System suggestions for Call of Cthulhu?

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi Eero,

I'm looking forward to hearing back from you on how your game goes.  Of course, now I have this stupid Pool-Lacuna mashup running around in my head.

Thanks a lot...

Cheers,
Darcy

[Eero Tuovinen]

OK, we played the game on Tuesday, and now I have the time to write about it. Here's a short rundown of what I learned:

The Good

We played in a mid-class Chinese restaurant in Iisalmi, which is always nice. Our usual haunt, when it comes to public places, is a cheap kebab/pizza restaurant favoured by teenagers, so it was a nice change of pace to upgrade a bit. The restaurant staff of Kai Sheng has previously indicated no animosity towards us well-mannered roleplayers, so we went, we ate a lot and played a full session.

The Bad

Everything else, pretty much. Luckily we played with a considerably high quality crew who can take the occasional flop with grace. Still, the actual play had all the same problems I've learned to associate with Call of Cthulhu:

• Players have no fucking clue of what they're supposed to be doing. Even if the GM outright tells them what they should be doing, often enough they don't have the appropriate tools or skill sets available.
• Everything takes a long, long time, because the GM and the players are entangled in a misplaced effort to situation immerse, often in the wrong places and with non-working techniques. It doesn't help that there is no methods for chairmanning the procedure or framing scenes efficiently.
• Everything does take such a long time that you'd need 8-hour sessions to even get to the rhythm, not to speak of actually accomplishing anything in the fiction.
• Player actions, as produced by the structural tools of CoC, are so undirected that they do more to slow and hamper play than speed it along. Worse, the usual player reaction to the process friction is to act brashly and outside the genre, which further deteriorates the fiction.

So it was all rather dull to play, I'm afraid. In concrete terms, to give an idea of how painful the investigation process with CoC methodology can be: at the beginning of the scenario we played there is mention of this family, who lived in the haunted house before both spouses went mad from the events there. They don't know anything particularly important about the house or its secrets. Regardless, one of the players managed to spend the entire session maneuvering at the asylum, apparently convinced that those two poor victims would reveal something of appropriate usefulness. Not that the other players managed any better, mind: they had this idea that spiritism would help them reveal and dispose of the evil spirits at the house, so that's what they messed with. Meanwhile, the scenario itself is a classically structured mystery, with little possible improvisation in flushing out the dark secret. It's not going to just jump out of the psyche of a third-rate NPC at a asylum, or panic at a random spiritist session; to figure out the mystery of the Haunted House requires examination of the history of the house and finding the final resting place of old Corbit, the owner of the house. So any responsiveness from the GM for the players's off-the-wall ideas would just serve to ruin the actual mystery scenario. Insofar as the scenario can be interpreted as a conflict between old Corbit and the investigators, Corbit is winning as long as the investigators stumble along with little talent or idea of appropriate research technique involved. From this viewpoint the scenario itself could be considered faulty: the way for the antagonist to win is to let the players bore themselves to death.

Well, at least I got lots to think about, and valuable data as to the credibility of the CoC GMing instructions and adventure design. In hindsight it is pretty obvious that a horror adventure wouldn't go well with a carefully delineated monster strategy and limited powers - means that the monster isn't going to spend too much time at being fearsome, being that it can't do that much. Also, the investigative structure is rubbish and needs to be heavily restructured to make it work for the horror atmosphere. I wrote some additional musings on the topic at my blog: here's something about the alternative and simplified rules system I used, while here is another formulation of the investigation question I've been wrangling with.

[Web_Weaver]

Hi again, sorry to here you found the game dull.

I am guessing from your bullet points that you don't prioritise exploring colour, because despite me agreeing in principle with many of your points I can't help letting my inner geek-sim-Lovecraftian ponder that I would have loved GMing the asylum scenes (when it comes to CoC I am unashamedly sim orientated) .

When players have wandered, as they inevitably do in this game, I have tended to push heavily on the colour elements, little gothic details of how the core horror is spilling out into the world and effecting the people around it, often serving as a thematic warning to stay away and not get too involved. And these bits remain my favourite moments running CoC.

The sleepy English village Police Station where they have collected evidence and then buried it in their records with a mixture of deliberate and unconscious denial. The elderly country farmer who has no idea what is going on but knows not to go poking his nose in, and can tell stories about strange happenings and tunnels under the hills until his cows come home, and so encouraging the investigators whilst simultaneously warning them to stay out of it. The insane shopkeeper who has seen too much, who whilst not being drawn on anything to do with the old house, constantly trips up on apparently innocuous words as if over cautious not to talk about certain things.

Sure its 'only colour' and can't help the players achieve anything in terms of the investigation, but as far as creating a gothic flavour and giving the players a feeling for what their investigators are up against, these asides are invaluable. And I don't see these colour elements as being fundamentally tied to any agenda or play style if used with care.

[Snowden]

I wish I'd found this thread earlier, because I've be re-reading Lovecraft and thinking about some similar issues.  I've actually been working on adapting some of the Dogs In The Vineyard mechanics; my thought was to handle investigations as a conflict in which the players are attempting to find the answer to whatever question they're pursuing.  The rub is that in order to have a chance to inflict any kind of serious insanity fallout on the players, the GM has to reveal more and more of the supernatural elements of the scenario by narrating them into the conflict to hamper the players' investigation.  The idea is that either way the players get something out of the investigation: if they roll well and have good skills, they get answers to the questions they're asking and may lose a little sanity along the way; if they roll badly and/or lack skills, they don't find what they were looking for but do stumble onto other related goings-on, and probably lose even more sanity in the process.

I'm not sure if you're interested in further discussion in this direction, though, so I'll hold off on posting more.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I don't really know, but Weaver might just be right that I'm just missing the forest for the trees here. Then again, the game would really need some kind of a reward cycle for me to orient to intentionally extending and colorizing a random and mystery-wise meaningless scene. My instinct here was to be straightforward about the mystery definitely not being at the asylum; I expect that if I'd done more color dwelling than I did (which was a fair amount during the first asylum scene and less in subsequent ones), the players might have misinterpreted that as a signal that there was actually play content available at the Asylum. Also, they might have gotten bored if I made the game even slower than it was. This is very difficult to say in a passive, simulationistic game and pace like this, though; I have some notion that my senses and sensibilities are not trained to gauge how well the players are faring in something like this, perhaps they're doing just fine. I can't say that anybody in the group would have been especially thrilled by the lame fiction we made during the session, but some earlier experiences seem to indicate that players are not, per se, agonized by passivity and a slow pace, as long as they can take it from the audience viewpoint.

It's also pretty suspect that I claim the purpose of the game to be "situation immersion", but then I don't recognize nor appreciate any opportunity for situation immersion at the asylum. This is mostly because I was oriented towards presenting the premade adventure material instead of improvising, so perhaps that's part of the problem. This kind of glacial immersion would seem to work better with improvisation. Then again, it might also work better without a GM monopoly on long descriptive monologues and such, but that's a different game from CoC, again. Interesting and intriguing, trying to work with a CA mode I've not played much for the last ten years.

Snowden: DiV is a fine match for a horror game (you probably know of Afraid, Vincent's own hack), but again, it's side-stepping the issue. I've been trying to think my head around why I really arranged for that session of CoC, and my answer seems to be that I'm simply curious to see if there's actually anything salvageable in the methods and play style advocated by one of the great classics of gaming. So switching over to conflict resolution and flexible No Myth backstory, while a fine solution for the Lovecraftian subject matter itself, is outside the purview of what I'm trying to do here. Heck, even playing the game commando-style, as the player portion of the advice suggests, is largely outside my field of interest right now. Perhaps when I solve the immersion problem satisfactorily.

[Web_Weaver]

I don't know about you, but I feel pulled in two directions when I try and return to Sim play of any kind, on the one hand wanting to utilise a wider technique toolbox but on the other not wanting to mess too much with a game that used to work.

I have expressed elsewhere that CoC and the other BRP games did do a pretty good job of Sim and I don't feel they had anywhere near the coherence problems that later RPGs did. It's just that they don't really have a solid set of techniques and mechanics built into them that drive home the agenda because back in the heyday of RQ2/3 and early CoC we all 'knew' that gaming was all about Sim without being told what it was.

I wonder what your actual motive is for deciding to run CoC? I here what you have to say about structure and investigation but why do you want your players to experience CoC?

Are you like me, wanting to show younger players the best elements of the past, and insisting that they at least taste the old classics like Paranoia or Pendragon, or do you want to revisit them for some different reason?

(At least with my reasons I can point to the system and say look that bit doesn't make sense nowadays. :-) )

[Snowden]

Gotcha; as a Lovecraft fan who never "got" CoC, I think I was projecting.  Good luck!

[Eero Tuovinen]

My motives here were and are mostly of intellectual curiousity - no particular need to show the teens how we played in the past, but rather a personal look back at what we used to play and how it worked. CoC promises a rather unique genre of play, which itself is interesting and markedly prominent in many '80s games; at that time there was a great drive at originality in genre and setting, with less emphasis on outright media emulation. Call of Cthulhu with its rather unique blend of detective horror proffers a specific challenge I'm interested in - how do you actually make use of the investigative process as a framework for horror immersion?

A longer-term motivation here is to simply learn to be a better and more flexible roleplayer, and perhaps find inspiration for new kinds of rpg design. It's an oft-repeated bit that we don't do enough high-quality sim design here at the Forge, so I wouldn't mind "fixing" CoC to do the things I'd like it to do, if I only figure out how. So in that regard I'm just fiddling with basic research at this point, seeing what's what in Sandy Petersen's design.

As for the coherence problems, I find the game text itself one of the most incoherent ones of all time. Just the mere fact that I'm here babbling about playing immersive horror Cthulhu, while the rulebook advices quite clearly that the game is about killing monsters while managing your limited Sanity supply, is a demonstrative pointer about that. It's interesting how this clear tendency was rather totally ignored by us, and probably many others, when we actually played the game during the '90s. I would even hazard that the rules system makes much more sense as a challenge-based commando game, I'd find that much easier to run with those rules than the immersive simulationistic horror story. Things like investigation with skill checks could be stacked with stakes for figuring out tactically pertinent secrets and so on, giving the investigative process clear strategic implications. That's how many of the standard adventures read, so in that sense it'd certainly make sense, despite the admittedly numerous pieces of advice in the book for the opposite style of running the game as well.

[GB Steve]

Call of Cthulhu with its rather unique blend of detective horror proffers a specific challenge I'm interested in - how do you actually make use of the investigative process as a framework for horror immersion?

Have you heard of GUMSHOE?

Call of Cthulhu has been, over the years, my staple for immersion, much of which, it seems to me, comes from the understanding of the background and tropes that the players share. In fact, apart from the SAN mechanic, the rest of the rules are, at best, neutral towards immersion rather than enhancing it.

Cthulhu is best played with players who want their characters to go mad and die.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Yeah, I know of Gumshoe, just haven't gotten around to checking it out. For all I know it might resolve all the problems I have with CoC single-handedly.

[Web_Weaver]

Cthulhu is best played with players who want their characters to go mad and die.

I second that, I always looked at players who told stories of defeating the serious monsters a little askew, wondering why and indeed how that could even happen. Look at Masks of Nyarlathotep for instance, I have talked to people that actually completed that, and the question that always rang in my head was 'are you supposed to do that?'. But they were recounting games that they appeared to enjoy and they didn't seem to have the odd polished gleam of 'story after', indeed they didn't sound like fiction at all and no one cared, the story was about a game experience, like recounting a fun game of Risk.

For the record, my preference for CoC sits somewhere between the first two options on Eero' blog, I switch off in GM monologues as my friends will testify, but I want the situation and rising tension, plenty of madness and mythos but light on detail or trivia, preferring less protection of the mythos in the interest of the other concerns.

The rules do suggest a more determined and successful approach, I just never found that the emergent play resulting from the sanity system ever matched that style, and Masks even has advice on replacement characters because they knew full well that PCs would die or go insane throughout.

Call of Cthulhu with its rather unique blend of detective horror proffers a specific challenge I'm interested in - how do you actually make use of the investigative process as a framework for horror immersion?

As I always delight in telling drivers who pull over to ask directions "well you don't want to start from here", and I am only half joking in this case because, as you suggest, all CoC does is throw a generic skill system at the problem.

How did we ever get it to work? The GM was allowed free reign to keep things on track and scene frame, and then once the key scenes were introduced the players were provided lots of tension and suggested horror with a sprinkling of fun insanities to play with. And, if they wanted a campaign feel then players were discouraged from going too far and plenty of sanity gaining situations were put into the mix.

In my analysis, the first taste of insanities and the chaos that they can cause provides a lot of the tension. The player tension in tentatively moving through the scenes perfectly reflects the PCs' fears, providing an avenue for exploration of situation, colour and character in roughly that order. Sandy Peterson used to say he knew they were onto something when players summoning a demon suddenly said "and then I hide my eyes".

They were simple days, and I genuinely did have a lot of fun with the game as a player and as a GM, the requirements were only stay on track, push colour and let players have fun with sanity.

From what I can tell, having followed the Gumshoe development from a distance, it's main drive is to provide structured scene based play with an overt mechanism for providing clues to push the story forward. Many people may say 'we did that stuff back then' but the overt part is the key, because not everyone did have the GM skills to provide structure and or steer the game, and understandably, not many supplements had the breadth of Masks or Mountains of Madness to allow players a free reign. So their solution seems to be, make the investigation part of the system and let the players have a certain amount of control in gaining clues. For me, even as a player this was never a priority but it could match your desires.

[contracycle]

A question:

Is the investigative framework important in Lovecrafts actual writing?

I have read virtually no lovecraft I'll admit, but my impression from the little I have is that this is really just an expositionary device.  It's walking the reader through the process of discovery rather than conducting a formal investigation.  The reasons people engage with the horror seems to be usually personal, rather than arising from their job function.  Isn;t the investigative aspect something more like justificatory colour?

I suggest the investigative framework might be totally misbegotten, and the real question is "how to make going mad fun".  One among the types of stories you tell with a system that makes going mad fun uses investigations and whatnot as its entry point, rather than being the central action of the game.

[Web_Weaver]

Is the investigative framework important in Lovecrafts actual writing?

In my opinion absolutely not, even where the story is structured as an investigation its more curiosity than clue searching. Lovecraft is more concerned with imparting the experience of horror and using language to portray a vivid experience often from a first person perspective using feelings and senses. Mystery is used to the full, but there isn't an expectation on the reader to pull together scattered clues or use intuition or deduction. Lovecraft's ideal reader is there for the ride not for the work.

Its an old question in CoC circles, is the game an attempt to emulate the fiction, or is it just a fun game of Runequest with overwhelming monsters and a system to model madness? And the arguments rarely stop there, with different perspectives on exactly what is worth emulating in the fiction, and which of the many other mythos writers are worth including in the canon.

I love the original stories, but most players I know are lucky to have read a couple of them, early 20th century fiction is unlikely to be on their bookshelf, and Lovecraft's own sources of inspiration, writers like Lord Dunsany or Robert W. Chambers, or even the classics of Gothic horror like The Yellow Wallpaper, are probably well below their radar. Indeed, I get the impression that here in England few people outside of the role-playing or horror fandom communities even know of Lovecraft. So whether CoC is an exercise in simulation of Lovecraft is not necessarily a meaningful question.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I find Call of Cthulhu to be its own genre, albeit with heavy Lovecraft fetishization. Perhaps this has something to do with the way gaming geeks approach the themes of Lovecraft: CoC is very concrete and in-your-face about the supposed "horror" of Lovecraft, presuming that we find horror in the concrete descriptions of the inhuman monsters or whatever. Adventures are usually rather graphic and prosaic, which is not something I'd say about Lovecraft stories.

The investigation procedure is also very central to published CoC material, which is only true of Lovecraft in the abstract sense: a Lovecraft horror story, generally speaking, is a step-by-step exercise in introducing new ideas and corresponding physical manifestations. Whether this happens because the character investigates actively or just because he happens to have the wrong blood in his veins or live in the wrong house or married the wrong woman or whatever is completely up in the air for Lovecraft, which it is not for Call of Cthulhu.

That being said, I have little difficulty with "doing" Lovecraft in a roleplaying game. It's simple, you can use well-tested mechanical technology and system techniques, you know exactly what you're trying to do... all very simple in its own way, anything from Shock: to Dead of Night can do it. Even my own zombie game can do it. As it stands, I'm significantly more interested in doing Call of Cthulhu, specifically, exactly because it is far from obvious how the active CSI-style investigative content should be used to pace and structure horror events. The questions becomes even more interesting when you read the GMing advice and realize that CoC instructs very clearly that it should be played as slice-of-life roleplaying: adventures should stream seamlessly from one to another, you should track time and resources in the off-time the investigators take, you might have several investigations going at once, and a central theme to it all is the increasing institutional knowledge of the mythos gained by the player characters during the process, which further refines their understanding of what it means to be a "mythos investigator". This is not Lovecraft, this is a specific invention of Sandy Petersen.

Which brings something to mind... Conspiracy of Shadows has a set of techniques and structure that might well be relevant for something like this. Specifically, it has the same presumed campaign structure to the tee. Good to remember, that.

[contracycle]

I see.  I misunderstood your goal.. But then, a system suggestion is easy for me - Conspiracy X, a system I regard as one of the best and most elegant in print.

In the second edition or in expansions to the first edition, there are also organised rules for investigative actions, and for constructing groups a, conspiracies, and factions.  Characters are defined by membership of these groups or some governmental body which in turns provides the main tools that character will bring to bear.  It is of course aimed towards the conspiracy genre but includes a kind of "supernatural corruption" that is interesting in its own right and can be used to model the cthulhoid descent into insanity easily enough.

Con-X is also very fast in resolution because its semi-karmic; abilities are compared and only rolled if they are close.