Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 5:40 am
My turn now.
I too am against reverting to the simple basics, but I understand where that feeling might have come from. I too am a nostalgic about many things, many times, but I began with RL too late to feel that here. Specifically, I began with the third BoS and with Domains of Dread, when the 2nd Ed line was about to end or just had.
Anyway, I have read earlier this year a book on vampires written on the early 1920s, I guess, and in it the author makes a survey of the vampire tales up to that time. This included books and most prominently theatrical plays. And one interesting point that he put accross, and which I find has merit, was that a horror story can not be long. Otherwise, horror themes don't make for good long stories, or series or whatever because the horror is based mostly on the strange and the unknown. Once it becomes too familiar, it's no longer horror. I'm sure many of us have read and defended similar points of view in these boards.
Now, that seems to be the problem with our setting nowadays. Everything is so carefully explained and set for so long campaigns that after a while, any DM will raise his arms and abandon his paladinic goal of creating horror and fear in his players (note that I said players and not PCs). Because the players will soon be used enough to the dark tones, they will be familiar with the mists and all that. For instance that my group of players laughs for most of any session, even though scary things are happening to their PCs and they never cared for setup environments with dim red lights or sinister music. That's just not their game. I run a low-fantasy campaign with some dark spots, but it's not really that horrorful. I guess Alhoon too said once he runs a dark-fantasy campaign and not exactly horror, and that's the whole point: I guess it's not that easy anymore to make a horror campaign. After all, if the players are natives AND heroes, they soon become familiar with the dark secrets and it takes really good RPers (or even actors) to overcome that familiarity and represent the fear in their playing. Occasionally they may feel sad about the loss of their characters, or some impediment cast upon them, but no one likes to suffer, least of all at a gaming table, and so no one will willingly cast herself in a depressive mood just to better enjoy the game.
That said, it seems it would be easier to pull that out with the earlier setting, where every new adventure was really different, where it focused on new thus far unknown dangers and where the monsters were different than those in the books players knew. They knew they were going to be scared by the surprises in the DM's sleeve.... and be killed.
And this is the whole problem with the WiH approach: your characters don't last, it's basically a masochist experience. I for one detest when a my PC dies, I like to see them growing with time and experience, to see them last time and overcome tests and actually become heroes of legend... not just tragic heroes who tried, were lauded for that, but failed like anyone else.
That was, I guess, why we eventually moved to a campaign setting, a trua campaign setting, like RL is now. And a campaign setting is a backdrop where you can stage your campaigns, which by definition are long stretches of adventures with connected heroes, not just a mish-mash of loose adventures with different PCs every time. A campaign has much more potential of pleasing players than a series of one-offs, I believe. And for that, you need the structured kind of setting you have now.
Why would you ever need a setting for a WiH? Why even the Black Box? Perhaps just to give a good set of rules appropriate for a certain kind of adventures once and in fixed format and thus save space in published adventures. But that's not a setting, that's an accessory, and the proof must be, although I have not read it, Heroes of Horror. I bet, and I could of course be wrong, that it is pretty much "how to run a horror adventure in any setting you choose", be it Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Eberron or any other. You don't need a full-fledged setting for that. And if you have one, you're probably underusing it. After all, if you want to kill the DL in the end, and if that DL happens to be Strahd, what use is the whole setting after that?
For the above reasons, I prefer the setting as is, whole, complex, with lots of possibilities. But I too feel the nostalgy, now and then, of innocence. Because that's it we crave once we are veterans: the first sensations we felt when everything was new, when secrets were still wonderful. But innocence, alas, once lost can not be recovered. And what can we do about it? Well, a few things, perhaps:
- read something connected to those earlier times, try to regain the feeling for the environment. I'm reading now an old book, "The Enchantress" by Katherine Yorke, and it is about a gypsy girl in 18th century England. It strikes me as having that kind of environment I longed for to live in games, books or films when I was 12, and which I never really experienced in any film. It was that search that brought me to RL eventually, a place where I could express myself and build that environment so that I could live it through my players. A bit selfish, perhaps, but a life's need. And although RL is well defined in the books, I alter it somewhat to always meet this kind of feeling, this air of rusticness, isolation and mystery. It becomes awkward when your players act so much in accordance to what they know that they fear the night, but that's what we were trying to capture anyway, the difference being that heroes in an RPG should amply transcend the common folk and one-time improbable heroes of the stories that served as our model.
- throw out what you don't like: this connects to the last one and is what much of us do. Use in that setting only that which conforms to your view, disregard the official history, craft personalities according to your needs. I simply ignore the existence of places like Valachan, Sithicus, Hazlan, Darkon and many others except for geographical references, like "this white panther you see is coming from distant Valachan". But it will never be more like that, it just doesn't fit my dream horror world, which is all about dark forests at night... or mostly that. Vampires and werewolves, that's what makes my world tickle. And of course I don't take part in fan books dedicated to advancing the cultural level, or based on the most advanced domains. That's not my game.
- go back in time: this is not that novel an idea. Someone suggested doing Ravenloft 528 and the thing I immediately thought was Forgotten Realms: Arcane Age. Well, why not?! Play in different time settings, take advantage of what existed by then. But don't make it one-off adventures, you don't need to. Perhaps you can make a whole campaign based on escaping a long plan of a vampire obsessed with Tatyana in a way we can't be in the future simply because he doesn't have anything else to do as of now.
- alter the villains: give them scarier motives, more pervasive or threatening, and perhaps even invincible, as long as you can make a clear attainable goal that does not include killing it, just surviving it. Make things unknown to the players, don't use all the resources at once.
- Or if you really prefer to kill your players and make a Gallery of Unsung Heroes, give it a unifying tone, like memories of a storyteller, portraits in a noble Hall detailing the deeds of the lineage, items in a museum that were recovered from many courageous deeds around the whole land.
I know this is long, I tried to give you what I think and to show that there is a way of doing it yourself without having to go back. Perhaps all we need is to "think it simple" once again.
As for trying to find new players, we can try that if we are DMs looking for player groups, but probably many of us are already set. So, barred that one, I second the idea of making a book with ideas for bringing Innocence back to the game.
Cheers, and if you've read it thus far, thank you.
Alex
I too am against reverting to the simple basics, but I understand where that feeling might have come from. I too am a nostalgic about many things, many times, but I began with RL too late to feel that here. Specifically, I began with the third BoS and with Domains of Dread, when the 2nd Ed line was about to end or just had.
Anyway, I have read earlier this year a book on vampires written on the early 1920s, I guess, and in it the author makes a survey of the vampire tales up to that time. This included books and most prominently theatrical plays. And one interesting point that he put accross, and which I find has merit, was that a horror story can not be long. Otherwise, horror themes don't make for good long stories, or series or whatever because the horror is based mostly on the strange and the unknown. Once it becomes too familiar, it's no longer horror. I'm sure many of us have read and defended similar points of view in these boards.
Now, that seems to be the problem with our setting nowadays. Everything is so carefully explained and set for so long campaigns that after a while, any DM will raise his arms and abandon his paladinic goal of creating horror and fear in his players (note that I said players and not PCs). Because the players will soon be used enough to the dark tones, they will be familiar with the mists and all that. For instance that my group of players laughs for most of any session, even though scary things are happening to their PCs and they never cared for setup environments with dim red lights or sinister music. That's just not their game. I run a low-fantasy campaign with some dark spots, but it's not really that horrorful. I guess Alhoon too said once he runs a dark-fantasy campaign and not exactly horror, and that's the whole point: I guess it's not that easy anymore to make a horror campaign. After all, if the players are natives AND heroes, they soon become familiar with the dark secrets and it takes really good RPers (or even actors) to overcome that familiarity and represent the fear in their playing. Occasionally they may feel sad about the loss of their characters, or some impediment cast upon them, but no one likes to suffer, least of all at a gaming table, and so no one will willingly cast herself in a depressive mood just to better enjoy the game.
That said, it seems it would be easier to pull that out with the earlier setting, where every new adventure was really different, where it focused on new thus far unknown dangers and where the monsters were different than those in the books players knew. They knew they were going to be scared by the surprises in the DM's sleeve.... and be killed.
And this is the whole problem with the WiH approach: your characters don't last, it's basically a masochist experience. I for one detest when a my PC dies, I like to see them growing with time and experience, to see them last time and overcome tests and actually become heroes of legend... not just tragic heroes who tried, were lauded for that, but failed like anyone else.
That was, I guess, why we eventually moved to a campaign setting, a trua campaign setting, like RL is now. And a campaign setting is a backdrop where you can stage your campaigns, which by definition are long stretches of adventures with connected heroes, not just a mish-mash of loose adventures with different PCs every time. A campaign has much more potential of pleasing players than a series of one-offs, I believe. And for that, you need the structured kind of setting you have now.
Why would you ever need a setting for a WiH? Why even the Black Box? Perhaps just to give a good set of rules appropriate for a certain kind of adventures once and in fixed format and thus save space in published adventures. But that's not a setting, that's an accessory, and the proof must be, although I have not read it, Heroes of Horror. I bet, and I could of course be wrong, that it is pretty much "how to run a horror adventure in any setting you choose", be it Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Eberron or any other. You don't need a full-fledged setting for that. And if you have one, you're probably underusing it. After all, if you want to kill the DL in the end, and if that DL happens to be Strahd, what use is the whole setting after that?
For the above reasons, I prefer the setting as is, whole, complex, with lots of possibilities. But I too feel the nostalgy, now and then, of innocence. Because that's it we crave once we are veterans: the first sensations we felt when everything was new, when secrets were still wonderful. But innocence, alas, once lost can not be recovered. And what can we do about it? Well, a few things, perhaps:
- read something connected to those earlier times, try to regain the feeling for the environment. I'm reading now an old book, "The Enchantress" by Katherine Yorke, and it is about a gypsy girl in 18th century England. It strikes me as having that kind of environment I longed for to live in games, books or films when I was 12, and which I never really experienced in any film. It was that search that brought me to RL eventually, a place where I could express myself and build that environment so that I could live it through my players. A bit selfish, perhaps, but a life's need. And although RL is well defined in the books, I alter it somewhat to always meet this kind of feeling, this air of rusticness, isolation and mystery. It becomes awkward when your players act so much in accordance to what they know that they fear the night, but that's what we were trying to capture anyway, the difference being that heroes in an RPG should amply transcend the common folk and one-time improbable heroes of the stories that served as our model.
- throw out what you don't like: this connects to the last one and is what much of us do. Use in that setting only that which conforms to your view, disregard the official history, craft personalities according to your needs. I simply ignore the existence of places like Valachan, Sithicus, Hazlan, Darkon and many others except for geographical references, like "this white panther you see is coming from distant Valachan". But it will never be more like that, it just doesn't fit my dream horror world, which is all about dark forests at night... or mostly that. Vampires and werewolves, that's what makes my world tickle. And of course I don't take part in fan books dedicated to advancing the cultural level, or based on the most advanced domains. That's not my game.
- go back in time: this is not that novel an idea. Someone suggested doing Ravenloft 528 and the thing I immediately thought was Forgotten Realms: Arcane Age. Well, why not?! Play in different time settings, take advantage of what existed by then. But don't make it one-off adventures, you don't need to. Perhaps you can make a whole campaign based on escaping a long plan of a vampire obsessed with Tatyana in a way we can't be in the future simply because he doesn't have anything else to do as of now.
- alter the villains: give them scarier motives, more pervasive or threatening, and perhaps even invincible, as long as you can make a clear attainable goal that does not include killing it, just surviving it. Make things unknown to the players, don't use all the resources at once.
- Or if you really prefer to kill your players and make a Gallery of Unsung Heroes, give it a unifying tone, like memories of a storyteller, portraits in a noble Hall detailing the deeds of the lineage, items in a museum that were recovered from many courageous deeds around the whole land.
I know this is long, I tried to give you what I think and to show that there is a way of doing it yourself without having to go back. Perhaps all we need is to "think it simple" once again.
As for trying to find new players, we can try that if we are DMs looking for player groups, but probably many of us are already set. So, barred that one, I second the idea of making a book with ideas for bringing Innocence back to the game.
Cheers, and if you've read it thus far, thank you.
Alex
): it is nostalgy, something i don't feel for adventures I really don't like (most of them) and I never played.
): they are looking for something more than one-shot adventure in a totally different setting.
) visiting Sri Raji or Rokushima Tayioo.
I gave you out! Ha!