Cthulhu Now!

[apeiron]

In terms of the players writing the story with the GM.  i was in a game of this last w/e and it was great fun.  You take a story like 'Rescue the Princess' and then the players answer questions about it.  "The Princess has the means to escape, why hasn't she done so?"  Our answer was that she was in on it.  "Why was the Princess kidnapped?", i suggested it was an arms dealer/mercenary trying to start a war.  Maybe it's not the same, but it has some elements that might inspire you.  The difference might be that in your game the players can suggest things, that may or may not be true.

[Mr. DNA]

Interesting....I'll have to check it out.  Burning Wheel's complexity has intimidated me up to now, although I've heard many good things about it.  Perhaps it's time I got someone to run it for me.  Thanks for the tip!

[Mr. DNA]

So, just to recap, then:

1. There's a GM, and there are players.
2. On the table, where everyone can see, there is a sheet called the Antagonist sheet, which has places to fill in elements of your Antagonist.
3. The players can take anything in the game and make it into a clue, simply by investigating it.
4. Investigation involves a contested roll between any players with different ideas about the clue, and the GM.
4a. Just to clarify, if more than one player has a theory, more than one player will be rolling dice.
5. The roll is a dice-pool, determined by the PC's investigative skills.  Only each player's top two dice will count.
6. If the top two dice of any player exceeds the GM's top two dice, that player's character succeeds in their interpretation of the clue.
7. The "truth" of the interpretation, however, is determined by whoever has the highest single die.  That person gets to write the truth on the Antagonist sheet.

To continue, it seems like there are quite a few levels that lovecraftian horror could work on, and they could all lead from one to the next.  You start out with something small, and only as you begin to solve that issue do you find that no, it's actually pointing to something else, something larger....

(With apologies to Dogs in the Vineyard)

1. Something bad happens.  Someone turns up dead, or some weird shit happens around town, or someone just plumb goes crazy.

That's because...

2. There are Local problems.  There's something or someone doing the killings, or causing the weird creepy shit, or making people go crazy.

If those local problems are bitey enough, then take care of them and break out the champagne.  Otherwise, the local problems are there because...

3. There are Bigger problems at work here.  The local problems are symptomatic of other forces at work; for example, perhaps the whole town is corrupt.  Perhaps the creature killing people is the scout preceding an invasion.  Perhaps the murderer belongs to a cult.

Now, if those Bigger issues seem dramatic enough, great.  Once they're dealt with the characters can call it a night.  But if the players want something more...

4. There are World-Wide issues at stake.  Even those bigger issues are just the effects of an even greater cause.  That cult?  It's a world-wide conspiracy.  That alien infestation?  A precursor to planet-wide "terraforming" and global conquest.

Now, world-wide is pretty dang big.  But if that's not quite enough for your players, maybe the problems are really...

5. Cosmic Horror.  The world-wide cult is trying to summon their Dread Lord into our world, effectively ending all life as we know it.  The alien invaders?  They were just trying to escape the real danger that's been chewing up galaxies for millenia -- and now it's reached us.  And all those people going crazy?  That was our reality crashing into another dimension -- the dimension of Darkness and Pain.

Only, instead of the GM making this up before the game, it happens in-game, with everyone contributing.  I'm not sure how this fits in with the Antagonist sheet -- perhaps we need a different sheet for each of these levels?

[Nev the Deranged]

Ok, I don't know if this is helpful in any way, but while reading your last post, the image in my head was of a large sheet with a series of concentric circles. The middle one is "local", the outermost one "cosmic" with all the layers in between. Then there are smaller circles within, linked like one of those cloud/bubble chart thingies on ManyEyes, with words in them. The word-bubbles start in the middle "Local" circle, and link to other bubbles, most of which will be in the Local circle, but eventually may start appearing in the next ring out.

Am I making any sense?

I don't know how useful that is, but that's what it looked like in my mind's eye.

[Mr. DNA]

Concentric circles on a single page!  Great idea.  Much better than having multiple sheets for different types of antagonists, depending on how much information ends up on the sheet at the end.

I've been thinking lately of something very central to most Lovecraftian horror games, and that's Madness.  I want to connect sanity loss with the differences between your character's perception of the antagonist, and the Truth about the antagonist determined by whoever gets the authority on a roll.  Essentially, I want Sanity loss to occur (or at least the possibility of sanity loss to occur) whenever the difference between the character's belief of as aspect of the antagonist is revealed to be different from the truth of that aspect.

Additionally, I've been thinking about how the GM can introduce scenes where the characters actually interact with the antagonist in some way before the antagonist sheet is complete.  I think the GM should be free to have the characters encounter the antagonist (in some form or another) in such a way that he or she only reveals whatever is already on the antagonist sheet, plus one element (possibly just a clue element?).  I think of the scene in Se7en, where Brad Pitt's character finds the killer's apartment, and then the killer comes home; we see him in the distance, pulling out a gun and shooting at Pitt, and then (if I remember correctly -- it's been a couple years since I saw the film), there's a chase scene.  It's all the character interacting directly with the antagonist, but we don't learn, you know, all of the details about the killer -- maybe just one or two more than we already did.  This could scale to the broader types of antagonists, of course, where the characters come across a cult but don't learn the name of the god, etc, etc.

But this ties back into Sanity and Madness in that, in any scene, the GM can use any of the details already on the sheet; and at any time these can conflict with the ideas in the characters' mind, which might lead to madness, a loss of reason or sanity, that sort of thing.

[Mr. DNA]

I'm also thinking that the characters will have an "Area of Expertise" stat, which is their main avenue of investigation, and then perhaps a couple lesser ones, and then a few contact NPCs with expertise in other areas (one each) that they can bring in to help.

I'm a bit stuck on combat at the moment: not sure how detailed I want it to be, or how abstract.  I'd like to fit it into the "roll dice, some players win conflict, highest single die narrates" scheme, as above, but I'm not sure how.

I guess I need a strategy for how the player character stats are implemented.  Any suggestions?

[Mr. DNA]

The group I'm in currently is playing a game of Prime Time Adventures over Skype (actual play over at rpg.net.), and since cards are a bit tough to use over voice or text chat, we've adapted the rules for dice instead; me with the thought that it might come in handy for my game here, since the dice mechanics are going to be similar.

1. Even numbers are "successes"
2. High evens trump low evens on ties.
3. The person with the most successes wins the conflict
4. The person whose dice, added all together, total the highest, wins Authority.

I don't know about the "evens are successes" for my cosmic horror investigation game (I really need a better title than Cthulhu Now, don't you think?); it might be something like "3s and above on a d6 are successes"; which might give me the ability to play around with different modifiers to what numbers are successes or not (like in, say, Arkham Horror?).