Drifting to R'lyeh:Facing the Problems with Call of Cthulhu

[Rob MacDougall]

One thing this reversal of the SAN mechanism might take away, for some players at least, is the possibility of the SAN mechanism working toward another purpose: making the players afraid (or at least, building suspense). If SAN loss is something expected or even sought after, then it can't be something the players are afraid of (although, the amount of actual fear in the players engendered by the existing SAN mechanics is debatable anyhow).

Maybe one could use the SAN mechanic in both the old way and this new way simultaneously: that is, SAN could be voluntarily traded away by the player for revelations, but it could also be lost without warning (when the PC is surprised by a Mythos creature or what have you). Then there's sort of a resource allocation thing going on. How much can I afford to spend?

[Valamir]

One thing this reversal of the SAN mechanism might take away, for some players at least, is the possibility of the SAN mechanism working toward another purpose: making the players afraid (or at least, building suspense). If SAN loss is something expected or even sought after, then it can't be something the players are afraid of (although, the amount of actual fear in the players engendered by the existing SAN mechanics is debatable anyhow).

There's some truth to that, but really who actually fears SAN loss in CoC.  Most either enthusiastically embrace it as giving them the opportunity to roleplay out bizarre and "insane" behavior, or are at lead begrudgingly resigned to it.  The SAN loss mechanism is so inevitable and so inexhorable that I don't think it retains any aspect of "fear".

Interestingly in Mongooses recently released Babylon 5 RPG, the forward by J Michael Strazynski (the show's creator) centers on his reminiscing on the one and only time he ever roleplayed.  It was CoC, and as a new RPer his first question was "how do you win".  The GM's answer..."you can't...there are only two possibilities: you either die, or you go mad."

When asked what the point of playing it was the GM answered "Living the moments until you go insane or die."

Not only does this pretty much frame the nature of Simulationism in the game (what I earlier was referring to as "Sim1" suggesting that it is pure exploration without any additional agenda) but it also suggests to me that the SAN mechanism is simply an alternative form of "hit points" which serves to determine which end fate the character gets hit with first.

Since one or the other is pretty much accepted as inevitable, I don't know that there really is any "fear" left from the players perspective.  All CoC players I've known tend to be rather fatalistic toward their eventual end with some (like Mike H) actively seeking to die or go mad as spectacularly as possible.

Since there is no fear of death or insanity for the players, there is no real fear for the characters which why IME CoC is occassionally creepy, sometimes gross, but never really horrifying.  Unlike, say Little Fear's True Horror, the subject matter is far to alien to be truly scary and the utter lack of meaningful consequences renders the game to me nothing more than a "who-dunnit" substituting the "unspeakable horror did it" for the "butler".  Most times the "unspeakable horror" is about as frightening as a butler.

Its been noted hear that most of the more successful CoC sessions have been short or one shots.  To me this is rather ironic since it makes the consequences of death or insanity even more trivial.  Putting a Cthulhu-esque scenario into the middle of an ongoing D&D campaign entering its 5th year of play would seem to me to be more scary...since the risk of losing a painstakingly built up character to an invincible foe that cannot be killed with mere sword and fireball, would actually be a legitimate consequence.


At any rate, IMO Call of Cthulhu stands with GURPS as what I consider to be the two most damaging games to the development of the hobby (precisely because of their popularity).  GURPS because it derailed the trend of customized game systems linked to their genre in favor of "universal mechanics" leading inevitably to the whole "system doesn't matter" dogma; and Cthulhu because of what it taught a generation of gamers on how story telling gaming should be (helpless players participating in a collosal illusion).

[Ian Charvill]

I think the value to the ablative, you've just seen something scary, use of sanity is that it encourages mimetic behaviour - that is to say, in a scene where a person (i.e. the PC) would turn away or run away, the player has their PC do that, to preserve a game resource.  It doesn't create fear in the player, it causes the player to have the character act as if they're scared (I guess via covert author stance stuff).

So the question for keeping ablative Sanity is just the question of whether you want to encourage that type of player behaviour.

I think Ralph nails the kind of sim Cthulhu represents, with the additional addendum that a lot of CoC play is based around Module Play.  So I think the options for variance and drift involve not only shifts to mode (including shifts within the sim mode) but also shifts to the way sessions are prepped.

[John Kim]

I think the value to the ablative, you've just seen something scary, use of sanity is that it encourages mimetic behaviour - that is to say, in a scene where a person (i.e. the PC) would turn away or run away, the player has their PC do that, to preserve a game resource.  It doesn't create fear in the player, it causes the player to have the character act as if they're scared (I guess via covert author stance stuff).  

Well, but mimesis is a tool for identification and horror.  The horror genre in particular is full of mimetic techniques.  For example, written stories (like Lovecraft's) may masquerade as a series of letters.  This gives an illusion of reality, even if the events portrayed are on the surface preposterous.  You can see similar issues with how horror films treat the camera point-of-view.  

Fundamentally, reading a book or watching a film isn't something that should scare the viewer.  There is nothing real to be afraid of.  Horror is a bunch of tricks and techniques to produce the illusion of fear, not fear itself.  

In this thread, several people suggested changes to empower the player, but at least on one level that seems contrary to the Lovecraftian experience.  Lovecraft's stories about disempowerment.  A classic example is the one about the sinking submarine (I forgot the name for the moment).  Of course, the question is what you are trying to emulate.

[Ian Charvill]

Well, but mimesis is a tool for identification and horror. The horror genre in particular is full of mimetic techniques. For example, written stories (like Lovecraft's) may masquerade as a series of letters. This gives an illusion of reality, even if the events portrayed are on the surface preposterous. You can see similar issues with how horror films treat the camera point-of-view.

I think the story in question is The Temple, but it's been a while since I read it.

I wanted to add that I think the mimetic behaviour can feed back into the players getting spooked.  By acting scared - although it's a mock scared - you can produce a general atmosphere of spookiness which can lead in turn to genuine emotions.  But I don't think that losing points from a sheet can ever really be a scary thing in and of itself - it's too abstracted and cerebral for that.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

That reminds me of the strong division I've observed in groups who enjoy Call of Cthulhu. One camp seems to be very concerned with player fear and generating uncertainty and spooking among the real people. GMs who excel at this tend to stalk around the table, act weird, and use music or other props, and the players are extremely oriented toward "feeling" their character. Perhaps the ideal is that the loss of SAN generates uneasiness in the player, not because he or she might "lose his character," but because it is supposed literally to translate from mechanic to real-person emotion. I've run the game in this fashion with extremely limited, perhaps no success; I understand that skilled play of this sort is highly recognized and valued in the CofC subculture.

The other camp seems to be semi-humorously, semi-dramatically collaborative in the pastiche element - "Oh, boy! I lose more Sanity? Cool! 'Why sir, how dare you impugn my honor? Take that!' You realize I'm talking to the coat-rack." Games of this sort don't have to be non-stop funny, although I've never played in one without a tad of comedic elements ("No! I'm too rich to die!"). I've played in many and they are almost always a cracking good time. However, "horror" only applies to them in the sense that it applies to Frighteners or The Addams Family.

I hope that pointing out these two applications as separate things can keep us from getting bogged down in what losing Sanity must mean or be in playing Call of Cthulhu.

Best,
Ron

[Lisa Padol]

I'm kind of resigned to CoC being less popular than I'd like and to there being badly written scenarios out there. I just want to know what I can use in my games and how to tweak things so that I've got something playable and long term.

This is actually a goal of a couple of other CoC GMs I've talked to. One, who turned me on to the game over 10 years ago, said that in a previous CoC game, the GM essentially powered up the PCs. That is, they were part of an organization, some kind of occult adventurers' club, and underwent a ritual where each PC had his or her POW drop to about 8, but each point was worth about 3 for spell casting / resistance purposes. At this point, on the magical plane, you've got a PC who can hold her own against moderate to low-high level sorcerers. The game lasted a while, and there were, I believe, only 2 PC deaths. One, he said, was very dramatic, a PC dying while saving the rest of the party from one of the major oogly beasts -- I think a Hound of Tindalos.

The other thing he told me is that PCs must know when to retreat. Said Hound can wipe out an ordinary CoC party. Now, this is what we had, an ordinary party. So, he didn't send Hounds against us. No, he said we could read as much Lovecraft as we wanted. His scenario had nothing to do with any of what we read. It was nicely horrific, to do with a sort of hidden world inside a mountain, some nasty monstery stuff, but mostly human bad guys, even if they had sorcery or weird weapons. He'd used Louis L'Amor's The Hidden Mesa as his source, rightly confident that none of his players would ever have deigned to read anything by that author. And, when the PCs were outgunned, he did let us all make idea rolls to figure out that a strategic retreat was in order. Statistcally, one of us was almost sure to make it.

I didn't find the game completely to my tastes, however. I do not like having to worry about things I get too much of in day to day life -- like having to count every last dollar. I did not really like the random results we seemed to be getting with SAN rolls. But SAN was really a side issue.

I took the power up the party approach in Cthulhupunk, with interesting, if not always appropriate, results, and I through a lot of things into the mix. But if one isn't doing it that way, there are still a few tricks that can be used.

First, make damned sure you read any modules you're using, cover to cover, 2 or 3 times. This sounds really obvious, but don't skip this step. You will spot where the problems are going to be, where opportunities specific to your group are, what you'll need to rework, what you can add. One scenario I'd been lusting to run for years I finally ran a year or two ago -- after months of build up for a relatively minor adventure. The build up was establishing the NPCs as people the PCs had known before the adventure.

See, one problem many groups will hit is that CoC adventures are written for, well, investigators. This problem the PCs have no personal reason to give a damn about is dropped in their laps, because they investigate stuff for a living, especially Weird stuff. Um? What if they don't? Look at who's doing the dropping -- can the PCs be the relatives who go to the investigators instead? Is there another hook?

The adventure I ran first, At Your Door, is designed so that the guy hiring the investigators can hire on whim -- he might think there's an astrological confluence that means he should hire, say, a phony psychic. But you could also make the PCs part of this guy's company. Or rivals. Or friends of the guy whose disappearance starts the whole chain of events.

Also, watch the power levels here. There are some fine low-powered Arkham County scenarios. Use them, and mingle with non-mythos period adventures for a Classic Cthulhu game.

Look for the good stuff. If the adventure really relies on the PCs making their mythos roll, scrap it or change it. Masks of Nyarlathotep is a bear to run, but it is almost perfect in its linkage of clues. There is precisely one place it breaks down, but everywhere else, the chart of what clue can be found where and what it links to is exquisite. Much of the Arkham County stuff works well, as does At Your Door. John Tynes' stuff tends to be deadly, but gorgeous.

For basic knowledge and perception, I usually have all PCs in the area roll, and give the info I want to release to whoever rolled the best. If I want the information to go out there, it will. Perhaps it takes the PCs longer to find it. Perhaps they ask for help -- when one of my players, Sam,  agreed to play Peter Venkman (as modified for the Cthulhupunk world I created), I gave the PC Library use at 30%. I gave the PC Find Helpful Librarian at 90%.

Why are the PCs together? How does the group function? John Redden from Alarums and Excursions told us about playing in Masks of Nyarlathotep. The GM was upfront about the high mortality rate. Instead of powering up the PCs, he told each player to come up in advance with a way to introduce a new PC to pick up from the old. IIRC, John came up with some kind of fighting religious order, keeping in touch with whichever PC he was currently playing.

Basically, for anything longer than a one shot, consider the shape of the campaign you want, and make sure the PCs fit it -- or get the PCs and shape the campaign to them. Power them up or keep them connected to a quick source of replacement PCs or keep the opposition powered down. Do not use a module that relies on the one PC with a 5% mythos roll making that roll -- change the module or don't use it. Read all modules carefully to see where your group will break them. Do this for adventures you're creating as well.

-Lisa

[Comte]

If I may I would like to point out a problem with COC that has been over looked and detrimental to the game.  I also feel that it is part of the problem with the hobby in general and it links into some of the things that have been discussed previously.

First some background.  HP Lovecraft did something increadble with his writing.  He had people convinced it was real.  His writting caputed the imagination of the reader in such a way that the boundarys of reality and fiction broke down and people thought it was real.  Real to the point where people went hunting for copies of the necronomicon.  Heck it was real to the point where someone felt that they could make some decent money by fordging a copy of it.  Oddly enough it is still in print and available at Barns and Noble.  There are several reasons for this amount of beleif, one of the biggest being the vauge interconnectivity between the stories, and the lack of desciption.  

The Necronomicon floated around Lovecraft's stories like a bad omen and when a copy of it was present the reader knew that strange and terrible things were afoot.  It made frequent apearences but it was never described really.  For the most part its contense remained a mystery which were only vaugly hinted at or eluded to.  

The same tactic was done for the description of the beasties in his stories.  True in some of his earlyer work some of the creatures are overly described.  He himself admitted the mistake but in the end it just served to heighten the imagination when it came to things that he didn't describe.  His undescriblable horrors became that much worse when it was known what some of them looked like.  

Basicly what we had here was the perfect set up for a Roleplaying game.  We had a mythos that was lightly defined at best, perfectly open to imaginitive interpretation and expansion.  There was a loyal and devoted fan base who pretty much have kept the game alive all these years, and the room for lots and lots of supliments so a profit could be easly turned.

Where it went wrong is the day they decided to crush the imaginative aspects of the game.  The day someone decided to illustrate, stat, describe, and define all the previously undefinable horrors is the day the game died.  At least in my opinion.  They took everyone's individual ideas of what the mythos creatures were and how they worked and streamlined them into the desighners personal vision.  By robbing the books of thier inhently imaginative properties they made it several billion times harder to do something intelegent with the game.  

I think by and large COC would make an exclent GNS game if they had just left the bloody monsters undefined.  For that section they could of had a a pleasently cross referended list of appearences and nothing more.  Then the imaginitive aspects of the mythos would still be in place more or less.  After all the work's greatest strength is it's ability to force the reader to imagine which is part of what roleplaying is all about.  By leaving mythos beasties undefined it can allow the players as well as the gm to provide thier own brand of horror.

When I say Cthullu or Yog-sothoth we should all see something diffrent inside our heads.  Idealy it should be something capable of inspiring fear and terror within us.  Creatures that are so vast that they fill our eyesight from a hundredmiles away and just by imagining a horror you can feel your sanity starting to erode away because the excistense of such a thing is just so horrilbe.  That is what we should be seeing.  Not the plushy who is sitting on top of my monitor right now wearing a santa hat.  It most certanly shouldn't be that jumble of stats sitting next to its illustration in the book.  

As a bigger issue statting out monsters would be something interesting to look at.  What if the AD&D monster manual was nothing but pages and pages of descriptions with no pictures, stats, or even names.  What would become of the game?  The amount of detail that goes into the creature descriptions shows a remarkable amount of work on the part of the desighners of COC.  They put everything together from a wide number of diffrent sources, still I think the game would of been better served left up to the imagination.  Its hard to imagine sanity loss when you read the description of something and can say well that's not scary.  Or worse as the gm when you read the description of something and a player corrects you.  For a horror game something is definatly lost there.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Comte,

I suggest that the transition you describe occurred long before role-playing became the hobby we know. I think that Lovecraft became "Lovecraftiana" (a.k.a. The Mythos) and Lovecraft-pastiche became the desired output, due to the fandom centered around August Derleth and his novels. This fandom included a lot of people like Robert Bloch and other horror/pulp intelligentsia of the 1950s.

Most Call of Cthulhu source material and play is strongly reminiscent of Derleth's writing, both fiction and about Lovecraft, and of the massive amount of homage-fiction produced by many, many other writers who entered into this fandom.

So I think the RPG represents a particular expression of this ongoing form of fandom, without much need to look for new transitions or effects of the game itself. In other words, the codifying you're pointing to had already mainly been accomplished (verbally and categorically, if not actually in Hit Points and SAN penaltieis) long before the game was written and played.

Best,
Ron

[GreatWolf]

That reminds me of the strong division I've observed in groups who enjoy Call of Cthulhu. One camp seems to be very concerned with player fear and generating uncertainty and spooking among the real people. GMs who excel at this tend to stalk around the table, act weird, and use music or other props, and the players are extremely oriented toward "feeling" their character. Perhaps the ideal is that the loss of SAN generates uneasiness in the player, not because he or she might "lose his character," but because it is supposed literally to translate from mechanic to real-person emotion. I've run the game in this fashion with extremely limited, perhaps no success; I understand that skilled play of this sort is highly recognized and valued in the CofC subculture.

This is exactly how I ran CoC when I was running it.  If I may say this without sounding too proud, I was quite good at it.  At the same time, I know that I Drifted the rules quite a bit to support the immersion of the experience.  In fact, I'm fairly sure that the SAN rules were the only ones that I really used.  Most other rules were dumped as needed to support the experience.  Of course, tt was generally understood that the goal was to enjoy being scared as a player, not a character.  Therefore, the ditching of rules wasn't a violation of the Social Contract.

In terms of your analysis of SAN loss, I think that Ron and Ralph are right.  SAN was indeed a "mental hit points", with the added effect of providing prompts to the characters.  ("You just lost 7 SAN points.  Figure out how you're going to go crazy.")

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[Callan S.]

It might have already been said, but isn't the easy answer with skills to consider them not pass/fail but pass/even better pass.

Eg, even if they fail you say 'Well, since you failed I can only give you this much info'. If they pass, they get a sweet little bit more that makes things that much easier.

Its also possible to lie and get away with it easily here. 'I can only tell you this much because you failed', when you actually go on to tell them everything anyway.

[simon_hibbs]

Interesting thread, as ever, but my experiences of playing Call of Cthulhu fall into two very different categories.

I have played in very long running CoC campaigns. The first was as a student. The gam,e had been running for 2 years before I joined, I played for 3 years and it continued for another year. That was an 1890s game. The second game was a 1920s game and had also been running for several years before I joined it for 6 years, and ran for another 4 years. A 12 year game! I don't think anyone plaing it at the end had been in at the beginning, including the GM. It was a club game and ran every (well, most) wednesday night for that period.

The first campaign did include a fair bit of character turnover, much more than the second which was more action adventure oriented for the most part but on those rare ocasions when the Mythos intruded it could be pretty dangerous.

The other kind of game is short-run games, basicaly one-off scenarios or mini campaigns. These I think tend to be more successful at capturing the feel of the game, but to be fair I think that's true generaly for short run games in any genre. In a short-run game you get the chance to invest more creativity in a shorter amount of time, while campaign play makes it hard to sustain a high level of creative input for such an extended period.

Maybe the group dynamic is different in the UK though. CoC has always been realy big over here, and while D&D dominates, I get the impression that domination has never been as complete here as it is in the US, so perhaps my experiences aren't typical for the hobby as a whole.


Simon Hibbs

[GB Steve]

At any rate, IMO Call of Cthulhu stands with GURPS as what I consider to be the two most damaging games to the development of the hobby (precisely because of their popularity).  GURPS because it derailed the trend of customized game systems linked to their genre in favor of "universal mechanics" leading inevitably to the whole "system doesn't matter" dogma; and Cthulhu because of what it taught a generation of gamers on how story telling gaming should be (helpless players participating in a collosal illusion).

It what sense do these games damage the hobby? They are the hobby!

The hobby is what is popular, it is D&D mainly and WoD. It is a little bit of GURPS, Rifts and CoC. Pretty much anything else is a footnote. Most people don't even consider what you call dogma when they play their games, they just have fun in whatever way they usually do. And who is to say that they are wrong?

As for "participating in an illusion", all roleplaying games are an illusion, when it comes down to it, somebody has to make a choice as to what works or not in this shared illusion and whether that is a player or a GM, it doesn't really matter.

In any case, Couldn't you consider a game of CoC to be played under the premise of "what will you do when the end comes?"

As such, Call of Cthulhu is a heroic game of standing against the inevitable.

[Valamir]

Hey Steve, pretty late to the party on this one.  Check out this companion thread which is already up to 3 pages on this very discussion.

I will say that your emphasis on what this hobby "is" is exactly what I'm talking about.  It has nothing to do with premise, or GNS, or Dogma, or whatever else you think I'm talking about.

When you say "They are the hobby"...I agree, and that's not a compliment.  The hobby ain't all that healthy.

[GB Steve]

Ah well, there you go, I missed the turn up the side canyon and went thundering past with the posse. The other thread's too long for me now so I'll just say my piece here and be done.

I think the hobby is doing fine, it's just not the hobby you want it to be. And truth be told, me neither, but I'm happy to lurk in the undergrowth.

What happens to great game designers? They can carry on as a hobby supported by some other kind of work, or they can drop the hobby and go into the real design money, computer games. That's nothing to do with unhealthyness, GNS or anything else like that, it's to do with economics.