D&D As Survival Horror

 I don't know that I'll necessarily be able to run a true survival horror RPG. My friends, I think, are drawn more to the power fantasy, the high-stakes set-pieces, and the character drama.

Matt Colville has said in the past that D&D was originally a survival horror game, and MCDM's "Crows" aims to take the DNA of their heroic fantasy game Draw Steel and rework it in all the ways that will make for a tough, brutal survival horror dungeon crawler (Draw Steel famously doesn't allow heroes or monsters to miss, while Crows, at its early stage of development, will always allow for bad luck to screw you - casting a spell can potentially open a rift to hell or some such dimension and instantly kill your character, though extremely rarely).

As I've been playing Resident Evil 4's remake (which is, admittedly, a more action-forward entry in the genre, with foes often dropping ammo - a purist could make the argument that it's less survival horror than just an action game with gruesome elements) I've been thinking about that idea: D&D as survival horror.

It's not the first time I've given it some thought, but here are some ideas:

Recovery:

The adventuring day in D&D is a really important resource, and I think if there's one real failing of the 2024 DMG it's guidance on how much adventuring a party ought to get up to in a day. To be fair, I and many other DMs ignored the advice in the 2014 DMG. Complaints that 5E heroes are too powerful might not have been so strong if we were sending our players into the utter slogs that the DMG suggests on a daily basis.

Long Rests almost totally reset everything, even more in 5.5, where even hit dice expended fully recharge rather than only getting half your maximum. That means that a D&D character can more or less go hard every single day, but it also raises the following challenge: if you have a dark and scary dungeon, the optimal strategy for players is to just go in, fight something or do some other challenge, clear a room, and then leave the dungeon and rest outside.

A party might decide to rest inside the dungeon, relying on a cleared room and maybe using spells like Leomund's Tiny Hut (if the room's big enough) or Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion (if they're high-level) to prevent any interruption of their rest.

And even if they don't have that kind of fortification, DMs are forced to do some extra work to create monster patrols to assault the party while they're resting.

And even then, here's a question for you: if the long rest is interrupted with a 3-round monster fight (basically 18 seconds in-game) and the party prevails, they can continue their rest. Unless it was a truly grueling fight, do you, as the DM, feel like you've really made the dungeon feel scarier? Is it really all that much tougher? And are you going to send the same patrols of monsters against them again to show how truly nasty and scary this place is?

Let's look to Survival Horror. One of the big things in the genre (or at least in the three games in the genre I've played) is that there's no single moment that just resets your HP to full (actually, there might be, but they're relatively invisible). Recovery, of ammo and of HP, or any other resource, is something you need to work for, and every error you make - a missed shot or taking damage when you can avoid it (and the deal the games make with you is that you can avoid taking damage) means some little bit of your overall cache of resources is diminished when it might not otherwise have been.

So, what we need to do is make recovery a resource that is not so easily regained.

In D&D, an eight hour rest is what you need for a long rest. Officially, you also need to eat a pound of food per day (and drink some amount of water - a gallon, maybe?)

Let's totally rewrite that rule:

Instead, let's say that a "long rest" is a "full ration." We take time out of the equation (this might complicate things later, but we'll address it) and actually allow an adventure like this to take place over one long and terrible night. The key, though, is that "long rests" are now a consumable item, rather than an activity you can take.

Next, we ban spells like Goodberry or Create Food and Water - spells that conjure food would, of course, eliminate the scarcity that we need. Indeed, if we didn't ban these, the optimal thing would be to cast Goodberry, eat one of those goodberries immediately, and then have 9 left over with all your spell slots.

Short Rests... might be able to work as they normally do, but what I might do is institute a cap on how many short rests you can take. In Baldur's Gate 3 (not a survival horror game) you can only take two short rests before you need to take a long rest (long rests do take up resources, but in my experience I was never unable to take another ten long rests or more after any that I did take, the resources being so plentiful). Naturally, classes like Warlocks, Monks, and most Fighters get nearly everything back on a short rest. I think instituting either a one or two short rest per "full ration" might balance this right.

Difficulty:

One of the other hallmarks of Survival Horror is a certain pressure to execute things perfectly: with no regenerating health and often limited ammo for your weapons, you can't just go whole-hog on enemies with overkill and just shrug it off. You're always trying to take enemies down in the most efficient way.

But, again, the games give you the tools to do this.

Now, D&D has an element of luck, always: it's not a "skill" based game in the way that video games test your manual dexterity. The most wonderfully optimized character might get screwed by the dice.

I think the key is this:

Combat should be low-difficulty. But it should be arduous.

Now, this plays into our recoveries: If we think of the game as being divided into chapters or sub-dungeons (I do think this style of game lends itself to something of a mega-dungeon crawl) we might only let the party find sufficient rations for everyone to get a long rest (though there's certainly some potential challenge to giving them, say, only one ration at a time and forcing the party to strategize on who gets it) after completing a major chapter - to use Silent Hill 2 (remake) as an example, maybe they don't find any rations from the moment they enter Woodside Apartments until they get to the apartment where they hide in the closet right before going to Blue Creek Apartments, and then from there only getting full rations for the whole party after the first fight against Pyramid Head.

But, here's the thing:

Every individual fight they get into should be easy. Like, maybe lower-difficulty than the 5.5 DMG's "Low difficulty encounter balance" math. Like, maybe for a party of four 1st level characters, like a single Zombie.

See, there's a good chance that that single zombie isn't going to even hit anyone in the party before they kill it. A Zombie only has 15 HP (huh, they nerfed it from 2014. Never realized,) and a very low AC. But with Undead Fortitude and just the fact that a 1st level character is probably doing at the absolute most 15 damage with a hit (that's max damage on a Greatsword with +3 to Strength) there's a good chance that that Zombie might survive long enough to take a swipe or two at the party. Maybe one of those hits connects, and at that point, 1d8+1 (oh, maybe not a total nerf, this used to be 1d6) is pretty nasty for just about any 1st level character.

Now sure, there's a good chance they kill the thing before it hurts anyone. That's ideal - that's their goal. And they might favor long-range attacks to make it even less likely for them to get hit. All good.

But you throw like fifteen such encounters at them, maybe mixing it up occasionally - there's two zombies now, or the zombie's in a narrow, twisty corridor, so the only real way to get an angle on them to hit them is by getting up close - and that starts to really add up.

See, I think Survival Horror as a genre lives not in the frantic, desperate moments with boss monsters that can kill you in two hits (though that has its place). I think the genre really lives more in the moment where you're like "damn, I screwed up that fight, and now I'm totally out of ammo, my health is super low, and I'm just desperately trying to find some healing item before I encounter more monsters."

There was a specific moment in Silent Hill 2, in the Otherworld Hospital segment, where I spent a good 10-15 minutes in a state where I had zero ammo whatsoever and was probably one or two hits away from death, frantically trying to open every drawer and cupboard for that delicious health drink.

This is the feeling you want to cultivate in D&D as survival horror - the Cleric is out of spell slots, the Barbarian used their last rage, the Sorcerer has one spell slot they're saving for a Thunderwave but only if they can get three monsters in the area, otherwise it'll feel like a waste, and the Monk is sitting there with 3 HP left hoping desperately that they won't encounter any of those ghouls who have two attacks and might bypass Deflect Attack if they hit twice.

Attack Resources:

So, what about ammo?

The survival horror games I've played have all been in basically modern settings (give or take a decade or three) where the main kind of weapon people use is a gun. Diminishing ammo is a challenge for all involved, and when you look at the single shell in your shotgun and find yourself realizing that using that will only mean having to swap weapons when the monster doesn't go down in one blast, it adds tension.

In D&D, only archers (well, ranged weapon users) really ever worry about ammo. Spellcasters are pretty happy to use cantrips (though I've actually tended to use True Strike with a Light Crossbow on my Wizard since converting to 2024 rules - 1d8+1d6+5 is actually a bit better than 2d10 from a Fire Bolt) and so ranged combat is not really limited.

This is an area I'm a little hesitant to screw around with that much: I think getting rid of damage cantrips, or putting some kind of ammo-like limitation on them, would be getting a little too far into the guts of the game's balance. Cantrips are not as good as a martial character using a weapon, and that's by design (Eldritch Blast, when tricked out with things like Agonizing Blast, comes quite close - but technically it's not going to keep up when magic weapons get involved, not getting the damage bonuses of a +X weapon).

But that's actually kind of great: martial characters are supposed to be better at two things than casters: they're supposed to have better single-target damage (which they don't, really, if you start considering things like Conjure Minor Elementals) and they're supposed to be more sustainable, doing their full damage potential or near it without expending resources.

The thing is, I think that most campaigns (or at least most that I've been in) focus so much on big set-piece combat encounters that this sustainability never really has a chance to shine (and the fact that resting is relatively easy, as we discussed above, means that it's rare that players are really forced into situations that demand sustainability).

Again, in Silent Hill 2, one of the elements of the game I loved was the melee weapon (first a wooden plank and then a steel pipe). Giving the player a melee weapon that would never run out of ammo or require repairs - something that James always has available to him - gives the game's designers the license to take everything else from him: the game never has to worry too much about letting you run out of all of your bullets because you always have that back-up option (an option you're likely to actually prioritize because of the potential for conservation).

I think leaving those cantrips, leaving those martial characters with their powerful weapon attacks, gives you, as the DM, license to hold off on granting the players any recovery items. You can let the players run out of spell slots.

Timing:

Ok, here's our next thing:

In D&D, a lot of spells and other effects (like Rage) last either one minute, ten minutes, an hour, eight hours, or twenty-four hours.

I don't know that this works for us.

One minute is actually fine: the real meaning of a one-minute-duration spell is that it lasts until combat ends. Combat takes place in 6-second rounds, and so a one-minute spell will last 10 rounds in a game where combat rarely goes beyond four or five rounds (for really epic fights).

But the others are trickier: because I've never encountered a DM who actually tracks things minute-by-minute in a dungeon. Functionally, what's the difference between a 10 minute spell and a 1 hour spell? The game doesn't tell you how long it takes to search a room, or how long it takes for you to walk down a corridor.

When in combat, walking speed is typically 30 feet, which is roughly three miles an hour. Can you walk three miles worth of dungeon corridors in the time that a Charm Person spell lasts? Well, probably not, because the dungeon is full of obstacles, traps, and monsters.

I think, then, you need to start thinking about what these durations are meant to mean, much as 1 minute means "one combat encounter."

If we think about it this way, we can propose the following:

10 minutes maybe means "it'll last as long as we're in this room, doing stuff."

Now, this can be a problem, because what is a room? Are we talking about one solitary alcove with nothing but a faded fresco that is like a 10x10 foot square? That seems like it shouldn't take that whole duration. But at the same time, if it's some massive cavern with a giant insect hive in it with various monster-filled mine tunnels catacombing through the walls, that feels like it's maybe too much.

I'll be honest, I don't have a great solution here, but I think that a place to start with is:

1 minute translates to one combat encounter.

10 minutes translates to exploring one fairly large room.

1 hour means exploring a level of the dungeon.

8 hours means exploring an entire sub-dungeon (what in a normal campaign would probably be a whole dungeon).

24 hours means... probably not the whole campaign, but maybe an entire "act" of the campaign.

The key, I think, to communicate to the players, is that we're not saying that "this is the amount of time it takes to do these things." What we're doing is replacing the idea of a time-based duration with more of a "progress-based" duration. A Barbarian's Rage (in 5.5) should be able to help with some kind of jumping puzzle or some challenge that requires lifting heavy things or even making use of Primal Knowledge to do other tricky checks - but it's meant to be there to last that entire challenge, and once it's completed, the rage ends, the resource is expended.

Mage Armor is supposed to basically set a Wizard or Sorcerer up as if they're wearing +1 Studded Leather armor for the day - they invest that spell slot into having halfway decent AC. You give them a good chunk of the dungeon to enjoy it, then.

This, I think, also solves the issue with "long rests" being replaced with recovery items: if it were purely time-based, casting Detect Magic right before noshing on a recovery item would be a pretty strong move, but if a 10-minute effect is only for the room you're in, it might not be so overpowered.

Notably, some spells and effects might need to be revisited: Detect Thoughts can be used in a social encounter (and if we think of 1-minute spells as being "per encounter," that can extend to social ones) but it can also be used to detect hidden enemies, which is more of a "room searching" function, so this might require us to classify it a little differently.

Level:

I think running a game like this is definitely going to work better at low levels. For the most part, I find D&D starts to really hum in its sweet spot in tier 2, but this might be a mode of play that could make tier 1 really interesting: but only if you have full buy-in from your players and are really up-front about wanting to run a survival horror variant of the game.

The genre need not dictate difficulty: Survival Horror games are not inherently harder than other genres, and I think it's a key attitude you need to have when running something like this that the players doing well and even getting lucky is actually fine. The tension in horror is there when the characters are under threat of death: paradoxically, dying in a horror game is a release of that tension. The horror, the real juice of this thing, is if you can get them right up to the edge, like where I was with James Sunderland in that hospital, any minor thing like a mannequin hiding a little too well or a lying figure belching out bile faster than I could dodge could spell the end. And then, maybe even better, drinking that health drink and realizing that, well, I'm still out of bullets.