Arbitrary means and the Sim-Agenda

[Rustin]

I composed this in response to this thread.

I agree with Ron, for CoC, it's all about the Sim-Agenda.  Though I suspect that the exploration of that agenda cannot be reached by any arbitrary agreed upon gaming approach because the mythos sim-agenda needs both supernatural horror and danger.  Approaches that fail for horror or danger, will fail to create the sim-experience.   

Chris, your experiment, which has the character seek out sanity loss, defeats the purpose of both horror and danger.   It goes back to the question: what does the sadist do the masochist? nothing.  If you as a player don't fear insanity for your character-- the mechanic loses its power of simulation. 

The GM will realize--"wow this threat of insanity is not working, how do I create fear, horror and mystery if this guy isn't really afraid of anything?"

I suppose if we look at it vis-a-vis your character's experience then maybe...but somehow that seems bankrupt. IOW you'd report back to us saying:  "wow, my character had a real fun CoC experience last night.."  That just doesn't make sense.

b_back's approach also appears to falter because he is eliminating danger.  Though it is still in the skeleton stage, so I can't really judge one way or another.  Can he really create horror if the players are certain of when and if they die? If it were that sort of horror you're looking for MLwM would probably be a better bet.

[Mike Holmes]

Hi Rustin (is that your real name?),

I think you're extrapolating something that wasn't said, based on a creative interpretation of the concept of simulationism. Or put another way, I think you're simply projecting your own personal goals for the game. Which is fine. But very simply, Rons assertion that what the general play of CoC tends towards is sim does not create a mandate to play it for horror.

Mike

[Rustin]

Mike-

That's my name. :)

Ah, maybe I was confused by what Ron meant.  I thought he was sort of saying  we could drift to that subjective post-modernist position and say "whatever the players want is what they get" of the sim-Agenda, and if they want to call that Horror more power to them.

But I want to draw a line in the sand and say-- "beyond this it is no longer Horror.  Call it Quasi-Cthulhu or what-not but its not Mythos horror." What Chris was doing-- seeking insanity just for the sake of "getting into it" maybe fun, and it may be a sim of something, but it ain't horror.

Now this is mostly just for the sake of argument.  I am a noobler here. I learn by diving in at the risk of looking like a fool. But maybe, deep down, I am seriously arguing that there is an objective, psychological based need to have something Supernatural and something Dangerous to make a proper simulation of Mythos Horror.

I think the entire GNS system would be much more clear if it was based on some objective foundation. But then again, I'm still learning so maybe I'm missing something.

 

[Mike Holmes]

Rustin,

I can certainly understand the desire to have a horror RPG. And I can see getting CoC to be one in theory. But I don't think it's particularly well built to be one as written. That is, I think it's more of a drift from the rules as written to get CoC to really be scary than it is to play in any of the other ways that people have proposed.

But, really, this seems to be all about subjective preference. GNS actually has quite an objective foundation, check out the essays for an idea of how objective. What it doesn't say is that any particular creative agenda is automatically superior to another. Because in the end what's important is that people get fun out of their play. So as long as that's happening, it really doesn't matter how you get there, does it?

Mike