How do you keep the horror spooky when your players are a bunch of goofballs?

Question

I've been out of the Call of Cthulhu game for a while, because when I run games, my players are just constantly cracking jokes and derailing the game with references and wisecracks. We have fun, of course, but I take the time to Keep because I want to tickle the goosebumps.

I would like some good subjective answers to: How do I actually scare these clowns?

Adjacent questions:

• How to execute horror when there is safety in numbers
• How to make a dense, immersive horror atmosphere?
• Preventing saturation in a horror campaign

My question, by contrast, is about specifically reining in jokers when it's time for spooks.

Answer 1

Use table rules and isolation

I’ve played a lot Call of Cthulhu, both as player and Keeper. The first thing I'd like to share is that while CoC is of course a "horror" RPG, you need to be careful what you wish for here. Actually scaring your players is quite unsettling, and not something to be done lightly. If you are in a circle of friends coming together for lighthearted fun, you should absolutely check with them first if that is what they are open to.

If they are, establish table rules, that there should be no joke cracking, or at least little of it. Even if they agree, and aim to keep it more somber, these are goofball friends, so it is easy to slip. One if our GMs had made up signs that said "No Jokes", “No movie talks" etc. to hold up, to remind everyone quickly to cut if out if they slipped. This worked efficiently to curb such table talk.

Secondly, CoC does already have an actual game mechanic to express the psychic strain of eldritch things that should not be, in the insanity mechanic. Typically, one of the things that players are afraid of is permanent damage to their characters, and they will try to avoid SAN checks wherever they can. Make liberal use of these, to make them feel the tension of inescapable decline, and drive home the message that even if they might achieve some seeming victory, it's all an illusion for misguided fools in an uncaring universe that makes no sense and where humanity is but a meaningless footnote, no more than insects to be soon gone.

Few things foster fear as much as isolation and not knowing whom you can trust. Even among the players. One such experience already helps to make them wonder ever after. Making player characters that have some dark secret from the get go that the others do not know about works well for this.¹

Take scenes only one of the players experiences and play them out one-on-one off the table, so the others do not know what is really going on or happening.² Agree with players to not share this out of the game. This means you can sow distrust also during the game. Psychosis, possession, replacement or brain manipulation by the Mi-Go, there are many ways you can ensure that their friend at the table in game may not be at all what they think he or she is, and may really be against them. So nobody knows whom to really trust. Passing secret notes they may not share also helps.

And of course, the players you take offsite for a 1:1 are isolated too in that experience, and have nobody to joke with. I had one player who told me he had literal nightmares after playing a such a scene in isolation. At one campaign we played in an actual old farm house, the drinks were stored in a dark shed outside. You had to go there with a torchlight in the middle of the night, for some real world isolation. With your mind full of things that shouldn't exist, you tried to get back into the warm light where the others were asap.

Overlapping with the general answers for creating a scary atmosphere, never spill secrets as a Keeper, no matter how much you’d like to share out of game. In one campaign we played, to this day I do not know if the entire world was really subverted by frog beings from another dimension that drugged humanity to keep it in an illusion of not seeing the truth of being subverted and harvested, or if we were just getting batshit crazy and hallucinated things as part of our insanity. That DM was sublime.

Lastly, keep in mind that cracking jokes is also a defense mechanism when faced with overwhelming odds or fears. If you do horror right, some level of this is needed as a safety valve for your players. Let it be — you don't want actual psychological trauma from them playing a game.

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¹ In one game, my brother and me got to play brothers in game, my character was mutilated in war, and his beloved brother took care of him. But without me or my character knowing the backstory was that my brother's character actually had engineered that mutilation to get me out of the way of something he wanted. When that became clear during play to me it was a really uneasy experience, as it was for ny brother the whole time, who of course knew this all along.

² This creates holes in the flow of the game for the others, so don't overdo it. If you only do it sometimes, when there is something to be hidden, while you play other such scenes at the table, it can work even better to instill the rest of the players with doubt what it is that they were not allowed to witness.

Answer 2

You talk with your players and get on the same page

I’ll preface this answer by stating that while I ran several scenarios in Call of Cthulhu, I am far from an expert in the system. I have, however, ran one full-length and several mini horror campaigns in D&D and I have experienced the thing you describe.

Horror atmosphere in a campaign is quite difficult to create and requires that everyone at the table contributes to setting suitable mood and maintaining immersion. By cracking jokes, making out of character references, etc. your players are actively sabotaging your efforts. To put it short, for the horror to work, they must want to be scared and actively lean into it. Call of Cthulhu is the best system for running horror from those I have experience with, but all the above still applies, you can be the best Keeper in the world but your players won’t get scared unless they want to be.

Are they even interested in a horror campaign? Their behaviour suggests they might want something more lighthearted. If they are indeed interested, they might not realise how much their behaviour is a hindrance, you need to tell them:

“Look guys, we agreed that we want this campaign to be a spooky, scary one. It’s not going to work if you keep constantly making jokes and unrelated comments, it pulls the atmosphere at the table from horror to comedy, could you please rein it in a bit?”

This doesn’t mean they can’t joke around at all, after all you can’t keep the tension high constantly, but there are times that are suitable and those that are not.

I had a similar experience to the one you describe when I first started running Call of Cthulhu scenarios for a party with which I had ran 5E before for a long time and the whole party was used to a lot of comedy involved. The script that I wrote here is the gist of what I told them during the first session and it worked well.

Note: My experience is almost exclusively with online-based games, if you’re playing in person, you have more options available, Nobody the Hobgoblin’s answer covers them really well.

Answer 3

Frame Challenge: A certain amount of comedy can help.

First, while I'm offering a frame challenge, I want to make clear that your goal is a perfectly valid one. Other existing answers make good proposals for actually addressing your stated goal.

But as an alternative perspective, I would like to suggest that a certain amount of comedy even in a horror setting can help the game.

Personally, I'm a major fan of horror/comedy crossovers. They definitely are not for everyone though.

But even in "serious horror" a certain amount of levity can help break things up. Something that is unrelentingly bleak can make it hard to keep caring. Well timed humor and references to lighter things occasionally can heighten the horror.

And in the real world, soldiers often make a lot of jokes and a lot of off-color jokes even in times that should be fairly serious. By dumb luck and the grace of God, I was never in a direct firefight. Talking to others, I don't think there were many jokes while bullets were flying and there weren't any while mortars and mines were exploding around me. But there was no shortage of them at other times including a lot that seem like they should have been serious. This includes patrols and reconnaissance where an imminent fire fight or IED was a real possibility at any moment and debriefings after missions with serious injuries.

In the real world, people use humor to help deal with real horrors. In fiction, humor can provide a contract to horror.

Now, it is possible to take that too far. Unless you want to go into explicit horror-comedy with heavy emphasis on the comedy, the characters should probably not be making jokes while directly confronting an eldritch abomination whose mere presence is assault on their sanity. If they tried, as a GM I would ask them to remember the context of the game.

But I find it perfectly realistic for the characters to make jokes on the way to or from the lair, and as long as they actually focus once things get serious, allowing a certain amount of it will likely make the scary parts more terrifying.

Answer 4

My suggestion would be very simple: remember that there is a difference between the players and the characters.

The questions of whether the players are horrified, or whether the characters are horrified, are separate. If playing a heroic adventure, you do not need your players to be the same as their characters either; it is nothing different for horror adventures. The characters need to be horrified for sure, but the players? That's an open question and all answers are equal.

A third question is whether your players are actually able and willing to role-play their characters, or whether they view it as simple, fun hack&slash.

Everything will follow from that. In principle, nothing speaks against playing a horror game in hack&slash mode, where they enjoy maybe the rules regarding horror ("insanity counters" and such) and just view that as another number. They can enjoy your colorful (or probably rather bleak ;) ) description of horrific things happening to the characters without themselves becoming horrified. If that is what all persons at the table want, then that is perfectly find, and much joking and hillarity can ensue while the characters are dumped into the deepest hells.

Or maybe your table decides that they can and want to role-play their characters. I.e., maybe you have a table of method-acters with a measure of voice-acting proficiency, then of course any laughter would only be the measure of the final stages of insanity percolating from the fate of the characters onto the table.

From my experience as a (very occasional) player of Cthulhu adventures, as soon as I start the "method-acting" style of play, goosebumps have a much higher chance of occurring than not (but still requires quite some skill on the part of the DM, describing scenes, playing with lightning, sound etc.). Focusing on game mechanics etc., instead, can feel just as fulfilling at the end of the day, but will definitely subtract from the "feeling" part.

It seems you are thinking about starting a new group as DM - the very first step would be to select your players by simply asking them what kind of player they are, in a non-judgemental way (unless you already know what they prefer).

Then, after you have pre-selected, do your Session 0, and discuss these things very clearly - describe the different ways the dimensions laid out above (player vs character; role-play vs "roll-play" etc.) could be done, and ask them what they wish, together. If they all vividly let each other and yourself know that they are in for the role-play goosebumps experience, then great! This forms a kind of social contract at the table, and if later the misbehaviour you've described happens, you can do a little meta discussion (after a session) and ask them if something changed to their initial intent.

Also, if your intended horror has themes that are even remotely "real", then there may be some that that are not appropriate because they get too close to some issues some of the players might have had in their past. Maybe it is a good idea to make all horror in the game so unreal that it is clearly not something that borders on a psychotic phase of your actual humans (this should be especially easily possible with Cthulhu-style horror).

From my own experience (not with horror, but with regular heroic fantasy) is that if you have a table of jokers, or power-gamers, or anything but role-players, then it is what it is. The above questions seem to have been answered by them: they do not want to role-play a character (or are not capable); the want to roll-play the mechanics of your universe, and want to have a nice social evening hanging out with friends. If you already are deep in an adventure and find this out, then in my experience it is much easier to wrap your head around that and run with it. Trying to force them to be something else will be more than hard, and likely lead straight into insanity for yourself.