Okay. Okay. Calming down now.

This is something that has bugged me for a long, long time. Mostly because I love words, partially because I've been playing Call of Cthulhu (or however that's spelled) and a lot because I'd really, really like to see things change for the better.

RPG-D has no horror boards. This is a simple statement of fact. Horror means fear. It doesn't mean wads of combat rules, power munching, or anything like that. It means fear.

Point the first- There are lots of things inherently scary about vampires. They are dead, but they move among us like the living. They are forced to drain the blood of the living to sustain themselves. They will turn to ash if sunlight touches them. They are inhumanly strong and immune to conventional weapons. They're spooky. A vampire stalking you down an alley, powerful, graceful, damned to a life its body no longer deserves, is inherently spooky.

Werewolves are also spooky. There are people, who look like you and me, who are cursed- cursed with the wolf-curse, damned to spend a night every month in the form of a vast monster, a killing machine, nothing but hatred and rage and power- and wake up the next morning without any knowledge of what they've done, of the harm they've caused. Waking up in your bed every morning, not knowing if, last night, you were the monster who slaughtered a group of innocent bystanders or if it was someone else, is spooky.

Hunters, they're creepy too. Because they don't have the excuse of a curse. They don't have that luxury. They are bastards. They are humans who, by religious belief or simple determination, have set themselves on slaying the monsters that walk among us, taking from us. If they kill vampires, no-one will notice. If they kill werewolves, all that's left is a human corpse. But they fundamentally believe they are right. They are that far off the beaten path. They are that insane. But they are not cursed or supernatural. They are just. Like. You.

Now, individually, those are spooky. Put together, they're real spooky. Not knowing if that guy muttering to himself on the bus on the way home from the party is insane, or a vampire, or a werewolf, is an ample breeding ground for fear. Especially if he then stands up and begins to slowly, carefully make his way toward you, his gloved, skeletal hand digging around inside his jacket for- for something, oh god, what does he want..?

But there is nothing like that here. Nothing.

Because there is no amount of creepiness or originality or fun that can't be driven into the ground with balancing rules. And combat rules. And power descriptions. And explanation upon explanation upon explanation.

Vampires have become unscary, mostly, I would say, because of the raft of vampire movies that have hit us recently- Underworld being the most obvious, but Ultraviolet and Blade have also had their effects. And NOT ONE OF THOSE FRICKEN' MOVIES WAS HORROR. They were action movies. Vampire-vs-Werewolf III. All of a sudden, Vampires aren't creepy-crawly shadow beasties, they're warriors. They have to fight.

As soon as all the spooky night creatures are beating the shit out of each other, they aren't scary anymore. And there's the problem. Horror is now action.

Okay. I've really calmed down now. I just needed to say some things. And I know, balance is important in combat boards, kind of, and all that, but... geh. Someone needs to make something genuinely scary. Otherwise 'horror' is the wrong word.

hmm...ever had a psychopathic killer that has crawled across walls stalk your rpc. Only to find out it looks and behaves(in some regards) JUST LIKE YOU(well your rpc) Then not to mention that the next minute a kid gets his hand chopped out and the hand proceeds to kill its owner?


probably not ^^ that happens on my board....and often the rpc's are the scariest o.O

Amen. I'd love to see more horror, though I'm thinking more like Resident Evil where you have some big, scary bad guys that will kick your hiney and all you can do is run and hide.

I get so terrified when I play that game because the zombie creatures are completely mindless, but, unlike 'real' zombies, they have AI. They can think and they can find the good guys and hunt them down. They don't just mill around aimlessly looking for food. No, these baddies actually follow the good guys into buildings and come after them with weapons.

Not to mention the fact that there are also big bosses that are just insanely scary--not so much in the game, but they would be if you met them IRL.

I'd love to see an RP with RE-like zombie creatures and other monsters. Not vampires or werewolves or demons.

What on earth is an RPC?

And this is in the wrong place. It's a rant, not a discussion (as far as I could tell).

I don't find werewolves or vampires or hunters scary. That entire genre is just insanely stupid, in my opinion. I'm not really into horror at all, but a vampire would be no scarier than a person with a gun, I think.

You're right. But horror is hard to write. It's hard to scare people with words. The only writer whose books I have to put down because I'll have nightmares if I don't is Neil Gaiman. And usually it's because of his poetry or his comics rather than his stories.

The reason that people don't find them scary is they're now impossible to take seriously! Because we KNOW they can't exist.

Right?

So do the board owners.

That's the problem with the whole thing. Vampire boards in particular are written tongue-in-cheek, with nods to action movies, video games, role-playing-games (not RP, RPGs). They play like MMORPGs, they feel like MMORPGs, they don't feel real. They've sacrificed viscerality and fear for open-endedness and power-munching.

What needs to happen is someone, somewhere, somehow, needs to figure out how to make them scary again. Because, and this is directed at you, Emma, they are scary. Vampires particularly. They are animated corpses. They are dead. They should be in the ground. But they aren't. Instead, they stalk the city streets at night, ripping the life out of us to fuel their... their undeath. Their lack of death. To fuel the fact that they can't, or don't, die. You can't avoid them. You can't fight them off. You can't kill them. You can't see them coming, and you won't be alive to see them leave.

How can they not be scary?

By making them heroes. By making them beat the shit out of equally impressive beasties. By avoiding their personal qualms for the sake of action. They drink. Your. Blood. But the also fight werewolves! So it's cool! They aren't scary, they're on our side!

GAH!

And that zombie idea would be AWESOME. Especially if the players were all humans.

When you put it that way I concede they are scary. But so are dogs. And I don't see anyone complaining why nobody's making an RP about being chased by dogs.

I guess I'm bored with the idea that horror has to equal vampires and werewolves. The lack of expansion there is boring. There are so many other things that could be scary. When I used to read Paul Jennings I got scared by the seagulls who tried to kill the girls. And then there's cats who try to smother their owners in the night. Dolls who set houses on fire. What about normal deranged people who kidnap you and then slice a piece off you every night?

Vampires are overdone and boring. Perhaps if they were forgotten for a couple hundred years they'd get some freshness back.

D:

I'm going to have nightmares now. Thanks. :o :sweat: x.x

But I do have to agree. Vampires and werewolves aren't scary. We need RE monsters! That game is freaky because it gives you what you don't expect: creatures that are neither mindless (zombies) nor human (vampires). Instead, it's something in between.

At any rate, I think Emma is on to something. Except for scary people who kidnap you and slice off a piece every night.

*shudders*

I dunno. I never found the RE monsters the least bit scary. They may have been smarter than the average zombie, but they were still just video-game shoot-em-up fodder to me.

Velociraptors, now -- that's another story.

Mostly though, what I find scariest is the monsters you can't see. The ones beneath the water. The ones under the bed. The ones in the shadows. And the ones who look human and act human ... until you're alone with them and it's too late.

Awww, velociraptors aren't scary. They're cute. :pink:

I have to say that I prefer psychological horror over slasher, but I don't really know how you'd pull that sort of thing off on an RP without the victim knowing that his companion is a monster.

That's when one of my personal great fears of asylums for the criminally insane come in ^.^ I suppose people would be able to tell a patient from a doctor, however, but the idea terrifies me. People would have to be awfully creative to make it work. There would have to be some overthrow and a random group of interns would be unsuspecting and have to figure out who was the real doctors or who was about to eat you o.O something like that.

Oh, and I'm also with you on the whole zombie thing. They scare the crap out of me but I've been looking for a good survival horror with zombie RP FOREVER.

Maybe something like the show The Mole ... but with some serious teeth.

Double amen to that. Some things just aren't scary...like the movies made out of Resident Evil. Bloody and make-you-jump worthy, but not scare-the-living-crap-out-of-you scary.

Although, these bosses in the game scare me enough to avoid looking at them again:

Saddler
Plaga + Puny French Guy
Mendez
IT

Yeah...that's like, all of them, but we've seen El Gigante in too many movies to really fear him. xD

I'm in love with some of the characters from that game because they're just so awesome. As far as the bad guys, I have saved different files before Salazar (puny French guy XD ) and Saddler so I can go back and beat them over and over again. I don't find the bosses that scary because, well, I don't know why, but I think they're totally cool. However, if I saw Mendez IRL, I'd wet myself.

Grey, I haven't seen The Mole. :(

SMC, there are always insane asylum RPs, but they usually turn out very . . . different.

So true and very sad indeed :( Rarely are they horror and if they are "horror" I bet some vampires will come and bite everything in site -.-

And I'm too much of a wussy to play Resident Evil video games :/ They give me anxiety. But I would RP on a board like that as long as it was zombie horror like.

I'd love a truly horror RE-like board. Unfortunately I don't have the time or the attention span to make one.

But I'd want to play Salazar!

On a mildly related topic, I think a board that would provide fertile ground for horror would be something based on Del Toro stuff and/or the Spiderwick Chronicles- put those together, kind of a Let Your Imagination Run Wild make your own monsters board, that would be fun. So long as the monsters were really, really scary. Or at least awesome. It'd need some really really solid RPers though...

Wasn't the Spiderwick Chronicle a non-horror children's book? (I haven't read it.)