#RPGaDAY2023 day 28: “SCARIEST game you’ve played”

Whereas I imagine many gamers will equate “scary” with “horror” in a genre sense, for me the scariest games have fallen into two camps:

1. Scary because we didn’t know what was going on (in a good way)
2. Scary because of the way one (or more) of the participants was behaving (in a bad way)

I’m not someone who finds the genre of Horror generally all that scary. What tickles my fear, and sometimes arises in a Horror story but can just as easily arise from any genre, is the sense of not knowing. The monster who is never quite seen is the Horror trope that works best for me. But the situation in which there exists uncertainty is what engages me.

Scary Participants

We can talk about the second type of scare at the RPG table: the participant who violates the “magic circle” of the group, or if you prefer, whose behaviour runs counter to the agreement we have made around how we play. The more unpredictable and seemingly out-of-nowhere the participant’s actions are, the more scary that will be… at least momentarily.

Violent anger erupts when something doesn’t go their way. Yelling ensues. Or someone suddenly emotes in a way that seems inappropriate at that moment, such as incessant giggling during the deeply tragic and sad death scene of a hero. These things unsettle me and drive a wedge between my experience of that person or those people. Which, by the way, is my problem: I am, after all, responsible for my feelings no matter the trigger.

Enjoyable Fear

The first type of scare is more interesting and far more common: games that are scary (and enjoyable) because we don’t know what is going on. Curiosity is engaged and we enter deeply into the situation. We are in-role as-character and we are entranced but we don’t have a clue what is going on, not just yet. There is where I am likely to sense uncertainty and rising fear.

I enjoy this kind of fear because it’s part of the wondrous illusion of roleplaying games. As we enter deeply into the imagined world, as we take on the perspective of the character we are playing, we become immersed in trying to understand what is happening. But, just for a little while, the situation is indistinct enough that we become uncertain and cautious.

Here is where the undescribed and incomplete image of the monstrous can have the greatest effect. But you can only have that experience of not knowing once in a given situation because the next time that monstrous pattern arises you’ll recognise it. The wondrous moment is with the thing you’ve not quite seen yet and you’re not sure you’ve seen before.

Hence the strongest memories are for games that were not about horror and fear. They were games focused on the unknown (and sometimes unknowable).

One example, at a convention many years ago, was the experience of meeting an alien species on a newly-visited world and not being able to communicate. As we observed one half-understood scene, uncertainty arose. As “boxes with long tubes on the front” were pointed at us, the question arose: “What is going on? Is this dangerous?”

What was notable in that case is the way the game transcended the details of the “rules” part and delved deeper into the in-character and experienced as-character “roleplay” part. Stats were forgotten as we engaged with the puzzle and resolved the situation through interaction with the NPCs (as roleplayed by the GM). This was Classic Traveller at its best and most tense.

All of which reminds me that the magic juice lies in the situations presented, the manner in which we engage in-character, and the focus on roleplaying – making decisions as if we are those characters. These are the moments of highest trust in the GM and least reliance on mechanism. Then, sometimes, I can become truly scared.

Game on!