Quote from: joewolzHowdy new guy.  I actually got really excited about Dread, bought the book and ran an adventure.

It did not work as advertised.  It felt like, as another poster put it, a freeform roleplaying exercise with occasional breaks for Jenga.  

I still want to give the game another try, but it does not make my top 5.

Howdy posts in the 300s guy I just did a quick search and read your thread about your experience: http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2448

The first time I ran Dread I had trouble getting the pacing down as well (as you mention in your thread above). It seems like a simple game to run, and in many ways it is, but it also requires a little practice to adjust to it. I had the same problems switching from playing D&D without miniatures to D&D with miniatures. It took a while before I really got the full experience and became comfortable enough with it that I could appreciate it for what it is. Same thing really capturing the feel of Cthulhu's sanity system at first or using Drama Points in Buffy without ruining our sense of disbelief while still letting the players introduce elements into our game on the fly. Or even worse getting use to the wacky probabilities in Cthulhu where a character with a skill of 80% who has almost world renowned skill could fail 5 times in row! hahahahaha.

Every game has a learning curve. Trust me, once you've played a few times, these problems pretty much go away and it feels nothing like freeform RP with a little Jenga on the side. It did for me at first but I've played over 20+ times, with probably around 50+ different people. A good chunk that never RPed before. Once it clicked for me, nothing did immersive horror the way Dread did. It's definitely worth giving it another try but if it still doesn't feel right don't be discouraged, not every game is for everyone. There are plenty of games I can't stand that most of my friends love. But luckily there are so many great games to choose from. This thread alone is a testament to that!

But that being said, we probably shouldn't debate the finer point of each of these games here. I don't want to drift Balbinus' thread more than I probably already have.

Rock,
John

One that I think is overlooked is Orpheus. That game can get genuinely scary if ran correctly. It's basically X-Files + Ghostbusters (with the jokes removed). Plus there are skads of plot ideas in the core book and the various supplements. And the over-arcing plot was deep but also very flexible.

If I were going to run any horror game, it's probably be that one.

I forgot to mention Zombi.  It's a great little game.  No frills zombie apocalypse.  Chargen is a snap.

For some reason my brain files 'horror rpgs' and 'zombie rpgs' in two separate drawers.  Weird.

Well... I'd go with Kult over just about anything else.  You want why?

Forget the mess of the rules. I've got both versions and I wouldn't run it with either. The first edition book rocked on toast, leading you very much through the rabbit hole. The second edition made the reasonably smart decision to break it up into two sections so you could get people playing without having to spill the beans.  But the first edition... at least the one in English that I could get... everything from the paper, to the art, to the written words on the page evoked every horror story ever told. Its epic, it's personal. Its grim and yet with a hint of hope... just enough to keep you gunning until the world grinds you underfoot.  

Give me a horror story, give me a horror trope and I can point out just how it fits, all so elegantly into Kult.  Deranged serial killer that just won't die? Pick your flavor: inhuman thing fulfilling it's sick and twisted pleasure, avatar of the Devil himself, or just some whackjob who has slipped so far into insanity he's starting to become more and less than human. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Pinhead? Not even hard, and the puzzle box is practically cannon.  Identity? You know, the movie where all the characters are trapped in a town in a rainstorm and one of them is a killer? No spoiler, but you can run that in Kult as presented, spoilers and all, with a straight, and terrifying face.

Salvation is possible... but forget your humanity, you'll have to loose it along the way.

Fuck, even the cockroaches are creepy signs that there is a hole in reality.  

Kult is the horror game where all the darkest warts of humanity can play just as vital a role in the tale being told as the things that go bump in the night without once removing the possibility that there were things man was not meant to know...

You've got a least one published adventure where the main NPC that the characters are going to sympathize with is trapped in a hell of her own making with the ghost of her serial murderer child molesting father and her victim mother while Angels who've had their wings ripped from them wander around in the background.  Perhaps I should say Hell, with teh capital H.

Sick, twisted, terrifying.  Kult in a nutshell.

Unknown Armies gets top spot for me because it's so complete and playable right out of the box (well, corebook).  While it's fun to read, this is a game that was meant to be played and it works wonderfully.

New World of Darkness is in second place because, while I actually prefer its system to that of UA (which is murder on PC competence), you need more than the corebook to really make it sing.  OTOH, if you have some of the top-notch supplements (Antagonists, Mysterious Places and Second Sight in particular) you have a fantastic toolkit for all sorts of horror gaming.

Call of Cthulhu plus Delta Green (BRP) is phenomenally good gaming and reading.  What drops it down the list for me is that as written, there is no by-the-book method of generating characters non-randomly -- IMO random chargen is pure, unadulterated ass (and I'm not interested in debating this point).  Sans DG, CoC isn't quite so fun for me because I think PC motivation is tenuous at best (to echo Abyssal Maw in another thread, it's harder to get a group of PCs to act in a way that's both believeable and gameworthy).  Of course, you can just sub in a DG analogue...

Kult is for me a counterexample to UA: I think it's a great read, a fascinating concept and setting, tremendously evocative and well-written and hugely beneficial as inspiration for other games... but I could never run it out of the box.  Not only do I think the system as written is pants, but it's not tremendously clear exactly what the players do in such a bleak setting.  But it gets mention here because it is such a rich resource for other games (NWoD in particular).

Werewolf: the Forsaken rounds out my list because I think it's a very good, eminently playable horror game that provides a fun experience for many many people.  It's a high-powered monster-hunting game which is genuinely horrific, unlike Buffy/Angel IMO.  OTOH, my personal interest in playing a werewolf is somewhat limited so to the bottom of the list it goes.

(Note that Mage: the Awakening would probably feature in third place on my list... if I thought it were really a horror game, rather than urban fantasy which is to me a different beast.)

KoOS

Unknown Armies - It's the easiest game, to run the kind of horror adventures I like.

Kult - Mostly for the setting. All I can say is brooding done right.

Whispering Vault - You can run some really Clive Barkerish adventures with this one.

CoC - What more needs to be said, about this game.

I going to say the concept of Ravenloft, simply because I have populated the mist with some of my own (admittedly stolen) ideas.

Regards,
David R

There are only three that I own and like:

Chill: The best for classic horror with all your old fiends, er, friends (vampires, werewolves, etc).

Call of Cthulhu: With Delta Green only. Not only does the DG background actually give a reason for PC groups to form and persist, but the 1920s setting of the original CoC doesn't do a thing for me. Too bad Lovecraft's monsters are so stale now. For the average gamer, is Nyarlathotep really any more exotic than the Dracula or the Wolf Man anymore?

All Flesh Must Be Eaten: Romero's zombie movies are my all-time favorite horror flicks, and this game does a good job emulating them. Lots of variant takes on zombies, too. I can't get into the suppliments, though. Zombies plus kung-fu or fantasy tropes leaves the realm of horror behind entirely for me.

GURPS Horror: The edition by Ken Hite. A brilliant overview of the genre.

And just to be an asshole, Ill say this:

World of Darkness: Not horror, but rather a type of modern fantasy/weird supers setting.

Unknown Armies: Again, not horror, but urban fantasy. Sure, you can do horror with it, but you can also run a scenario similar to Alien in a Traveller campaign without coloring outside the lines. That doesn't make Trav a horror game.

I don't have a full list really, because I've never done much horror.  CoC is classic of course, but one I'd like to nominate:

Wraith.  The only one of the WoD games that really lives up to that oft-abused WW moniker "personal horror".  Shit is fucked up, your character is basically going insane, and you live in an otherworld where most of the objects around you were crafted from human souls.

Joining in the fun...

Call of Cthulhu because it evokes the feel of the Mythos quite well.

Kult because it does despair real well.

Tribe Eight because it's Hell as it really is.

Little Fears because it evokes small child cognition so damn well. People forget that children can't think like adults, they don't have the equipment.

I'm in:

Call of Cthulhu: I love BRP. It has also fucking DG, and you can't get much cooler than that. And there's something on lovecraftian horror that never gets old, no matter what other people say. And because the Cthulhu PCs are the greatest heroes ever.

Unknown Armies: Because it shows all that you can do with a D100 system. Because it's original, and exceptionally well written.

Kult: For the same reasons Spike said. By the way, good work, Spike.

WoD: Because the morality of your actions is supposed to matter. Because the system is gritty and quite sleek and streamlined. Because you can be the monster, the human, or even both.

NEMESIS: Because the ORE system fucking rocks, and the UA madness meters make it even more sweet. My alt system for doing lovecraftian horror.

Let me give this one a spin:

5: HOL: You don't think this one is horror? Run it and see what your players get up to. Brrr.

4: Nephilim: I don't speak French, but I found the Chaosium version eminantly workable (especially with a few supplements to round things out).

3: The Whispering Vault: Mainly because if you have the PCs be amnesiacs who think they are still human beings it can get pretty intense...

2: Unknown Armies: For the madness meters, for the magic, for the atmosphere.

1: Call of Cthulhu: There are better systems out there. The investigation structure is ultimately repetitive. It's been done to death. But at the same time, there's simply no substitute for just picking up the rulebook again and running some old-school Cthulhu.

Quote from: jcfialaGood one.

1) Call of Cthulhu

The classic game of roleplaying horror, and the one I first think of, and which most everyone thinks of.  The game sits high partially because of the years of fantastic support it's had, from classic modules to their modern city books.

Quote2) Call of Cthulhu d20

The classic game, only given more modern rules - I found it just about as easy to run, really, and it was pretty simple to convert the stats on the fly.  Plus, some fantastic advice on how to run a good game.

Quote3) Buffy

Vampires.  Evil priests.  Ghouls.  Chaos Demons.  Math Homework.  What could be more horrible?  Add in a great lightweight rule system (which I'll admit has some problems) that encourages, say, thrusting the stake you're holding into the spokes of the vampire's motorcycle, and you've got a lot of fun.

Quote4) Can I put in a shout-out to Delta Green here?

Delta Green took CoC when it was at a low point, and showed how you could re-envision it in the modern world, with all of the campaign ideas you could want.  

Quote5) Beyond the Supernatural 2nd (for all that it's incomplete, the bits that are there are fun.  If it were complete, it's rank higher.)

As I said in my first post, it's incomplete - there's no magic rules in the book, and not a lot of monsters.  But what it does have is a psychic-powered action movie character array, from the quiet emo girl who hears things, to the shuffling guy in the corner who sets things on fire when he's suprised, to the quiet hunter whose guns never run out of ammo because he creates telekinetic bullets.  Add that to a campaign framework of hunting down the things that go bump in the night, and you've practicly got HellBoy the rpg, minus Hellboy.  Plus, I like the new rules that state that the amount of psychic oomph you have is directly related to how close the monsters are to you.  James Randi may not be able to detect your ability to pick up a bookcase and throw it, but the Devourerer in the Dark has the Encyclopedia Brittanica up his nose.

Quote from: ImperatorKult: For the same reasons Spike said. By the way, good work, Spike.

.

What can I say? I've been a fan ever since I found it.

Quote from: SpikeWhat can I say? I've been a fan ever since I found it.

It's a clever game. Putting game fiction into the rules (like the short vignettes before each (dis-)advantage) is much better than the WW mode with fourty pages of vague exposition before you get to the real stuff.

Quote from: SpikeWhat can I say? I've been a fan ever since I found it.

Same here.

Actually, I found it through a friend who owned it, and had the intention to run it. But he never could finish the book because he got freaked out. He used to tell me: 'I know it's just a game, and that it's not real. But is too fucking verisimil.'