Time for another update. This week, I’m going to talk about Fear and another class, The Normal.
First, FEAR. After all, Gary Vs The Monsters is a horror game and with a horror game you have to have fear. Digging through my gaming shelves and the internet, there’s few fear mechanics that are popular. One is just scare the players. No real mechanics for the characters. Then there’s the characters run away. The other is to use some sort point system to tell how scarred the characters are. Gary Vs The Monsters is an old school game. One of the tenants (IMHO) of OSR games is the players’ freedom to choose. Do they run away or not? So I ran with that idea.
When the party runs across a monster or monsters, each player character makes a Fear Saving Throw. Survivors get a bonus to Fear Saves. For each player character who fails, the GM rolls on a little chart and the monster(s) get buffed. More dangerous or frightening monsters have a modifier to Fear Saves against them. The monsters feed on fear and the more people who are frightened by them, the stronger they get. So the more characters who fail the save, the more dangerous the monster becomes. The player characters don’t have to run but if a bunch of them fail then they really should run. It’s their choice. This would only apply to player characters. Let’s face it if there’s 20 innocents and 5 player characters then most of those innocents will probably fail their Saves. The game is dangerous enough without add that much on and plus I don’t think any GM wants to roll on a simple table 10 times.
And here’s some rants on another class. The Normal. All of the player characters are supposed to be “normal” people. The Normal is extra not extraordinary. Normals do have some neat abilities. They are the best at their Day Job. They gain a bonus when they run away from monsters. However in the world of monster hunting, they do have some good tricks to bring to the table. If something weird is going to happen then it will be to the Normal. Normals make great monster bait. If the Normal is getting attacked by a monster then the other characters get a bonus attack and damage that monster. And lastly, they’re really lucky. Once per game session, they can totally avoid getting killed.
There you go. More previews and rants. Stay tuned for more and dang. We’re getting really close to getting this done.