Living Explosions?

Would this be okay?

  • Sure! It would be great!

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • It's good, but.. meh.

    Votes: 1 50.0%
  • I don't care.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • No.

    Votes: 1 50.0%
  • AHH FUCK NO GET OUT GET OUT MIDDLE FINGER GO DDIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    2
E

Energetic Alice

Guest
Original poster
I'm really partially fooling people with the title...
Anyway, would it be okay to make an RP about a smallish-mediumish-largish group stuck in a mansion with all sorts of monsters and a demon controlling said monsters? For all I know, I'm talking to myself, but I came up with it in the bath and got bored. Also, this is my first time with a horror/thriller, so I'm kind of confused.
 
Aaw, you made me excited when I saw "living explosions". I thought I'd finally get to play Explodia in an RP.
 
Anyway, you have to be really careful with horror settings, especially "trapped in a mansion" scenarios. There are about a million ways one of those could run, and only 3 or 4 of those actually work. If you aren't careful, it ends up turning into a detective RP instead of a horror RP. You also need to be really strict with which characters and which RPers get accepted. You don't want any character that's going to be headstrong and immune to the scary things, because they'll take over. You also don't want an RPer who will do that. You need to get a good balance of characters and you need to make sure you're in control of the story telling at all times. If a leader-type character manages to establish itself, you've already lost and now it's a detective RP.
 
Oh, okay! Once I think about it, that makes sense.
Do you think it's possible to do both? As in, is it easy to do a "how do we get out of here? Who did this? AH FUCK THAT IS SCARY!" thing?
 
Well, all horrors eventually end up doing that because they need some kind of plotline, but obviously, actually being scary is very hard to do in a writing format because you can't rely on jump scares. The only way to write in a scary manner is to induce several emotions in the players: First and most importantly, they need to feel like they're in control, but also they need to be very much not in control. The best way to do this is to have a hidden co-gm who plays the role of the leader of the humans and who constantly guides them into the GM's traps. Second, you need to induce the feeling of uncertainty. They need to be able to come to conclusions about what is going on, but always be wrong and always doubt whether what they come up with is correct. Thirdly, you need some kind of underlying and very scary theme, for example, the idea of mortality. In the case of using mortality, your plotline needs to constantly remind the players that they could suddenly die in real life without any prior notice. The really hard bit of all this, however, is that you can't let the players know that this is what is happening. It needs to creep up slowly so that you'd only notice it happening when you go back to the beginning and read it all through. You also need to be in absolute control of the pace. It stops being a horror if any of the characters are able to have a conversation because the GM is asleep. So yeah like I said, horror is very hard to do :D I've never managed to do one successfully. This information is collected from the most successful of the horror RPs i've seen.

I have no idea if that paragraph was coherent and my brain isn't functioning properly today so I can't check it.
 
It's a coherent paragraph. Ah, this is gonna be hard...