Three Tiers

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Post originally by TS at 2002-06-06 15:49:29
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Steven King posited in an essay that there were three levels of horror possible within a written form. One is not, of necessity, superior to the others, they are just different levels and many writers will wend between the different levels.

In order:

Gore
Fear
Terror

Gore or splatter is the "gross-out". Melting eyeballs and spurting blood. Gore is the material that makes a reader go "ewwww" and maybe gives them a cold chill. The "best" gore makes one's skin crawl.

Fear is what most aspire to. Fear gets a reader's heart racing. Situations that make a reader fear for a character's continued existence and cause one to turn the pages rapidly one after another are the hallmarks of fear.

Terror is the most difficult to envoke because it is unique to each individual. Terror is when a reader, despite being safe in their own home {wherever}, reading a book, fears for their own life, as opposed to the lives of the characters in the book. The reader "suspends their disbelief" to a point where it is they, emotionally, that is in danger. A writer is hard pressed to set out to create 'terror'. Rather, a horror writer attempts to write the scariest story they can, using equal parts gore and fear, and hopefully, envokes terror in a fair amount of their readers.

I've always thought that this applies directly to RPGs. GMs can do "gore" to set a scene and try to invoke "fear" for their characters in Players, but actually crafting something scary enough to get a Player to forget their playing a game is no small feat.

TS
Adamant

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Post originally by Count_Zero at 2002-06-06 19:44:08
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I completely agree, and with a game like Call of Cthulhu, there's one perfect house rule to help with that. Keep the keeping track of players SAN scores to the GM, and only have the GM roll SAN checks. To assist in the mood, roll the dice on a padded surface, or better yet, use an electronic dice roller, so that the players don't even know your rolling dice. The lack of knowledge of dice rolls helps to let the fact that they are at a gaming table slip from the players minds a bit.

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Post originally by Robert A. Rodger at 2002-06-07 06:48:05
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I don't remember if it was King as quoted by Orson Scott Card or Card commenting on King, but a fourth tier, and the one King is best at, really is Dread.

You know something is going to happen. You know its going to be bad. But you don't know what or when.

Its dread that makes us jump when the door suddenly slams in a ghost movie. Its dread that really invests the audience in the story. Get them to care and then get them to worry.

It's a techniqe I'd love to come close to mastering.

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Post originally by Mack Knopf at 2002-06-07 09:35:41
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Well, in response to the quite well-written article on creating
fear and terror in one's players, I'd like to bring up the ethics
issue a little more. The main problem being: can someone really give informed consent to something they don't know about?

Asking a player if you can use some knowledge about them as a person to create fear can be problematic, because that sort of blanket
question (or release) covers a lot of ground. Knowledge about their fear of snakes is one thing; fear of rape might be quite another. Even if they give consent to have some of their buttons pushed, are they really giving informed consent to having those buttons pushed?

White Wolf advocated having a "safe word" on such matters, an idea taken from the whole BDSM realm where you have a known word you can say in-character when things get too sticky out-of-character. The problem with *that* being that if you can't tell if something is getting OOC uncomfortable without a safeword, maybe you shouldn't be using that topic to game about in the first place.

I suppose my personal preference is I play to have fun, and that while I'm willing to hit a few buttons to do so, I just don't want to do so in a way that could possibly make people uncomfortable, even in the name of fun. Playing on generalized fears of the dark or the unknown that all humans have is one thing. Playing on personal knowledge of an individual player is another (except for things like, "I know they like X activity, like car chases. I think I'll throw one in.").

I think using out-of-character fears to scare someone, even in a horror game, isn't ethical even with consent, since consent can't really be informed in this case. And actually, I don't even like to scare people much -- my horror games may be scary for the characters, but the players are usually rolling around laughing. Still, I don't think that weakens my actual argument.

Thoughts? Things I've misunderstood?

Mack

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Post originally by Thomas Gray at 2002-06-09 14:46:51
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One solution I've seen was for the person running the game to request a list of topics that each player do not want or cannot handle in the game. There was no explanation needed, just a 'this distubs me very much and I could not handle running into it in a dark alley, no matter how well my character could'. It gave the person running the game a feel for how much the players could handle. The bonus was that what was bad for one person (ie: big snakes or somesuch) wouldn't really bother somebody else, but would scare them enough, so the players wound up giving ideas for what to use on each other without realizing it.

The only other circumstance I encountered something like this was the live CoC chronicle starting up where somebody wisely suggested "Don't put things that really disturb you as a player down for your character's phobias because they'll show up. Lots."