Re: [HOE] Coup questions

["Scott Pedersen" <spederse@hotmail.com>]

> Hi all!
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> Don't know if this counts as spoilers, but it's talking about some
> potentially behind-the-scenes stuff, so consider yourself warned....
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> 1) The huckster has a very high Spirit, especially now that he's dead and
> bought Supernatural Trait.  I'm concerned that everytime a Servator/nasty
> beast dies, he'll be the one to count coup on it.  I don't want to
> overpower him any more than an undead Huckster who rolls 6d12+2 to cast
> hexes and has his Greater Manitou cowed in fear already is overpowered,
and
> I don't want to piss off the other players by leaving them out.  Should I
> just blatantly ignore the rule here and hand out the coup as seems fit, or
> is there some other trick I should know about?

In addition to what the others have suggested, remember that coup doesn't
have to be 100% good.  Most coup is a mixed blessing at best.  The coup for
defeating Modeen, for example, basically turns the winner into a
anti-templar.  Thus, you could have some of the first coup your posse
encounters to be extremely mixed blessings.  Assuming you can keep the
details a secret you can scare the huckster off without terrifying the rest
of the posse.  You might also find a way to tone his power down a bit.
Also, a harrowed should never completely have his manitou cowed.  Use
whatever chips you have to, but the manitou should still come out to play
every so often.  Also, if you were feeling evil, you could apply the
supernatural spirit trait to the manitou as well as the huckster.  Remember
all those harrowed powers come from the manitou and it's not going to hand
out power to screw itself over.

> -A really nice, super friendly young woman who everyone loves; no one's
> figured out she's Harrowed yet.  Worse, she's mildly radioactive, and has
a
> nasty habit of killing all the crops in any town she vists.
Accidentally,
> sure, but Famine doesn't care about her motives, really.

Contrary to what the other responders have said, there is a precedent for
this sort of thing.  I don't have my books in front of me so I can't give
you all the details, but I do remember a servitor of pestilince who operates
in a movie theater showing movies that contain subliminal messages.  The guy
showing the movies is aware of the negative consequences but he doesn't like
to think about it and just wants to show movies.  The woman servitor you
mention above could work on the same model.  That is, she knows that she
kills crops but she doesn't like to think about it, she just wants to visit
people and be friendly.  Stubborn denial fufills the requirement for
embracing evil as well as anger or hatred.

> 3) One of my players has said the dreaded to me.  "It doesn't seem scary;
> it just seems like rolling a lot of dice, to me."  Given, I'm new at this
> and have been overusing the Scart Table and Guts checks, but I'm still not
> happy with this.  How do you create horror, fear, and terror in an RPG?
My
> prior experience is all with fantasy and swashbuckling RPG, so this is new
> to me.

Well, first you need the right players.  You need some moderately mature
players who are willing to role-play and be scared.  I don't think the
terror aspect of HOE would ever work with super munchkin power gamers.  It
doesn't work without a little active participation from the players.  I know
nothing about your players, so it is up to you to gauge how much fear they
want in the game.  However, if one of them is complaining that it isn't
spooky enough then that might be a good sign ;)

Secondly, as you've noticed, the guts check mechanic isn't very scary.  I
use the scart table rarely.  In fact my players use it more that I do (on
several occasions I've described a scene and my players all voluntarily took
guts checks without me asking).  The purpose of the guts check mechanic is
to put some teeth into the fear element by having very specific rules and
consequences.  I use it as a rough guideline.  I find the constant
references in the scart table to vomiting to be particularly annoying, and
generally inappropriate unless the guts check was triggered by a gory scene.
When a player fails a guts check I tell them any immediate consequences such
as losing wind, but I allow them to role-play the rest out however they see
fit.  Any non-immediate effects such as phobias are written down in my notes
and discussed later.  As a corollary to this, I told all my players going
into the game that they were going to fail guts checks and they needed to
think about how their characters reacted to fear, stoically standing their
ground while displaying no emotion was not an acceptable option.
Furthermore, I only use terror numbers when I feel it's appropriate.  I
completely disregard the terror number for automatons most of the time, for
example.

As for actively creating a sense of fear, I have found several tools to be
useful.  First, normalcy.  Your players need to spend some time doing normal
things with normal people for the creepy to stuff to really seem creepy,
it's about contrast.  Black Hats are good for this.  Second, description.  A
zombie with a terror number of 11 isn't scary compared to a humanoid form
shambling out of the morgue dragging it's entrails and wielding an electric
autopsy saw.  This is not just for monsters either.  Describe the cracked
paint, the moldy carpeting, the piles of rotting plaster on the floor form
where the ceiling has caved in, the cockroaches watching you pass from the
holes in the wall.  You need to do the whole scene.  It is very easy to
become self-conscious and skimp on description, this must be avoided.
Describe everything.  Also, involve the other senses, don't just tell people
how things look, tell them how they sound, how they smell.  Get the players
involved in this too if you can, get them to describe their character's
actions.  Also, you want to give your players freedom to play their
characters how they want, but it is helpful to tell them how they feel.
Describe how they feel scared, or nervous, or nauseous and then let them go
from there.  Third, the unknown.  Keeping your players completely in the
dark is no fun, but they should never completely be sure of everything
either.  Give them hints that are useful but leave new questions.  Use red
herrings.  In movies, it's a horror movie until you get a good look at the
villain, from then on it's an action movie.  HOE is much the same way.
Fourth, make them wait.  There shouldn't be a zombie in every dark closet.
Don't scare them when they expect it.  Every time they expect something
scary to happen and it doesn't it makes them that much more scared.  Good
horror movies use this.  Fifth, inevitability.  It's great when the posse
knows they're screwed but they have to go ahead anyway.  This works best if
they aren't trapped in the conventional sense of no way out but are trapped
in the metaphorical sense that they have freedom to choose but all the other
choices are even worse.  This all ties together.  You end up with a posse in
a well set scene that knows just enough to know they're in trouble but they
also know they have to go ahead anyway.  They're just waiting for the
badness to start and every minute that passes where it doesn't makes them
that much more nervous.  To sum it up, lots of description, and for
everything else less is more.

-Scott Pedersen

P.S. There's no way to make walking dead scary, there just isn't.  Don't
try.  Years of Doom, D&D, and zombie movies have soaked all the horror out
of the undead.