Do you find that these environmental horror moments work best when sprinkled in on an improvisational basis based on the needs of the session or do you find a ratio of dread, dread, payoff in how you layout how information is being given to players?
I tend to work heavily in improv at the table and am trying to reassess how much work I do in planning to keep my stories tight while maintaining the narrative punch that can come from tailoring a situation to what’s happening at the table.
I feel like where the pacing tension of a lot of DND-likes is the management of resources in a high risk/high reward setting, for horror games the pacing tension is instilling a sense of dread and closely cultivating it through play. I want to say it's more important than getting the rules 100%.
Two of my favorite moments in horror gaming came from the same session of Gradient Descent I ran, where a player playing a scientist legitimately fell into the "are you a human" issue and actually started freaking out IRL and then 30 minutes later the dread got so bad they started believing the android player had spoken to me privately about betraying them (they didn't).
All of that comes from what you mentioned, environmental horror, because it builds up dread. You start to think something is WAY worse than it may actually be.
Do you find that these environmental horror moments work best when sprinkled in on an improvisational basis based on the needs of the session or do you find a ratio of dread, dread, payoff in how you layout how information is being given to players?
I tend to work heavily in improv at the table and am trying to reassess how much work I do in planning to keep my stories tight while maintaining the narrative punch that can come from tailoring a situation to what’s happening at the table.
I feel like where the pacing tension of a lot of DND-likes is the management of resources in a high risk/high reward setting, for horror games the pacing tension is instilling a sense of dread and closely cultivating it through play. I want to say it's more important than getting the rules 100%.
Two of my favorite moments in horror gaming came from the same session of Gradient Descent I ran, where a player playing a scientist legitimately fell into the "are you a human" issue and actually started freaking out IRL and then 30 minutes later the dread got so bad they started believing the android player had spoken to me privately about betraying them (they didn't).
All of that comes from what you mentioned, environmental horror, because it builds up dread. You start to think something is WAY worse than it may actually be.