all.

And there’s the outcome where the dread of the poor reaction is mixed with the anger of miscalculating a bet. Two different emotions from two different places that conflict rather than support each other.

Or…

Player: I’ll spend two points. [Rolls] Made by two! (Wish I hadn’t spent those points.)

And there’s the outcome where the elation of a good outcome is mixed, again, with the anger of miscalculating a bet. Two different emotions from two different places that conflict even worse.

If you’re not trying for tension in a game, this mechanic is fine. It’s an interesting drama management system, where you ask the question of “how much do you want this?” But in a horror game, abstract economics breaks tension at its most crucial moment: the point right before mechanical revelation. You have to rebuild quickly coming out of that moment of gambling and the emotional hook related to that outcome. And that’s not fine, which is why the “maybe you could spend Fate points before the roll” doesn’t solve the problem.

(Which is why I have this odd desire to run a Chinatown (the film) game with Gumshoe, rather than one of its horror variants or and of the games where you need to know a lot of unique IP in order to know why the clues in the game matter.)

Such mechanics also prompt thought & consideration before the roll, to weigh spending more or fewer abstract resources. What if they weren’t abstract? What if we could use natural language rather than numbers to introduce the “how bad do you want this” element? What if that wasn’t a resource, but a form of consequence generation? What if whatever currency you used had a linked meaning in the fiction rather than purely dramatic management?

A lot of questions to ask about what feeds into a horror mechanic, which is why I love looking at horror systems.

Audience participation: What systems work for you for keeping tension? What don’t? Why? It doesn’t have to be specifically horror, as long as it keeps strong tension and could probably be used for horror.

- Ryan

Welcome to Horror Week here on my blog! :D

I played a lot of GURPS back in the day, and I was particularly drawn to GMing horror games. I couldn’t tell you why that was; at the time, I hated horror movies. (This was before I watched the Alien franchise, and began understanding horror went beyond slasher flicks.) The games were successful — there was a sense of grit & dread from the system that I could tap into.

Then I played Unknown Armies, which friends & long-time readers know that I claim it’s the best RPG in existence. I loved the feel it has, even though today I feel the whiff factor is a lot less to my liking.

Of course, I’ve played a lot of Fate, and in my experiments trying to make a Fate horror game, I have formulated a hypothesis on what makes a central mechanic work in horror:

Decisions about resources to bear for a given moment are made before the dice are cast. Once the dice are cast, they cannot be manipulated by other resources.

Or, to put it simply:

No fucking rerolls.

The dice are a threshold of uncertainty & capriciousness. In a game where the stakes are set to be harsh and uncaring, like any good horror game, that feels tense. You have to decide whether this die roll (and whatever resources you’re putting to it) before rolling. This shifts the hope in this situation to a single moment in the dice, and hope is the core element of horror.

When you have a game that allows for resources to be marshaled after a roll, like rerolling or adding a bonus like in Fate‘s aspect invocations, you completely destroy that emotional grip the dice have. Immediately, your mind goes to the thought of “well, if this roll doesn’t work, I have these three aspects I can tap and some Fate points…” Some equate this with player agency or games with powerful, competent characters, but it’s more primal than that. It’s where we put our hope or faith in a moment — is it one where we have some control, or is it one where we don’t?

All games are, in some way or another, about emotional points — from the simple celebrations of being victorious to satisfaction of executing a narrative arc. Horror games are about celebrating that feeling of tension and hope of triumph in spite of the wolf in the darkness. At least, the horror I want to play. You know, Alien. Or (some episodes of) The X-Files. Placing hope outside of you (the dice) rather than within you (your ability to deal with a shit roll through resources & other effects) is key.

Games like Fate & Cortex Plus can’t do Alien-style horror, but they can do urban fantasy[1], which is the kissing cousin of horror. That gets into a different discussion, one of theme versus tropes. It takes more than a die mechanic to make a game horror[2], but the wrong die mechanic can turn it into urban fantasy very quickly. And there are die mechanics that seem like they should work for horror, but create other emotional responses that distract from the moment.

All that is what I intend to write about this week. Because, you know, it’s Horror Week! :D

- Ryan

[1] Duh.

[2] Pro tip: you can’t just tack on a sanity or madness system and say “Look at me! I’m horror!“