As the title says, I was wondering what’d make for good horror in the medium, and thought I’d try to ask here!
Resist the urge to run Pathfinder or Dungeons and Dragons. Those systems empower the PCs to fight evil, and win. That power undermines the horror so completely, it may as well just be a coat of paint. You might think “hey, what if I just make the monster too strong to actually fight?” That’s going to lead to a TPK 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, the spellcaster will pull a wild move you didn’t anticipate and come out on top anyway.
In Pathfinder 2e, you’ll more likely get a chance of martials getting more crits than anticipated than wild spellcasters moves haha.
It can be done… but only by making the monster unfightable. Not “too strong”, literally invincible. To some, that’s horror enough haha.
That said, horror games are indeed the perfect setting to try out other systems, there are some out there like Mothership where the rules hold on one page.
I disagree. There are plenty of ways of presenting scenarios where the threat can be fought by the PCs and even be bested in a small, local sense - yet overall victory can be almost impossible.
Consider something as simple as a zombie apocalypse. Zombies aren’t much of a threat to any put the most low-level adventurers. But once the zombie outbreak becomes too large, the PCs will be unable to contain it - after all, they cannot be everywhere. Village after village, city after city, country after country will fall. They can still fight the zombies - and they should - but true “victory” may become impossible. Instead, the goal becomes: “How can we ensure the survival of as many people as possible?” And there is plenty of horror in that, as the PCs must make harsh choices on what to prioritize.
Nonsense, Pathfinder and D&D (not 5e) do horror fine. I mean, obviously, if you just dump the monster in front of them and tell them it’s a scary fight you’re not going to get anywhere, but other games don’t do that either. The horror comes in the build up, the discoveries they make along the way, and the feelings of helplessness they induce.
You can’t fight a small town tradition that’s just a little bit off, or a room full of humanoid bones that are unusually small. Combat has already finished when the party realises the monster they just defeated was only a pawn of something even more sinister. There’s nothing to roll initiative against when the party is discussing what they’ve discovered so far and can’t quite get the pieces to fit together.
Overwhelming personal danger from the monster itself is an incredibly small part of horror, and 5e couldn’t balance a fight to save its life, but 4e and PF2e are extremely built for it. From a skill challenge as “combat” against an enemy that can’t be beaten, to a PL+3 statblock and some hazards for a challenging fight with a high likelihood of killing players without causing a TPK, you can very much tune the difficulty of combat. Even PF1 and 3.x can do a good job at lower levels.
I’m a big proponent of using the right system for the job, but horror is such a broad, circumstances dependent genre that it’s a lot more about using the right horror for the system. There’s plenty of classic horror tropes that Ellen Ripley would shrug off, which is why she faces xenomorphs instead. A warhammer space marine wouldn’t find a zombie apocalypse particularly inconvenient, but trudging through a chaos and xenos infested hulk is still pretty terrifying for them. All horror has to be customised to fit the context.
Not a DM / etc but our DM had us all fill in a horror questionnaire to gauge what can and cannot be included in campaigns. We never did run a horror TTRPG (yet) but it was a nice thought.
Trajectory of Fear is a must read: https://nerdsonearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Trajectory-of-Fear.pdf
And it’s really important that the table has at least somewhat common understandin of what kind of narrative they are trying to achieve.
I love a horror game.
First having a system designed for horror will really help you to build tension. As someone else said D&D etc are bad for horror because you’re supposed to be powerful, it can work but takes more effort.
Next you need player buy in, everyone needs to want to be a little scared or uncomfortable. You’re also very unlikely to get horror movie levels of scared and trigger that fight or flight response as you’re all sat round a table playing games together.
Having a good session zero for horror is especially important, to make sure you do it safely, have your lines and veils or your X card available and discuss your boundaries. Some people will be fine with body horror but can’t manage anything with children or whatever.
Pacing is key to horror, leave the monster in the dark as long as possible, let the players imagine it and what is going on before you show them with a description. Give them downtime to decompress after a particularly tense moment. Let them make jokes but don’t join in during the tense bits, join in during the chill out section.
If your looking for recommendations: Trail of Cthulhu (gumshoe) was great. I ran a SCP style game, just picked a monster and had the PCs try and work out what was happening.
Delta Green is a really easy system to intro new people to, it’s d100 roll under and you’re playing X-files so people have a strong base to work from. Has some great modules to get you started.
Mothership is wonderful and my current obsession. It’s also d100 roll under and it’s basically Alien/s in terms of the setting but you could easily fit in whatever you wanted sci-fi wise. The modules that come with the box set are brilliant.
It’s easy to inject horror into most settings, my party were really light hearted and jokey in Blades in the dark but I had a few sessions where an automaton was hunting them which they found genuinely scary.
Honourable mention the Fate horror toolkit mostly for the GM advice.
Happy to give thoughts on anything horror related if you’ve got more questions.
Dread is commonly recommended but I haven’t tried it myself yet.
Trophy is another one. Listening to their podcast, I found it creepy indeed.
