The hobbyist’s natural instinct is to tinker, like a rules goblin. Such is natural, and, I believe, more effective as a direct result from play. A campaign is the rules text more than the actual ruleset you bring with you in many schools of gaming, and it will take priority over the written word if it can.
This is especially true of horror. If someone asks me what they need to do horror gaming, I can just say that they need a scenario, appropriately disturbing themes that they want to engage intellectually (I believe that horror gaming shines better as a way of exploring difficult philosophical ideas through an improvisational collective process, instead of frightening the players as we do watching a horror film), a few players and if necessary a couple of dice to decide shit you don’t want. You don’t even need mental health rules or whatever, players will most likely already act paranoid and rather out of step with conventional society’s classifications of sane behavior.
So we don’t need an extensive collection of rules, or even a small collection, which means we can run horror in any game. Which isn’t to say all games are most practical to do it: horror rulesets exist because some rules may help diminish cognitive load, or offer a particular narrative arc the table wants and doesn’t feel that they can achieve through their base conversation. And, of course, some rules make the Keeper’s work harder.
The Three Little Brown Books
My latest project besides running Cthulhu Dark and such has been compiling the OD&D (Three Little Books, specifically) rules that are most conductive to horror gaming, reducing those that carry the influence from adventurous play and glory and focusing on those that lead to impersonalization, fragility, and that guarantee all the gameplay loops towards the same purposes that traditional horror roleplaying more or less carried on intact from its inception. It isn’t a retroclone, nor a hack. Likely a small supplement of ideas and that purposely excludes most rules, interprets some of the famously vague OD&D rules in specific ways, and slightly alters others. I want to extract the horror game lying there in its purest form instead of just recreating Call of Cthulhu or whatever with that chassis (I already like that game, why would I just recreate it?).
So let’s talk about combat.
Combat in early D&D is comparatively quicker than most RPGs with a dedicated combat system. Early as in both “early editions” and “early game” before HP creep sets in with damage being mostly static. It’s quick and boring, and boring is good here. It gets out of the way of what the game is actually about without requiring the Referee to make many calls regarding how things go down. Adjudicating freeform combat can be a nightmare to some, despite being perfectly doable. A horror RPG does well to include a quick-and-dirty combat system that ends quickly, at least as an option. Because the game isn’t about combat in most cases, so a couple quick rules to move on from it in a way everyone considers sane and fair is good.
I’ve given consideration about OD&D combat under the scope of the project. Many would say it is rather improper for a pure horror game and that it needs change for maximum efficiency. One intuition was to replace it with a version of Into the Odd’s combat, which I have already defined guidelines to do with compatibility in this post. Into the Odd’s combat is fast and decisive, and it carries a survival horror atmosphere by itself, so it feels like a natural fit. Another was something like Cavegirl’s wonderful one-roll fight rule, that I’ve already adapted into World of Dungeons to success. And of course this. Whatever my choice, replacing combat would be a major alteration, or even addition. It wouldn’t be a reduction because it isn’t just excluding a rule.
A part of me opts against doing it because it defeats the purpose of the project, from a thought experiment perspective. And also because it’s, deep down, unnecessary.
D&D Combat as Horror Gaming
One of the greatest tricks of the trade when approaching rules for a campaign is that, often, the rules aren’t what needs modification, but your framing of how you approach them. So we need to see the original combat rules as how they would actually connect to the scenario being played.
It takes a day to recover one Hit Point in OD&D. A character with 30 HP, which is already rather high and inside the heroic fantasy game scope that campaigns have (with OD&D being many games within a campaign distributed by the level advancement into stages) would be out of commission for nearly a month if they were severely hurt during an adventure.
An investigator in a horror game does not have a month, and D&D combat works as is when we keep that strictly in mind. They may not even have two days to recover 2 HP. A cult or monster advances their plans very fast, and a two days break, in a game where the Keeper is being strict about the timeline of the enemy’s dark agenda, may mean the investigators are already incapable of concluding many of their objectives and will find it out in the most unpleasant manner possible. Hit Points in this game are connected with time in a way that is hard to equal. Once we do the obvious thing (declare a HP cap or, even better, static HP for all investigators), we create a megastructure for a sandbox mystery campaign, one where managing time is the only option. Every combat, every trap, every choice you make in trying to take down cultists for information or because you feel like you can’t escape becomes the major choice because you are forever losing time if the die betrays you for a split second.
The proposal of changing D&D combat comes first from HP inflation. I already gave my thoughts above. Secondly, it comes from its flow: it may feel too stilted compared to others due to the misses. This is the ultimate case of your mileage may vary, because in early levels it is fast (concluded at most in a few minutes in all my experiences), and it offers the tactical consideration of retreating at any moment, the push-and-pull of whether you should run as a few attacks miss and others hit. Whiff in the early game is confusion and despair in the fog of war, only in later levels it feels like a tiring affair to me.
So for now I decided to not change OD&D combat in my thought experiment, because the HP recovery clock fits the horror campaign’s theme of crushing time, and the whiff factor of missing in combat does not last long enough to be a bother with limited HP compared to the massive advantage it brings of time for retreating and foolish players testing their luck. It’s so familiar that it gets out of the way. It doesn’t need alterations in itself, only how we conceptualize it during play.
It isn’t like the other options above don’t bring those considerations. A separate Flesh stat that works like STR does in ItO from Grit HP would perhaps do it. HP recovery works the same in Cavegirl’s method. But I’m considering whether it’s needed, based strongly in a memory:
I still remember vividly my first time running OSR. The panic players had in combat against a pack of eels. Every time they missed, they would curse and fear, because they were level one and the ladder to escape the pit they were in wouldn’t come down fast enough that turn. There was a palpable dread of being struck by an attack after missing, waiting for the ticking clock of the ladder coming down, and the fear that more eels would come. That was enough.
And the lack of initiative in the Little Brown Books helps.
Roll to Doubt 