In search of a satisfying ending...

[jdagna]

There's a general issue here as well as some actual play, so I'll start with the play example first.

My regular group has been taking a break from Pax Draconis to play Call of Cthlulhu for a short campaign (six sessions or so).  The plot for the story ws a fairly typical Lovecraftian kind of thing.  The characters were all visiting in a small Massachusetts fishing town.  I played a professor who studied brain physiology and psychology pursuing a theory that would make him look visionary (wrong, but basically visionary) to today's neurosurgeons, but his peers considered him more than a little eccentric n(and the directory of the university he works for had basically forced him to go on vacation for a while).  Trent played a tough Boston detective also forced to go on vacation after a few complaints about roughing up suspects.  Ariel played a news reporter here looking for article ideas for her regular column.  And my wife Sally played Bob the bum (sorry, travelling gentleman[/]) who was just wandering through and looking to get by as best as possible.

As get into town, a young girl gets kidnapped, so we all get involved to help.  The plot progresses, with a few more kidnappings, some sights of a ghost and the local cop dies, to be replaced with a younger substitute.  There are plots involving a ship that went down fifty years ago,  including rumors that it had dealings with the occult and other rumors that it had been sunk to collect on the insurance.  I won't go too much into the specifics here, because nothing in the game play really stands out - things went a little slowly because of the GM's style, but we were all having fun collecting clues and trying out theories.

Now, the group itself was really clicking - lots of in-character dialogue between PCs (which I always associate with people who are getting into the story and not just figuring out where the next monster is and how they can kill it to take its stuff).  All of the characters developed little quirks in their personalities so that you could really envision them as people, and watch how they handled all this mysterious ghostly stuff going on (which, as you'll see, is the facet of gaming that keeps me in the hobby).  My character kept insisting on scientific explanations, but was so bored by vacationing that the investigation intrigued him... the cop chalked it up to small-town weirdness and a cover-up over the ship sinking and insurance stuff, but was much like my character in being bored by vacations... the bum didn't seem to care about any of it except that he'd found an antique wooden statutue early on and the bad guys had apparently stolen it (and the fortune he was sure he'd get from it)... and the reporter kept taking notes and exploring options to turn the thing into a story (fictional or otherwise and, like any good yellow journalist, she wasn't above trying to instigate even more interesting things to write about).

The campaign really started clicking for me in the two sessions at the end.  In the first, the characters were attacked by a mysterious black-garbed man they'd seen before in association with the kidnappings.  As the guy ran away, he dropped a carved stone piece that transported the PCs into sort of a dream world with parallels to the real city (but lots of differences).  We ultimately survived (barely) by smashing the dream version of the stone and then awake back where we'd started... but with a fractured stone.  We had also found a cave in the dream and when the characters investigated it in person, we found it identical the dream and with an apparition of one of the kidnapped girls inside it.

What made these two incidents so interesting for me is that it was finally "proof" that my character's insistence on a scientific solution was wrong.  (In fact, the first thing the character said on coming out of the cave has become a catch-phrase for my character "Bob, there are some things science can explain...")

In the rest of the last session, our characters raided a house in search of the kids (we were running out of time and decided that offending the locals was now worth it).  In classic fashion, there was an underground passage down to a cave with the big man and the evil woman and we managed to overcome both with our health and sanity still somewhat intact.  We found a diary with the whole plot, some kids, some loot and... the end.

The end?

I mean, I knew it was going to be the end (we'd decided as a group that Cthulhu would just be a short diversion), but it just seems like a royal let-down to me.  My character has just had a life-altering revelation - who cares about a witch and a bunch of kids?!  Will he decide to go back to his ordinary life?  Can he?  I don't see him jumping head first into a full-time job as a paranormal investigator, but I don't see him able to ignore it either.  And he's recovered both the diary and a stone book written in an unknown language and hasn't decided what to do with them...

So, as much as it was extremely satisfying play for me, the ending is greatly disappointing because it really is just the beginning of what interests me (the psychological drama inside the character).  Nobody else really seems to feel this way - they had their fun diversion, they solved the problem, killed the bad guys, what should we play now?

Anyone ever experienced this before?  It's not the first time for me, though I normally GM so it hasn't happened all that often.  If it's happened to you, what were the circumstances?

What do you do when it happens?  I mean, my first thought was just to write up what happens to my characters as an epilogue, but that seems even more disappointing in a way than just wondering about it.  I really get off on reconciling the character with the unpredictable events thrown in by the GM - it creates a synergy that's much more interesting.  I can't really bring the character into the next campaign, since Pax Draconis won't really suit him.

In thinking about reusing this character, it occured to me that I could have started him off with these conflicts, so that he could have resolved his issues more in tempo with the resolution of the plot itself.  Any advice on that kind of approach?

[komradebob]

Well, I can't speak to your character's particular innner conflicts, but I have run a fair number of CoC adventures and I've noticed a couple of things that might help.

CoC is a really good game for groups into Participationist style play. I mean that as a positive thing, actually. It sounds like your group might have been in that mindset abit. The things that suggest that to me are:
a) Your group decided to run a short campaign.
People knew that this was a break from the regular game you were playing, and ran with it.
b) People started focusing on their characters' quirks/personalities, which seems to be a classic area where players can show creativity in a semi-railroady style of play.

Running open ended CoC campaigns can be kind of rough on players, keepers and general suspension of disbelief.
HPL's world is pretty horrific. Big body counts ( including trips to the asylum) are pretty common. When I've tried running open ended CoC campaigns, there seems to be a tendency for things to degenerate into Ghostbustersish humor or a sort of Dungeons and Tommyguns mentality. Shorter sessions seem to bring out a more "straight" CoC mentality.

If you really like your character and you think you might want to bring them back, think about treating your occasional CoC mini-campaigns more like a series of mystery novels than an on-going comic book. What I mean is, treat the adventure as a story in itself. People that really grooved on their pc, like yourself, can certainly share ideas about what you think happens post-game.  That can end up creating seeds/hooks for return visits to CoC. Other folks that might have enjoyed the game, but don't care to revisit their character can either simply let them drift away to obscurity or come up with some appropriately horrible end for them offscreen. When the next CoC session comes up, they can build a new character, probably with some hints from the Keeper on what sorts of characters might be useful (again, a benefit of Participationist mentality as applied to CoC).

The thing is, CoC works really well this way. While older/experienced pcs tend to be slightly more skilled, due to skill checks post game and the desireable(?) acquisition of Mythos skill, they also tend to lose in the SAN department. A newly created pc and an old hand are usually roughly equal. CoC isn't like levelling up games where adventuring gives a vast difference in power level.

If you really feel let down, see if the other participants are at all interested in a "post-game" wrap up for their characters. Some of them probably are. CoC adventures have a tendency to end with a bang, and a very sort of quick mechanical (skill rolls/san loss/san gain) denouement. I've known players to actually be exhausted after an adventure ends. You might try getting a little postgame debrief going before your nesxt regular game session.

Good luck,
K-Bob

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Not much to add - this post is to throw my vote in with everything Bob says. All my Call of Cthulhu experiences confirm his points.

Best,
Ron

[jdagna]

Thanks for the replies, guys.

Partly I guess I was just whining... it's the first time, I've ever had this happen, but usually I'm the GM and am quite happy to see campaigns when they do.

I like the idea of an episodic string of short-term campaigns that recycle some characters as needed (it would provide some sense of continuity, which would be good).  Having never played CoC before, I'm kind of new to it, but just from reading the book, I had a feeling that this kind of play would work best anyway - especially in terms of running it in discrete pieces instead of a long continuous campaign.  

I didn't really want a open-ended campaign in the first place - I was just caught by surprise when my character developed issues that really needed more play to address them in.  And in that sense, I wasn't particularly let down (the campaign provided everything I wanted it to), it's just the in-game events created/activated this subplot just before the end, where there wasn't time to explore or resolve it.