[Frights!] Horror Movie Game

[Russell Collins]

Still in the early stages, here is a teaser for Frights! I wrote this up in about a day.

Frights! is a game meant to recreate the horror of Monster movies, slasher pics or horror video games. If you want to play Friday the 13th, House on Haunted Hill, Alien, or even Silent Hill this game should suit.

The worst thing that can happen to you in a horror movie is to trip and sprain your ankle.

PCs have four pools: Fight, Flight, Wits (talking, hiding or riddle solving) and Scared. Each pool is D6s. Monsters (villains, ghost, whatever) have one pool: Monstrous.

Situations
The Author (GM with terrible godlike power.) Sets up situations like "the Shambling Horror stalks toward you Mary Beth!" and Mary says something insightful like "I run!" Then we have a situation. The choice of the player determines the kind of situation we get.

Since Mary's running we grab her flight pool of 5 and roll it. The monster always rolls the same pool, so he gets 6 dice. After the roll, we're looking for the high die. If there's a tie, move to the next highest etc. The high unmatched die is the winner. (At the outset this is much like the mechanics of Ron Edward's Sorcerer but the damage mechanic is different. If you dislike what I've done, Ron, I can change it.)

So Mary rolled:    6, 4, 4, 2, 1
The monster got: 6, 4, 3, 3, 2, 1

Mary's second 4 beat the monster's 3 and she wins, escaping the monster.

The monster now takes damage from the lost conflict. Mary won with the 4 but there are two dice left in her pool (The 2 and 1.) The monster takes those dice as damage reducing his pool by 2 resulting in 4.

If a pool hits 0 you automatically lose a situation involving it. Go mad, get killed, etc. The lowest any pool can go is 0.

At the end of the situation the players have the option of pushing to continue the scene into another situation or letting both sides break away to set up the next situation. The Author can't push to continue a situation! There are some situations that will call for a follow up however, as detailed below:

There's more to this intro, rules for making characters and monsters, and rules for more elaborate situations in the current text. You'll find that on my blog here: http://lucrepress.blogspot.com/

Comment here, comment there, whichever you prefer I'll track it down. Please read the entire text first as it may answer initial questions.

Thank you,

[Stefan / 1of3]

Horror movies sound interesting. I thought about making such a game myself but I missed the inspiration.

So, what types of pools do you use?

How do you structure the game?

[Russell Collins]

Right now it's d6 pools based around the 4 characteristics I listed above. Players divvy up 20 dice between these pools and pick a few "specialties" to make their characters. The specialties provide bonuses in certain situations (as well as being the obvious clue to the GM about what people want their characters to do.)

The scenario structure is what I'm totally lacking, but I'm hoping to steal the formulaic structure of several dozen B-movies and turn it into a plan. That's going to take more time than I have for this game now, though.