Horror in Sorcerer: Does it happen, is it different?
Jaakko Koivula:
Heya.
Im doing a small bit about horror in indie-games in a finnish convention (http://2010.tracon.fi/). If it's ok, I'd like to strike up conversation about what do Ron and people in here think about horror in Sorcerer and indie games.
My thoughts:
I have this hunch, that old-school horror is somehow tied to a pretty strong GM. In traditional RPG:ing this doesn't really show. Call of Cthulhu has basically same sort of GM as D&D or Stormbringer. The GM is maybe supposed to keep the players "more in the dark" about the statistics of monsters etc. to preserve the mystery and fear of unknown. If the players know how many HP the Great Cthulhu has, they might just start calculating how many bazookas they need to kill it, instead of being utterly terrified by it.
In Forge-styled games the GM rarely is the sort of "I arbitrarely inflict horros upon you hapless mortals" -kind of narrator/director. But in Dead of Night for example, the GM actually is quite powerful again. He throws the punches and the players go running "eek!" and "aak!" around. The game is straightly aimed at scaring the players.
But how about Sorcerer or perhaps My Life With The Master? In Sorcerer all sorts of horror film -stuff happens. Demons devour everyone and their summoners or drive people insane with fear and magiks etc. But is it horror for the players? They've pretty much responsible for most of the stuff and usually know what they've got into, so can it scare the player horror-style? If you're the bastard that's causing all the horror to happen, can you get scared by it? Or do you need to be more of a helpless victim?
Im guessing my point is, how does the system matter concerning horror? Is simulationism more "suitable" for horror in sort of: "oh crap oh crap, that werewolf is going to eat me" -way, than narrativism? Im not trying to flame up any "getting immersed in character works better in simulationism than in narrativism" -quarrel, but it's just a thought I had.
Eero Tuovinen:
I'd say that the concept of "horror" is something you should qualify and analyze a bit for your lecture. It seems to be at the root of the concern here.
My experience with games like Sorcerer and MLwM is that they do horror, but it's a bit different sort than the dread and visceral panic you mostly get in games like Call of Cthulhu or Dead of Night. The "narrativist horror" is a gut-wrenching existential desperation in the face of awful reality. It's caused by getting the player to buy into the situation (the same as visceral horror) before representing the repulsive truth that is all too credible in the situation you sold.
(Somebody has written about terror vs. horror somewhere - Lovecraft, I think. Might be useful.)
Perhaps the difference is most clearly seen in the content that is typical of these slightly different emotional reactions? Terror and desperation are caused by feelings of immediacy and confusion, a pressing need to do something right or face terrible consequences. This is what you're mostly striving for in a game like Dead of Night, and you do it by building an atmosphere and expectations, then revealing the monster, causing horrible consequences for wrong choices, making it clear that there is no God out there to save the player character from his terrible fate. In comparison, horror in a narrativist game is usually consternation at observing and experiencing an inhuman static situation with no way out. Typical of it is a strong feeling of sympathy the players have for the poor character, and typical is that the character is somehow at least symbolically responsible for his condition.
I don't off-hand see why these types of horror couldn't be mixed in one game - arguably Call of Cthulhu strives for that. There's probably not any immediate creative agenda reason for preferring one over the other, except perhaps the idea that terror does not require choices, while horror does: terror is a passive experiental state, while horror seems to have something to do with moral repulsion and consequences of your actions. A slasher killing an innocent victim is a terror element, while a sorcerer opting to summon a demon and ending up growing a second, evil head out of his armpit is horror. It might be that we usually see terror paired with simulationism and horror paired with narrativism because the viewpoints are more facilely compatible with a specific creative agenda that way - it's sort of like you're spinning your wheels doing secondary stuff if you spend a session of Sorcerer doing atmosphere and hunting the PCs through an abandoned city with an axe when you could be getting down to the business of growing demon heads out of armpits, instead. (Could do the terrorful hunt thing afterwards, though - atmospheric terror fits in a focused narrativist game easily enough in the role of consequence) So economy of expression drives individual games towards the things they really want to do.
Hmm... MLwM actually has a minor role for experiental terror in the form of Horror Revealed (was that the English name?) - now and then the players get to narrate horror vignettes that are really rather similar to the "terror" I postulate above. A natural fit for that type of content in a narrativist game seems to be as a consequence of action.
Nocker:
D. Marshall Burns has written about horror in his draft of Rustbelt in the GM Guide section :
This game is about horror. I don’t mean that’s about fear, or even revulsion; that’s not what horror is. Horror is when something WRONG happens. Which probably triggers fear and/or revulsion, sure, but those aren’t in themselves horror.
Stephen King wrote a lot about this, terror and fear, also.
Jaakko Koivula:
Eero: I like the terror - horror split! Now I'd just have to think how I can translate that into finnish...
But that's an excellent point of approach. And I think it might also be pretty nearly the only possible one. Actually it illuminates nicely what Nocker wrote in the other comment. Horror as something WRONG happening is a totally different beast, than being afraid that the guy with a meathook kills you in five horrible ways. Looking at Sorcerer, Im more inclined to see WRONG horror, and less terror. It's an interesting point.
If terror is a passive thing, then that would naturally demand that someone else than the players are laying down the horrible on the characters. You can say that your character is passive and just randomly gets devoured by a demon, but if you as a player narrate it, it propably doesn't work as terror that much. Horror on the other hand might be more easily doable in a shared narrative -type of game. Everyone can individually descent into as much madness and depravity as they want, without the GM kicking in the door and making the cops interrupt all the child-molesting and necrophilia. No-one has anyone else to blame etc.
Hmm. I like this distinction. Gotta give more thought on this.
Eero Tuovinen:
Most fortunate that we could be helpful here - I thought that everybody's encountered the old saw about terror vs. horror before. I agree with Nocker that King has written something about it, too.
My pick for Finnish translation of the distinction would be "kauhu" vs. "kammo". Needs definition, but so do the English concepts - my understanding is that standard English doesn't really differentiate between those two in any generally accepted manner.
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