Indie Gaming Monday (5/20)

[Zak Arntson]

[minor editing for more coherence]

We played a ton of Munchkin (5 players makes the game) and played a little d20 Call of Cthulhu. It's not indie, but I've been using the playing advice given in both the d20 book (_very_ valuable resource for scenario design) and stuff on the Forge.

Synopsis:
A) Set up a situation that is familiar and will interest the Players. I told them, "You are all students in a dorm with some reason to stick together, and be out late at night." They decided they were skaters who shot underground skate videos and released them on the Internet.

B) Make characters. d20 still takes too long. I don't like much of d20. It didn't make for a good Exploration of Character among my Players (player's CoC decisions look to be Exploration of Char and Situation, and I bet by the end it will probably turn into Cooperation against Badness), the Players seemed confused/annoyed at the high number of Skills and extra little bonuses all over their character sheet.

Here's the characters:
1) Two skater guys, mostly slackers who love to skate.
2) One ROTC guy who feels like he shouldn't skate, but these are his long-time buddies, so he's torn and goes skating with 'em.
3) One Journalist Major with digital camera who films the skaters for fun and education.

C) Hook - This is something described in the d20 book. It's a Bang! to get the Players emotionally involved. In this case, they were returning from skating at 2am on a school night. No one around. As they pass under the biology building, one of them hears a muffled commotion from above. Then all of them see something fly out the 3rd story window and crash to the ground. Looks like some bloody monkey, a bunch of lab equipment, and a ton of shattered glass. Journalist starts filming, another player gets a scratch (which will start to fester later). The monkey evaporates and melts.

The PCs then look up to see someone staring down at them. It's 2am, and the doors to the building are locked. They head back to their dorm to review the footage.

What I learned from the Forge: Bang! Nice to see it represented in d20 book in the form of a "Hook."

D) Initial Stuff - Another step in the d20 book. They're watching the video, and I have one of the NPC companions (red shirts to up tension) head out on a smoke break. He's going to automatically die, but suddenly a Player pipes up, "I'll join him." Crap, but I realize this will be more exciting. While three players review the film (it's definitely a monkey), the smoking one is bullshitting and being scared with his buddy. Raising tension, ask for a Listen roll. Failed miserably, so some animal shape leaps onto red-shirt NPC one and they fall into the bushes. The PC runs into the building and pulls the fire alarm.

All the PCs get back together on the way out of the building and, with direction of smoker PC, one peeks into the bushes to see his buddy with half a face. Police are called, questions made, and session ends.

What I learned from the Forge: Exciting transitions. Group split up? Do dramatic scene cuts. I would have the guy fail a listen roll, then go to the other group. Then the shape would fly out of the dark and crash into the bushes. Quick response, then go back to the video. I think the juxtaposition of scary assault and casual examination of green-gooey bloody monkey got the Players themselves kind of freaked.

---

Things learned:
- Dramatic scene switching is very effective.
- A Bang! is a great way to get Players involved. So is giving the Players some control in the beginning (to get them invested in their PCs).
- Players are loving Exploration of Character & Situation. They perceive little threat (at least up until the animal attack), and their decisions were purely Exploration. When the heat's on, looks like they turn Gamist. Which is how I picture CoC anyway, so it looks like a functional group.
- Don't give things away. Though the window-crashing thing _looked_ like a monkey, I described as ape-like, with fingers and fur. And threw out some possibilities: Possum, raccoon, monkey.
- Little bits of weird are effective: Instead of a big combat or a zombie monkey, it was semi-plausible. An animal flies out of a window. Something the Players could grasp. After they bought into this, I described a cyan goo mixed in with the blood. After that, the thing started melting and smoking (eventually evaporating into thin air). Make sure your Players are buying into things before springing more weirdness. Having a green-goo monkey fall to the ground and immediately start evaporating would've probably been harder to swallow. And yes, this is Sim/Immersion playing, so the Players want to be scared/surprised as well as the PCs.

Things to do differently:
- Do some initial roleplaying before the game starts. I always take about 10-15 minutes to get into the GMing groove. To cover, we did some roleplaying and rolling to get used to System and figure out what they were doing at 2am. We played Munchkin beforehand, but I may have us play Pantheon next.
- Possibly try a different System. We all found the System overly confusing; even though half of use are D&D players from a while back. I'm thinking of writing a new System with less granular Skills (which I believe FURTHERs Exploration of Char, because it's easier for a Player to know their character at a glance).

Best part:
Level of group satisfaction. Especially when one Player said, "I thought it wouldn't be scary, playing CoC, but now I'm kind of creeped out." Woot!

[Clay]

Zak,

Any particular reason that you're using D20 CoC instead of the original?  We found the percentile system to be pretty easy to get behind. The fights aren't as good as you'd get with something like Sorcerer, but trying to fight the monsters in CoC is generally followed by creating new characters.

In any event, glad to hear that the session went well.  CoC is one of my favorite games.

[Zak Arntson]

We are using d20 because I just bought the thing, to be honest. I haven't yet found anything that pushes me towards d20 or BRP. In fact, we may go with a different system altogether.

The best part of the d20 book are the scenario design and mythos background chapters.

[Mike Holmes]

First, I wanna play! (Big Cthulhu fan)

I'm thinking of writing a new System with less granular Skills (which I believe FURTHERs Exploration of Char, because it's easier for a Player to know their character at a glance).

Right. Lots of skills, etc, is Exploration of System. See Rolemaster. For Exploration of Character, you need roomy attributes, that allow you to roam about in them. Try FUDGE, perhaps?

Best part:
Level of group satisfaction. Especially when one Player said, "I thought it wouldn't be scary, playing CoC, but now I'm kind of creeped out." Woot!

Once again, evidence of Sim Immersion causing actual emotional response. Yay! It's not just me.

Squick 'em hard next episode, Zak, squick 'em hard! Use that advice from your post, and don't hit them with much, if any, hard evidence of the supernatural until the climax. Then Kill! Kill! Kill!

Oh, I envy you, the fun you'll have.

Mike

[hardcoremoose]

Okay, sue  me, but isn't this a good time to get that long awaited Cthonian rewrite off the ground?  That's something I'd like to see.

- Scott

[Balbinus]

I would also like to see a rewrite of Cthonian.

[Gordon C. Landis]

I just wanted to say that this is a *great* actual play post - fun to read and informative.  My only fear is that it sets the bar even higher for contemplated attempts at describing my own actual play :-)

Good stuff,

Gordon

[Mike Holmes]

Hey Zak,

What's with the Gamism?

I assume that D20 supports it somewhat, and the original CoC is somewhat Gamist in design. But I see this as the critical incoherency in the game that most damages the mood. As soon as players start playing against the game, they loose that Immersion that delivers the chills in the game. Which I, personally, see as the point of the exercise. This is the style of play that CoC supports best, IMO.

Worse, if the players play gamist, especially when they encounter the bad unknown, they will probably find that they are unable to win, anyway. CoC is a what has previously been refered to as a loser game. One creates protagonism in the Sim sense, through the heroic or tragic failures of their characters. Someone once said that CoC is the most heroic game they knew of because the characters weren't superpowered, they were just relatively normal people who, despite understanding that they were up against incredible odds struggle to defeat the bad things anyway. From a player perspective, this is doubly so. Knowing the rules, the player can really see the futility of their character's actions.

This is as opposed to D&D where the player knows that they probably have enough hit points to make it through the next encounter. I hope that D20 hasn't ruined this by putting players on an equal footing with the baddies. It's much more fun to see the characters struggle with the evil in various ways, and die trying, go mad, or resort to flight to save their fragile lives.

I'd encourage your players to try to adopt a more philosophical Sim attitutde about the game, and enjoy the doom that they are about to encounter. Will their characters strive heroically and die trying, or will they succumb to the temptations of power that Hidden World can provide, and go insane contemplating them.

Here's what I'd do to get the idea across. Bring a really good pastry or some other food item that you'll sure everyone will drool over. Place it off to the side, and tell your players that it is a reward for the player who can orchestrate things such that their character comes to the most compelling demise. This can be as simple as bumbling into the Bad Unknown, or as complex as reading too much, going mad, and getting killed in an attempt to do away with the other characters. Whatever. Just so long as it's rol-played in such a way as it spooks the bejezes out of everyone playing.

Remind them to Immerse, deeply actor stance, and think what would the character do? That's the cool part, the player creates reasonable reactions for the character, yet they all turn out wrong. Prooving that there is no sense to the universe, and that it's pointless.

That's an important part of CoC. It really should be pointless. The more pointless it is, the more horrific. That's the key to CoC, that the universe is wrong because, when all is said and done, it has no meaning. As has been pointed out before, it's that Wrong, that makes the players uneasy, hopefully.

Well, I probably talked too much about this. But do you see my concern? Gamist are likely to be really frustrated. Or if D20 has "fixed" that problem, then the players really are playing Alone in the Dark, and not CoC, and thus loose a critical dynamic. IMO.

Mike

[Zak Arntson]

I assume that D20 supports [Gamism] somewhat, and the original CoC is somewhat Gamist in design. But I see this as the critical incoherency in the game that most damages the mood.

Well, the Players (at least, they seem to) desire Exploration of Character, knowing that it is an uphill battle. They also explicitly expressed a desire to be more effective. This leads me to believe they will make Gamist decisions when the pressure's on. The only dangerous moment during play led to a PC rushing away from his buddy, into the building and pulling a fire alarm. I'm still not sure whether that was caused by Exp. of Char or Gamist survival instinct. They may stick to Exp. of Char and prove my thoughts wrong! (which means I'll tailor play accordingly)

I hope that D20 hasn't ruined this by putting players on an equal footing with the baddies.

It hasn't. The game recommends only one or two monsters per an entire scenario.

I'd encourage your players to try to adopt a more philosophical Sim attitutde about the game, and enjoy the doom that they are about to encounter.

I don't think that's what they want. They want to a) fight an uphill battle and b) win pyhrric victories at the cost of health & sanity & sometimes life. I'll discuss more with my Players to look into this, though.

That's an important part of CoC. It really should be pointless.
...
then the players really are playing Alone in the Dark, and not CoC, and thus loose a critical dynamic. IMO.

I've never played Alone in the Dark. So I'll sum up my view on our CoC play: There are terrible truths. You are fighting a losing battle, but it's the little victories that count. Helping your buddies and keeping back the inevitable end-times by a day, or a week. This isn't in line with most of Lovecraft's fiction (the protagonists learn something mundane, it turns terrible and insanity ensues), but rather with a smaller set of his stories where the protagonists survive and even triumph in a small way (Pickman's Model, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Lurking Fear). There is always the horrible knowledge that the horrors you have stopped are only the tip of an iceberg attached to, say, the Antarctic.

So the drift between survival (Gamism) and creepy immersion (Expl. of Char & Situation) is proper, given our group's attitudes towards the game. We could argue that survival is simply Expl. of Char and Situation with protagonists focusing on survival, though I'm guessing they have a desire to succeed/survive that transcends acting within PC plausibility.

I'll bring this up to my group and see what they think. They aren't Forge-heads, and not interested (at least as far as my brief mentions to them) in rpg theory, so I'll relay their responses back to this thread.

[J B Bell]

Well, just as another vote for FUDGE (and to plug one of my own half-assed designs), I think it could work in this context.  You can also do Sanity quite easily as a specialized FUDGE-style wound-track, with the bonus of not having the "scared by your cat puts you over the brink into total madness" problem of a simple "mental hit-point" system.  I do this:

Code Select Expand


Touched      Shaken     Disturbed     Psychotic     Gone
O O O          O           O             O            O


The different mental states subtract from an appropriate score (ego, willpower, something like that, or hey, just plain Sanity) just like regular FUDGE wounds.

A fuller (though still incomplete) explanation can be found at http://www.swcp.com/~tquid/pmbm.htm .  That URL is mainly a (warning!  broken!) magic system for FUDGE, but the "cost of magick" in it is in terms of sanity.

Anyway, I hope that's helpful to somebody.

--JB

[Tim Denee]

Re: the stuff about gamism.

The vibe that came through strongest in Zak's post for me (and which I was really digging) was a Silent Hill one. Silent Hill is definitely a 'game' (in the gamist sense), but it's also really creepy and horrific. If I were ever to run a cthulu game, I would definitely go for a Silent Hill-ish tone, and I think it's a credit to Zak that he seems to have achieved that (unintentionally, I assume).

Edit: point I was trying to make is, gamism and horror can mix successfully. Don't ask me how. Silent Hill does it, so it must be possible. Admittedly video games are a different kettle of fish from role-playing games... But still.

[Zak Arntson]

Blabinus, Hardcoremoose,
I'm working on a Chthonian rewrite! It's going to be more the Sim + Gamism approach to support our group's play. Hope you won't be disappointed.

JB Bell,
I'm not keen on FUDGE, but thanks for offering (and why I don't like it would be a whole new thread). It seems like a popular base for System, however, so hopefully other readers may try it out.

... and I think it's a credit to Zak that he seems to have achieved that (unintentionally, I assume).

Thanks! It was entirely intentional. Before buying d20 Cthulhu, I knew that D20 was a Gamist system. I've played BRP Cthulhu, and that game promotes Exploration of Character/Situation. After reading d20 Cthulhu, I realized that d20 Cthulhu's GM sections promote both of these. That's exactly what I'm going for. My Players and I are fans of the horror-survival video game/movie style, so it's natural for us to play CoC that way. Best part is, a few of Lovecraft's stories feature pyhrric victories (or shaky stand-stills), so we're staying true to the source we love to read.

Unfortunately, while the Color (does GM's advice count as Color?) promotes Exp. of Char and Situation & Gamism, the rules promote Exp. of System and Gamism. So I'm working on my own system. I'll put up my progress here in Indie Game Design.