pen 'n' paper Horror RPG's: What was your favorite?

A sex life?

Call of Cthulhu. Just don't get attached to your characters.

Paranoia. It doesn't matter if you get attached to your characters.

Paranoia was cool, what I played of it. Having all the clones of your character sort of took away any urgency, but then, humor was the idea.

My favorite horror game was Chill. Loved the idea of a monster hunting secret society, before it had been done to death. Had some great campaigns before I moved on from RPGs. The modules were really well thought out. Don't know if you can get this still, since this was almost twenty years ago. You'll have to check ebay, unless it's been rereleased since.

When run properly (as in not as some sort of goth-chick wet dream where all the vampires are so cool and hip and being dead is a minor inconvenience at worst), the original World of Darkness games were great.

I'll agree with that. I had some great Vampire: The Masquarade games, and the same can be said with Mage: The Ascension. The 1st game was slowly ruined by Goth retards while the 2nd was filled with power gamers.

Oh well.

I had a great GM for the few Mage sessions we did, and another GM was running a fantastic campaign where we mixed Vampire, Werewolf, Wraith, and Mage characters into a single campaign. We even had a mummy thrown in for good measure, and everyone had these great back-stories that had so much potential. Then the GM decided he hated the atmosphere at the game store we were playing at and the whole thing fell apart. Damn shame.

And then the game becomes a crappy version of Underworld, out of all things....

Oh, I know the pain...

It's still a traditional RPG.

The story would be the focus of the game, with dice rolls there and there to enhance the game, not bugging it. Which is unlike most D&D games where you see endless rolls of dices for hours for irrelevent details, where a fight between 3 characters and 3 orcs would take 4 hours.

Nah, Vampire and the other WoD games had plenty of dice-rolling (you basically roll a number of 10-sided dice equal to the number of dots you have in an ability or skill, with anything higher than a set target number being a success and 10s re-rolled). But while Werewolf was frequently a combat-based game (based on the nature of the player characters), Mage and especially Vampire were more about social interaction. Characters in Mage couldn't simply sling spells everywhere, since the natural balance of things would see magic as an aberration and try to snap reality back to normal, usually with disastrous consequences for the character. So while you wouldn't want to just blatantly cast a lightning bolt at someone, you could make it look like that computer just shorted out and sent an arc of electricity through someone. The game made you think about your actions. With Vampire, the whole idea is that the vampires aren't supposed to let out the fact that there are vanpires. Thus the masquerade of the game's title, the idea that your whole way of life has to be hidden from mortal eyes. Plus, the vampires are divided into clans with all kinds of political and social rivalries, and a good GM could spin all of this into a game session where you never roll any dice at all.

In addition, Vampire had (and probably still has) a very active live-action roleplaying aspect, which is also light on dice and heavy on interaction.

That pretty much sums it up. Didn't really play Werewolf - too much hack & bash, but Mage was a great mix of both. Vampire had the first political aspect with the clans as so, it was what prompted the social interaction to begin with. It was pretty cool.

When I think of it, it's the social interaction of Vampire that actually attracted the real freaks. Not the political stuff, the pathos of the vampire and all that crap. All the Anne Rice wannabee and so on were attracted like moths.

Hey Iggy -
If we're talking horror RPGs, then probably the following are my favorites:

Blood! Old school percentile based game of survival horror. Weapon stats for any kind of improvised weapon you could think of, from table legs to curling irons, rules for bleeding out, insanity. Brutal.

All Flesh Must Be Eaten: the George A. Romero of zombie horror rpgs.

Chill: I'll second that.

New World of Darkness Core Game: an excellent system for ghost stories and the like.

Anyway, those are just a few. Check out www.therpgsite.com for a good online RPG forum, by the way.

Totally forgot about that one, and a good choice. Haven't played, but I have the core rules and it seems like it'd be a blast to play.

Both Call of Cthulhu and Vampire are personal favourites, of course.

However, the wonderful GURPS Horror (regardless of what you think of the basic system) is possibly the finest all-round sourcebook on the subject. Worth buying for the art alone.

Deadlands! It's a horror-western and my favorite RPG of any genre. We still stubbornly play Classic (with a healthy dose of house rules), but the new system is supposed to be much more simple.

It may be simpler, but it ain't Deadlands. The card and chip mechanic was absolutely brilliant and a perfect match for the setting.