Survival Horror RPG

[ironick]

This is a set of mechanics for a survival horror game that my friends and I were tossing around this past summer.  I had been working on it around Halloween and Thanksgiving, but I kind of lost interest when I saw the "Last One Standing" post because our idea has a lot of the same elements.  I've had a lot of free time lately, so I've decided to pick it up again and I wanted some outside thoughts on it.

Basically what we were going for is to mimic those types of what I call "rural horror" stories.  Think Children on the Corn (the first one) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or even (God forbid!) Jeepers Creepers. There is a very high mortality rate, so I wanted characters to be quick and easy to make. There will be only one surivor, and the game runs until there is only one left.

Anyway, the basic stuff I've got right now is this:

You've got 4 stats, all self-explanatory, with 10 points to distribute: Physique, Coordination, Intellect, Psyche.  These range from 1 to 5.  For a test, you add the two most relevant stats together and try to roll at or under that total with 2d6.  You always roll against your own abilities, because usually the only thing that should be hampering you is your fear.

Speaking of fear: when you are confronted by scary nastiness you make a Fear Check--roll Psyche doubled--and if you fail you gain 1 point of Fear; if you succeed you gain 1 point of Adrenaline.  When your Fear surpasses your Psyche you have reached the limits of what your mind can handle and you must now roll 3d6 and take the two highest dice for every test--including new Fear Checks. You may spend a point of Adrenaline to gain an extra die on one roll and you may keep the two lowest dice.

Damage: When you fail a roll to dodge or defend yourself against bad stuff, the GM may choose to deal you damage. He or she doesn't have to, and he may also choose the severity of the wound he wants to inflict. A Flesh Wound gives you a +1 penalty on all rolls and gains you 1 Monkeywrench Point to use after your character dies; a Crippling Blow gives a +2 penalty and gets you 3 MW points; a Mortal Wound means instant death and nabs you 5 Monkeywrench Points.

Monkeywrench Points work thusly: after your character dies, the player may use his or her stored up MW points to affect the GM's narration.  1 point lets you tack on a Conditional (e.g., Steve jumps off the roof okay but lands badly and twists his ankle).  2 points lets you state one Uncontested Fact.  5 points lets you steal narration from the GM for the remainder of the scene.  At any point after there is only 1 character left the GM may call Endgame; during Endgame no player may steal narrative control, although they may still state Conditionals and Facts.  Once Endgame has been called, the game must end that scene.

Wow, this kind of got away from me.  There're some more details, but I think I'll stop here for now.  Please comment and criticize all you like, I need feedback badly on this.

[TonyLB]

I'm not in love with the Adrenaline spending system, which seems... well, very humdrum.

Why not say that each point of "damage" means a loss of a point of Adrenaline, and that when they're all out (assuming they start with some existing pool) they succumb to despair/stupidity and therefore die?

They'd have to start with a beginning pool of adrenaline, but then the system gives them a motive to seek out scary things that they think they can handle (in order to earn Adrenaline).

[Spooky Fanboy]

May I make a suggestion?

Have all players start out with a pool of Stupidity points. They have to roll (something) vs. their Stupidity score to do something intelligent.

When they confront something horrific, they make the Psyche score roll vs. Stupidity. Success changes a certain amount of Stupidity into Adrenaline. Thus, scary things can make you more focused and less apt to do dumb things. Failure means the character is still stupid, only now s/he's making bonehead maneuvers due to fright rather than just being stupid.

Let's face it, the vast majority of people in horror movies, regardless of education and/or life experience, are boneheads waiting to autodarwinate. A Stupidity stat is not only in-genre, it drives the players forward to the horrors so that they can lose Stupidity and hopefully survive the horror show.  

Come to think of it, you may want to allow the players to use their highest-score ability to roll vs. Stupidity in a Fear-check. The geeks don't always survive the horror films, anymore.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Something must be in the water, because another person recently proposed a similar idea (hey, that's a horror movie plot right there), albeit with totally different mechanics: Last One Standing.

[Jason Morningstar]

I like the fear/adrenalin dichotomy and the extra die mechanic.  I also like the suggestion of something pushing back to keep characters doing things that are appropriate but totally stupid.  

I wonder if you need attributes - maybe all characters have is resourcefulness or a will to live.   In genre, great physical strength or coordination never carry the day - such gifts are subsumed by the demands of the plot.  Jock and nerd alike are victims.  Maybe the real question is whether your fear overwhelms your urge to survive...

[ironick]

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone!  Keep them coming.

I had a few extra rules in my head, but I didn't include them before.  Now it occurs to me they kind of function similarly to the Stupidity suggestions:

As you gain Fear points, you may convert them to points of Adrenaline on a one-for-one basis (not sure about this), one point per round.  In order to do this you must spend at least one round doing nothing but marshalling your wits, and you must use at least one point of Adrenaline immediately the following round or all of the newly converted points are lost.  Now here's the Stupidity part: for every point of Fear you convert, the GM can assign one automatic failure to any action.

That could easily be modified to some sort of Stupidity mechanic, I think.

I was also toying with the idea of including two skill-ish traits.  Since everyone is supposed to be college-age or so, I was thinking of having everyone decide on a Course of Study, which would function kind like a Cover in Sorcerer, and a Joe Job, which would be some sort of wild card skill.  Not sure how they would work mechanically, though.  My first thought was to give them a -2 and -1 bonus to appropriate rolls, but that seems kinda boring.

As to Last One Standing, yeah, I saw that.  I hate when I have an idea and then I find out someone else had the same idea.  It ususally happens at the same time, too.

[Sydney Freedberg]

As to Last One Standing, yeah, I saw that.  I hate when I have an idea and then I find out someone else had the same idea.  It ususally happens at the same time, too.

Yeah, but having the idea is 10%. How you implement it is 90%.

[ironick]

Touche, good sir.

[TonyLB]

"Marshalling your wits"?  Do people in the genre ever actually do that?

What about fighting between yourself, or throwing around blame and recrimination?  Those sound like equally valid (and more genre-appropriate) ways to turn fear into adrenaline.

[ironick]

Hmm...perhaps "marshalling one's huevos" might be a better term.  Every once in a while you see someone staring in horror as the villain mauls a friend and they muster the presence of mind to attack said villain, usually ineffectively.  But hey, let's give 'em a sporting chance, right?  I mean, only one person's gonna live, regardless...

[Peregrine]

Have all players start out with a pool of Stupidity points. They have to roll (something) vs. their Stupidity score to do something intelligent.

Genius.

You could also use the Scary Movie observation that you'll survive only as long as you remain goody-goody pure. As soon as you do something sinful or indulgent your stupidity could go up?

Or you could have a psycho magnet token that is held by the player whose character has most recently done something immoral or stupid. It gets passed around the table. Maybe by nomination and peer vote.

If your is the psycho magnet all the creepy killers come after you first.

I would try to make the game a slightly tongue-in-cheek satire.

Chris

[ironick]

Ooh!  I really like the Psycho Magnet suggestion!!  Excellent idea.  I think I'm also going to incorporate some sort of Stupidity rules, although I don't want to go too over the top.  I am actually trying to stay away from the satire aspect, while staying true to most of the tropes of the genre.  I actually want this to be *somewhat* creepy/scary, not funny.  

I live in some pretty bleak farm country and I love to drive aroundin the autumn and get creeped out by the landscape.  There are hangn' trees, one-lane bridges, and crybaby lanes all over the place out here.  I want it to be kind of bleak.

[TonyLB]

I like the psycho magnet too.  But if I were designing, rather than just armchair quarterbacking, I'd give the players some rules reason to seek the Psycho Magnet:  like maybe they get important in-game resources every time they escape an attack.  

Then the players will deliberately do stupid/immoral things, in order to be able to sieze the psycho magnet.  "I've got an idea!  Let's go down to the old abandoned boat-house by the indian burial ground and have sex!"

[Uccisore]

Ooh! I really like the Psycho Magnet suggestion!! Excellent idea. I think I'm also going to incorporate some sort of Stupidity rules, although I don't want to go too over the top. I am actually trying to stay away from the satire aspect, while staying true to most of the tropes of the genre. I actually want this to be *somewhat* creepy/scary, not funny.

    So more Texas Chainsaw and less Scream?  If you want it to be scary, have the 'Psycho Magnet' rules be such that the players know they can do certain things to affect who the Psycho Magnet is, but they don't actually know which one of them it is. In other words, the players have things they can do, but the killer has his own characteristics that affect things that the players aren't privy too, like 'prefers to kill women' or 'hates the color orange' or something like that. Then the players are speculating about who's going to bite it next, just like viewers would be in a good movie.  Of course, if you do it that way, it would be scarier if the PCs were doing things to avoid being the psycho magnet.
      The problem here, is that if the players know only one person is going to survive, they don't have much of a meta-game reason to work together. It becomes a competition (which could be fun in it's own way, I suppose!)  How about this:  Every scenario, everybody makes fresh characters.  People who survived the previous scenario get some sort of bonus (kind of like XP) on making their new characters. This bonus could even be based on how many people total survive- the more survivors, the more XP each person gets. NPC survivors could even be factored in, if you want.   You could even have  'Sequels' in which people get to play past favorite characters who actually lived through previous scenarios.
  IF you go this way, I think it would be scary, but on the other hand, would discourage some of those sterotypical foolish things people do in horror movies. I'm not sure you can have one without sacrificing the other.

[J. Campbell]

One thing about your mechanics: I don't like the way the distribution works. With a 2d6 roll, players are averaging a 7 per roll. With an average of 2.5 per stat, this means that a lot of people will be failing a lot of rolls unless they've got one of the stats at 4 or 5. This problem can be easily corrected by giving players 14 points to distribute. This puts the average of each stat at 3.5, which means that average players will succeed at tasks roughly 65% of the time... and hell, it's not like you have to worry about advancement when you've got rules for what happens when players die.

And let's face it, these poor bastards are going to be dying left, right, and central, so they need as much help as they can get.

The Psycho Magnet, unfortunately, is a bit too much satire for a serious piece, at least to me. I love the idea, but a token you toss around every time players do something stupid would be a bit over the edge.

Perhaps players instead convert Stupidity to Adrenaline every time they do something stupid and have an encounter with the big bad meanie. Sure, they might panic, but they should still gain the Adrenaline. Perhaps instead, when players encounter the big baddy, they convert some of their Stupidity over to Adrenaline automatically (giving players reason to play up the whole horror movie idiots thing), but if they fail a Psyche test they just flee in panic and have a penalty of +2 for the rest of the scene.

Characters with the highest Stupidity get attacked more often, because they're easier prey and are probably doing something stupid. Hell, if you make a starting pool of Stupidity fairly high (IE 30 or so), players will actually be fairly eager to jump into stupid situations and you won't have to put a mechanic in to force them along. It's a simple, elegant way to handle the Psycho Magnet as an in-game thing without making it part of the satire, and eliminate a mechanic which forces players to do something they might not want to do in the first place.