Interactive GM'ing (Or how to make a dark theme actually dark)
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The scariest stuff I've ever seen in MU*s were not in WoD games. Honestly I've never really experienced any particular horror in them.
I think the most emotionally intense games I was ever on were X-Men Movieverse and String Theory (The Heroes game). Characters, both established and new, died at pretty dramatically appropriate moments in a lot of plots. The deaths were typically planned, but they were always kept a secret. There was an air that people your character loves could die, it made everything way more emotionally intense.
You wanted to be involved in plots to try to make the world better, you genuinely felt that you wanted to protect people because if you -did- save someone from dying, you might genuinely be altering the course of losing that person. It didn't feel empty, the dark moments didn't feel forced, and I felt like there was a legitimate emotional investment. It's not just about death, it's about feeling an emotional connection to the world, like, the world is alive and you want to interact with it.
When a world feels alive, when it feels like you can go out there and actually change it, like investing in it isn't just an empty roadblock of GMs being overly protective of their world and plots, then it can also be scary. When people have a reason to care, they also have a reason to be afraid. You can't expect to run something in a cold, lifeless shell of a game, and also expect people to be as invested as they could be if the plot actually mattered.
Of course, that's not really the GM/ST's fault, that's more about how well staff works with STs (and vice versa) to run meaningful plots.
Also don't suck at writing basic horror, that's pretty important too.
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@ThatGuyThere said:
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.
Perhaps something similar to SAN loss a la Call of Cthulhu. Though that would mean eventually losing the character if the degeneration goes too far. But it would be a lot harder to consider it business as usual if each time you can feel your mind slipping away.
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If its important enough for records, then sure, make a stress load meter, and let folks recover from various things. Allow that sometimes concurrent processing slows it all down, and sometimes processing through a major issue can relieve or eliminate stress from many minor things.
Some folks love pressure from the system telling them how tough they have it. Some folks hate being intruded upon. If it's important to your game, intrude anyway.
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@TNP said:
@ThatGuyThere said:
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.
Perhaps something similar to SAN loss a la Call of Cthulhu. Though that would mean eventually losing the character if the degeneration goes too far. But it would be a lot harder to consider it business as usual if each time you can feel your mind slipping away.
This is already a thing. integrity works this way. That's why 'being the victim of a supernatural power' is often a Breaking Point.
If you look at the supernatural splats's version of "Integrity" it's more about doing monstrous things, like I pointed out before, and losing yourself in one way or another because of it.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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@Coin said:
If you look at the supernatural splats's version of "Integrity" it's more about doing monstrous things, like I pointed out before, and losing yourself in one way or another because of it.
I'd suggest the overarching theme for WoD is one of tragedy, rather than 'true' horror.
"... 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:
@Coin said:
If you look at the supernatural splats's version of "Integrity" it's more about doing monstrous things, like I pointed out before, and losing yourself in one way or another because of it.
I'd suggest the overarching theme for WoD is one of tragedy, rather than 'true' horror.
No reason they need to be mutually exclusive. I think tragedy through horror is pretty nifty.
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@Thenomain said:
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.
Yeah. There's this overlap, though. Or so I believe, because I figure that some difference between WoD horror/tragedy and WoD superhero-monsters arises from the fact that the superhero ones don't get their stuff taken away?
I know nothing, I haven't played a WoD MU in years.
