This post will probably wind up having a Silent Hill tag, but it's not really about the game (I just like to keep my posts ostensibly organized via these tags, though actually searching by tag is kind of a mess).
Playing through the evidently-quite-faithful remake of the beloved classic of the genre, I got thinking about Survival Horror as a genre, and how it might translate as a TTRPG.
Now, of course, there's already plenty of horror RPGs out there. Call of Cthulhu is, I'm given to understand, more popular than D&D in some countries, and there are other systems like Candela Obscura (itself built on the bones of Blades in the Dark, as I understand it, which is less horror than dark gaslamp fantasy).
And I'm certain that someone has built some RPG system directly inspired by the Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises.
But still, it got me thinking.
Like most TTRPG players, I got my start and still primarily play D&D - while I got in only a year or so into it, I'm a 5th Edition baby (that does make me something of a veteran given that the edition is now 10 years old, but I still think of myself as something of a newcomer because in a better timeline, I'd have probably started playing in, like, early 3rd or 3.5 edition, which came out when I was in high school).
I've heard early D&D described (I think by Matt Colville) as survival horror, where players managed dwindling resources in deadly dungeons. In fact, MCDM, his company, which recently launched its heroic fantasy RPG Draw Steel (which you may have noticed is something I've posted a lot about lately,) is in the early days of testing another RPG called Crows, which aims to be the grittier, count-your-torches-and-rations-style dungeon-crawler cousin to Draw Steel's "I'm here to save the world, not to amass gold."
Having played both Alan Wake II and Silent Hill 2 (again, I'm new to the genre,) one thing that really struck me as a contrast to other games I've played (even the first Alan Wake) is how there's never any hard reset in which you regain all your HP or other resources. There is no resting to recuperate in either game: every bit of healing you receive comes from an item that you find, which is consumed and gone.
Now, I know that Alan Wake II, at least on the easy and standard difficulty modes, has a bit of a difficulty-smoothing element, where if you're running really low on health or ammo, enemies will stat dropping some. However, Alan Wake II is also less linear - if you want to explore all the secrets of Bright Falls, you're going to be going back into previously-explored areas, and while you can find ammo and healing items in the optional areas, there's a certain lack of certainty about where you'll go. Silent Hill 2, on the other hand, is, I think, more or less a totally linear experience, and as far as I can tell, the remake has a set, finite number of items to find (though I also think it has a set, finite number of monsters to fight).
I know that in horror RPGs, recuperating from adventures is usually a limited thing - in Candela Obscura, your scars don't go away, and eventually you're forced to either retire a character or they'll likely die. In Call of Cthulhu (a game whose rules I think I remember less - I got a starter set a few years ago and ran the included solo adventure, but that was it) you can also accumulate things like Insanity that will eventually mean your character has to sit out future adventures.
The thing is, in Survival Horror video games, at least ones of these kinds, the design does allow you to keep going indefinitely as long as you play carefully. Once again, the key is that you always need some item that you have to find somewhere to recover.
Now, before we get into the weeds of the mechanics that I've got brewing in my head, let's acknowledge some hurdles:
TTRPGs are typically played in a group, with players cooperating. Survival Horror thrives on isolation. James Sunderland's interactions with the people in the town are all strange and ephemeral - the only character we really spend extended periods of time with is Maria, whose presence is more of a mystery and a source of unease than of being a reliable ally. In Alan Wake II, Alan's interactions with people like Mr. Door or Tom Zane are at best dizzying, and meeting Ahti or Tim Breaker is always just a brief respite. Saga, on the other hand, has periods of relative safety when she gets to talk with friendly NPCs, but when she goes off on her own to look into things, she's often rapidly cast in isolation and darkness, like when she chats with the Koskela Brothers but only like 20 yards away from them, she's deep in the dark woods heading toward their spooky-as-hell amusement park filled with Taken.
While I suppose you could design a game for two players - a GM and a single player - I suspect that just the nature of a TTRPG starts to feel weird with just two people (though I know some have done that). If we're going to try to make a system that allows for a group of players, we'll need to find a way for players to distinguish themselves, and to make the horror still land despite there being a group of characters rather than one isolated character.
Again, this is a very, very rough draft, and I honestly don't think I've got the real hook to allow for things to feel scary for a group as much as they do for an individual. On a deep, deep instinctive human level, we feel safer when we're around other people. Horror sometimes uses this instinct ironically - to pull off a reversal in which the people the protagonists find themselves with are the real threats - but more often, it's the separation of the characters that lead to the horror. Just like in an RPG, a group of people can shore up one the weaknesses of the others, making the entire group more effective.
So yeah, I haven't solved that issue, but for a "back of the napkin" kind of idea, I'm ok with that. I don't know if this will ever develop beyond these ideas.
Enough preamble, though!
The structure of the game would be using maps divided into clearly distinct rooms. A path through a "dungeon" (which, given the genre, would likely be some kind of iconic type of building, like a school, a police department headquarters, a hotel, a hospital, etc.,) is limited in large part by navigational puzzles, with things like doors that can only be unlocked from one side, keys (and key-like items) that need to be retrieved, and the like, as well as some more traditional puzzles to unlock further progress.
Entering a room (for the first time in most cases) will prompt some kind of die roll to search it. A player can invest in building their character to make them better at finding items, and maybe as a separate skill, finding hiding monsters.
If there is a monster or monsters in the room, combat will break out. I think combat is probably best handled as theater-of-the-mind, abstracting things like moving to put some object between you and the monster as some part of your die roll.
Here's how I see combat working (borrowing a little, actually, from the Elden Ring 1-shot they did on Critical Role, though I don't know if that system was based on some other existing system). I think the player and the monster alternate turns (spotting a monster maybe lets you act first, while failing to lets them act first).
Now, I think this might be an asymmetrical system - the GM might not even roll any dice, or if they do, it might be simply to randomize the kinds of attacks that the monster uses.
The player, based on one of the stats they determine at character creation, has a certain number of actions they can take on their turn. These actions can be used to, say, fire a weapon, reload a weapon, or dodge an attack. In other words, you can spend your whole turn attacking a monster, and if you're lucky, you might kill it before it can hit you. But if you don't kill it, and you didn't use up any of your actions dodging, you'll take some damage.
Now, if we randomize our monster behavior, perhaps a monster like a Mannequin (to come up with a totally random term for a monster with no precedence) will roll to determine whether they do a leaping charge, which is just one attack on their turn but does more damage, or a two-hit combo that does less damage each. Let's say that the player has the stats to take three actions on their turn. If they attack twice and dodge once on their turn, they'll be fine if the monster does its leaping charge, but if the monster does its two-attack combo, they'll take one of those hits.
The "skill" here the player could employ would likely be based on the repeated use of monsters - Survival Horror tends to have fairly small enemy variety, because it's useful for players to learn the patterns of the monsters in these games to better survive their encounters. The GM would roll a die to determine which attack pattern the monster uses each turn. I'd be hesitant to say that there needs to be some telegraphed cue for which attack pattern was coming, because a player could just figure them all out and never take damage, but I think the table for the attacks would be skewed such that some attacks are far more common than others.
Instinctively, I like the idea of this system just using a d6 as its die, though I recognize the value of having, for example, larger dice to allow for better tuning. But if we imagine that our basic Mannequin-like enemy just has those two attack patterns, perhaps we make its Charging Leap what happens on a 1-4, and the two-hit combo on a 5 or 6. After a few encounters with these things, the player might start to understand that they should probably always dodge at least once, but that, to play it safe, they really should dodge twice.
Now, I've noticed a problem right there: if a player dodges twice every time they fight one of these things, they'll never take damage.
Perhaps we make dodging not 100% reliable - perhaps we have a roll for how successful your dodges are. You might have a stat that determines how likely your dodges are to fully negate incoming damage.
Likewise, attacking requires a roll, and I think the results are probably different for each type of weapon.
Again, if we assume you're just rolling a d6, maybe there's a range for missing, a range for hitting, and a range for getting a critical hit (or a deadly hit, or something). Different weapons might have different damage values for each type of hit - maybe a handgun does just 1 damage on a hit and 2 damage on a deadly hit, while a hunting rifle does, say, 2 damage on a hit and 6 on a deadly hit. But you have to reload the rifle after 4 shots and the handgun after like, 10.
And perhaps, at base, if you roll a 1-3 on a handgun, you miss, get a hit on a 4 or 5, and a deadly hit on a 6. But if your character has the stats for higher accuracy, maybe those ranged get pushed down by 1, so that you're only missing on 1-2, getting a normal hit on a 3-4, and getting a deadly hit on a 5 or 6.
Likewise, your dodges might use a similar system. Maybe when you dodge, you avoid the next hit if you roll a 4-6, but you still take the hit if you roll a 1-3. If your character has invested in evasion, perhaps you now successfully dodge on a 3-6.
A couple thoughts on stats: while characters in Survival Horror games do, sort of, get more powerful because of the new weapons they get, and they can feel a bit more secure if they're good at avoiding damage and conserving ammo, I think the character shouldn't truly get more powerful over the course of a game.
As such, I don't think there's any stat progression to have in this game. You build a character at the start, and that's it.
Between this idea and the notion of truly committing to just a d6 as the die for this system, I think these stats only bump things by a little bit. Your accuracy stat will improve your attack results by 1, but that's it. Your evasive stat will improve your dodge chance by 1, but that's it.
Indeed, I think "stat" might not be the right term for these, as I think overall you're probably just going to build a character by picking some small number of these rolls that you're better at, and you're rolling everything else at baseline.
As a rough list of what skills you might have, we could have Evasive, Accurate, Perceptive (for finding things - though maybe we make this two separate ones, one for monsters and one for items,) maybe Resilient increases your max HP (not sure by how much - we might need to figure out how much damage things do and how much healing items heal for before we can figure out what that should be.) Depending on how many skills we can think of (yeah, separating Perceptive into two things, maybe Perceptive and Resourceful? would be good) I think you build your character by choosing maybe two of these. Oh, and of course, something like Vigorous, which would give you an extra action on your turn.
Now, regarding resources and monsters, I think that these should be pre-determined, along with the layout of the "dungeons" and puzzles. But I think, if I were to ever actually try to playtest and really get into the math of it all, there would be some guidance on how many monsters and how many resources to put in there (probably giving them in some regular ratio, so a long dungeon would have more monsters but also more resources).
Again, there are some challenges: how do we handle fights against multiple monsters, when in theory they might take more attacks than the player has actions to dodge? I think it's important that each fight should theoretically allow the player to get through it without taking damage.
Likewise, I think we could add some nuance and complexity: for example, in these games, you can often buy yourself some time by shooting a foe in the leg to slow them down. (In fact, if I go back to play Silent Hill 2 again, I'm likely to try that more often, as I think it might have made it easier to conserve ammo by using a single shot to drop a monster to its knee and then I could wail on them with the wooden plank/steel pipe.) Maybe the player has different options for where to aim - extremity, center mass, or head shot - with different result ranges for each.
Yes, I wouldn't want to get too complex with all of this, but if we keep everything else really stripped down, we might have room for more complexity with how we use weapons.
Ideally, we'd be able to fit it all on a single character sheet, perhaps only with a second sheet to track key and puzzle items.
I do also think that another challenge would be useful guidance on building these navigational puzzles, not to mention the more traditional puzzles.
But anyway, this is all just scribbled notes. Not sure if this could go anywhere, but hey, it's fun to consider.
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