What kind of system would you recommend for a horror one shot? Preferably something quick to learn

What kind of system would you recommend for a horror one shot? Preferably something quick to learn.

If it's a one shot and you want something fast, RISUS would be ok, or FATE maybe. They both have fast and very simple dice mechanics that allow a few skills, which is mostly what you will need. FATE has mechanics that can be adapted to fear and pain and injury and whatnot, RISUS you can just do that all through roleplay.

Don't Rest your Head

The Final Girl

Cthulhu Grey

Dread

Ten Candles

Call of Cthulhu 7e
Fear Itself
Dread

It's an odd kind of horror, but Don't Rest Your Head is a really cool system that works great for one shots.

The big thing about DRYH is that your players have all the power. If they want to, they can throw enough dice at a problem to almost certainly obliterate it. The trouble is how much it cost them.

You only have three 'safe' dice, your Discipline, which on their own aren't going to be enough to save you most of the time. So you need to rely on Madness and Exhaustion, two resources you can tap for extra dice.

The trouble is, the more Madness and Exhaustion you use, the more likely you are to suffer consequences of one or the other. The game becomes a question not of if you can survive, but of just how much you're willing to lose. There are far worse things than death waiting for those who walk the Mad City in the thirteenth hour.

Honestly all horror one-shots I've ran(and I did run a plenty of them) were without any system. I always just ask players to describe their PCs to me(or I prepare them myself) and then whenever it's needed I ask them to roll d20: the higher result the better. This is pretty much all I usually need and I find that a more complex system usually rather messes with the horror atmosphere rather then helping it. For one-shots that is.

>Playing any edition of CoC after 5.5

>playing COC instead of Lovecraftesque

Dread.

Unlike other posters, I'm going to tell you why it's an easy system to learn. Here are the rules players need to know:
- If a PC wants to do something that's easy, they do it automatically.
- If a PC wants to attempt something the GM decides is difficult, they pull a block from the Jenga tower and place it on top. If they succeed at the pull, they succeed at the task. If they knock the tower over, their PC dies, goes mad, or is otherwise removed from the game. Intentionally knocking over the tower is a heroic sacrifice.
- Some tasks might be broken into several parts. Each part requires moving another block to the top. Each block moved means progress that will not be lost should the PC die or choose not to continue.
- When the tower falls over, it gets rebuilt then play resumes.
- Character creation is the GM writing a bunch of leading questions for each PC. At the start of the session the players answer the questions.

The big reason Dread works for horror is the cycle of building and releasing tension. The more blocks that get pulled, the riskier it is to pull the next block. When the tower falls, tension is released because it's much less risky to pull blocks from the rebuilt tower.

That players don't know their chances of failure, only that the chance grows with each pull, also helps.

Dread. You're just playing an exceptionally tense game of Jenga.

Sound like a pure roleplay experience with the dice only deciding the luck factor. My friends and I often play that way if feeling extremely lazy. It great way to do it if there is no giant monster to kill or anything (which would be more gore than horror imo anyway) but otherwise players might feel they are getting cheated unless they know it is a pure roleplaying-only game. More so when they roll an one and a brick knock them out during a heated moment. I guess in the end it depends on how good your players are when it come to roleplaying with bad/good luck.

Personally if you already know Call of Cthulhu I'll just do an one off game of that but instead of making it about cults and demon/alien-like invasion stuff I'll do something more of being stuck in one (or many) of Junji Ito (Spiral is a good one) comics and are forced to deal with the events. No necessary win or lose conditions, let's just see what happen to your characters and see if you could change anything (likely not though depending on the story). If your character somehow survived and somehow still sane then see that as a win. Bonus points if the group never read any of the mangas and they found out for themselves what is happening to try their best to stop it.

I mean, it's note really pure randomness. If, for example, a PC has a military background than I will let him pass a shooting roll with a lower d20 result than in case of other PCs. It's just more common sense with dice deciding when there is a chance of failing rather than a specific system

>Not playing CoC 7e

>Not playing Delta Green

These are much better than these

Is that Slenderman in there? Is that his home? I wonder what he does in his spare time.

Call of Cthulhu.

That pic looks incredibly comfy.

>FATE maybe
Pretty sure Fate points out itself that it's not well suited for horror as the players are in far too much control to ever actually feel threatened or uncomfortable. If what you really want is an action game with horror aesthetics, then yes, Fate can do that, but actual psychological, slow, crawling horror... there's better systems for that.

GURPS with pregenerated characters to choose from

>Is that Slenderman in there?
Yeah, it must be, because he's the only character who wears a suit.

Savage Worlds or Monster of the Week

for a one shot probably monster of the week because character creation takes literally five minutes.

Seconded. Give GURPS Horror a read if nothing else. Amazing work by Hite on that one.

end of the world zombie apocalypse from FFG. Really easy mechanincs, fun to play for people that don't normally play tabletop RPGs. Was mastering for a group of friends that have never played any RPG and they all had a great time. You can make this into more of a horror game or you can make it more loose in tone like we did. Cool stuff

Could someone please make a case for or against CoC 7e? I have pic related but have considered buying 7e.

...

I agree. Though it seems to be meant for more narrative play with how easily you can rack up wounds when SUCCESSFULLY rolling checks. I've run straight zombie horror and a game where the players watched Atlantis flood and conquer the world then successfully lead a resistance to free the surface.

It's far more horrible than that. Look at the candles. A bloodthirsty JEW lives in that concrete box

Cthulhu Grey was already proposed

But I agree, COC is shit and at least this gets away with the unnecessary bullshit

bump

Dredd for the weirdo mechanic. Prerequisite: Short-ish plot.

Unknown Armies/NEMESIS for my favourite sanity mechanism.

Runners-up: Every system your characters know inside out, which is gonna be least in the way.

I find stuff like Delta Green and Laundry Files etc. to be pointless, since it's supposed to be a one-shot and you probably don't need a ready-made setting, which is 95% of the appeal of those systems (apart from the setting they're pretty much Vanilla Cthulhu).

That's clearly an Swedish advent wreath and not a menorah.

I would rec playing a long-running horror campaign and making things more deadly and surreal after every few sessions.

>Not using the OG Delta Green splats in combination with 7e

Did you like 6e? 7e is an improvement on that version of the system.

Unfortunately I have not actually played any CoC. Yet. I got 5.5 on the cheap and on a lark. It sounds to me like the dividing line is what I have (5.5e) versus what is new (7e). What is different between 5.5e and 6e/7e? Are they both good in their own right? I am under the impression that every edition is largely compatible with any other though.