Horror is the ugly and retarded step-child of genres in the miniature wargame hobby. Yeah, it’s there, but it doesn’t do very much and we don’t usually talk about it. This is, of course, a blog where we often say the things that were not supposed to say, and since it’s All Hallow’s Eve, let’s go ahead and talk horror.
The problem with horror on the tabletop is that a wargame asks the player to do the very things that wreck the mood. Horror depends in large part on uncertainty.
You don’t know what’s out there.
You don’t know what it can do.
You don’t know whether you’re safe.
You don’t know whether the decision you’re making is going to save you.
The monster is frightening because you don’t understand it. But put that monster on a wargaming table and it gets a stat block which turns the ancient mind blasting horror from another dimension to just another string of numbers. At this point the monster became mes less a source of fear and more of a tactical problem.
That tension just doesn’t work. Wargames reward information, but horror rewards ignorance. And that translates to thr table where a wargamer wants to know the rules of the monster and the horror protagonist desperately wishes they didn’t have to find out.
There’s a less mechanical contradiction at work too, and it’s something that the TTRPG crowd is very familiar with: agency.
Wargames are generally about giving the player meaningful control. You take in the table, formulate plans, and execute one of them, which lets you learn from your mistakes and get better at playing the game. But horror is built on evoking the opposite feeling. You’re supposed to be trapped, outmatched, lacking information, and forced to choose from terrible options. Heck, sometimes there simply isn’t a good decision, or if there is you don’t have the time or information identify it. Which leaves the game playing you rather than the other way around.
Obviously horror miniatures games exist. The new hotness is Don’t Look Back, but Space Hulk is the classic example. These games get closest to allowing horror to peek through the mechanics, and they use much the same methods to do so:
- hidden information,
- random events,
- escalating threats,
- limited resources,
- asymmetric scenarios,
- persistent characters,
- unpredictable enemy behavior, and
- objectives other than “kill everything.”
The important distinction is that these titles and other like them make the player experience uncertainty rather than merely depicting something scary. The late is particularly hard to do given that your monster is about the size of your thumb, and even the largest miniature is probably smaller than a chihuahua.
I don’t know, maybe the real problem is that we tend to treat horror as an aesthetic. We use dark terrain, explicitly no-win campaigns*. But those are just the trappings of horror. Horror is fundamentally about the player’s relationship to uncertainty, danger, and vulnerability, and you can’t paint that onto a miniature.
You have to put it into the rules. Byou have to prevent the player from becoming comfortable. Because once the player knows exactly what the monster is and what it does and how many dice to roll against it… it’s just another tactical exercise.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today. Happy Halloween. Go enjoy some candy.
*Man, oh man, isn’t that one an overused trope these days? Seems like every other indie game out there is set in a doomed world in which nothing you do matters so you’re only fighting to survive one more day. Total snoozefests at this point. Loser thinking. But that’s a subject for another blog post.