Using The Mental-Emotional Traumas Of The Players

 ⭑The way to get the so requested “fear in the gaming table”⭑

By Felipe Lohan Pinheiro da Silva

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People says that it’s easy to scare CHARACTERS, but diƒƒіcult to scare PLAYERS. This is because if the GM wants to scare the characters, he just needs to put in the scene some element related to his past trauma/phobia/mental disadvantage and makes the characters do the appropriate roll, or give to the character the appropriate penalty in the rolls during that scene.

Most RPGs expressly recommend to avoid the traumas of the players. But İ will go in the opposite direction and recommend to use them. For example, if a player suffered a rape, sexual harassment or domestic violence, or is relative/acquaintance of a victim (regardless if the player or the victim are male or female), ensure to include such a scene or at least a reference in the game. The reference may be a character meeting a NPC that tells him a rape case, or ƒіnding a newspaper w/ an article talking such cases, or a TV airing a news program covering such a story. The same goes for players or his relatives/acquaintances that suffered accidents (specially those that left permanent damages), miscarriages, tragic deaths (this case obviously only his relatives/acquaintances), or served a prison term; any phobia like of rats, snakes, cockroaches, acrophobia (fear of high places), claustrophobia (fear of closed spaces), etc; in short, any exploitable trauma.

¿ What’s the point of a game that labels itself as “horror” if you can’t use the traumas of the players? After all, as the Brazilian saying says “those who walks under the rain must expect to get wet”.

Call me a jerkass. İf you do as my recommendation, you will also be called “jerkass”, you may even be punched in the face, people may stop attending the games you run, you may be hated among the RPG community. But you will have distilled the true essence of the horror.