How do you get your players to not treat the game as much like a "game"?

>running the excellent Delta Green scenario Night Floors
>players are posing a FBI agents investigating a missing person
>they goof off a bit IC/OOC, only sort of getting into the horror/spoopy mindset
>searching the missing girl's apartment they find the pages of an unidentified play
>player who finds it asks what it's about, I hand them pic related
>player starts doing an amusing dramatic reading
>hesitates before he reads the last line
>mfw

Oh man that's good.

It's garbage and that scenario is a particular brand of exquisite garbage, time and again delta green is shown to be someone's story hour masquerading as an RPG. That particular story ends in a one way trip to Carcosa. The End.

> it's an user hasn't read the scenario episode
As written you can't even get to Carcosa without GM fiat. I've only seen it happen once and it was because the party stubbornly insisted on trying to save the girl.

You can't save the girl. She's gone. And anyway your mission isn't to save the girl, it's to find out what happened to her and close the rift.

Its delta green good for a haloween one shot?

I say yes but I suspect that other user will say no. Between the two of us you should be able to drive a nuanced answer.

I do an annual delta green Halloween game with great success. I can recommend scenarios if you're looking for something specific - but if you've never run a horror game before it might take some extra work on your part to pull off. I can offer some suggestions in that regard as well.

mmm something with zombies/player survival

also i dont know anything about the system is it easy to learn?

There's no such thing as a rift. If you've read and understood what Tynes was going for when he originally referred the 'Hastur Vibe' you'd understand that reality warps. There is no rift the night floors literally go on forever after leaving the McAllstair building proper and therefore I direct your attention to the additional writings Tynes contributed to Carcosa where it specifically notes the connection between the night floors and Carcosa. I also recommend you hunt down an online copy of 'Inslyum' which provides further background reading.
>Hasn't read the scenario LMFAO

Other user. Call of Cthulhu and by extension Delta Green is generally good for any kind of one shot but not so good for extended play this is not only due to game mechanic mandated play character attrition either.

I don't know that there's a lot of zombie/survival type scenarios published for DG. The predominant themes are slow-burning horror and a sort of cosmic nihilism; it is, after all, based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft.

That said there are some scenarios that are definitely "crunchy" in a way that might fit what you're looking for. Kali Ghati was written specifically to test the combat rules; A Night on Owlshead Mountain is your classic "monster in the woods"; Lover in the Ice and VISCID are solid creature features.

Next there's a /ysg/ see if anyone can upload any of these.

> what's written in the scenario is not what happens in the scenario
Just take you (You) and go to bed please.

Oh yes user short of burning the place down do please relate how you are sealing your non existent rift and remember you are a field agent probably with at most one other unrelated op under your belt, no using OOC knowledge and no calling A cell is not an option.

Find the copy of TKiY in Michelle's library at night. Burn it.

Now please fuck off.

Nope that won't work. Quote 'The only permanent solution is for the Macallistar to be demolished.' Invariably players being what they are will inevitably start wandering around and ultimately doom themselves. It's why the scenario falls short because there is insufficient detail addressing night floor exploration. Again a narrative pretending to be an RPG same is true for most delta green desu.
I sense you are getting triggered user.

lol The Meme in Yellow.

> How do you solve the scenario, without using the solution given in the scenario?
> lol, you didn't use the solution given in the scenario that I you couldn't use
There is no way a real person could be this retarded.

That was partly your fuck-up. It's understandable. Running horror (and running games in general) is hard. There were two parts that contributed to the loss of the sense of urgency. The first:

>"The first thing you see is a tall humanoid form."

This is a static description. There's nothing wrong with that, but there are certain things that that kind of description lends itself to. You'd use the same language if the first thing they saw was an interesting painting, or a recliner chair. You tell them *what* they're seeing, but you don't give any indication that what they're seeing is *doing* anything. Compare:

>"The first thing you see is a tall humanoid form."
>"A tall humanoid form rears up from inside the room"

The above example isn't exactly fantastic because I tried to just change the language from static to active without changing the essence of it, but the point is that the players won't assume an object is in action unless you *tell* them it's in action. They can't see the room until you tell them what to see. If you wanted them to think that the coat rack was a threat, you need to tell them it's doing something threatening.

(Continued)

(Continued)

You had a chance to save it, but you got lured into another player trap. It was:

>"Well what's it doing?"
>"Standing there."

The only reason they were able to ask this question in the first place is because they weren't told what it was doing originally. Again, "you see a tall humanoid form" versus "a tall humanoid form " is huge. But they ask the question, and you gave them information they shouldn't have had. Compare:

>"Well what's it doing?"
>"Standing there."

>"Well what's it doing?"
>"You don't know."

They'd just swung open the door. They don't know it's just standing there. All they know is that it's a tall humanoid form. "You don't know" might by the simplest response, but this was also your second chance to give it a menacing aspect. Maybe it's up like in my first example. Maybe it's across the far wall (you could always explain this away as the shadows of their torches or flashlights being cast on the coat rack.

Again, the moral is that the players won't assume that an object is threatening unless you give them some reason to do so. It's tough to get the language right, but that kind of comes with the territory in a hobby that almost entirely takes place through conversation.

Play systems that give the players fewer tools to rely upon. If you're playing a game with levels, abilities etc they always feel armed and ready for action. Vulnerability is the key to calculated decision making

This user's got it right, but I'm going to add to it a bit
1) Don't feel obligated to use vague descriptors, as the other user was teasing at, tall humanoid form doesn't sound like ax murderer. If they don't know something isn't a person, but it looks kind of like a person, tell them it's a person until proven otherwise.
The human brain is designed to assume any odd shadow in the bush is a predator. Because well, if you assume it's a predator, and your wrong, whoops a bit of an adrenaline spike, no biggy, but if you assume it's just some shadows and you're wrong, you're dead

That could've been an ax murderer until a light was flashed on it, or people took the time to roll their system appropriate looking real hard skill

2) You can mechanically reinforce spooks and take advantage of the fact that you're playing a game
You walk into the room, door creaking with every inch, out of the corner of your eye you spot what you're sure was movement, a tall man lying in wait by the door
Roll for initiative
Nothing says that ain't no coat rack like dropping into what is perceived as combat, but is actually just rapid (enforce that with an hourglass if you want, something horror games absolutely benefit from doing) decision making time

Make sure they know this before hand, but take their first words as gospel. There is no room for take backs, or "no waits" in a scary scenario, you have one thing and one thing alone, and that's split second reaction time between you and an ax to the head. Emphasise this mechanically

"I want to investigate the man"
Alright roll skill
"I got a success"
Good on you, you know more about the man, but since you cannot act on that information now that you've taken your turn I'll tell you next round
"But I want to tell the rest of the group"
Sorry mate, the second you stop talking and I start describing that's your lot, in the future you should have specified that sooner. Talking is an action free or not it needs to be declared

>>"what is it user?"
>"alright, you hesitate and the thing attacks you before you can react. you cannot dodge or parry his initial attack, I'm afraid." rolls dice.... "oops you just lost half your hitpoints, buddy."

teach them fear.

>How do you get your players to not treat the game as much like a "game"?

Ask them nicely.

Arbitrarily changing little numbers on a sheet is teaching fear now?

That's not teaching them fear, that's teaching them that the entire game is going to be a contest to see how far the DM shoves his e-peen up your ass until you quit.
If you wanna really teach people fear, build shit up a bit. They walk into an empty mansion on the edge of town, there's a stain on the ground that might be blood, they happen upon a journal that get more and more unhinged and the last entry was from three days ago, etc.

You can't just throw people into a horror situation and expect them to feel scared out of obligation, you need to treat your campaign like a Jenga tower, where each action that they do reveals more about the situation, at the cost of causing their anchors on reality to become more and more unstable until they learn something that causes the whole structure to collapse.

Alternatively, you could give Dread a try too if you want to try a new horror system.

>running horror/action game
See, that's where you've made a mistake.

> the party is on a spooky ship
> any usual mortal thing disappeared ~10 years ago, captains log doesn't mention anything suspicious
> there's also a party of NPC adventurers on the ship, that I wanted the party to interact with. They're not hostile, just some paladins on a mission
> "I roll to sneak closer to them"
> well, okay, that will do too. "You see that they are very well equipped". Exclusively point out that NPCs have much better armor (1-3 AP vs 4-6 AP) and weapons than the party
>Some spooks with body possessions and acid-ish trips occur on the middle deck (not sure if it's called that in English)
> Party hears something running around below them, scratching wood with its claws
> No news from NPC party. Assassin fails horror check, runs back upstairs, takes the NPCs' boat, rows to the shore until he passes out.
> Archer/thief says, "Fuck it, I'm going up", acknowledges the fact that he won't be able to hear his comrades getting ripped to shreds.
> Mage and warrior go downstairs
> See dead NPCs. One heavy armor chestpiece is shattered, guy in a light armor looks like a strainer
> Give every. single. fucking. clue that they should maybe grab a weapon from NPC and bail
> "Nah. Let's go kill that fucker"
> Mage ends up popping up in the air above the ship after seeing that he can't do shit, warrior loses her weapon and runs upstairs
> The beast tries to lunge at the rowboat as they move away from the ship, but archer stops it in the air with couple of arrows

The creature that haunted that place was rated 'Deadly Group' in the bestiary. It had immunity to every element and poison, so only normal or pure magic damage could hurt it, but it also had perk that decreases any damage it receives by 5 (warrior had 1d8 damage). The mage couldn't kill it at all, and the warrior could take its health down to 80% before dying, if lucky.

yes, the players obviously ask for a description because they don't sense any danger if they don't attack immediately. teaching the players fear means putting them in a spot where they have to make a decision under uncertainty, being aware that the wrong decision might have bad consequences either way.

yeah, you don't get it. they asked OP exactly because they were not afraid to hesitate. OP has not taught them the dangers of hesitation yet. my advice amounts to him doing just that.

Hesitation doesn't matter in a tabletop game because initiative rolls exist and if you're fighting something that's way out of your weight class, you're better off trying to avoid it than to try and go in guns blazing into a meat grinder.

Besides, all your advice is going to do is teach players that horror games amount to how many ways the GM can kill you through no-save bullshit until everyone either quits or they have a TPK, which is the shittiest way to run horror because it means that the numbers will either always favor one side over the other and the players will just think that you're railroading them to the meat grinder.

True horror is a slow burn that takes time to actually build up towards, you can't just arbitrarily snipe a dude and shave off half his health and call it horror because dead people cannot be frightened by anything...because they're dead.

>my advice amounts to him doing just that.
No, your advice amounts to fucking them over just because you're terrible at describing anything.

If anything, basing "fear" on number of HPs would make the players MORE likely to treat the game as a game instead of getting invested in the story.

>True horror is a slow burn that takes time to actually build up towards, you can't just arbitrarily snipe a dude and shave off half his health and call it horror because dead people cannot be frightened by anything...because they're dead.

Fancy-pants authors usually refer to this as the difference between horror and terror. Horror is the feeling something bad is going to happen, while terror is something bad actually happening right now aaaa

I assume he used it as a marker for an enemy, so when he drops it down the player essentially went "shit we have to fight that huge guy?"