Is there any way to make horror games actually scary/unsettling for the players?

Is there any way to make horror games actually scary/unsettling for the players?

Stab one of your players without warning.

Music, lighting, and drugs come to mind

Great idea. I was also thinking of setting their house on fire and sending them pictures.

Turn it into an ARTTRPG

Not if they don't want to be scared.

They have to co-operate or it doesn't work.

I think it requires some theatricality on your part and a commitment to cultivating atmosphere.

Think about telling scary stories across a campfire. It wouldn't have the same effect if you told them in a brightly lit room while the TV was on and everyone is on their phone or eating cheetos.

Get the snacking and the bullshitting out of the way first and insist that everyone focus in and concentrate on the story for the duration of the session. Then dim the lights, put some music or ambient sounds on, and go to work.

A break in the middle for bathroom and shit and to relieve tension wouldn't go amiss, but really what you need is a group that's willing to make a commitment to a scary or disturbing kind of game, and if they don't want to it's just not going to work

This.

Just slip everyone a little LSD thirty minutes before you start playing.

There exists a D&D 3rd ed. book (or 3.5, I can't remember) called Heroes of Horror. Had a good chunk of the book dedicated to how a DM should run a horror-themed game. I'm actually looking to get it back from my friend to implement its concepts into a 5th ed. game I'm going to run soon.

If they want to psyche themselves into imaginary fear, they can do it any time.
If they don't then there is absolutely nothing you can do. Any attempts to force horror will only achieve annoyance.

You're projecting a little hard there, buddy.

>Heroes of Horror.
Google'd it, First link PDF, read it, downloaded it.

It's gonna be a good day ^_^

yes. both narratively and mechanically.

not quite true. you can lure them into the story and then hit them when they forgot about the horror part.

Horror is about disempowerment, at the core. You're not afraid of the werewolf because teeth. You're afraid because you KNOW those teeth could tear you apart and if you met the wolf in a dark forest, you wouldn't be able to do shit against it.

It's why slasher movie villains are seen doing shit like taking a beartrap to the leg without flinching. Or "blocking" a knife stab by raising their hand and taking it through the palm.

You can't hurt them. Sure you can stab them or shoot them, but it doesnt Hurt. It just irritates, or vexes.

Something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers works because you honestly don't know who's been taken and who hasn't.

Night of the Living Dead finds horror in the inevitability of death. It's out there, it's staring you in the face, and it's clawing at the windows. You can run, sure. But you'll tire eventually.

Alien takes its horror from a fear of rape, or violation. You're not even a victim to the xenomorphs... you're an ASSET. They're bigger than you, stronger than you. If they catch you, they choose what happens to you. They might eat you, they might cut you in half. They might decide to implant eggs in your stomach and have you watch the children chew their way out. You hold no value to it except as a temporary amusement to chase, all it needs is your body.

Continued.

Fear of the unknown is a massive source of horror in fiction and you'll want to milk it for all it's worth.

Think back to those scenes in the Silent Hill franchise where you'd just be confronted with empty rooms and fog.

Think to the blood test scene from The Thing, where you know SOMEBODY is a monster but no idea who it is.

The motion tracker in Alien(s)... something is moving. It should be right in front of us. Where is it?

>Veeky Forums related

If your players have a good understanding of how their stats compare to the monsters' stats, you lose some scare potential.

If your PCs can replicate a set-piece or learn how it functioned, you've broken their immersion.

If your PCs ever feel safe it gives them a chance to recuperate. Grant them safety, lull them into a false sense of security, then cut them down.

Infighting is ENCOURAGED. Make the party mistrust eachother. Pass blank notes? Give one character information the others don't, see if they share with the party?

He's only projecting about the annoyance bit. Any piece of horror media requires that the viewers be willing to engage and be scared. This goes double for tabletop, where no matter how good the GMs descriptions, how dim the lights are, or whatever spooky accompaniment they use you're still jut a group of people sitting around a table playing pretend. If your players aren't willing to be scared they're not going to be.

1) The players have to buy in to the experience. If they don't want to be scared, they won't be.
2) The actual session will require you being able to spin dramatic tension and suspense on the fly.
3) You might consider taking away their character sheets. The anxiety of not knowing how much HP they have left will fuck with their heads.

There are many ways, although none of them are guaranteed to work and they aren't likely to be effective in the face of players who don't want to be scared.

My guidelines:

The story should work even if the horror doesn't. It should be interesting in it's own right.

Believable horror is more disturbing than fantastic horror. Human evil and human suffering will affect your players more than the most alien monsters.

There is such a thing as being too scary. You have to walk a fine line to be enjoyable.

Game mechanics for fear and madness have never really worked well for me. Use the narrative to put characters in situations where crazy behaviour makes sense for them instead.

This first point is incredibly important. People who are there to combat the horror ("nothing scares me!") are not good fits for this stuff. You have to have players who are willing to be scared.

Have the horror game take place in /d/'s magical realms.

You die in the game you die in real life

Parasites.

You don't have to go that far.

You do have to spend the rest of the game in the spider room though.

I would recommend mixing it up with comedy and just letting the characters explore their characters however they want. People can't take a totally grimdark session seriously but if you have a normal RPG game before you introduce the monster or the clues or whatever (thinking CoC) it makes it more impactful. Just my two cents.

So Brazilian rules then?

You have to actually scare them. It's like a comedy game. You have to actually make them laugh.

If you die in the game you die in real life

Unintentionally during a game I made my players freak out.

We were crawling through a basement with flashlights, and I was describing the floorboards creaking overhead, we were playing CoC and they broke into a mansion, old school mansion from a previous campaign in 1890 (this was 1990) the door had rattled, and they heard whispering from the wall. A player rolled to touch it, and i thumped the table with a leg when he rolled, making him jump. Then we heard a branch break off a tree and we went to go look and then my fucking power went out and THEN the most ungodly thunderstrike struck outside that brightly lit the room and shook the windows like the world was ending, it sounded like a jet engine tearing the sound barrier.

So, pitch blackness. Lightning, sound so loud and ominous it could cause panic. Phones are out with flashlights, and guess where the breaker box was?

They thought it was part of the game.

Scared the piss out of everyone.

So if you wanna scare players, play a game late at night, low light, during a thunderstorm with gale wind and heavy rain and pray your power goes out.

Dry ice in a bucket in the room can unsettle players, just because not being able to see the floor will fuck with them.

A little more dry ice in a vent so mist is pouring out of it is another great prop.

If you've got an old smart phone or whatever, set them on the floor (somewhere nobody will trip on it or break it) and have it play random creepy sounds in ten to thirty minute intervals.

Props are key.

Sitting in a dank basement with mist pouring out of a vent and covering the floor while things chitter from out of the mist makes a Call of Cthulhu campaign a shitload more creepy than playing in a well-lit kitchen.

>Dry ice
>Basement
>dank = poorly ventilated

+++ A group of teenagers was discovered this evening in what officials are calling a possible ritual suicide. They had often congregated in this basement of a residential building before to 'level up' as acquaintances remember. But nobody would have suspected a desperate act like flooding the entire structure with carbon dioxide from dry ice placed in the only ventilation opening. Much like running a car in a closed garage but much faster this lead to the suffocation of several local students. Their identities have not been released because the families are still being contacted this minute. But a book titled Dungeons and Dragons has reportedly been spotted by first responders who were at the scene. +++

Don't tell them it's a horror game. Tell them it's a down to earth investigation game.

Worst idea ever.
>ha ha. tricked everyone into chargen for the wrong kind of challenges. muh realism!

Can confirm dry ice works, unfortunately I have had it backfire.

Rented a nice house, guy I rented from didn't tell me he had carbon monoxide sensors in the vents they went off for 20 minutes and the neighbors called the fire department, they came, saw a bunch of nerds in a house frantically searching for the noise.

Then the firemen couldn't find the alarms

We called my landlord and he told me to check the vents.

Found 4 of them recessed into the walls of the vents near my ice. Firemen and us nerds couldn't stop laughing.

I had the alarms moved out of the vents. Landlord agreed they didn't help.

If you're prepared for a horror campaign then you're not going to get scared. It's going to be just a bunch of people who conveniently have a full military background, in-character know every horror cliche, and at least two people have exceptionally specific "Don't trip while running from a monster" skills.

So your solution to your players not being up for Horror is to force it upon them?

From your description they are clearly set in the way of the murderhobo. You can play Dread or Dead of Night with them, but I suspect they will find the rules unfair.

Turn the lights off, illuminate the room with candles
Have someone dressed in all black hiding in the house, make sure they're sneaky
Get him to spook the players by sneaking up on them during a spooky moment

>dank
>adjective
>unpleasantly damp and cold.
Are you autistic?

I'm pretty shocked no one replied to the OP with "Jenga Tower." I've tried it and it's amazing how freaked out everyone gets.

Second, don't try to shock or amaze the group directly, ". . .his GIGANTIC red leathery wings have dead babies stapled to them!!!11" o_o

>Second, don't try to shock or amaze the group directly
Unless you're literally Cormac McCarthy and can describe things in really unpleasant spooky ways. But even then, I think, going subtle is better.

This but to expand on the making them feel safe before the axe.

Make the players really care about their characters well being, giving them achievable yet challenging goals, have them be a master at a certain thing, let them think they've taken care of what is actually a benign but they don't know that, give them the illusion that there is hope and that they can win...and then...right before they start to think nothing can stop them...let the scale slide in the other direction. Tear them down piece by piece, make their goals traps, their rewards depleted, what they thought was their enemy simply a lackey to something much worse, make them feel as if that they could have done something but failed until you lay down the hammer on one of them, and they realize they never really had a chance to begin with, reward the cowardly to live another day knowing there braver counterparts were doomed for their hubris, until you have just one scared and mortified victim left wondering why them, and when will the hammer fall on them? When they reach that pitiable and broken state, where they await the sweet embrace of death....don't grant it. Let them suffer with the paranoia of not knowing when, if ever.

Also a side note, don't forget that humans can be monsters to.