What makes you scared, and How can you make a RPG game truly frightful???

[bigznak]

I have always toyed with the idea of running a horror based game, and I always talk myself out of it due to the fact that I have never felt that I could be a good GM that could really get my players truly scared and thrown off their game. I always felt being scared is a state of not feeling in control of a situation. Anything that makes someone uncomfortable could make them truly scared. But what is that? So I enlist everyone here what makes you scared, freaked out, nervous, or uncomfortable?

Spiders?
Dark buildings?
Clowns?
Ghosts?
Heights?
Closed in spaces?
The food from your local crappy mexican restaurant?

I am looking for true fright. I would love to run a game session where people were really nervous about going home alone afterwards. It just seems very challenging to me to transfer that kind of fright into a role-playing game.  Is there anything that could be put in a RPG game that can truly make you scared?

[JonHook]

Disease or illness, (the more mysterious the better), that is contracted by the bite of a spider, or cat, or rat, or anything else. Have the disease eat away at the character's ability scores, and have it cause the character to hallucinate enough that they might even attack fellow players.

[Setherick]

I think what makes the most scared is the effects of mass paranoia in any form.

[clockworkjoe]

Disease or illness, (the more mysterious the better), that is contracted by the bite of a spider, or cat, or rat, or anything else. Have the disease eat away at the character's ability scores, and have it cause the character to hallucinate enough that they might even attack fellow players.

Gaming scenario: Players wake up in a strange place, no clue as to what happened. They wander around and realize they are in a lab. A NPC who is with them suddenly transforms into a horrible monster and dies painfully. Players start to realize that one or all of them are infected.

To reinforce this in the game, keep throwing symptoms at them. Keep it varied. Use notes to give secret messages to players.

[arthwollipot]

Hmm. My first horror game was mentioned on the podcast just after Halloween. The elements I used:

1. I cribbed mercilessly from an existing source (in this case, the movie Alien).
2. I had the players trapped and unable to escape (in a starship between systems).
3. I killed off NPCs one by one.
4. I revealed the monster only gradually.
5. I gave them a challenge to overcome that was not the monster (repairing the drives so that they could continue the trip).

Um, it was a while ago now, so I'm having a little trouble remembering. Fortunately I document all sessions:
http://www.arthwollipot.com/games/metascape-ii/the-story/the-horror

[Corrosive Rabbit]

One thing that has worked for me in the past is that, no matter what you choose, never describe it in full or let the PCs get a good look at it.  Describe it as "a blur of shadowy motion", "a shifting shape at the edge of your vision", or "a scuttling figure, seen out of the corner of your eye."  No matter what you come up with, it won't be as terrifying to the players as the unknown (or the images that pop into their head).

Another key ingredient of horror is isolation.  Sometimes this is physical isolation (such as being trapped in a spaceship stranded in deepspace) or it can be psychological isolation (the PCs know that there are horrible things lurking in the shadows, but can't get anyone to believe them).

Thirdly, I think one of the hardest things about running horror in an RPG is that the horror theme relies on a state of powerlessness.  In most horror stories, the enemy is far more powerful than the protagonist, forcing them to flee or otherwise act defensively until they can come up with a way to defeat it.  This is a bit of a switch from most RPG games, where the PCs tend to have decent odds in a stand-up fight against the majority of the enemies they encounter, and it can be tough for even veteran gamers to make that mental "switch."

CR

[codered]

spiders freak me out

and retarded peolple freak the shit outa me

[Shallazar]

and retarded peolple freak the shit outa me

Wow. My players don't like insanity, or the insane- I think the fact that I have a lithe frame, sallow features, scars on my head where I was lobotomized, and a great laugh also adds to their fright.

[xHero]

Stoic Children.... scare the fucking spooky shit out of me.

I have nightmares of having children and waking up to see them quietly watching me from the foot of my bed with blank expressions.

Mmmm...Vasectomy you're mah only friend.

[pwvogt]

Use notes to give secret messages to players.

Do this a couple of times, talk to each player beforehand and figure out what their unique goal. Fear of what the other players might do to your own character is terrible, but in a good way.

Horror makes it possible for each player to have their own goal and motives more than any other genre, use that and any mundane event from any other game will be magnified and powerful.

[Boyos]

I would have to say, namek's rapeing me with a gun is up in my top things I fear!

[UbuRex]

My go-to technique for freaking players out is subverting their expectations.

Fear is often a response to things not behaving like we think they should.  So if you make ordinary things act in not-so-ordinary ways, you can produce a really creepy atmosphere.

For example, in the Hunter game I'm running, I dropped a hint about a fortune-telling ATM that required a credit card as a sacrifice.  I advised them not to use one of their own.  They stole a random person's wallet and used one of his credit cards.  They got three questions, and the answers came printed out on ATM receipts. 

One of the PCs was a doctor whose brother was Chief of Neurology at the local teaching hospital. a few weeks later, the PC's brother and called the PC in to consult on a strange case where a catatonic patient was admitted with no record of his identity.  When the PC arrived on the scene, he recognized the patient -- it was the man whose card they'd fed to the ATM.  What had happened was implicit; the man''s identity was stolen.  The look of revelation on their faces was priceless.

[Tadanori Oyama]

That's a great horror moment, showing the PCs the bad things that they did when they didn't really think.

[UbuRex]

That's a great horror moment, showing the PCs the bad things that they did when they didn't really think.

Thanks!

[Tadanori Oyama]

Thanks!

I like to try and get the players into a tail spin. You get them to make a rash choice and then develope problems as a result of that choice.

When I ran Tom's Divine Fire game the players had to fill up a vehical with fuel in order to escape. The fuel close to the vehical had been taken by one of the PCs who'd gone rogue and the only other fuel was across the facility in the plane hangar.

So they manage to get the horse's watering trough onto a sled and fill it with gas, pull it to the machine shop while begin chased by a mutated former-ally, and fuel the tank enough to get it to the hangar where they rig up a temporary connecter and hit the switch.

During their daring escape from the hangar before hand they had fired wildly and now they saw a tiny water show of gas spraying from dozens of holes in the fuel hoze. They duck tape the holes, in outright panic at this point, when the sergent (one of the infected original troops on the base) shows up and demands to know why they are out of uniform.

They panic, shot him, and when he gets up again they try to run him over with the still fueling tank, which none of them know how to drive because the character with Operate Heavy Machinary got infected and turned. So, the driver botches his attempt and starts the tank turning in a circle while another PC gets into a fist fight with the sergent ontop of the tank.

The fuel line is now wrapping around the tank as it turns and close to breaking. The last PC, a russian acrobat, run over and jumps onto the tank and pulls out the fuel line, impaling her roll to do so and prevents fuel from spraying everywhere.

At that point they started to remove but having them on the edge of their seats, genuinly worried about the lives of their characters, was very cool.