ok so is it just me?

[Soft Serve]

Or is horror/dark future the like, most unappreciated pnp gametype on this site?

There are a total number of TWO threads in the Campaign Resources section, and only 4 pages of threads in general discussion.

Theres a thread in "General Chatter" where some people think Pen and Paper games are dieing, or their gone from their golden age or whatever they happen to think I'm not going to speak for all the posters there BUT I'm fairly positive that the death bell for pen and paper gaming will be when the weaker genres start to go...the weakest genre apparently being horror/dark future...

There will be little pockets of underground groups playing horror/df games by candle light in their basements, when fellow RPG-ers kick in the door, turn on the lights, point and laugh at the dieing breed!

On what level do we survive if the kids everyone laughed at in highschool are laughing at US!


-for the record this thread is here to make you laugh...I'm going to be on a plane tomorrow and I'm a bit nervous, and also considering making that one of my next advents for my group..or something airborne...idk. Anyway just enjoy this I needed something to joke about. -

[Etarnon]

Not at all.

I just have had limited time to dive into discussions of the backslide of morality amidst advancing technology... focusing more on D&D, Recruiting for my Upcoming Sc-fi game (via openRPG most likely) (that nobody has seen fit to reply to despite 40+ views), and posting in the wat's a DM to do, and what's a player to do on wotc forums, plus personal life BS.


You want to talk? Have at it.

I've got:

Friday night firefight
Cyberpunk 2020 by R Talsorian, and a near complete collection
GURPS cyberpunk and Cyberworld
ICE Cyberspace
Some D20 supplements for firearms
D20 Modern and Future and the cyberspace booklet.

A few Novels by William Gibson, Walter Jon Williams, and a few others lesser well known.

I've run and played in some really col Cyberpunk 2020 games via openRPG.

What did you want to discuss?

[mrken]

Hey Bunny Man, travel safe. Back in my younger days I had to do a pile of travel by air. For me it was an adventure, for about the first five or ten trips, then it became pretty much routine, then it became a door to pass through. Except the trip to Japan., that was an ordeal, thirteen hours in the air. That made my bones stiff as we were stuffed in an old stretched DC-8. Plane flights have been and still are by far the safest method of traveling.

As for Horror and Dark Future being a dying game, I don’t really think so. They have always been a bit on the fringe of the rp sport. I have played in both and enjoyed them both. Just remember the 800 pound gorilla in the room has been from day one the fantasy game. It reaches the widest audience with sci-fi coming in a rather distant second. Dividing the pool of role players always leaves you with a smaller number of possible players. You just prefer a more self-selecting game.

Something you might like to keep in mind is how difficult it is to GM a horror game. The pacing is sometimes rather difficult to do. Building up the tension is almost impossible to do if you or any of the players has a sense of humor. One joke or wise crack and it’s over.

This last group of players was planning to get together for the first time a few days before Halloween. I thought it would be great to go with a Halloween theme. Induce a bit of horror into the game. Well, to make a short story even shorter, we didn’t get the characters finished until that day and people got there late and had to leave early so the actual game was rather short. I (who can’t remember my own dog’s name sometimes) didn’t do a very good job of frightening any of the characters. In fact, that was one of the worst games I had ever run anyone through. Yeah, you gotta bring your A game if you want to run horror. The story is not enough.

[GoddessGood]

Horror RPGs have always intimidated me, mostly because I'd have had to be the one running them. I only moved to Dallas in the last year and it took me most of that year to get an Exalted group together (Exalted is the game I'm most comfortable with and it's the easiest for me to run on a weekly to biweekly basis). Now that I do have that regular group, I'm picking my head up to look at other RPGs. I've considered CoC since it was suggested to me by one of my group members, but I've also been longing for a LOTR game ... and it seems like either way I'd have to run the game if I want to experience it at all.

For the very reasons mrken mentioned, I've been hesitating to pick up a horror game. Also, I'm lazy

[Skunkape]

Personally, I really like zombies, and quite a few other things horror, also am a big post-apoc fan, but my current group doesn't have any interest in anything beyond fantasy at the moment. I've finally gotten them to accept a weird west campaign, Deadlandsish, but that was a big fight.

Course, I won't start running that until after I finish my current, fantasy campaign, so while I really like that kind of thing, I don't have much time or info to input into those sections of the site. Once I start my western campaign, I'll probably be more active there.

[Webhead]

I like horror RPGs but don't get to play them very often. All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Deadlands, Cyberpunk 2020 and Call of Cthulhu are a few of my faves.

Getting some players to play anything but fantasy (or, more specifically, D&D) can be a chore sometimes.

Oh, and Goddess...if you're in the market for trying CoC, I've got a campaign that's been in the back of my head for years but I've never gotten to use (one of my players refuses to play CoC). I'd love an opportunity to run a group through it, time and schedule permitting.

[Skunkape]

I like horror RPGs but don't get to play them very often. All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Deadlands and Call of Cthulhu are a few of my faves.

Oh, and Goddess...if you're in the market for trying CoC, I've got a campaign that's been in the back of my head for years but I've never gotten to use (one of my players refuses to play CoC). I'd love an opportunity to run a group through it, time and schedule permitting.

I have to partially agree with that one player about CoC. I've had some bad experiences playing the game. I know it was because of the GM, but I just don't have that great an interest in the game type. Now, AFMBE & Deadlands, I'm good with those!

[Webhead]

I have to partially agree with that one player about CoC. I've had some bad experiences playing the game. I know it was because of the GM, but I just don't have that great an interest in the game type...

It really is all in how you play it, but I'm not one to force a game on anyone. It's sad that it means I never really get to run CoC, but them's the breaks I guess.

...Now, AFMBE & Deadlands, I'm good with those!

Me too! I'm longing for something in that vein in the near future.

[Windrider687]

I'm actually a Horror RPG fan, again, like the others have said, it's a smaller, harder niche to play.

I'm not a big fan of the "Let's kill endless hordes of mindless zombies, where we five people are somehow magically the only people that survived!"

I'm more of the small-scale extreme realism "There's a serial killer in a medium-sized town, and you've all recieved letters from him, marking you as the next target" type game...

...or something akin to 'X-Files', or my new favourite show of the genre 'Fringe' (which I'm biased to like, it being set in my favourite state ).

...if it must involve the undead...I like vampires over zombie; vampires are usually cunning, smart, and very hard to kill...and they are oft-encounter in the deepest dark of night.

[Arch Lich Thoth-Amon]

I've never played a horror campaign per say, but would like to. Closest i have gotten was to inject horror into my WFRP campaigns, for there are plenty of opportunities in that system to do so.

[placebosonly]

its not so much dieing or a smaller group of people as it is a DIFFERENT group of people who play... at the hobby shop i go to there are actually more horror players between the 2 horror campaigns actually played at the store compared to the one 4e dnd game ran there and from what i hear from the owners the horror books seem to sell better than the high fantasy i dont know maybe it depends on where you live

[mrken]

Yeah, I'm not really a big fan of horror games, but every now and again I will run a session that just gets scary. Back when Aliens came out the first time I saw it I thought someone that had played my game had copied it and sole it for the movie. It just had that feeling of a game I had run. And sometimes when running a fantasy game the session will just turn out that way, scary, though not very often, I really prefer the more gritty historical fantasy stuff.

[tesral]

Horror, like passion difficult to engender and oh so fragile. When my set of players it isn't happening. I have one guy that would find humor in a bloodbath, somehow. Humor banishes all horror.

Dark Future holds no interest. I find the present dark enough. I like bright futures.

[gdmcbride]

Some of the best campaigns I've ever been associated with were horror campaigns. Further, some of the best RPGs ever written have been written in the horror genre -- Call of Cthulhu, Beyond the Mountains of Madness, Delta Green. Consider giving horror a try.

But I agree that horror is fragile. I have three points of advice:

1. First, a little humor isn't a bad thing. Don't go too far. Don't make it wacky. But if you've managed to create a true horrific atmosphere, a little humor can break the relentless gloom.

2. Make the horror intellectual. A two hour movie can do visceral, gut-level horror. RPG campaigns need something more. For example, the boo-something-leaps-out moments work well on film. In RPGs, they are quickly boring. What isn't boring is realizing that everyone you know and love is now trying to claw your eyes out and if you don't kill these flesh-eating zombies before they make it off this military base, humanity is doomed. Actually, horror NOVELS are probably better fodder for horror rpgs than horror movies.

3. Horror is descriptive. When an orc dies in D&D, it dies. Fine. Reward XP. When something dies in horror it bleeds and twitches. Death can be casual in lots of genres. Death is never casual in horror.

Anyways, hope it helps!

Gary

[Etarnon]

Oh yeah, I think Conspiracy X is a great modern day horror / conspiracy game. ConX 2.0 (via Unisystem by eden studios, or GURPS by sjg), easier to run, but use the data and grittiness from the first edition.

I had a blast running that game. Kind of like "24" meets "X-files".