1408 and stuff about Stephen King and God.

[pyrephox]

I went to see 1408 this afternoon, and enjoyed it. It is not the greatest horror movie ever, but let's face it...you've got essentially an hour of a guy in a hotel room, for the most part by himself. It's not an easy set up! But they did a respectable job with it.

It does remind me, however, of something I have noticed about the God of Stephen King's stories. The SK God is definitely old testament; he believes in the power of sacrifice, and he wants blood in tribute, and nothing less. It's not that he's not a benevolent figure...in a way he is. The White works for the good, and that's indisputable. But it's a bloody good, and that's what makes it horror. You cannot stop the darkness without losing your life. It's only when you're willing to go forth, and bleed, and hurt, and die, that God can intervene on behalf of the world; or that's the only time that he /will/ intervene. Other benevolent figures, though they may love and watch humanity, such as the Turtle, do not ask sacrifice, and therefore are powerless to actually step in and do something about what they see.

Power comes from blood, freely given or forcibly taken. It can perhaps be argued in the cosmology that blood freely given is by far the stronger, but it's also comparatively rare, so the Bad Things in The Night have supremacy over most situations, and it's only when someone is willing to truly, honestly, walk into the mouth of the beast and let it choke on them that Good is able to win.

It's the kind of feeling that I want to invoke in RPGs, really, but it's harder there.

Comments

[cpip.livejournal.com]

Personally, I agree and approve of that sort of God.

However, it is harder to see that in RPGs because so few people want to lose in ANY fashion. A lot of games seem to involve "and then you blow away the bad guys without even trying, and nothing is lost that can't be gotten back with a healing spell or two."

Now, there's a certain appeal to that. Certainly, I like that when I'm grinding (because I hate grinding) and I just want to wave a hand and have all the nameless NPCs fall before me... but then there's times I want my character to be flayed within an inch of his life spiritually and metaphorically and end up a bloody pulp at the end, perhaps never able to appreciate the victory -- but I can, as a player.

[soulscode.livejournal.com]

I agree with Pip in the losing part, but also in that RPG players don't have the same sense of worth, or attachment to their characters they way they have an attachment to their life. The character is a piece of paper, he can be replaced as easily as once can put pen to paper.

There's a fine line between a character sacrificing themselves because the character thinks that it's what needs to be done and doesn't expect to come back, and a player that's sacrificing a character 'cause it's what needs to be done and is already rolling the new character in his head, or expecting that the GM won't let his toon die.

All the difficulties aside, I would love to be able to run/play in a game with that type of horror setting.

[cpip.livejournal.com]

And yet, I find that a lot of players DO have that -- I mean, c'mon, remember how many folks were WAY too attached to their characters on RH? -- and a lot of folks take the idea of character death way, way too seriously.

[soulscode.livejournal.com]

I think RH had more to do with GM trust than anything else. In a normal RPG, you trust the GM to not let the characters die unless they do something monumentally stupid. On RH, the admins/GMs considered nearly everything the players did monumentally stupid and as such made it policy that characters could die final death fairly easily. I think the only way this didn't happen was characters agreeing amongst themselves not to deliver finishing blows.

[cpip.livejournal.com]

That's a rather specific level of trust, though. There are games where the GM is happy to let you die if the dice fall in such a way -- take 25 hp, and poof, you're dead. Drive through.

On RH, though, characters frequently found elaborate methods of avoiding death, or flat-out insisted they shouldn't be killed for things that logically could've resulted in said death -- and more than one player cried "unfair!" for a death that others said was logical.

I've met other gamers who believe that killing a character without, practically, the express written consent of the player of the character is a horrible thing, and should never be done.

[soulscode.livejournal.com]

Yea, there were a high percentage of those types on RH. Mind you, we didn't get too many of them in the UBW, something about telling players up front when they joined that they could be killed at any time for any reason the leaders could think up. 8)

Perhaps it's also a matter of the type of game. In a Sci-fi type of game you don't really expect God to swoop in and magicly heal a character because they've done something incredibly sacrificial for the good of humanity.

[cpip.livejournal.com]

No, but you can expect to be thrown in some sort of super-science healing tank and regrown from their toenails.

Not saying it always happens -- not by a long-shot -- but still.

[soulscode.livejournal.com]

Or having one of your preprepared clones released from the storage vats.

mmMMmm.. Paranoia. 8)