Thriller in RPGs

#1

When you hear the term “thriller” in an RPG what do you think of or what have you seen that’s worked for that game?

#2

Honestly for me, there needs to be that rising tension that something bad is going to happen mechanically.

To talk stuff in Codex, that’s why in Slasher I wanted to make sure that all that was visible, and there wasn’t much you could do in order to stop the killer from attacking. All you could do is watch the tokens get higher until something bad was certainly going to happen.

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#3

I agree with Jonathan. I think Dread does this very well, since at any moment the tower could fall, and Final Girl has some great suspense too since you don’t know what cards will be played and how they’ll affect the characters’ fate.

Trophy does some great terror as well with the rising Ruin stat, but I don’t know if it strictly counts as a thriller. I’m not sure where the line between thriller and horror falls on in RPGs

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#4

I also agree about the rising tension. Apart from the games already mentioned it is the sort of thing I’ve experience in long running games where there is a high degree of investment and the stakes in a given situation are high.

So in Apocalypse World it doesn’t happen because the status quo is shifting so rapidly you don’t get the same sense of build up and investment. But in the 4 year long Dark Heresy campaign that @rabalias ran many years ago which was a bit like a Lovecraftian Horror in Space game - the stakes were high and the tension was baked in.

I really love things like Dread which have a way of getting that sense of stakes, drama and tension out in a shorter timeframe. I’ll have to check out Slasher as well!

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#5

Hmm, now I’m interested to see if you could do an Incursion/reskin of Trophy where you’re penetrating deeper and deeper into a conspiracy, while risking becoming compromised by it :sweat_smile:

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#6

I hadn’t even thought about how Nuns With Guns[1] (in spaaaaace) was a thriller, but I guess it was.

What was thriller-ish about it was:

  • There was always a shadowy something going on for the players to investigate
  • That something had its own momentum and would roll forward, leading to deaths or other disasters if the group didn’t get on top of it
  • The something often stood ready to target the players if they weren’t careful about how they proceeded
  • There was murk. Like, the nature of the enemy was often murky, with scary options ranging from demons to aliens to political actors or a combination of those
  • There was a sense of epic scale: some of the plotlines were fire-and-forget, but some of them were linked together by even murkier large-scale stuff going on in the background, some of it city-wide, some planet-wide or even galaxy-wide

So I guess my key takeaways are - murkiness and pace. You’re not sure what’s going on, it’s hard to find out, but if you don’t act then bad shit will happen and/or you get attacked yourselves.

[1] NWG(is) was the name of our Dark Heresy campaign, alternating between a group of low-powered investigators and a party of rather over-powered Adepta Sororitas.

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#7

When I think of thrillers, I think of time. You have a scarcity of time in which to act. Suspense and time pressure (so I guess pacing) go hand in hand for me.

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#8

I feel like Night’s Black Agents - designed expressly to be a supernatural spy thriller game, by a designer who really knows how thrillers work - is the best experience I’ve had with thrills in a tabletop setting. It’s what I think of when I hear about an RPG thriller and basically my standard for the genre.

The PCs are pretty boss by human standards - competent, capable, trained, etc. - but they’re out of their depth in the grand scheme of things, going up against the worst the supernatural has to offer.

I think what works is the core loop that Ken identified: You get information that leads you into danger. The reward for overcoming that danger is more information, which leads you into danger…

There’s a real motivation for players to put together the clues their characters gather, to make sense of what they know, to test their understanding by action, etc.

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#9

These are all great responses. I’ve been thinking about what makes an interesting thriller and to me some of that has to do with how much accurate and important information is revealed in a story. In Unknown Armies, I don’t feel like it’s a thriller because there is so much weirdness going on and maybe as others have suggested, the build up of tension over time is a good way to add to the feeling. In games, like PbtA, playing to find out seems to be both a pro and a con for information reveals, but may end up being a stretch for logical consistency. What are your thoughts on this?

#10

Three things…

1-You don’t find out all the answers, some soon, some later, but never all.

2-Five senses. Two of the murder scenes have the scent of lavender, one has the sounds of trains going past. These things may be involved in the plot or not, but they help the sense of immersion rather than everything being visual.

3-Threat of violence rather just immediate violence. You may hear about the villains temper, or even the heroes temper before you see them struggle with it, then finally give in or injure themselves to avoid it. Also fights do not have to be to the death, once injured the Werewolves may run for it.

#11

Yay! Note that the best art part is that there are standees that you can cutout and use for your characters in the line.