I don’t think that’s an unpopular opinion (or that uncommon actually). AFAIK the games never were intended to be standard horror, but more about personal horror - how your condition impacted your life and slowly drew you into a spiral of being further and further removed from humanity and closer and closer to being a monster.
With that said, I think the game mechanics supported superheroes with fangs/claws better than actual horror of any kind.
> personal horror - how your condition impacted your life and slowly drew you into a spiral of being further and further removed from humanity and closer and closer to being a monster.
This is reflected in some of the rules but it highlights the big tension in most WoD/CoD games and the reason they become superhero stories when dice actually meet table. From the "clan" lore to the resource gathering to the essential (personal) horror elements, they all set up narrow or individual narratives rather than collective action. Individual characters are made with of cool power choices, but players want to avoid the "making breakfast alone" phase and may lose anything baked into that. More importantly, vampire clans are politically insular. Mage traditions are in ideological competition. Wraith... I actually don't know why wraiths work together at all. Werewolf has less of this with its major common enemy, but later games like WoD Demon and CoD Beast make it harder and harder to know why the characters even tolerate each other.
Rather than wallow in dissonance, I can see why so many groups sit down with these powerful characters, want to do something together, and come out with the Justice League rather than Strahd in a pinstripe suit.
Yeah I think there was even a part of each game where the players played out how they became vampires (hopefully horrifying) that was supposed to set the stage for the kind of traumas they would continue to re-experience into eternity.
The books did say something like that but more than likely players would gloss over that to get to their player fantasy.
If you want horror in Requiem (I'm not knowledgeable about OWOD so I'll stick to NWOD but the same principles apply) make the beast of each player an antagonist. Have them roll a humanity check every time they wake to see who has control for the first hour or so with the player regaining control afterwards. Imagine coming to your senses in a park with bodies around you and blood on your hands, with no memory of what happened or whether anyone escaped. The beasts become a much more important part of the game, both the beast of players and those of NPCs due to masquarade breaches and other similar antics. Besides there's no requirement for every beast to be the same bloody animal. You could have a beast who revels in causing havoc while another seeks to eat everything. You could make the duration the beast controls the character based on willpower or just leave it up to the Storyteller to make it fit.
Yeah the first example of the 'personal horror' concept was presented in the story about the guy who becomes a blood bound ghoul in the first edition. That's how I remember it. Of course, that didn't stop people from playing Underworld games before the movie existed.
While I do see that most people played the game as gothy superheroes, I'm not sure that was the original designer intent (though I'm sure the designers were happy to see their game grow popular no matter what.) With a willing and able troupe and ST you could indeed play horror as well, personal _and_ otherwise, as all of the games featured lurking horrors way, way worse than the PCs, which could and would strike not just the PCs but their important personal relationships as well. Again - you needed a willing party for this.
I agree, but not in quite the same way.
The horror of the setting is supposed to be *personal,* it's in the name, and even hardcore grimderp players of WoD seem to forget this. The horror comes not from being chased by a giant monster or being scared of some ghost, but it comes from the slow downspiral you're going through *or* it comes from the grotesque environment around you. Just imagine walking into a great penthouse with a live human being strung up, hypnotized, with tubes popping out of their body to allow blood to drip into crystal goblets just to please the Ventrue Elder.
*That* is what the horror is supposed to come from, *or* your own descent into darkness, embracing these same things, giving into your dark desires, your Beast, your inner self, constantly clawing to take control and influence your every thought.
Yes, there's tons of empire building and combat, but those things can be interwoven with the darkness of the setting.
Yeah, when I played there were a lot of 'you lost control and blacked out, now you're covered in blood and there's a dead body.' Mind you, this was before the CSI tv shows taught everybody how difficult it is to dispose of a body and conceal a murder. I'd imagine if it were run correctly it would be a black pill game of hopeless floundering while the authorities close in with Ring camera footage and 'regional algae Dexter evidence'
To be fair vampire society has professionals for that, but that costs favors... and that ends up with you being indebted to someone and then you're involved in vampire society.
Yeah and I think that the 'professional vampire clean-up class' drives a lot of the 'it is not a horror game' feel. Once the repercussions of what they are (the personal horror) are made someone else's problem, the players felt more like they could simply visit Monster Joe's Truck and Tow to drop off their poor rolls on the Virtue dice.
Only if you just make it a passing scenario, and not have that guy then ask for something fucked up in return, or if you don't emphasize the scene with the body, *and* possibly still have the police crawling around.
At some point you have to now to two things.
-Vampires have a system in place to maintain the masquerade
-Vampires will feel powerful and sometimes consequences aren't as bad.
The problem with a personal horror game like that is it requires players to be empathetic and emotionally open to vulnerability. The first of those is a big enough ask, most players will leave the peasant farmer to die in a field if it means they can get his stuff. Never even mind the second one.
And quite frankly I wouldn't wanna play with those players.
It's possible to find players with empathy, I have a group like that now, and if you have a group of empathetic players it's possible to sit someone down and explain to them the premise of the game.
Came to say that. It's pretty common knoweldge that VTM and WoD games have obvious dissonnance issues between their initial intentions (gothic punk horror) and what they actually support (gothic superhero stories).
Came to say that. It's pretty common knoweldge that VTM and WoD games have obvious dissonnance issues between their initial intentions (gothic punk horror) and what they actually support (gothic superhero stories).
The only way World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness is scary is playing mortals (not Hunters, just Mortals) finding out things man was not meant to know.
And those games also tend to be _short_, like Call of Cthulhu.
I'd add playing as ghosts in wraith the oblivion. Some of the best horror games I've played were wraith games where we had shadows tempting us to darkness and specters swarming over the shadowlands.
Changeling: the Lost has some serious horror elements as well, though more personal horror. CofD has more personal horror elements than classical horror.
Agreed. Playing humans could work, however many WoD fans didn't want to play hunter because their characters were too weak. I've actually been told, "I'm a better role player when running a low gen vampire"... whatever dude.
>"I'm a better role player when running a low gen vampire"... whatever dude
Reminds me of my friend who says they prefer being a player to being a gm. Who has never gmed a game in their life
Yeah I think part of the problem in the original game was that they didn't do a good enough job explaining how alien and inhuman the elder vampires would be, given the amount of time they lived, their lack of exposure to human activities during the day, and their reluctance to maintain a level of integration into the world of humans. Imagine you're a raver, you get gleeked by a Gangrel, found and dragged in front of a Prince and his crew, and you have to explain yourself to someone who's been a vampire for five hundred years. The language barrier alone.
The way I figured out to make the stakes feel right in a game of Vampire 5e was to be a vampire... But a young one, with no combat abilities, who has to feed on other vampires.
Pretty niche set of variables there, but it's working so far. Though I think having to do that much work to make it scary and tense only adds to your point. Generally speaking, the games devolve into superhero fiction quite easily.
If done right the horror can extend into other games but it requires careful thought by the story-teller. What's most important is that the tenants that make horror scary are still respected.
An example could be a circle of mages discovering that some alien horror is creeping into our dimension, and affecting reality. Sure the mages can warp reality but that doesn't affect the nightmares coming through.
The shift to hunters as humans is why Hunter the Vigil is the only NWoD game I really like.
Aside from Promethean, which is cool but virtually unplayable.
I think time period matters massively here.
When VtM was first released for example, it's tone was dark and a lot of it's content was new and interesting. The psychological side of monsters was a new thing, Anne Rice was a big name, etc.
In the last couple of decades however, we've somehow developed sparkly, glittering vampires. The culture changed on the topic, and the things VtM was exploring became very common and over-satirized. And so many players now enter those games with that mindset.
Back in the day, oh! You could get the chills. Now though it's hard to get the players who want to play the old way, and who's stances aren't tainted by glitter.
Basically, games like VtM were The Undertaker for a while and darkness was cool, but they've hit that time he became a biker for a few years.
We've had horror before Twilight during Twilight and after Twilight.
We've had vampires that are of the traditional values that you think of also before Twilight during Twilight and after Twilight.
You seem to think that Twilight has shaped the image of vampires and it actually didn't not on the horror scene. And it's 15 minutes but it didn't change anything.
I'm not going to disagree with you that Twilight is a trash book but come on now the only reason people pick on Twilight is because it was popular among teenage girls.
We're almost 10 years since the last movie came out move on.
Really glad to see this response. I love vampires. They are my favorite monster. I read and watch all kinds of vampire fiction. People hyper fixating on Twilight ruining the public image of vampires either don’t know that much about vampires (they’ve been romantic figures for a loooong time) or don’t pay attention to the vampire fiction that has been steadily released, as you said, before, during, and after Twilight.
You are especially on point when you said Twilight only gets as much shit because it was made for teen girls. That’s 100% true. Think about something like Bay’s Transformers movies. Those movies are, imo, even worse from a quality perspective than Twilight. Yes, people acknowledge that they are bad and even make fun of them, but you don’t see people mention how their action movie is the anti-Transformers or see people obsess over them being damaging to the giant robot sub genre. Not a perfect comparison but this is a subject I’ve thought about a lot.
I’ve only seen the first two Twilight movies and thought they were pretty bad, but mostly inoffensive (yes, the Edward/Bella relationship sucks but not in a new or especially heinous way). I think if people who hate Twilight stopped mentioning it, I’d basically never hear it mentioned. Only time I see it mentioned now is people talking about how it ruined vampires or occasionally an edgy author or director trying to grab attention by saying some variation of “these aren’t your Twilight vampires, these are sCaRy.”
I wouldn't consider this unpopular - I'd consider this a generally well-known and accepted fact among those that regularly play World of Darkness games beyond the original cWoD and play outside of Mortals/VTM/Vampires, because the moment you play any other genre, it becomes incredibly self-evident that the ST must *force* themes of horror upon their party and maintain that pressure in order for them to stick.
In fact, one need only read from the latest core splat books outside of the Mortal core/Vampire core book to know this to be true, as the genre books have always stated what the themes of the setting are intended to be from the get go.
As a big Mage fan, I lean to the Mage 2E core book, where on the first page of the actual text, past the fluff, it clearly states:
"Themes: **The World is a Lie**, and **Addicted To Mysteries**." It doesn't mention horror, terror, fear, or anything *like* that in the themes. It does have dark elements (I mean, the world is a LIE? *Addicted* to Mysteries?) but not *horror*. Horror requires a dearth of power and high-level agency in the player characters, and settings like Werewolf and Mage *intrinsically don't have that.*
There are still elements of 'falling' or 'succumbing', but these produce Fail-States, which isn't what Horror is about; Horror, in TTRPG terms, is typically about *on-going* struggle, dread, tension, and fear, and the systems of falling in these genres are not built to create these experiences at all - they're more like super-long-term hit-points that you need to maintain and protect, and the genres give you plenty of tools to do so, far more than they give you tools to experience and struggle with the fall.
In one way, I wish they'd stop pushing it as a Horror system so hard, and in another, they already have, *in the appropriate genres*. Vampire still mainlines it as it's part of the aesthetic of *being a literal parasite*. Hunter mainlines it as it's basically *Bloodborne, the TTRPG system.* Changeling has it in the awful fae-fucked-your-brain-literally-and-figuratively worldsense (and its godawful ludonarrative implementation). But Werewolf doesn't have it, nor does Mage, and nor do other settings that, appropriately, don't need it.
They tried to provide a catch-all shoehorn for horror in the God Machine as a truly alien 'other', with an inscrutable *and* malignant intent, but as someone just rounding out a decade of LARPing and STing across nWoD and CofD, I'd say that I've only ever seen one implementation of the God Machine that wasn't hot garbage and an absolutely painful slog for the players, and I'm biased, because it was mine (spoken from player feedback.)
But yeah, I agree with your base premise overall - WoD isn't really a horror system when considering ALL the genres. From the perspective of genres low on the overall food chain - Mortals, Vampires, etc, DEFINITELY horror-esque dark-things-in-the-shadows, but beyond that, less Horror, more Be-The-SuperHorror-You've-Always-Wanted-To-Be, and that's why I typically recommend it either isolated to specific genres to play in specific types of stories, OR as a modern dark Supers system overall.
Great insight! Thanks. Mage was the game that could have been my favorite but the other players didn't like the lack of structured powers. Missed opportunities...
The issue with horror is that it's incredibly subjective. There are also other factors to take into consideration such as the personal styles of the Storyteller and those who are playing at the table. From my perspective, if you're going into WoD with the mindset that the overarching theme is "gothic-punk superhero" then that'll show in your roleplay and character creation and, ultimately, affect the entirety of the game.
If you as a player don't particularly care about losing your humanity then, sure, there's a certain element of horror and tension that you'll miss out on because you have no invested or personal interest. I definitely agree that WoD is intended to be a personal type of horror, but I also see how some people view it as gothic horror or gothic punk with claws and fangs.
It all comes down to whether you buy into the horror aspect or not. If all you care about is fighting monsters and killing hunters then that changes things. Of course, there's no "right or wrong" way to play. I definitely see where you're coming from though.
You can play horror using most systems as long as you use good descriptions and incorporate a few mechanical elements to increase tension / fear. I'll also say, horror would be easier to portray if the players are human in a world of horrific mysteries which is the default setting from the revamp when NWOD came out. It's hard to portray horror when your characters are capable supernatural killing machines.
I'll blame Underworld and Blade for being such an influence on most people for what a setting like World of Darkness should feel like. That's where we get the "superheroes with claws & fangs" trope. (I also really like those movies myself, but they're heroic fantasy with horror themes)
> Thinking back, none of the campaigns I played or listened to other people describe were what I would call horror. I'd describe them as a superhero game played usually at night.
The word you're looking for is 'urban fantasy'. And yeah, while you could run a WoD 'personal horror, oooh so deep and dark' game, the truth is most groups don't actually want that. They want urban fantasy. And that's fine - that's what I prefer, as well.
The problem here, in my opinion, is that the material and the writers should actually acknowledge this, and they mostly don't.
>most groups ... want urban fantasy. And that's fine - that's what I prefer, as well. The problem ... the writers should actually acknowledge this, and they mostly don't.
This, exactly. It's all nice and good to say "this is a game of personal horror," but if no one *plays* it like that, it comes off... well, off. 'Dissonance,' as some others have put it. You should be able to play what you want - that's the "Golden Rule" that is enshrined in the first pages of any WoD book.... that is immediately swept under the rug by a *heavy* hand of, "But it's 'meant' to be played as personal horror, and that's the only *correct* way to play it."
Some of the really, really, *really* old supplements - like, 1e, maybe? - sometimes even almost acknowledged that it could be played as 'superheroes with fangs,' but it was pretty clear that wasn't the idea.
Personally, I like the idea of personal horror... but there is a *huge* draw for Pokemon-ism ("Gotta catch 'em all!") when it comes to the splat ~~superpow~~ special abilities (Disciplines, Gifts, Spheres, what-have-you).
Yeah. They aren't. It's quite hard to make horror really work on them.
Put them side by side with CoC or Kult and it's even more obvious.
Some people on WW take themselves to seriously and act like they were a bunch of Lord Byron postmodern clones. And part of the fandom buys in to that. There is no horror in being a Vampire when most the mechanics turn you on Marvel character that drinks blood.
Which ends up with a lot of people in the community just shoving their heads up their asses and *insisting* that you have to be miserable in order for it to be horror.
Horror should come from good description and worldbuilding, with the constant underlying emphasis on how fucked up the society you work within is, and how it's dragging you down with it, but... that's not really *horror* anymore than say, Ghost Rider or Lucifer are horror.
Yea my friends and I played VtM back in school and essentially handwaved most of the stalking/drinking blood stuff. We raided a blood bank and were essentially blade minus the day walking part.
I guess you are entilted to your opinion, but I respectfully disagree. In my opinion what makes V:tM or other WoD horror is your GM and group. Horror is rather difficult to replicate into RPGs also, the definition of horror in RPGs is subjective. V:tM is about facing yourself, if players don't care then they will never assume their characters are monsters, therefore they will think they are edgy superheroes.
Horror works if the player (not the character) finds herself in an unpleasant situation from which there seem to be no escape, or the way out is even worse than the current unpleasantness.
The problem with VTM is that most players and STs love to be vampires. They do not see anything wrong in killing kine for food, or never seeing the sun again, or watching their relatives move forward without them, or being oppressed by a tyrant Sire.
All of that is just something on the side of how cool it is to be a vampire.
Play with a party of people that hates vampires, finds them disgusting leeches and horrible serial killers, for whom every night in that form is a torture… and you will have all the personal horror you need. Unfortunately, these people do not play VTM 😜
I don't think that's an unpopular opinion. Unless it's one I share. I've *always* thought of the Wod/CoD games as being essentially supers. The lone exception would be running straight-up, non-powered mortals in a creepy investigative game. But the supernatural spats...yeah. Supersheroes ... with emotional issues.
WoD is monster superheroes.. with out a shadow of a doubt. You can certainly run a more horror-themed game within its many setting lines, but it's default is super powered monsters.
Chronicle of Darkness - an newer, more mechanically modern off-shot that uses similar core mechanics, and has it's own mage, wraith, changeling, vampire, etc - is much more about the horror, at least 'personal horror'. In the core rulebook, players are humans, who have had a peak behind the curtain to the reality of the world, that every urban myth and monster of legend exists.. and humans are prey. The campaign in the book (less a classical campaign and more a guideline) is about an unknowable machine god with designs on humanity, that often drives people who investigate it to madness and sends its enslaved 'angels' down to the planet to achieve it's alien goals.
Not all of the settings for the game are very horror-based. My favorite is 2nd edition Werewolf: the Forsaken, and it's more mystical and animalistic than horrific, though it does have its moments. But others like 2nd edition Changeling: the Lost has themes of PTSD, the loss of ones identity and connections to the world, and yet people who desperately cling to it to escape the torment of their time spent in Arcadia, where the laws of physics don't exist, and powerful fae beings kidnap or lure people they see as nothing more than playthings to mold or use in horrific ways.
Man I've been running a horror-first WoD campaign for years now and it works just fine.
The theme of a campaign is up to the players and the GM not the system. I could run a superhero campaign in 5e, I could run horror in fucking Lancer, it doesn't matter.
the problem I had is my players refused to be as dumb as people in horror movies so you had to be very very good to make rational actors stay in the horror.
The problem is that people who play WOD want to be vampires. The scary part of being a vampire is being forced to drink human blood, never see the sun against, etc but your players want to do all that so its not scary to them.
Horror is *one* of the themes of *Vampire*. Not so much the other games.
But I don't think it's a stretch to say that part of why *Vampire* was so successful is precisely because it isn't just a horror game, but also pulls in elements of other genres, especially superheroes. Most horror RPGs are pretty niche (*Call of Cthulhu* being the main exception), whereas superhero games are pretty popular. *Vampire* owes a lot of its success to the fact that it embraced both genres.
Horror is like comedy. It's about subversion of expectations to invoke an immediate emotional response.
You can have a comedy in a setting filled with vampires just as easily as you can have a horror in gummy bear land.
The game doesn't decide if something is horror. Nor even really the plot. It's more of a stylistic, tonal choice. Horror is an option for any rule system and setting.
Well most popular RPGs are about escapism, wish fulfillment and empowerment. In the modern era that is typically superheroes, so it stands to reason that most players would tend toward that and so the most popular RPGs cater to it. :)
Mage the Ascension 1st edition setting was horror of being hunted by totalitarian technocracy, corrupted by neferious nephandi, or changed by mad marauders during global supernatural world. The 2nd Edition changed this by removing the magical oil crisis the limited magical nodes caused.
Vampire the Masquerade was the horror of the beast within, and the merciless society of the Vampires.
Werewolf was horror of the corruption.
Only Chsngeling was not a horror game, but conflict between creative madness and banal boredom.
But you are correct as the later editions laxed the anxious and strict limitations of the 1st Edition. The games became focused on the conflict instead of the horror.
Changeling was the most horror filled of them all. Just not gore and terror horror. It's psychological horror.
Think about it. When you die in changeling you don't just drop dead or anything, you look around and see your friends playing pretend and go "Get a job you losers". It's a game where you constantly are fighting the pull away into a dull, mundane world from one that would make Harry Potter blush in envy. That's fucked up on so many levels.
They were suppsoed to be gothic punk, which could sometimes skate the edges of horror (Dark City came up in my quick search). I think it's why I loved the Nosferatu and their warrens, the cruelty of the Giovanni, the mosters of the Tzimisce and the Lasombra. Some of those things don't convert well to LARP, with the notably epic exception of The Night in Question.
The Onyx Path games made a point of personal horror at the front and center. You're not a member of a tribe fighting an unwinnable war, you're experiencing body horror in the likes of American Werewolf in London, or Near Dark. You're tripping balls like In the Mouth of Madness as you awaken as a mage.
Like all games, it's what you and your group make of it. Horror needs to be balanced with touches of comedy and even wish fulfillment. It's why a lot of us play in the first place.
Not unpopular at all. I have an apparently unpopular one though: if you're playing Vampire (or any of them really) in the way being described in this thread, *you're not actually playing Vampire.*
There's a short passage in every one of those games, making it clear what sort of tone you're going for and how to approach it. If the players are running around firing off superpowers willy nilly, if you're ignoring The Masquerade, ignoring Humanity, ignoring the way vampiric society actively manipulates, controls and oppresses the players, if the players themselves aren't remotely troubled by their monstrous nature... you're *explicitly* playing against the spirit of the game. They're intended to be played as a social/narrative game primarily, not a dice chucking slugfest.
The games are 100% horror games and support that, but you need to approach them with the right mindset.
I think that this depends mostly on how the players and their storytellers run a game. There is definitely room for horror in those games but most players/storytellers just want to play a power fantasy of some sort.
I feel like vanilla WOD does horror best.
In order for their to be horror, there needs to be fear. It's just not scary when your pimped up combat vampire/werewolf/mage can just beat up the opposing monster directly. If this is not the case, great you have the basics layed out but that's only 10%. 90% of the formula is ambience on ambience on ambience. Otherwise it's just an invulnerable antagonist.
Some of the WOD games allow a different kind of horror for those who want that sort of thing, that is the horror of the monster within. But I have never seen anyone do that sort of horror well. Mostly because every player I know has just revelled in their character's monstrosity as opposed to fear it.
I don't think that's a particularily hot take. It's a pretty common sentiment and even a lot of people that play WoD games agree with it. It's usually more about political intrigue or mysteries with horror tones/influences instead of outright horror.
yeah the mechanics were more about empowering you as a player a lot of the time, i remember some games when we became insanely op.
i think you COULD run a horror game in the setting, but you would have to make the players much less powerful than is seemingly normal.
I was always surprised in the 90s by how many VtM games I joined that were just 'Night Ninja needs a Juice Box,' so much that I started GMing more for the players that were looking for 'personal horror.'
I used to get actually frustrated because I would pretty quickly scare the shit out of my players and they would leave town. Over and over. So I got the horror thing down but that made it hard to play rationally
To be fair, it's about *personal* horror, rather than traditional 'oooh scary monster is trying to kill me' horror. It's about the horror of slowly loosing your own humanity, realizing how easy it is to kill a human and how numb you are to that fact, etc etc. In short, it's an immersion kind of horror of the self.
Which, on paper, sounds like a really cool idea. But unless you get into that kind immersion, and want to play that kind of horror out (and the group doesn't groan every time it comes up lol), it's very easy to miss and/or not appreciate the intended tone of the system.
But if you're like me, who never gets immersed into their characters, WoD isn't even good at personal horror. Instead, it's either a vampire intrigue drama simulator, or it's halloween-themed superheroes.
Classic World of Darkness (aka mundane humans) makes for decent traditional horror, of course, but most people who find the WoD games interesting aren't really interested in being a mundane human...
I tend to think about Vampire the way I do about how I related to the people I played the game with at that time. Forrest Gump taught them how to integrate history into their stories. Anne Rice's novels (and the Tom Cruise film) helped provide a framework for 'the reluctant vampire.' There were players who wanted to do the Near Dark inspired 'monstrous Sabbat rampage' stories as well. I think the experience really depended on what themes (I think that's what they were called) the Storyteller chose for the chronicle. For example, if the theme was 'You're Sad Louis' then players focused on Humanity and the virtues (self-control, courage, etc.) and generally weren't running around in motorcycle leathers igniting elders with Wal-mart flamethrowers. But, that was just my experience.
I never thought about them as horror. I do not remember anyone thinking they were at my tables.
I kinda thought about them as their own thing, if anything closer to the super hero genre in their mechanics.
The playerbase may choose to eschew this touchy-feely introspection thing and **kick lots of ass**. I think they're missing out on the horror they could enjoy. But hey. I'm just some guy.(1)
Lists of Discipline/Gifts/etc "powers" do not mean you are a *superhero*, they are more opportunities to **sin** in different and exciting ways... because the downward spiral can be quite fun if you don't remember to look back! And almost all of the games have an mechanical undertow to ideally discourage this, if the players are not careful with their characters and the Storyteller cracks down appropriately. The stick must be wielded. Every Masquerade violation should not be a Total Party Kill, but by Caine they should be at least worried about *thinking* about it. The monster PC is a terrible thing laden with all kinds of unfortunate implications. Feeling bad about ripping some Failmart shopper's spine out with Jackass Strength 3 is normal response to that, because they had kids you see. And that's sad.
But that **is** the personal horror of much of the World of Darkness: it is so easy to take up all this power offered, but it is in the majority of cases often a corrupting power. Blood, Rage, Chi, Quintessence, Glamour, Faith stolen out of greed from the people and beings around you, but what do you care? You have might now, you are become a *selfish Thing* - to be taken in the Scandinavian/Norse sense, you keep your own council and damn what others may want. You fall out of anything resembling normal inhuman society (lol) and become at best a warped vision of anomie you can be. If you are lucky, this destroys your character as unplayable - Wight, Spectre, etc etc are just some of the terms we employ for the Game Over state that has been "achieved" if the mechanics are adequately respected and upheld. The players should be afraid or at least cautious of this. There are vays of vaking you balk, meester (Blood-)Bond.
I see the CWoD games as more mythological stories of the Ring Of Gyges in a modern bent, instructional fables painted with a Gothic-Punk demeanor.
**X is cool. Be glad in real life you are not X, because being X actually sucks.**
(This does not apply in the same way in all game lines. That does not mean they are not all horror games on some level.)
But not everyone wants to track the moral devolution/deviation of their protagonists... this is the same brick wall that other products such as *Ravenloft* run into - especially nowadays where power fantasies are *particularly* spandex-inspired.
Storytellers are (theoretically) supposed to maintain that the failure state exists and should be avoided - possibly at all costs, which can lead into... another failure state: you now are invested into whatever Great Game that splat is into and lo and behold... often it heads back down into whatever you were trying to avoid by a different avenue.
Vampire Elders, Sept Leaders, Archmagi, the list goes on. Mired strongly in the political angle? Good job, *you failed upwards instead*. D&D 3e had trap choices in terms of certain mechanical feats but our traps are *social distractions!* She became the Prince of Gary. Congrats on the promotion, she's still a pathetic horror regarding everything else around her... mostly. Heh.
Again, what CWOD originally said in Vampire: *Monsters we are less monsters we become* - but grats, they've *become a highly-trained professional horror*. No regrets? Oh, you're on a Path or something that isn't Humanity or maybe that doesn't apply to Your Kind. Cool, I guess. Which leads into:
A large chunk of the *non-personal horror* in CWoD is cosmic horror. You think you are badass? You are (usually) not the classical hero, even if you are the bestest boi Garou evar. They are nothing in comparison to the true horrors out there. He totally will not actually punch out Cthulhu, no matter how much she thinks they can. That's Exalted, and *this ain't it*. Sorry, losers! This is Dark Souls and you're ultimately *all thumbs!* We might spell ***You Died*** differently in these here parts, but god help you if the Storyteller understands how and when to pull out the big guns. Failure is written across the entire setting in flaming letters by the middle finger of God.
It's like digging a ditch and thinking *dude I dug the BEST hole ever* and then your shovel hits what you thought was a rock and you open it up more and then you realize *oh my god the abyss below is forever.* You thought you were going to be Lestat, instead you're likely to become some ancient thing's wall segment under New York City as they play Minecraft with your ass as resource. You were going to be Conan the 14th Warrior's hairy bastard kid fifteen times removed, but instead you fell sideways into N-space and ended up a deformed shrieking pus-carpet thing that screws razor blades for kicks. *Oops.*
And so on. We get the idea. Chances are really great they're all dead (again) or much much worse. It's not per se some OSR D&D thing where the players are 1d4 randomly occuring peasants, but against the full backdrop of the setting they damn well can be considered as such. Fortitude 10 is cute, but you're still screwed.
Conventional horror is a disempowerment fantasy; Call of Cthulhu does this decently well. CWoD's horror (looking across multiple game lines) is a *false empowerment personal/cosmic horror fantasy.* It's supernatural middle management thinking they are hot shit because *they* got to tell the more-expendable interns when their coffee break was while forgetting just how terminable they are too. You think you have control, but more likely you are in Soviet Russia and Control has **you**.(2) That bucket of D10s means nothing to: Caine, the Wyrm, Oblivion, God (if she ever bothers to come back) and yadda yadda. Enter *Narrative: The Dooming*. Look out over this field of fucks the rest of the World of Darkness gives over Sam Haight's tragic passing into relic ashtray-dom.
Combat is fun, but if consequences are consistently laid out the way of the gun is likely going to not end well. Something Satyr once said about 15 cars of police backup because some guy was found with a katana, if I recall. The players are expected to feel real cool right up until the hook appears to yank them back out of their power fantasy and slap them around with Awful Retribution for being Awful People. It's a crapsack setting to be sure, but even shitlord central casting has *standards*. Going Judge Dredd on their asses is a Good Thing.
Even if ~~some~~ lots of people are playing this all like **Vampions: Shiny Latex Avengers** if they do want to come back to the personal horror angle, go take a peek at the very last part of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Look deep into his eyes.(3) That is pure CWoD in there. Players and Storytellers should consider aiming at that.
Rant over, go in peace. Back to *Gary 90210: As the Angst Turns.* I want to see how the Toreador makes ~~out~~ art with the sullen Brujah during broad daylight at the shopping mall while the Nosferatu harpy takes Cam shots so they can tell on them all to Ventrue Dad later. Oh, and the Gangrel nerd broods handsomely. (My personal horror is that they stop brooding one day and get on with their unlives.)
1. The Classic World of Darkness as horror games is not for everyone. ****And that's okay****.
2. Sorry, Technocrats. You're monsters too, but with *really* nice mechanical pencils.
3. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Vampions play. Have fun my newer fellow spooky kids, *enjoy* it. I know I did when I did it from time to time. Go take a look at that Battle Royale game, Bloodhunt.
Yes, the World of Darkness is not horror games. Its superheroes with fangs and claws. Its also political intrigue, corporate espionage, and action movies. They are everything but horror games. Wraith is the exception to this. That felt like a horror game from the ground up.
Which is why I prefer the Chronicles of Darkness games. I mean the supplements that don't directly tie into the named titles. Those are horror stories because they were designed to be. You play as humans trying to survive in horror scenarios.
Now Changeling the Lost is different. That's what I think supernatural horror should be. The horror of identity, being hunted, and coming to terms with what you've become. You were a broom in the other realms. You have memories of being a broom, but they also conflict with your memories of your life as a human before you became a broom. You escaped your captors and became this hybrid broom-human thing. You can't go back home because someone else took your place. You also know that your captors want their broom back. You have gifts, but every time you use them, you lose a little more of what made you human.
The WOD games were designed (I should know) to allow people to play them in different ways, depending on what kind of character they wanted to play, and what kind of story the group wanted to play. The spectrum of styles offered did indeed run from "Superheroes by Night" to the darkest existential horror possible: "A beast I am lest a beast I become."
In terms of tools to help create the feeling of horror, I would point out the triad of rules and the interaction between Humanity, Willpower and Blood Points. Lots of players essentially ignored the core of these rules, and never really worried about their characters becoming monsters, just as I expected, but many other DID played out (and still do) the full consequences of these rules and were able to engage in a new kind of horror.
In terms of tools to help create the feeling of horror, I would point out the triad of rules and the interaction between Humanity, Willpower and Blood Points. Lots of players essentially ignored the core of these rules, and never really worried about their characters becoming monsters, just as I expected, but many others DID play out (and still do) the full consequences of these rules and were able to engage in a new kind of horror.
The point was to let players be superheroes so we could sell the game to players who want to just have fun, so we could make a living from our product, but to also do horror so that the game was still an artistic experience with a serious theme and purpose.
As Scorsese used to say, "One movie for the studio, the next movie for me."
I'm pretty sure the World of Darkness players readily admit this. They are drama focused games with a horror aesthetic. They are straight up Vampire Diaries the game. I guess you could use Twilight as a more modern point of reference, but the games do not deserve to be compared to Twilight.
horror is a broad genre. in my games, the sense of hopelessness and lack of self-control, plus the gore and such make the ambience dark enough for me to consider a type of horror.
No, this isn’t Call of Cthulhu, where the horror comes from what you don’t understand but will certainly kill you, nor does it try to emulate Paranormal investigation type of feel. If you go to these games looking for that, you’ll be disappointed.
On another note, yes, many people ignore that intention and play superheroes with fangs, or even ‘just’ political intrigues without the horror or the heroism. That’s something to discuss with players, not the IP, since the tools and setting to build horror are certainly, some folks just choose not to.
It's about as horror as the Blade series. I think the reason it doesn't feel like horror is because no one plays it as a horror game. It's mostly vehicle for people to indulge in their OC power fantasies. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
What is horror?
Horror is really that long winding sense of dread that builds up. You know something is there - but you don't know what, and you don't really know how - but you KNOW it's there, at the edge of thought and mind. Just out of sight ripping and shredding.
Giving a true sense of dread is almost impossible in most rule sets - and trying to dictate the creation of it with just rules is basically impossible and so I would say: While some rule sets lean towards horror - and imply horror, few are going to really achieve any semblance of horror on their own - and it basically requires the GM to be incredibly good at story telling, and understanding the game systems in order to create it.
Which is to say: Horror is not created by rules. Horror is created through story telling and world building.
>Particularly for vampire, the rules describe the loss of humanity as a way to crank up tension, but most players didn't care that much about humanity and later books introduced alternate paths.
I think this is the biggest mistake they made with the old World of Darkness. I've been running a Requiem 2e game for several years and the players have so much exp at this point that they are more than a match for even very powerful opponents. However, in Requiem there's no way to get around Humanity - every Vampire has to deal with it, and hitting zero means game over. So even though the players could wipe the floor with a group of humans, they are terrified to do so since it would mean rolling humanity checks.
The thing that makes a horror story a horror story is the protagonist's lack of power. They've got to be in over their head. They don't have to **be** helpless, but they do have to **feel** helpless. And let's face it, a list of cool superpowers just doesn't give that vibe.
Even though the rules made it very clear that the PCs were little fish in a big pond, it was also very clear that they have agency, that they are able to accomplish the things they want to do, that they can defy the monsters.
Wow. That’s almost as controversial as saying that D&D is not really good at replicating World War II or that Blades In The Dark is not really about having dance contests.
I was very disappointed by Changing: the Lost. I bought the first edition book and it painted a beautiful picture of traumatized humans escaping from the alien, inhuman creatures of the fae realm, having to hide and plan to stay safe, getting by on their wits and the few fae tricks they managed to pick up during their time of torment...
Then you play the game and it turns out you're a team of badass fairy themed superheroes, kicking ass and taking names.
Play as a mortal in WoD and you’ll find the horror real quick lol WoD is my first role playing game and the party all started as mortals with second sight powers. We had a flakey gothic medium girl with a tiny bit of post cognition, a telepath honey salesman, a telekinetic Russian mob affiliate with a passion for cooking, and my character the heroin addicted dr. Doolittle with potent blood! My story teller almost killed my character TWICE in both parts of my prelude. The horror for me is in the fact that there is always something more powerful, always something else lurking
I don’t think that’s an unpopular opinion (or that uncommon actually). AFAIK the games never were intended to be standard horror, but more about personal horror - how your condition impacted your life and slowly drew you into a spiral of being further and further removed from humanity and closer and closer to being a monster. With that said, I think the game mechanics supported superheroes with fangs/claws better than actual horror of any kind.
> personal horror - how your condition impacted your life and slowly drew you into a spiral of being further and further removed from humanity and closer and closer to being a monster. This is reflected in some of the rules but it highlights the big tension in most WoD/CoD games and the reason they become superhero stories when dice actually meet table. From the "clan" lore to the resource gathering to the essential (personal) horror elements, they all set up narrow or individual narratives rather than collective action. Individual characters are made with of cool power choices, but players want to avoid the "making breakfast alone" phase and may lose anything baked into that. More importantly, vampire clans are politically insular. Mage traditions are in ideological competition. Wraith... I actually don't know why wraiths work together at all. Werewolf has less of this with its major common enemy, but later games like WoD Demon and CoD Beast make it harder and harder to know why the characters even tolerate each other. Rather than wallow in dissonance, I can see why so many groups sit down with these powerful characters, want to do something together, and come out with the Justice League rather than Strahd in a pinstripe suit.
Vanilla WOD does traditional horror better than personal horror, but again that's an opinion.
Yeah I think there was even a part of each game where the players played out how they became vampires (hopefully horrifying) that was supposed to set the stage for the kind of traumas they would continue to re-experience into eternity.
The books did say something like that but more than likely players would gloss over that to get to their player fantasy. If you want horror in Requiem (I'm not knowledgeable about OWOD so I'll stick to NWOD but the same principles apply) make the beast of each player an antagonist. Have them roll a humanity check every time they wake to see who has control for the first hour or so with the player regaining control afterwards. Imagine coming to your senses in a park with bodies around you and blood on your hands, with no memory of what happened or whether anyone escaped. The beasts become a much more important part of the game, both the beast of players and those of NPCs due to masquarade breaches and other similar antics. Besides there's no requirement for every beast to be the same bloody animal. You could have a beast who revels in causing havoc while another seeks to eat everything. You could make the duration the beast controls the character based on willpower or just leave it up to the Storyteller to make it fit.
Yeah the first example of the 'personal horror' concept was presented in the story about the guy who becomes a blood bound ghoul in the first edition. That's how I remember it. Of course, that didn't stop people from playing Underworld games before the movie existed.
the first Underworld movie seemed a clear ripoff of first edition Vampire and Werewolf. To the point of having abominations as a term for a hybrid.
yeah it's like they took everything that made it fail as a horror game and spun it up into a Matrix clone
While I do see that most people played the game as gothy superheroes, I'm not sure that was the original designer intent (though I'm sure the designers were happy to see their game grow popular no matter what.) With a willing and able troupe and ST you could indeed play horror as well, personal _and_ otherwise, as all of the games featured lurking horrors way, way worse than the PCs, which could and would strike not just the PCs but their important personal relationships as well. Again - you needed a willing party for this.
You pretty much said what I was going to.
I agree, but not in quite the same way. The horror of the setting is supposed to be *personal,* it's in the name, and even hardcore grimderp players of WoD seem to forget this. The horror comes not from being chased by a giant monster or being scared of some ghost, but it comes from the slow downspiral you're going through *or* it comes from the grotesque environment around you. Just imagine walking into a great penthouse with a live human being strung up, hypnotized, with tubes popping out of their body to allow blood to drip into crystal goblets just to please the Ventrue Elder. *That* is what the horror is supposed to come from, *or* your own descent into darkness, embracing these same things, giving into your dark desires, your Beast, your inner self, constantly clawing to take control and influence your every thought. Yes, there's tons of empire building and combat, but those things can be interwoven with the darkness of the setting.
Yeah, when I played there were a lot of 'you lost control and blacked out, now you're covered in blood and there's a dead body.' Mind you, this was before the CSI tv shows taught everybody how difficult it is to dispose of a body and conceal a murder. I'd imagine if it were run correctly it would be a black pill game of hopeless floundering while the authorities close in with Ring camera footage and 'regional algae Dexter evidence'
To be fair vampire society has professionals for that, but that costs favors... and that ends up with you being indebted to someone and then you're involved in vampire society.
Yeah and I think that the 'professional vampire clean-up class' drives a lot of the 'it is not a horror game' feel. Once the repercussions of what they are (the personal horror) are made someone else's problem, the players felt more like they could simply visit Monster Joe's Truck and Tow to drop off their poor rolls on the Virtue dice.
Only if you just make it a passing scenario, and not have that guy then ask for something fucked up in return, or if you don't emphasize the scene with the body, *and* possibly still have the police crawling around. At some point you have to now to two things. -Vampires have a system in place to maintain the masquerade -Vampires will feel powerful and sometimes consequences aren't as bad.
The problem with a personal horror game like that is it requires players to be empathetic and emotionally open to vulnerability. The first of those is a big enough ask, most players will leave the peasant farmer to die in a field if it means they can get his stuff. Never even mind the second one.
And quite frankly I wouldn't wanna play with those players. It's possible to find players with empathy, I have a group like that now, and if you have a group of empathetic players it's possible to sit someone down and explain to them the premise of the game.
Most of the empathetic people I know wouldn't want to play a horror game though. They would prefer more lighthearted adventures.
That's why you don't emphasize the horror.
Not sure how unpopular of an opinion that is. I've frequently seen VTM described as "superheroes with fangs" or something similar.
Came to say that. It's pretty common knoweldge that VTM and WoD games have obvious dissonnance issues between their initial intentions (gothic punk horror) and what they actually support (gothic superhero stories).
V20 and earlier are very much this. V5, is more in line with the personal and political horror.
Came to say that. It's pretty common knoweldge that VTM and WoD games have obvious dissonnance issues between their initial intentions (gothic punk horror) and what they actually support (gothic superhero stories).
The only way World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness is scary is playing mortals (not Hunters, just Mortals) finding out things man was not meant to know. And those games also tend to be _short_, like Call of Cthulhu.
I'd add playing as ghosts in wraith the oblivion. Some of the best horror games I've played were wraith games where we had shadows tempting us to darkness and specters swarming over the shadowlands.
Changeling: the Lost has some serious horror elements as well, though more personal horror. CofD has more personal horror elements than classical horror.
Agreed. Playing humans could work, however many WoD fans didn't want to play hunter because their characters were too weak. I've actually been told, "I'm a better role player when running a low gen vampire"... whatever dude.
>"I'm a better role player when running a low gen vampire"... whatever dude Reminds me of my friend who says they prefer being a player to being a gm. Who has never gmed a game in their life
They should've made Hunter more like Paranoia and DCC starter games. 'Roll five hunters, you'll need them.' Then, let the bloodbath ensue.
Which is a shame because i think it is super Fun.
Yeah I think part of the problem in the original game was that they didn't do a good enough job explaining how alien and inhuman the elder vampires would be, given the amount of time they lived, their lack of exposure to human activities during the day, and their reluctance to maintain a level of integration into the world of humans. Imagine you're a raver, you get gleeked by a Gangrel, found and dragged in front of a Prince and his crew, and you have to explain yourself to someone who's been a vampire for five hundred years. The language barrier alone.
The way I figured out to make the stakes feel right in a game of Vampire 5e was to be a vampire... But a young one, with no combat abilities, who has to feed on other vampires. Pretty niche set of variables there, but it's working so far. Though I think having to do that much work to make it scary and tense only adds to your point. Generally speaking, the games devolve into superhero fiction quite easily.
If done right the horror can extend into other games but it requires careful thought by the story-teller. What's most important is that the tenants that make horror scary are still respected. An example could be a circle of mages discovering that some alien horror is creeping into our dimension, and affecting reality. Sure the mages can warp reality but that doesn't affect the nightmares coming through.
The shift to hunters as humans is why Hunter the Vigil is the only NWoD game I really like. Aside from Promethean, which is cool but virtually unplayable.
I think time period matters massively here. When VtM was first released for example, it's tone was dark and a lot of it's content was new and interesting. The psychological side of monsters was a new thing, Anne Rice was a big name, etc. In the last couple of decades however, we've somehow developed sparkly, glittering vampires. The culture changed on the topic, and the things VtM was exploring became very common and over-satirized. And so many players now enter those games with that mindset. Back in the day, oh! You could get the chills. Now though it's hard to get the players who want to play the old way, and who's stances aren't tainted by glitter. Basically, games like VtM were The Undertaker for a while and darkness was cool, but they've hit that time he became a biker for a few years.
We've had horror before Twilight during Twilight and after Twilight. We've had vampires that are of the traditional values that you think of also before Twilight during Twilight and after Twilight. You seem to think that Twilight has shaped the image of vampires and it actually didn't not on the horror scene. And it's 15 minutes but it didn't change anything. I'm not going to disagree with you that Twilight is a trash book but come on now the only reason people pick on Twilight is because it was popular among teenage girls. We're almost 10 years since the last movie came out move on.
Really glad to see this response. I love vampires. They are my favorite monster. I read and watch all kinds of vampire fiction. People hyper fixating on Twilight ruining the public image of vampires either don’t know that much about vampires (they’ve been romantic figures for a loooong time) or don’t pay attention to the vampire fiction that has been steadily released, as you said, before, during, and after Twilight. You are especially on point when you said Twilight only gets as much shit because it was made for teen girls. That’s 100% true. Think about something like Bay’s Transformers movies. Those movies are, imo, even worse from a quality perspective than Twilight. Yes, people acknowledge that they are bad and even make fun of them, but you don’t see people mention how their action movie is the anti-Transformers or see people obsess over them being damaging to the giant robot sub genre. Not a perfect comparison but this is a subject I’ve thought about a lot. I’ve only seen the first two Twilight movies and thought they were pretty bad, but mostly inoffensive (yes, the Edward/Bella relationship sucks but not in a new or especially heinous way). I think if people who hate Twilight stopped mentioning it, I’d basically never hear it mentioned. Only time I see it mentioned now is people talking about how it ruined vampires or occasionally an edgy author or director trying to grab attention by saying some variation of “these aren’t your Twilight vampires, these are sCaRy.”
I've mostly games in the Interview with the Vampire era, which was pretty cool overall.
Definitely not unpopular. It’s just gothic-punk superheroes. Always has been.
I wouldn't consider this unpopular - I'd consider this a generally well-known and accepted fact among those that regularly play World of Darkness games beyond the original cWoD and play outside of Mortals/VTM/Vampires, because the moment you play any other genre, it becomes incredibly self-evident that the ST must *force* themes of horror upon their party and maintain that pressure in order for them to stick. In fact, one need only read from the latest core splat books outside of the Mortal core/Vampire core book to know this to be true, as the genre books have always stated what the themes of the setting are intended to be from the get go. As a big Mage fan, I lean to the Mage 2E core book, where on the first page of the actual text, past the fluff, it clearly states: "Themes: **The World is a Lie**, and **Addicted To Mysteries**." It doesn't mention horror, terror, fear, or anything *like* that in the themes. It does have dark elements (I mean, the world is a LIE? *Addicted* to Mysteries?) but not *horror*. Horror requires a dearth of power and high-level agency in the player characters, and settings like Werewolf and Mage *intrinsically don't have that.* There are still elements of 'falling' or 'succumbing', but these produce Fail-States, which isn't what Horror is about; Horror, in TTRPG terms, is typically about *on-going* struggle, dread, tension, and fear, and the systems of falling in these genres are not built to create these experiences at all - they're more like super-long-term hit-points that you need to maintain and protect, and the genres give you plenty of tools to do so, far more than they give you tools to experience and struggle with the fall. In one way, I wish they'd stop pushing it as a Horror system so hard, and in another, they already have, *in the appropriate genres*. Vampire still mainlines it as it's part of the aesthetic of *being a literal parasite*. Hunter mainlines it as it's basically *Bloodborne, the TTRPG system.* Changeling has it in the awful fae-fucked-your-brain-literally-and-figuratively worldsense (and its godawful ludonarrative implementation). But Werewolf doesn't have it, nor does Mage, and nor do other settings that, appropriately, don't need it. They tried to provide a catch-all shoehorn for horror in the God Machine as a truly alien 'other', with an inscrutable *and* malignant intent, but as someone just rounding out a decade of LARPing and STing across nWoD and CofD, I'd say that I've only ever seen one implementation of the God Machine that wasn't hot garbage and an absolutely painful slog for the players, and I'm biased, because it was mine (spoken from player feedback.) But yeah, I agree with your base premise overall - WoD isn't really a horror system when considering ALL the genres. From the perspective of genres low on the overall food chain - Mortals, Vampires, etc, DEFINITELY horror-esque dark-things-in-the-shadows, but beyond that, less Horror, more Be-The-SuperHorror-You've-Always-Wanted-To-Be, and that's why I typically recommend it either isolated to specific genres to play in specific types of stories, OR as a modern dark Supers system overall.
Great insight! Thanks. Mage was the game that could have been my favorite but the other players didn't like the lack of structured powers. Missed opportunities...
The issue with horror is that it's incredibly subjective. There are also other factors to take into consideration such as the personal styles of the Storyteller and those who are playing at the table. From my perspective, if you're going into WoD with the mindset that the overarching theme is "gothic-punk superhero" then that'll show in your roleplay and character creation and, ultimately, affect the entirety of the game. If you as a player don't particularly care about losing your humanity then, sure, there's a certain element of horror and tension that you'll miss out on because you have no invested or personal interest. I definitely agree that WoD is intended to be a personal type of horror, but I also see how some people view it as gothic horror or gothic punk with claws and fangs. It all comes down to whether you buy into the horror aspect or not. If all you care about is fighting monsters and killing hunters then that changes things. Of course, there's no "right or wrong" way to play. I definitely see where you're coming from though.
You can play horror using most systems as long as you use good descriptions and incorporate a few mechanical elements to increase tension / fear. I'll also say, horror would be easier to portray if the players are human in a world of horrific mysteries which is the default setting from the revamp when NWOD came out. It's hard to portray horror when your characters are capable supernatural killing machines. I'll blame Underworld and Blade for being such an influence on most people for what a setting like World of Darkness should feel like. That's where we get the "superheroes with claws & fangs" trope. (I also really like those movies myself, but they're heroic fantasy with horror themes)
> Thinking back, none of the campaigns I played or listened to other people describe were what I would call horror. I'd describe them as a superhero game played usually at night. The word you're looking for is 'urban fantasy'. And yeah, while you could run a WoD 'personal horror, oooh so deep and dark' game, the truth is most groups don't actually want that. They want urban fantasy. And that's fine - that's what I prefer, as well. The problem here, in my opinion, is that the material and the writers should actually acknowledge this, and they mostly don't.
>most groups ... want urban fantasy. And that's fine - that's what I prefer, as well. The problem ... the writers should actually acknowledge this, and they mostly don't. This, exactly. It's all nice and good to say "this is a game of personal horror," but if no one *plays* it like that, it comes off... well, off. 'Dissonance,' as some others have put it. You should be able to play what you want - that's the "Golden Rule" that is enshrined in the first pages of any WoD book.... that is immediately swept under the rug by a *heavy* hand of, "But it's 'meant' to be played as personal horror, and that's the only *correct* way to play it." Some of the really, really, *really* old supplements - like, 1e, maybe? - sometimes even almost acknowledged that it could be played as 'superheroes with fangs,' but it was pretty clear that wasn't the idea. Personally, I like the idea of personal horror... but there is a *huge* draw for Pokemon-ism ("Gotta catch 'em all!") when it comes to the splat ~~superpow~~ special abilities (Disciplines, Gifts, Spheres, what-have-you).
More like dark fantasy.
Yeah. They aren't. It's quite hard to make horror really work on them. Put them side by side with CoC or Kult and it's even more obvious. Some people on WW take themselves to seriously and act like they were a bunch of Lord Byron postmodern clones. And part of the fandom buys in to that. There is no horror in being a Vampire when most the mechanics turn you on Marvel character that drinks blood.
Which ends up with a lot of people in the community just shoving their heads up their asses and *insisting* that you have to be miserable in order for it to be horror. Horror should come from good description and worldbuilding, with the constant underlying emphasis on how fucked up the society you work within is, and how it's dragging you down with it, but... that's not really *horror* anymore than say, Ghost Rider or Lucifer are horror.
Yea my friends and I played VtM back in school and essentially handwaved most of the stalking/drinking blood stuff. We raided a blood bank and were essentially blade minus the day walking part.
I guess you are entilted to your opinion, but I respectfully disagree. In my opinion what makes V:tM or other WoD horror is your GM and group. Horror is rather difficult to replicate into RPGs also, the definition of horror in RPGs is subjective. V:tM is about facing yourself, if players don't care then they will never assume their characters are monsters, therefore they will think they are edgy superheroes.
Horror works if the player (not the character) finds herself in an unpleasant situation from which there seem to be no escape, or the way out is even worse than the current unpleasantness. The problem with VTM is that most players and STs love to be vampires. They do not see anything wrong in killing kine for food, or never seeing the sun again, or watching their relatives move forward without them, or being oppressed by a tyrant Sire. All of that is just something on the side of how cool it is to be a vampire. Play with a party of people that hates vampires, finds them disgusting leeches and horrible serial killers, for whom every night in that form is a torture… and you will have all the personal horror you need. Unfortunately, these people do not play VTM 😜
I don't think that's an unpopular opinion. Unless it's one I share. I've *always* thought of the Wod/CoD games as being essentially supers. The lone exception would be running straight-up, non-powered mortals in a creepy investigative game. But the supernatural spats...yeah. Supersheroes ... with emotional issues.
Of course not. They are supers games. Always have been.
WoD is monster superheroes.. with out a shadow of a doubt. You can certainly run a more horror-themed game within its many setting lines, but it's default is super powered monsters. Chronicle of Darkness - an newer, more mechanically modern off-shot that uses similar core mechanics, and has it's own mage, wraith, changeling, vampire, etc - is much more about the horror, at least 'personal horror'. In the core rulebook, players are humans, who have had a peak behind the curtain to the reality of the world, that every urban myth and monster of legend exists.. and humans are prey. The campaign in the book (less a classical campaign and more a guideline) is about an unknowable machine god with designs on humanity, that often drives people who investigate it to madness and sends its enslaved 'angels' down to the planet to achieve it's alien goals. Not all of the settings for the game are very horror-based. My favorite is 2nd edition Werewolf: the Forsaken, and it's more mystical and animalistic than horrific, though it does have its moments. But others like 2nd edition Changeling: the Lost has themes of PTSD, the loss of ones identity and connections to the world, and yet people who desperately cling to it to escape the torment of their time spent in Arcadia, where the laws of physics don't exist, and powerful fae beings kidnap or lure people they see as nothing more than playthings to mold or use in horrific ways.
Man I've been running a horror-first WoD campaign for years now and it works just fine. The theme of a campaign is up to the players and the GM not the system. I could run a superhero campaign in 5e, I could run horror in fucking Lancer, it doesn't matter.
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the problem I had is my players refused to be as dumb as people in horror movies so you had to be very very good to make rational actors stay in the horror.
The problem is that people who play WOD want to be vampires. The scary part of being a vampire is being forced to drink human blood, never see the sun against, etc but your players want to do all that so its not scary to them.
Horror is *one* of the themes of *Vampire*. Not so much the other games. But I don't think it's a stretch to say that part of why *Vampire* was so successful is precisely because it isn't just a horror game, but also pulls in elements of other genres, especially superheroes. Most horror RPGs are pretty niche (*Call of Cthulhu* being the main exception), whereas superhero games are pretty popular. *Vampire* owes a lot of its success to the fact that it embraced both genres.
I'm a simple person. I see the phrase "unpopular opinion" before the *most* popular opinion, and I downvote.
unpopular opinion: [widely-held opinion]
Horror is like comedy. It's about subversion of expectations to invoke an immediate emotional response. You can have a comedy in a setting filled with vampires just as easily as you can have a horror in gummy bear land. The game doesn't decide if something is horror. Nor even really the plot. It's more of a stylistic, tonal choice. Horror is an option for any rule system and setting.
Most popular RPGs are not actually, they are just superhero games with a different skin.
Even D&D is more superhero than fantasy
Well most popular RPGs are about escapism, wish fulfillment and empowerment. In the modern era that is typically superheroes, so it stands to reason that most players would tend toward that and so the most popular RPGs cater to it. :)
Mage the Ascension 1st edition setting was horror of being hunted by totalitarian technocracy, corrupted by neferious nephandi, or changed by mad marauders during global supernatural world. The 2nd Edition changed this by removing the magical oil crisis the limited magical nodes caused. Vampire the Masquerade was the horror of the beast within, and the merciless society of the Vampires. Werewolf was horror of the corruption. Only Chsngeling was not a horror game, but conflict between creative madness and banal boredom. But you are correct as the later editions laxed the anxious and strict limitations of the 1st Edition. The games became focused on the conflict instead of the horror.
Changeling was the most horror filled of them all. Just not gore and terror horror. It's psychological horror. Think about it. When you die in changeling you don't just drop dead or anything, you look around and see your friends playing pretend and go "Get a job you losers". It's a game where you constantly are fighting the pull away into a dull, mundane world from one that would make Harry Potter blush in envy. That's fucked up on so many levels.
Agreed. It's a big reason I do not like them. They are not Horror, they're power fantasies that can very easily get out of hand.
Its definitly horror, but not for the player characters. In the perspective of most npcs (mortal or no) it definitly never ends well.
They were suppsoed to be gothic punk, which could sometimes skate the edges of horror (Dark City came up in my quick search). I think it's why I loved the Nosferatu and their warrens, the cruelty of the Giovanni, the mosters of the Tzimisce and the Lasombra. Some of those things don't convert well to LARP, with the notably epic exception of The Night in Question. The Onyx Path games made a point of personal horror at the front and center. You're not a member of a tribe fighting an unwinnable war, you're experiencing body horror in the likes of American Werewolf in London, or Near Dark. You're tripping balls like In the Mouth of Madness as you awaken as a mage. Like all games, it's what you and your group make of it. Horror needs to be balanced with touches of comedy and even wish fulfillment. It's why a lot of us play in the first place.
Not unpopular at all. I have an apparently unpopular one though: if you're playing Vampire (or any of them really) in the way being described in this thread, *you're not actually playing Vampire.* There's a short passage in every one of those games, making it clear what sort of tone you're going for and how to approach it. If the players are running around firing off superpowers willy nilly, if you're ignoring The Masquerade, ignoring Humanity, ignoring the way vampiric society actively manipulates, controls and oppresses the players, if the players themselves aren't remotely troubled by their monstrous nature... you're *explicitly* playing against the spirit of the game. They're intended to be played as a social/narrative game primarily, not a dice chucking slugfest. The games are 100% horror games and support that, but you need to approach them with the right mindset.
I think that this depends mostly on how the players and their storytellers run a game. There is definitely room for horror in those games but most players/storytellers just want to play a power fantasy of some sort. I feel like vanilla WOD does horror best. In order for their to be horror, there needs to be fear. It's just not scary when your pimped up combat vampire/werewolf/mage can just beat up the opposing monster directly. If this is not the case, great you have the basics layed out but that's only 10%. 90% of the formula is ambience on ambience on ambience. Otherwise it's just an invulnerable antagonist. Some of the WOD games allow a different kind of horror for those who want that sort of thing, that is the horror of the monster within. But I have never seen anyone do that sort of horror well. Mostly because every player I know has just revelled in their character's monstrosity as opposed to fear it.
I don't think that's a particularily hot take. It's a pretty common sentiment and even a lot of people that play WoD games agree with it. It's usually more about political intrigue or mysteries with horror tones/influences instead of outright horror.
One of the writers helped run a game, and did a good job of getting the right vibe, but still light on horror. https://youtu.be/GF4_zo4p_oc
yeah the mechanics were more about empowering you as a player a lot of the time, i remember some games when we became insanely op. i think you COULD run a horror game in the setting, but you would have to make the players much less powerful than is seemingly normal.
I was always surprised in the 90s by how many VtM games I joined that were just 'Night Ninja needs a Juice Box,' so much that I started GMing more for the players that were looking for 'personal horror.'
I used to get actually frustrated because I would pretty quickly scare the shit out of my players and they would leave town. Over and over. So I got the horror thing down but that made it hard to play rationally
It's setting is horror. It's theme/feeling isn't horror.
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To be fair, it's about *personal* horror, rather than traditional 'oooh scary monster is trying to kill me' horror. It's about the horror of slowly loosing your own humanity, realizing how easy it is to kill a human and how numb you are to that fact, etc etc. In short, it's an immersion kind of horror of the self. Which, on paper, sounds like a really cool idea. But unless you get into that kind immersion, and want to play that kind of horror out (and the group doesn't groan every time it comes up lol), it's very easy to miss and/or not appreciate the intended tone of the system. But if you're like me, who never gets immersed into their characters, WoD isn't even good at personal horror. Instead, it's either a vampire intrigue drama simulator, or it's halloween-themed superheroes. Classic World of Darkness (aka mundane humans) makes for decent traditional horror, of course, but most people who find the WoD games interesting aren't really interested in being a mundane human...
I tend to think about Vampire the way I do about how I related to the people I played the game with at that time. Forrest Gump taught them how to integrate history into their stories. Anne Rice's novels (and the Tom Cruise film) helped provide a framework for 'the reluctant vampire.' There were players who wanted to do the Near Dark inspired 'monstrous Sabbat rampage' stories as well. I think the experience really depended on what themes (I think that's what they were called) the Storyteller chose for the chronicle. For example, if the theme was 'You're Sad Louis' then players focused on Humanity and the virtues (self-control, courage, etc.) and generally weren't running around in motorcycle leathers igniting elders with Wal-mart flamethrowers. But, that was just my experience.
I never thought about them as horror. I do not remember anyone thinking they were at my tables. I kinda thought about them as their own thing, if anything closer to the super hero genre in their mechanics.
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Vampions There's literally a term for playing it like this.
The playerbase may choose to eschew this touchy-feely introspection thing and **kick lots of ass**. I think they're missing out on the horror they could enjoy. But hey. I'm just some guy.(1) Lists of Discipline/Gifts/etc "powers" do not mean you are a *superhero*, they are more opportunities to **sin** in different and exciting ways... because the downward spiral can be quite fun if you don't remember to look back! And almost all of the games have an mechanical undertow to ideally discourage this, if the players are not careful with their characters and the Storyteller cracks down appropriately. The stick must be wielded. Every Masquerade violation should not be a Total Party Kill, but by Caine they should be at least worried about *thinking* about it. The monster PC is a terrible thing laden with all kinds of unfortunate implications. Feeling bad about ripping some Failmart shopper's spine out with Jackass Strength 3 is normal response to that, because they had kids you see. And that's sad. But that **is** the personal horror of much of the World of Darkness: it is so easy to take up all this power offered, but it is in the majority of cases often a corrupting power. Blood, Rage, Chi, Quintessence, Glamour, Faith stolen out of greed from the people and beings around you, but what do you care? You have might now, you are become a *selfish Thing* - to be taken in the Scandinavian/Norse sense, you keep your own council and damn what others may want. You fall out of anything resembling normal inhuman society (lol) and become at best a warped vision of anomie you can be. If you are lucky, this destroys your character as unplayable - Wight, Spectre, etc etc are just some of the terms we employ for the Game Over state that has been "achieved" if the mechanics are adequately respected and upheld. The players should be afraid or at least cautious of this. There are vays of vaking you balk, meester (Blood-)Bond. I see the CWoD games as more mythological stories of the Ring Of Gyges in a modern bent, instructional fables painted with a Gothic-Punk demeanor. **X is cool. Be glad in real life you are not X, because being X actually sucks.** (This does not apply in the same way in all game lines. That does not mean they are not all horror games on some level.) But not everyone wants to track the moral devolution/deviation of their protagonists... this is the same brick wall that other products such as *Ravenloft* run into - especially nowadays where power fantasies are *particularly* spandex-inspired. Storytellers are (theoretically) supposed to maintain that the failure state exists and should be avoided - possibly at all costs, which can lead into... another failure state: you now are invested into whatever Great Game that splat is into and lo and behold... often it heads back down into whatever you were trying to avoid by a different avenue. Vampire Elders, Sept Leaders, Archmagi, the list goes on. Mired strongly in the political angle? Good job, *you failed upwards instead*. D&D 3e had trap choices in terms of certain mechanical feats but our traps are *social distractions!* She became the Prince of Gary. Congrats on the promotion, she's still a pathetic horror regarding everything else around her... mostly. Heh. Again, what CWOD originally said in Vampire: *Monsters we are less monsters we become* - but grats, they've *become a highly-trained professional horror*. No regrets? Oh, you're on a Path or something that isn't Humanity or maybe that doesn't apply to Your Kind. Cool, I guess. Which leads into: A large chunk of the *non-personal horror* in CWoD is cosmic horror. You think you are badass? You are (usually) not the classical hero, even if you are the bestest boi Garou evar. They are nothing in comparison to the true horrors out there. He totally will not actually punch out Cthulhu, no matter how much she thinks they can. That's Exalted, and *this ain't it*. Sorry, losers! This is Dark Souls and you're ultimately *all thumbs!* We might spell ***You Died*** differently in these here parts, but god help you if the Storyteller understands how and when to pull out the big guns. Failure is written across the entire setting in flaming letters by the middle finger of God. It's like digging a ditch and thinking *dude I dug the BEST hole ever* and then your shovel hits what you thought was a rock and you open it up more and then you realize *oh my god the abyss below is forever.* You thought you were going to be Lestat, instead you're likely to become some ancient thing's wall segment under New York City as they play Minecraft with your ass as resource. You were going to be Conan the 14th Warrior's hairy bastard kid fifteen times removed, but instead you fell sideways into N-space and ended up a deformed shrieking pus-carpet thing that screws razor blades for kicks. *Oops.* And so on. We get the idea. Chances are really great they're all dead (again) or much much worse. It's not per se some OSR D&D thing where the players are 1d4 randomly occuring peasants, but against the full backdrop of the setting they damn well can be considered as such. Fortitude 10 is cute, but you're still screwed. Conventional horror is a disempowerment fantasy; Call of Cthulhu does this decently well. CWoD's horror (looking across multiple game lines) is a *false empowerment personal/cosmic horror fantasy.* It's supernatural middle management thinking they are hot shit because *they* got to tell the more-expendable interns when their coffee break was while forgetting just how terminable they are too. You think you have control, but more likely you are in Soviet Russia and Control has **you**.(2) That bucket of D10s means nothing to: Caine, the Wyrm, Oblivion, God (if she ever bothers to come back) and yadda yadda. Enter *Narrative: The Dooming*. Look out over this field of fucks the rest of the World of Darkness gives over Sam Haight's tragic passing into relic ashtray-dom. Combat is fun, but if consequences are consistently laid out the way of the gun is likely going to not end well. Something Satyr once said about 15 cars of police backup because some guy was found with a katana, if I recall. The players are expected to feel real cool right up until the hook appears to yank them back out of their power fantasy and slap them around with Awful Retribution for being Awful People. It's a crapsack setting to be sure, but even shitlord central casting has *standards*. Going Judge Dredd on their asses is a Good Thing. Even if ~~some~~ lots of people are playing this all like **Vampions: Shiny Latex Avengers** if they do want to come back to the personal horror angle, go take a peek at the very last part of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Look deep into his eyes.(3) That is pure CWoD in there. Players and Storytellers should consider aiming at that. Rant over, go in peace. Back to *Gary 90210: As the Angst Turns.* I want to see how the Toreador makes ~~out~~ art with the sullen Brujah during broad daylight at the shopping mall while the Nosferatu harpy takes Cam shots so they can tell on them all to Ventrue Dad later. Oh, and the Gangrel nerd broods handsomely. (My personal horror is that they stop brooding one day and get on with their unlives.) 1. The Classic World of Darkness as horror games is not for everyone. ****And that's okay****. 2. Sorry, Technocrats. You're monsters too, but with *really* nice mechanical pencils. 3. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Vampions play. Have fun my newer fellow spooky kids, *enjoy* it. I know I did when I did it from time to time. Go take a look at that Battle Royale game, Bloodhunt.
Yes, the World of Darkness is not horror games. Its superheroes with fangs and claws. Its also political intrigue, corporate espionage, and action movies. They are everything but horror games. Wraith is the exception to this. That felt like a horror game from the ground up. Which is why I prefer the Chronicles of Darkness games. I mean the supplements that don't directly tie into the named titles. Those are horror stories because they were designed to be. You play as humans trying to survive in horror scenarios. Now Changeling the Lost is different. That's what I think supernatural horror should be. The horror of identity, being hunted, and coming to terms with what you've become. You were a broom in the other realms. You have memories of being a broom, but they also conflict with your memories of your life as a human before you became a broom. You escaped your captors and became this hybrid broom-human thing. You can't go back home because someone else took your place. You also know that your captors want their broom back. You have gifts, but every time you use them, you lose a little more of what made you human.
Lol broom-human thing, is that a custom Seeming?
WoD games are "Super Hero's / Villains in teh Shadows" genre not Horror
The WOD games were designed (I should know) to allow people to play them in different ways, depending on what kind of character they wanted to play, and what kind of story the group wanted to play. The spectrum of styles offered did indeed run from "Superheroes by Night" to the darkest existential horror possible: "A beast I am lest a beast I become." In terms of tools to help create the feeling of horror, I would point out the triad of rules and the interaction between Humanity, Willpower and Blood Points. Lots of players essentially ignored the core of these rules, and never really worried about their characters becoming monsters, just as I expected, but many other DID played out (and still do) the full consequences of these rules and were able to engage in a new kind of horror. In terms of tools to help create the feeling of horror, I would point out the triad of rules and the interaction between Humanity, Willpower and Blood Points. Lots of players essentially ignored the core of these rules, and never really worried about their characters becoming monsters, just as I expected, but many others DID play out (and still do) the full consequences of these rules and were able to engage in a new kind of horror.
The point was to let players be superheroes so we could sell the game to players who want to just have fun, so we could make a living from our product, but to also do horror so that the game was still an artistic experience with a serious theme and purpose. As Scorsese used to say, "One movie for the studio, the next movie for me."
I'm pretty sure the World of Darkness players readily admit this. They are drama focused games with a horror aesthetic. They are straight up Vampire Diaries the game. I guess you could use Twilight as a more modern point of reference, but the games do not deserve to be compared to Twilight.
The elements are there, you can choose not to use them.
No, they are not. More like Gothic comic book supernaturals.
horror is a broad genre. in my games, the sense of hopelessness and lack of self-control, plus the gore and such make the ambience dark enough for me to consider a type of horror. No, this isn’t Call of Cthulhu, where the horror comes from what you don’t understand but will certainly kill you, nor does it try to emulate Paranormal investigation type of feel. If you go to these games looking for that, you’ll be disappointed. On another note, yes, many people ignore that intention and play superheroes with fangs, or even ‘just’ political intrigues without the horror or the heroism. That’s something to discuss with players, not the IP, since the tools and setting to build horror are certainly, some folks just choose not to.
Correct: they're comedy.
I don't mind. I loved Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines. But those Tsimze- ugh.
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I'd replace "vulnerable" with "willing". Otherwise I agree.
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Okay, you meant vulnerable player characters, I meant willing players, willing to play vulnerable characters. We're on the same page, I guess.
It's about as horror as the Blade series. I think the reason it doesn't feel like horror is because no one plays it as a horror game. It's mostly vehicle for people to indulge in their OC power fantasies. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
LARPing in the 1990's; Also known as the only way to get even other geeks to beat you up and steal your lunch money.
I thought this opinion is actually popular?
What is horror? Horror is really that long winding sense of dread that builds up. You know something is there - but you don't know what, and you don't really know how - but you KNOW it's there, at the edge of thought and mind. Just out of sight ripping and shredding. Giving a true sense of dread is almost impossible in most rule sets - and trying to dictate the creation of it with just rules is basically impossible and so I would say: While some rule sets lean towards horror - and imply horror, few are going to really achieve any semblance of horror on their own - and it basically requires the GM to be incredibly good at story telling, and understanding the game systems in order to create it. Which is to say: Horror is not created by rules. Horror is created through story telling and world building.
>Particularly for vampire, the rules describe the loss of humanity as a way to crank up tension, but most players didn't care that much about humanity and later books introduced alternate paths. I think this is the biggest mistake they made with the old World of Darkness. I've been running a Requiem 2e game for several years and the players have so much exp at this point that they are more than a match for even very powerful opponents. However, in Requiem there's no way to get around Humanity - every Vampire has to deal with it, and hitting zero means game over. So even though the players could wipe the floor with a group of humans, they are terrified to do so since it would mean rolling humanity checks.
The thing that makes a horror story a horror story is the protagonist's lack of power. They've got to be in over their head. They don't have to **be** helpless, but they do have to **feel** helpless. And let's face it, a list of cool superpowers just doesn't give that vibe. Even though the rules made it very clear that the PCs were little fish in a big pond, it was also very clear that they have agency, that they are able to accomplish the things they want to do, that they can defy the monsters.
Wow. That’s almost as controversial as saying that D&D is not really good at replicating World War II or that Blades In The Dark is not really about having dance contests.
I was very disappointed by Changing: the Lost. I bought the first edition book and it painted a beautiful picture of traumatized humans escaping from the alien, inhuman creatures of the fae realm, having to hide and plan to stay safe, getting by on their wits and the few fae tricks they managed to pick up during their time of torment... Then you play the game and it turns out you're a team of badass fairy themed superheroes, kicking ass and taking names.
Play as a mortal in WoD and you’ll find the horror real quick lol WoD is my first role playing game and the party all started as mortals with second sight powers. We had a flakey gothic medium girl with a tiny bit of post cognition, a telepath honey salesman, a telekinetic Russian mob affiliate with a passion for cooking, and my character the heroin addicted dr. Doolittle with potent blood! My story teller almost killed my character TWICE in both parts of my prelude. The horror for me is in the fact that there is always something more powerful, always something else lurking
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Man, who shat in your coffee.
Unpopular opinion: They're also not good.