Hook Horror: Character motivation in horror RPGs
If my last post wasn’t an indication, horror has been on my mind lately. I actually wrote that story because I wanted to run a horror game but didn’t have the opportunity to… until earlier today.
I used Cthulu Dark to run an original scenario of mine for the fourth time. I might clean it up and share it on here at some point, but I do not have the bandwidth for that at the moment. EDIT: I barely cleaned it up but decided to share the scenario notes on this blog to provide an idea of what I'm talking about.
What I do have the bandwidth for today is an essay examining one of the key issues I have with horror games, both when I run them and when I play in them, which is how to balance character motivations against player motivations.
This is a problem largely unique to a style of play that emphasizes roleplaying a character as a real individual with their own psychology and goals rather than as an avatar of the player’s will, but I’ve seen other players at my tables struggle with it as well. That said, I think there’s value in discussing it and potential solutions I’ve seen in action or considered.
Hooks and motivations
A “hook” in RPG parlance typically refers to the in-world reason a character has to get involved in an adventure or module. Here are some examples:
-“Hey, why are we going into this abandoned wizard tower?”/ “We were hired to loot it.”
-“Hey, why are we fighting these cultists?” / “They kidnapped your sister.”
-“Hey, why are we running into this hole full of traps and creatures that want to kill us?” / “It is also full of money.”
Hooks are meant to appeal to character motivations — to explain why your character would engage in a particular activity even if it’s dangerous. They also help to create stakes — logical consequences for what happens if characters succeed or fail.
Stakes give roleplaying meaning. They mean that the choices you make matter and are the evidence that players have agency in the fictional world. (I have seen arguments that horror as a genre is fundamentally about a loss of agency, which means stakes would be less important in a horror game, but that question is too large to get into here.)
That said, hooks don’t cover player motivations — that is, the interests and concerns your players have at a table. In fact, they are typically irrelevant or at least secondary to that aspect of the game.
If Kat isn’t interested in a fantasy scenario whatsoever, shouting “This adventure is about saving your sister!” won’t sway her. (This goes back to an ancient RPG truism, which is that table dynamics can’t be addressed or fixed within the game.)
Shifting focus to what player motivations look like, they can be varied, but obvious ones are “Spend time with other people around the table” and “Have fun.” Of course, you can dive deeper into any of these — Annalise and Kat might not find the same things enjoyable to the same degree or whatsoever.
Often, character motivation and player motivation align. In a dungeon-crawling RPG, your characters are adventurers whose goal in life is to find wealth or power secreted away in dangerous places, and many players will be interested in the challenge of overcoming the obstacles standing between those characters and their objectives.
But horror games are complicated because of the subject matter and tone. Remember what we said about hooks and stakes? Often in a horror game, the hook is “You were roped into investigating this weird or dangerous thing,” their motivations are “survive” and “solve the mystery” and the stakes are usually life or death (for the characters. Please don’t harm your players).
Unless it’s some kind of horror comedy game, the obstacles players need to face are likely to get them hurt or killed, which means that characters are likely to have a motivation (“Survive”) that conflicts with one or more of the motivations players are bringing to the table (“See horrible stuff.”)
This can lead to tension when a player also wants to solve the mystery but wants to roleplay their character in accordance with that character’s goals — especially if one of those character goals is “survive.”
HHS
This dissonance is at its worst in scenarios that suffer from Haunted House Syndrome (“HHS” for short).
HHS results in a GM ushering the characters from one scare to the next with rolls for Sanity loss or Stress gain along the way. There might be some problem solving or some mystery-busting, but fundamentally, a player’s goal is to go through all the rooms in the haunted house and see everything at least once.*
A character’s goals in a haunted house are less obvious. Why would you keep pressing on into the darkness and the horror if you have an option to turn back or stay still?
I’ve seen other players at my table struggle with this when I run Cthulu Dark. In the scenario I mentioned before, there is a point of no return near the end where the characters have the option of giving up their hunt for the truth with their minds and bodies mostly intact. But if they turn back, the players won’t get to see every room of the haunted house, and they bought tickets for the damn haunted house.**
I’ve seen a few solutions to address this conundrum. The most interesting one is when a player said his character would just “Nope” out, so we replaced him with an NPC already present and kept going.
Another trick is to give characters two motivations that are at odds with each other, echoing the tension between character motivation and player motivation. One obvious example is a character who wants to survive and also feels tugged by compulsion toward uncovering the awful secrets that underpin the world. (This is a way of framing so-called “play-to-lose” games, where the fun is watching and roleplaying your character’s unraveling.)
Bringing character and player motivation into alignment
An alternative solution is to put something the characters want on the other side of the haunted house so that player and character motivation align. The player will get to see all of the rooms and all of the animatronics while the characters will be making meaningful progress toward their goal, even if it means risking their lives to do so.
It can be pretty easy to tweak a module to accommodate this sort of framing. I’ll use the Mothership module “Gradient Descent” as an example. At a high level, it’s a science-fiction megadungeon full of galaxy-threatening loot and killer androids posing as people, with a near omniscient artificial intelligence pulling the strings.
The scenario is cool, but what stuck out to me on a read is how hostile the space station is to any character that come aboard it. If you have a functioning space ship and can go to less awful places to find rare technology or make money, why even bother going in there if you’re almost guaranteed to get murdered, lose your mind, or be replaced by some insidious android?
But an easy tweak to that module or others like it is to put something essential on the space station that the characters need to survive or to escape. Maybe their ship drifts into the system damaged and they can’t leave until it’s replaced. Or maybe the AI is threatening their destruction with nukes until they take care of some particular task.
A change like this helps to create clearer stakes. The scenario goes from seeing how much AI loot the players can amass to seeing if they escape with their humanity and lives intact, which in turn reinforces the agency they have over the fictional world in the process.
*I diagnosed the last section of my scenario with HHS today. Thoughts and prayers. **The price of admission for my haunted houses are typically snacks and fun drinks.