Interactive GM'ing (Or how to make a dark theme actually dark)
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Unless your players are arachnophobes. Then you whip out the spiders on them, and there is terror at the table. Many laughs were had, by me at least, but I like spiders, and there were also air pirates, conquistadors, the Anasazi, and a tent on fire with a box of TNT inside. Good times, good times.
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The other thing to consider with horror is how often different STs use the same antagonists.
For example i made a psychic mortal on a WoD much no clue about anything supernatural. I got into some events and plots, first one involved zombies I poses being appropriately freaked out. A few months later the the forth plot scene with zombies my character acted blase when they appeared. When asked about it ooc I pointed out, Hey this is literally the fourth time this character has run into zombies in the last two months. Yeah he might not know vampires or werewolves exist, but zombies to him are like gangs, dangerous as hell and best avoided but not OMG shocking.
Horror needs fresh victims to work there is a reason horror franchises cycle through casts at the rate they do. -
Just as a note, a setting can be dark without it being filled with horror. Batman's Gotham, for example.
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I dunno, having the Joker in town in sorta like having the bad guy from Saw in the neighborhood.
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Saw isn't horror. Saw is gore-porn. I got a laugh when watching a play-through of Until Dawn and they mentioned this.
(edit: not trying to derail the discussion. i wholeheartedly admit that tension and suspense are very valuable tools in the arsenal of horror. i just wanted to note strongly that there is more to 'dark' than horror.)
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Gotham etc plays into creating uncertainty and isolation. The apparent rules aren't the rules. While it's all about who you know, and what favors you can grant, you are also alone at times, not just alone in a crowd where your bodyguards can be bought, but physically alone where a single psycho can take you out.
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Personal horror's main mechanism is in the phrase. The rub is that one PC's paralyzing issues about abandonment isn't going to make another PC blink but they may be terrified of going broke.
Having a player articulate the things that drive their PCs to avoid their idea of personal harm (real or imagined) and ruin as part of app process or as part of pre-event 'homework' allows the GM to drop personal horror bombs as appropriate and meaningful to player/PC experience.
This comes with a 2-fold caveat though:
- Players can't ignore what's happening to them. They can rationalize it or get a raging case of denial about it IG or the like but they can't straight up ignore it happening to the PC OOG and they should be informed of that going in in terms of what to expect and an attempt to ignore it won't escape consequences. If the player doesn't want to sign on for that kind of RP experience then they have an automatic out and it saves a lot of sturm and drang down the line.
- That most things are on the table but probably some things shouldn't be, like for example rape or incest or child abuse or whatever it is that's a hard limit. These things are deep seated denizens of personal real life horror but in a game setting, the benefits are totally overshadowed by the piles of OOG drama and upset that eclipses the focus on IG.
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So, I see two parts of this discussion that I think I'd like to address --
Effectively telling dark stuff is kind of hard. Especially on a MU, as some have already pointed out. As @AmishRakeFight pointed out above. some people have all the feels about some of the darker situations that you can find in horror literature, and taking out the psychological horrors leaves you with gore-porn, as @Thenomain stated.
Failing that, though, you do tend to have an awful lot of people wanting to play Superheroes with Fangs/Magic/Claws/SparkleFairyStuff. Which then branches off into its own problem. How do you get players to keep to the feel of the game you are wanting to create without telling them that their fun is WrongFun? And if you really do want to push for some of the darker stuff, how do you get away from the things that people have Feels about, and still make it horrifying?
It's weird. We are a bunch of people with a bunch of issues playing games revolved around horror and looking for happiness and hope, a lot of the time, and as a community a lot of us don't want to approach some of the most terrible things humans do to each other because in many cases they are the source of the issues that make us more than a little socially reclusive/awkward/damaged. I'm not sure this is an issue that we'll ever actually work out.
But more than that, random scene-dropping un-ignorable grid patrols don't tend to actually work, for two reasons:
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Players have their own goals with the times that they are online. If an ST comes in and derails what they were attempting to do, even with the best intentions of making fun for the players, it can result in people getting irritated. So ST's back off from that kind of thing, and then -- well, you've seen the things posting stating where plot is lacking. It's a delicate balance, that is mostly resolved by just scheduling things, but then you're scheduling things, and it's not at all random.
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In horror things especially, you do have to go for the slow buildup, rather than 'oh look at that, monster down the street'. 'Cept, lots of times, people don't have the kind of time it takes to invest in that, which is doubly true if you're dropping a random scene on a group already in progress. Fifteen minutes in, just as the monster is slithering out of its <insert dwelling here>, someone is like 'welp, fun, gotta go, try to not die', which leads to all sorts of awkward complication. You either have to pause and pick up later which causes time-jumpy goodness they have to explain OR you wrap it up with who you got and try to figure out what happened to Amanda Sue or Bobby Joe without violating their agency and still creating a believable story.
TL;DR - Horror is hard, yo.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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All interesting takes on the problem at hand, and good conversation.
Thanks everyone, a lot to think about as I try to figure out how to make the slums on my game be dark, horrible, and a foul place that nobody should want to be without focusing purely on exploitation of those weaker than yourself.
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@Derp said:
How do you get players to keep to the feel of the game you are wanting to create without telling them that their fun is WrongFun?
I don't think you can, really. With WoD especially, you're going to get a lot of players showing up who have expectations about what a WoD MUSH will be like, which will lead them to think that playing Superheroes with Splat is wot's goin' down, and they'll be angry when it isn't.
Besides the PC-lack-of-control thing, or part of it: In a horror plot, one tends to take things away from the PCs. Someone they love is lost to them somehow, their house is haunted and you can't use the bad-ass billiards room in the basement because of all the ghostly viscera hanging from the ceiling, their fifty retainers are dying of rabies, the office building they own was blown up by Project Mayhem and their wealth stat has been dropped hugely, whatever. It's not just the 'we can't create tension when players know characters prolly won't die' trip, either. For a horror plot to be horrifying, something bad has to happen. But when something bad happens more or less out of the blue to a PC, they often feel that the GMs are punishing them. The in-game culture of a good horror MU has to accept IC loss as part of the fun.
"... you'll find the story doesn’t end how you think, and the most important characters aren’t who you expect.” - Penny 40 to Derek, The Magicians S04E07 ‘The Side Effect’
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@il-volpe said:
Besides the PC-lack-of-control thing, or part of it: In a horror plot, one tends to take things away from the PCs. Someone they love is lost to them somehow, their house is haunted and you can't use the bad-ass billiards room in the basement because of all the ghostly viscera hanging from the ceiling, their fifty retainers are dying of rabies, the office building they own was blown up by Project Mayhem and their wealth stat has been dropped hugely, whatever. It's not just the 'we can't create tension when players know characters prolly won't die' trip, either. For a horror plot to be horrifying, something bad has to happen. But when something bad happens more or less out of the blue to a PC, they often feel that the GMs are punishing them. The in-game culture of a good horror MU has to accept IC loss as part of the fun.
It bears repeating.
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I think it comes down to a player and their willingness to actually have their characters be or act afraid or, you know, like they're in a horrifying situation.
There's very little in between the super horrified vegetable that poses hiding in the corner and the character that transforms into the terminator. But you could argue that happens in just about any action scene.
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RL horror isn't always paralyzing. There are so many moments where people find themselves continuing down a path of action that they don't like, unable or unwilling to stop, yet horrified at the time, and scarred for life. This makes you an active, no matter how reluctant, participant in some aspect of the horror. People will question their ability to have chosen otherwise, or wonder at what is inside them (or all of humanity) for the rest of their lives.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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Apocalypse World, a horrifically dark game system and world, has a few rules about how to play the game, something that nearly all other RPGs out there explain as a simple "just pretend that's all you need!"
Rule Number One: Play to see what happens.
GM's Rule Number One: Barf forth theme.
The author has distilled one of the methods of playing an RPG down into straight forward steps, clear enough that if you don't play the game this way you can say, "No, you're wrong."
This is really what we're talking about in this thread. Not so much how to portray darkness, but how to get players to stick to theme and treat their character as a living creation that is not themselves.
Once we can work that out, we can tell people that they volunteered to play a game where bad things happen and ask them where the disconnect is.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@mietze said:
Depend on what you mean by "dark" maybe. I don't think Dropping Anvils By Night is more dark;
I suddenly want to make a PC who wears long grey bunny ears, carries a carrot and is a serial killer via dropping Anvils on people by night. I don't need the traditional giant acme Anvils either, they have those 35 pounders and lighter. Supply might be an issue.
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It's also important to remember that, in the World of Darkness (this doesn't apply necessarily to other games) and especially Werewolf and Vampire, the horror aspect is not so much what happens to the player characters but rather what the player characters do.
In werewolf and vampire, generally speaking, you are the monster. Mortify your friends with what your character is willing to do. The reason why there's a large disconnect, I suspect (but cannot confirm) is that in MUs we interact with each other, and are reluctant to inflict the full-range of our characters's horrific sides on other PCs, while in tabletop, it's all too easy to allow yourself to be horrible to the NPCs.
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@Misadventure said:
RL horror isn't always paralyzing. There are so many moments where people find themselves continuing down a path of action that they don't like, unable or unwilling to stop, yet horrified at the time, and scarred for life. This makes you an active, no matter how reluctant, participant in some aspect of the horror. People will question their ability to have chosen otherwise, or wonder at what is inside them (or all of humanity) for the rest of their lives.
I'm meaning more in the sense of:
<insert horrific situation here>
My character, readying weapon, shivering ever so slightly, beads of sweat forming (a standard description of being visibly shaken in horrific situation.)Tough badass woman character, decidedly NOT afraid, telling my character "Toughen up girly, it's showtime. Get your shit together."
Laconic, stereotypical badass dude going "grrrr, kill krites!"
Me oocly going wtf?!? There's something, really unnatural going down and everybody's going all Micheal Bay.
I've seen that happen a few times and always think it could've been a little more atmospheric if everybody wasn't acting like it was business as usual.
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Yup.
My approach is to try to replace something that is problematic rather than just point it out.I hear you. I am even a player who sometimes has characters who are that. Almost always they've been swimming in whatever they are facing from their background on wards, but people don't usually know that. It's meant to be a tell of a sort, but in the end it's still I made a character that is less fazed by horrific things than usual.
EG soldier whose job was to commit atrocities, a character that killed the way most people eat, and a zealot who felt that the stakes were worth killing for atop that they were more than powerful enough to do so.
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@ThugHeaven said:
I've seen that happen a few times and always think it could've been a little more atmospheric if everybody wasn't acting like it was business as usual.
The things is to a lot of characters that have been around for a few months on grid it is business as usual. I tend to not do a lot of plots on mushes to spread the wealth and also I tend to avoid STs I am not familiar with but even I get into two or three plots a month and most in WoD at least involve horrific or dark situations. How many does it take for a character to become desensitized? I try not to play it as too soon when it is literally the tenth horrific thing he has witnessed in six months, he would have to be a bit touched to not think of it as business as usual.
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@ThatGuyThere said:
@ThugHeaven said:
I've seen that happen a few times and always think it could've been a little more atmospheric if everybody wasn't acting like it was business as usual.
The things is to a lot of characters that have been around for a few months on grid it is business as usual. I tend to not do a lot of plots on mushes to spread the wealth and also I tend to avoid STs I am not familiar with but even I get into two or three plots a month and most in WoD at least involve horrific or dark situations. How many does it take for a character to become desensitized? I try not to play it as too soon when it is literally the tenth horrific thing he has witnessed in six months, he would have to be a bit touched to not think of it as business as usual.
Eh, fair point, but wouldn't you be a little horrified just of the strength of you knowing how horrible what you're dealing with is?
