My last memory lane posts seem to have resonated well so here’s another. #CallOfCthulhu is up there as one of the games that I’m not very keen on. This comes from a couple of games (both at conventions with well respected Keepers) where the aim has been to scare the player rather than the characters. This put me off for quite a while but after a good game with someone who was running Cthulhu as their first ever GMing attempt I’m tempted to go back to it. #GamesWorkshop#RPG#TTRPG
I’ve been reading way too many recently published #CallOfCthulhu scenarios that feature a perfunctory investigation before the Investigators board a train to creepy town that is a one way exercise in hit point and SAN attrition. Sure, some of the imagery is very creepy, but something is definitely missing, that being real problem solving and meaningful choices.
@JazzDude Enduring attritional survival horror is not why I play #CallOfCthulhu. Not saying that it can't be done or you should never do it, but it's so prevalent in today's scenarios.
@AndreasDavour The sheer volume of published adventures is one of the reasons I love #DND and #CallOfCthulhu. That said, the constant churn leads to some really high highs and some really low lows!
I was thinking some more about this, especially in relation to one of my favorite #CallOfCthulhu scenarios "Bad Moon Rising," which ends with an extended sequence of horrifying and weird experiences. I think the key difference is that before then, there's an extensive investigation with lots of RP and then the Investigators can explore HMS Selene and do lots of cool things before the Great Race of Yith get a hold of them. It's that build-up that makes the experiential sequences work IMO.
@Tim_Eagon There's a really simple reason for that. Nobody has done it before.
Obviously, that's a complete simplification, but it's not far off from the truth. "That's not how Call of Cthulhu scenarios are designed" is just the facts. On top of that, it is creating content that you know some significant percentage of the players are never going to see because they will have already got the first clue. So why make the second clue? I mean, sure, they could have completely missed that first clue, and need the second clue, but isn't the "Good Keeper's job" to make sure they don't/can't miss the first one the first time?
The small-scale stories are easier to manage because in the same expected space that someone paid for, you can have a lot more things going on simultaneously and stuff just works.
I would love to see some Lovecraftian fantasy horror using the system of Fantasy World. The game is so low prep and so extremely clear both on how it expects mechanics to be operated and how much it leans on the precepts of PbtA that it almost deliberately excises that get in the way of a good COC game. I think there's something there to be mined out, but my brain is still chewing on it.
@Tim_Eagon I think I actually have a good reason for it:
Because for three quarters of the PbtA/FitD games out there, some element of Lovecraftian horror is already worked into one of the potential world building paths, so going purely Lovecraftian would be firstly something that felt like somebody else had already done it and secondly duplicating effort.
I can pick up Blades in the Dark right now and run an extremely Lovecraftian-flavored game, and it can even be from the perspective of the cultists. I can pick up Starforged and run an extremely Lovecraftian-flavored game – in space. Scum and Villainy, maybe a little bit harder but not impossible.
It's reasonable to assert that Call of Cthulhu, as a specific subgenre representative, is dominated by a single game which represents pretty much a single manifestation of the style… But Lovecraftian horror has spread as a concept through almost everything else to the point where unless you specifically want to do 1920s-era Lovecraftian horror, you can do it with the tools in your pocket.
@Tim_Eagon I'd say that probably counts. I'd probably throw in Trophy Dark/Gold as a closely related game design which puts its fingers into a lot of the same spaces. Also the Dee Sanction.
Let me grab some links for those people who may be coming along later and want to check out what we're talking about:
That last is particularly interesting because they put out a standalone SRD book (Sanction) which essentially lets anybody build a game off of the core that they want, as quite a lot of indie RPGs these days are doing.
In a real sense, we are not spoiled for choice when it comes to Lovecraft on the tabletop. Not even a little bit. In my mind, truthfully, the question is "why does Call of Cthulhu remain so ridiculously dominant when there are better game designs out there for doing the same thing?"
But I ask the same question about D&D on a regular basis.
@Tim_Eagon True; there are a vast number of books published under the imprint…
I would be willing to say that's actually not a plus but actually a minus. People seem to want that but it also encourages a lack of imagination, formulaic results, something I think of as "lore stasis" as there's so much already on the table that there's no room for a Keeper to introduce something that won't be stepping on something else's toes eventually… More problems than it's worth.
This is one of the problems with the traditional concept of TTRPG game studios. You create one product that you hope gets popular with the intention of riding that horse until it's dead dead dead, cranking out as much dead tree in the meantime as you can. It's a plan for vertical silo development and not for horizontal spreading development, and we see what the results of that are like for everybody who is not the absolute forerunner of a given segment.
One of many reasons that I prefer the indie market.
@Rollenspielblog@Tim_Eagon Perversely – not something in my collection, but the existence thereof doesn't shock me at all.
According to DriveThruRPG, it was added to the catalog and thus probably came out about 10 years ago which puts it in a particular era of #PbtA development, one of the front runners. That would explain why it's not in my pocket.
@Tim_Eagon@Rollenspielblog My guess is that people who classically went in for Call of Cthulhu-style experiences weren't really interested in the PbtA-style experiences, and Chaosium hasn't had a significant enough scandal that got traction in public to push people away from their products (unlike Hasbro/Wizards), so there's not been market pressure to go discover other things.
Super heroics have always been a pretty market diverse silo, Blades did something very specific and very strong while introducing an excellent description of the mechanics themselves, Monster had the advantage of effectively being Buffy and putting relationships upfront as first-order mechanical objects… But Cthulhu has Call of Cthulhu which is probably best described as "adequate."
And "dominant."
It's hard to see something else slipping in there without a significant change.
@luxet@Tim_Eagon That definitely touches on one of the significant issues in mimicking the architecture of the original mythos stories: they aren't intended to nor do they involve characters who continue from one experience to another.
Some unprepared person falls into a horrific, nightmarish situation and either manages to escape from it or is consumed by it – and then we go on to the next guy.
Continuity of character is not something important to generating verisimilitude of the stories, but it's extremely important to Call of Cthulhu as it is formulated mechanically in the TTRPG.
If it took five minutes to put together a character, you drop them into a situation, and they either get killed while discovering things or make their way out and enter the NPC pool that anyone could draw on, that would be a far better representation of how characters in the Cthulhu mythos actually exist within the stories.
You would also probably get better set up situations, better kickers, as a result.
@Tim_Eagon@luxet I don't think that's really quite the assumption at all. And it's certainly not the way that the game itself is architected, which is part of the disjoint, of course.
It takes way too long to assign a bunch of fiddly points to percentile-based skills, 20 of them or so, along with derived stats. Then you go into a scenario which is explicitly erosive of the two traits that you have which can be reduced over time, but pretty much all the scenarios have a positive survival end state that it's assumed you achieve.
That's part of the problem, of course, the game mechanics are at odds with both the literature and the assumptions of the scenario, except in the worst possible places.
It's a weirdly schizophrenic setup, given the publications. That's a bit ironic in retrospect.
Eventually, my position on Call of Cthulhu ended up being "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "So don't do that." BRP and the assumptions of the architecture eventually ejected me from the plane. I'm not really sad about that.
@chakatfirepaw@Tim_Eagon@luxet That would certainly provide a wider framing experience that would play into actual ongoing gameplay.
But does it accord with the kind of stories and literature that inspire the Cthulhu mythos? I don't really think that it does, unfortunately.
Now, there are games already extant which play to that particular game style and still allow for engaging with "Cthulhuan phenomena." The 1986 West End Games Ghostbusters RPG (https://ghostbusterscities.com/media/ghostbusters-the-roleplaying-game/) is a fine example of a game which is specifically set up to do exactly that. So is the later InSpectres (https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17891/InSpectres), which also takes the conceit that it's all being filmed as a reality TV show, including individual asides to comment on the action that's currently going on. It's really a brilliant take on using flashbacks and flash asides to inform ongoing play.
I would be willing to assert that the BRP Call of Cthulhu RPG is too heavy to do the "one-shot" playstyle that a lot of the source material almost demands. And that's why some of the other more recent, lighter weight RPGs seem to deliver better on that core competency.
@luxet@Tim_Eagon@chakatfirepaw It also begs the question of "What is a minor issue in the mythos?," even something as relatively minor as the fungi from Yuggoth Trying to protect a mining interest on Earth essentially just gives the party the knowledge and probably physical evidence of alien intelligence and its activity on Earth.
That's a pretty big deal, as would anything which gave concrete proof of cults with actual magical power. or a deep sea species which frequently desires to breed with humans...
It's hard to get away from the idea that mythos knowledge itself is destabilizing. And if you had it, unless you had a significant reason not to expose it, that's exactly what you would do.
This might make minor issues easier to deal with in a one-shot because you don't have to deal with the fallout afterwards. But the idea of a sustained narrative where this information is going around a lot is inherently a problem. Again, something that Delta Green helps address just by its setup.
@lextenebris@luxet@chakatfirepaw There are some really good “minor” scenarios though. There are two in particular by Jeffrey Moeller that involve spells going awry. In one a mathematician unknowingly creates a teleportation spell with horrific results; in the other, a crazy cat lady (an ex-anthropologist) creates a localized time loop to save her beloved cat after it died in a car accident. It’s nothing earthshaking, but very effective.
@lextenebris@luxet@chakatfirepaw but overall, you’re correct, much of CoC’s world building falls apart under close scrutiny. It’s literally based on a hodgepodge though, so that’s somewhat expected!
@Tim_Eagon@luxet@chakatfirepaw I think I have to circle back to the core idea that the BRP version of Call of Cthulhu is just entirely too heavy to do the kind of risky actions that play out in Cthulhu mythos source literature. Characters aren't nearly disposable enough.
If you're out there digging through ancient stacks and interviewing people to find out why someone who has been dead for 200 years was just spotted, get discovered because you're not a particularly sneaky spy, you're just a university researcher, and get killed - it's just a lot of work to have another character show up, find your notes and take up where you left off. And yet that's exactly what happens in at least one of Lovecraft's stories. And it's cool. It's a really cool swerve that happens surprisingly late in the narrative.
That's really difficult to do when you have to point account percentile-based skills. It's a lot easier to do if it takes 10 minutes to come up with a character and you knew going in there was a good chance the character you started with wouldn't make it to the end.
@lextenebris@luxet@Tim_Eagon I read « A Happy Family » by Kevin Hassall recently which is a serial killer having used a byakhee to kill. It’s very minor issue involving 6 characters & 1 monster not including the PCs. #CallofCthulhu#ttrpg
Still thinking about yesterday's #callofcthulhu session where the player's character went temporarily insane from seeing a Shoggoth and I rolled a 10, which meant they gained a mania and I sat there with uhhhs and ohhhhs trying to think one up. Whoops. Lol. Will have a mania and phobia chart handy from now on. Lesson learned. :bd261:
Because of @vintagerpg, I'm checking out old Different Worlds magazines tonight while watching Elite 8 games with my father-in-law. Remember the days when there were multiple print #TTRPG magazines?
My #CallOfCthulhu game just imploded. And not in the fun "oh my god they were all consumed by a lovecraftian horror" sort of way. And I am super bummed. #ttrpg
Unclear that I can assemble any replacement or alternate game from any of the usual players in my pool either.
Just me, with lots of books and ideas... but even ... less tabletop gaming... for a while.