Unintential Player-oriented horror in Character-oriented horror systems
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hi Dithmer,
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And looking at Dread, it seems to connect the Tension directly to the mechanics themselves, in the way that to some people (myself included) Jenga in itself is pretty good at creating Tension, thus alleviating pressure from the GM. Intorporeal called it 'physiologically taxing' for the players, but it definitely has an impact on how the GM has to handle things; considering that the Jenga is the only mechanic, it doesn't seem like he has a lot to do apart from setting the scenes and determining the challenges, whereas the GM in Dead of Night has a bunch of tools he can play with.
While I was really excited about the idea of using Jenga as a game mechanism for a horror RPG, for the very reason you describe, I grew increasingly frustrated with the game text and the GM role it set out. Basically the text was saying, “Use the Jenga tower to fool the players and do everything the way you planned it anyway.” You’d find a lot of those silly meta-game tricks you were talking about described in the book. They even managed to turn the Jenga tower into one of them, effectively.
Still I think the Jenga idea might work if applied differently. But really, Dread is intended for the ultimate tyrannical Illusionist GM.
I think the reason your players reacted in such an extreme way to “the water” was that they simply did not know what it was and what it could do. So the unknown is an important GM tool in running a player-horror oriented scenario, which means that you as a GM are the only one who knows what’s going on and therefore, you are the only one who can really judge the consequences of what the characters do, which does put you in a very strong position regarding “what happens in the game fiction”. This is not really how I like to run games and I think you neither. I have occasionally enjoyed it as a player but it does tend to get old at some point.
The way I’ve played Dead of Night, we played it in a more collaborative way, with everybody embracing the clichés and playing their characters more like movie protagonists, than like actual, real, scared-as-shit humans. So it was more popcorn horror than campfire horror, I guess. I don’t think anyone was really genuinely scared at any time.
- Frank
Frank Tarcikowski:
P.S.: Hey Ron, reading your account in Sorcerer-horror-thread of your nightly dog-walk after watching The Sixth Sense really made me grin. The very same thing happened to me after watching that movie, when I was taking the laundry to the cellar one night and suddenly the lights went out.
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