#dddragoni

There are lots of tabletop RPGs where the player characters are everyday people, but that alone isn’t enough to serve the premise you’re aiming for – doing proper horror at the tabletop requires a fair bit of game-mechanical finesse beyond just making the numbers smaller. That in mind, you might have a look at any of the following:

Dread - A survival-oriented horror RPG that uses a Jenga tower for conflict resolution rather than dice or cards. The basics are pretty simple: whenever you’re confronted with a situation that has the potential to go horribly wrong, you make one or more pulls from the tower. If the tower falls, your character dies! It’s pretty much only playable in person due to the equipment involved, so you’ll have to look elsewhere if you were planning on running your Hallowe’en game online.

Ocean - This premise-specific survival game focuses more on existential horror than visceral horror. The players are cast in the roles of a group of people who awaken, amnesiac, in an apparently abandoned undersea research facility, and have to figure out who they are, how they got there, and what’s trying to kill them. Uses a collaborative, GMless framework where the consequences of your failures are narrated by the player of the character your character trusts the least!

Strain - More of a general purpose psychological horror system that can be scaled for everyday protagonists than a low-powered game per se. Probably the most conventional game in this list mechanics-wise, if you’re worried about minimising the learning curve; most of the tension comes from the rules’ unforgiving mental health death spiral. The game’s basic version is currently pay-what-you-want, so getting a general idea of what it’s like will only cost a buck.

Ten Candles - A game patterned after the found-footage horror genre that uses actual candles as a resource tracking mechanism. As the situation gets worse, you extinguish candles and literally burn up your character sheet (which consists of a stack of index cards for easy immolation). When there are no candles left, everybody dies. Unlike Dread, you can theoretically play this one online with some component substitutions, but it loses a great deal of atmosphere.

More than 2

You could probably get by with just general pop-culture osmosis knowledge, if you’re okay with some things not making a ton of sense. Most of the key plot points and relationships are explained or exhibited early, but not everything.

Oh, I see! That’s acceptable! I pretty much stopped paying attention after Iron Man 3 and Winter Soldier, although I’ve seen Age of Ultron...

But I guess if that’s the case I could always go back and watch the other movies and kind of gain a better understanding of the depth behind all other characters I’m not familiar with!

sounds like it's time to push that block button