Drifting to R'lyeh: An Autopsy on Call of Cthulu

Introduction

Call of Cthulhu is one of the simplest rules systems around. The Cthulhu Mythos is popular among the members of the gaming subculture. And the published scenario rank IMHO as some the best ever designed for any rpg ever.
One of the first difficulties in gaming CoC is overcoming the resistance to play. CoC has a baleful reputation among rpg gamers. According to WOTC marketing surveys only about 1% of gamers play CoC. The game has the well know rep of being an excercise in futility and unsurvivable (although when I have played the death rate is no higher than that of low level D&D campaigns!). I have had gamers actually CRINGE at the mere MENTION of CoC. So I have learned when bringing the game up to segue IMMEDIATELY to my discussion of how I have drifted the rules.

Why is this? And how has the game survived (albeit barely) in spite of all this?

The Great Sucking Sound is Your Game Being Pulled Toward Illusionism

There are a number of reasons why the Keeper is drawn toward illusionism. These reasons have to do with the fundamental mismatches between CoC rules and the structure of the typical game.
The 'onionskin' structure of the classic CoC scenario is mediated by skill rolls. Penetrating to the deeper levels of the onion requires making skill rolls to acquire the information to do so. The problem is, what happens when Lady Luck is on the rag and your players can't roll their way out of a paper sack? What is the keeper going to do? The sensible keeper will of course maintain a matrix structure to the gathering of information so if your Archeologist can't make his rolls, then the con artist might get the information with his Fast Talk, but what if your whole group is having a bad dice day?

You will be faced with the same problem as all other similarly structured scenarios will. You will be sitting across the table from players who are milling around ,accomplishing nothing and getting more bored and frustrated by the minute.....

The keeper then has to make a choice, if he is particularly rigid he will simply sit there and let them stew...I've seen this happen and it can kill the campaign,much less the game......

Or you will intervene with some game world eventuality which will essentially drop the needed info into their laps. But the problem is that if you do this, what were the skill rolls for? Whats worse some players will figure this out, and then just sit on their hands and try to wait the keeper out and avoid the whole messy business of wandering about the game world gathering the info themselves, and why should they ?

This creates an interesting paradox. Although CoC as a game has a supposed bias against combat, in practice they are the only skills that really matter, in the sense of having real consequences. Miss a comabat roll and you can lose your character! But as I have shown missing the other skill rolles doesn't necessarily have any real consequences in the play of the game.

Player effectiveness
The issue of player effectiveness in CoC is confused. In CoC the basic character stats don't change Hit points in CoC do not inflate like they do in D&D. Sanity is notoriously ablative in CoC. The only real form of sytemic player effectiveness that increases are skill rolls. And as i just pointed out skill rolls don't really matter...
Another bug in the issue of player effectiveness is the Cthulhu Mythos skill.
You would think that this would be a very important skill except that since it sets a cap on sanity, it actually reduces player effectiveness. Since skill rolls themselves are irrelevant the mythos skill is of actually less value than any other skills! Plus to get it you almost always have to contract sanity loss. While it may help tell you what you are up against, it increases the chance you will go nuts when you actually encounter it...

Since mythos knowledge is of little real value, and almost all use of magic entails loss of effectiveness (sanity) the only good way to deal with the problem is load up the shotguns! Once again the 'anti combat' game shows that it really rewards Ramboism (and it's a myth that guns don't do you any good, lesser servitor and independent races come apart under gunfire just about as well as human cultists and constitute the bulk of the mythos encounters.....). The real hidden truth about Call of Cthulhu is that bigger guns are the only real road to increased character effectiveness.


GNS of Cthulhu

Gamist- It is very difficult to play CoC in a gamist fashion. The game has essentially no reward system at all, , virtually no real way of accumulating player effectiveness, in fact the overewhelming tendency is for player effectiveness to be reduced . ' Game Balance', certainly doesn't exist, at least not without extrememly carefull drift by the Keeper. The very idea of metagame min-maxing is a bad joke (other than 'load up on library use and spot hidden). Many of the published scenarios although well written are wildly imbalanced from any gamist perspective and often must be extensively drifted for a player to have any chance of resolving the situation with their skin intact or indeed often at all. (Masks of Nyarlathotep for example).

Narrativist- More than any other aspect, Call of Cthulhu strives to be narrativist. Over and over the rhetoric of the game stresses plot and story over consideration in other issues. The rules do seem well designed to create a particular tone of helplessness and inevitability, and toward that end support a particular theme. (Unfortunately the same thing could be said of a 'Dilbert' rpg...... ) The narrative structure of the game is in fact highly stereotyped, essentially a detectvie story with specialized elements of color and setting. Yet there are no rules for the players as co-authors not even as threadbare a device as 'fortune points'. The universe of Lovecraft is distinctly amoral so moral issues don't seem to make much difference in the play of the game. Put simply the antagonists in the typical CoC game are either completely inhuman or partake of so much inhumanity that few players feel much of a problem with 'dropping the hammer' on them. The actual rules in Coc are prototypically simulationist in content.

Simulationism- CoC is a consumate sumulationist game. The rules are well designed to produce an outcome not unlike that of the (stereotyped) Lovecraft story. And great care is given to the quantification of the game world. But Coc is deceptive with regards to how well it deals with many aspects of Exploration.

Exploration of Color- This is arguably the biggest factor drawing people into playing the game. There are few people going 'Call of Cthulhu? hyuk hyuk thats a funny name, lets play this and see what it's about'! Overwhelmingly people get into playing the game because they have read some Lovecraft and like the color elements he created. The problem with EoS in CoC is that virtually everything you encounter, the lowliest deep one, the weakest spell, the most trivial historical tract, in some cases just the NOISE of something wierd in the attic ,all cause damaging sanity loss! So the more of the color you encounter the more your effectiveness is damaged. As one character in KODT exclaimed 'I've played a lot of K'chooloo and one thing I know is BURN THE BOOKS'. This is pretty good advice for the game but a bitter pill to swallow for someone looking forward to EoCo.......


Exploration of Setting-At first glance CoC looks like it's dominated by exploration of setting (history and location). But in fact call of Cthulhu can and has been played in a wide range of settings. What makes a game 'Lovecraftian' isn't really the setting but the color elements, the gods,the manuscripts, the spells, all of these are readily transportable to a wide range of settings. In essence setting really doesn't matter much in Call of Cthulhu.
Exploration of Situation- Call of Cthulhu is consumately a game of EoSi. After all the players arent' called investigators for nothing. Something is going on somewhere and something has to be done about it, is the invitable model for a scenario.


Exploration of Character- CoC does offer opportunities for EoC but very little real support for it in the game. CoC was one of the first gmaes to support a high level of character customization by allow free choice withing a well developed skill system, and the choice of player skill naturally implied a background which most players relish elaborating on.
The problem develops when this model comes up against the overwhelming concentration on situation. Put simply the game is almost never really 'about' the characters, and virtually any characters will fit so long as their nature makes sense within the situation (ie: if it's an archeological dig, you need archeologists , but any archeologist will do) Usually the well thought out player backgrounds are simply ignored. Sometimes ham fisted approaches to bolting elements of the situation on the character's background are made but this isn't really exploration of character as the same elements can often be bolted onto virtually any character in the game.
Some player find a certain enjoyable type of EoC in playing out the insanities that long time characters almost invetably develop, as well they might as it's the only aspect of character that has a mechanism in the rule other than skills, If only they didn't diminish player effectiveness......
Of course the biggest discouragement to EoC is the game's lethality. Because of this people start to avoid becoming attatched, become more distant, and less interested in actually exploring the character, this tendency gets worse the longer most people play the game (and the more characters they have lost). Since character identification is one of the most important pleasures in rpgs (and one thing that makes them unique among games) this is a telling disadvantage in Call of Cthulhu.

Exploration of system- This is a particularly trivial aspect of CoC because put simply there is so little system to explore! Besides customizing your character in his choice of skills, there is really little else for the player to do with the system.

In short CoC falls into the category of 'Simulationist play in which elements of situation and color are preferentially explored'. Indeed situation and color are so central that quite enjoyable 'Lovecraftian' board games and card games have been created! And virtually any narrativist structure can be made 'Lovecraftian by the injection of the righ color elements. This is, for example,the only thing needed to make a game of 'My Life with Master' or 'Inspectres' Lovecraftian .


The Horror out of Petersen: Why People hate Call of Cthulhu
This is the point of the discussion when the pro-CoC person grumbles about how the game is for 'real' role players and that 'maturity' consists of blandly accepting the limitations I have outline. This rhetoric is personally satisfying but worthless for my purposes.
If we accept the premise that all gaming modes are equally valid so long as they provide enjoyable play then this analysis provides excellent clues as to why the game in fact is so disliked.

Why everybody hates it
It must be extensively drifted to accomodate other GNS priorities, thus it is very easy to be a bad CoC keeper.
It is uniquely poorly suited to the traditional continuing campaign
It runs down violent solutions but the scenarios are mostly unresolveable without them

Why narrativists hate it:
It crossdresses as a narrativist game but is really solidly simulationist
.No player authoring, period
Lethality discourages player identification with character and the game has
no rules to ameliorate this

Why gamists hate it.
No min-maxing
Radically unbalanced
No increase in character effectiveness
Confused issues regarding character effectiveness ,generally
No meaningful reward mechanic


Why Simulationists hate it
Skill rolls look important but really aren't
Supports only Narrow simulationist priorities well (situation and color) and
then punishes you for exploring them (sanity loss).

So we see why CoC in practice is so unpopular. It really does have something for everyone to hate.

Call of Cthulhu is popular in convention tournament play. There ratio of people hosting Coc games at conventions is widely divergent from what sales figure dictate to be the actual popularity of the game. This is because the games disadvantages are a lot less signifigant in one-shot scenarios.

Indeed the question when discussing Call of Cthulhu is 'why has the game lasted so long"? There are several reasons, uniqueness (there have been hundreds of fantasy games but CoC has had few imitators) and the fact that it does cover the color elements quite well. This makes it useful for extracting these elemenst for play in other games. This is the 'secret weapon' behind the viability of the GURPS line and to a lesser extent Palladium. Those setting guides are so good even if you don't like the game they are worth buying.... Plus the better scenarios are enjoyable just as Cthulhu Mythos stories in their own right.

At this point my autopsy of Call of Cthulhu is concluded. Now the next step, taking this cadaver and like Herbert West, sewing on the parts that will make it better.

My first essay on this subject will be 'Cthulhu's Clues: New approaches to information in Lovecraftian scenarios'.

Cheerleading noises! This is exactly the sort of thread I wish people would post more often.

My only quibble: the possible proviso that my anecdotal experience with Call of Cthulhu's popularity implies that it is indeed popular ... in terms of acknowledgment, appreciation, and short-term play. What it doesn't do especially well are "campaigns," and although I'm shy on the details, I'll speculate that WotC's survey was biased toward long-term, high-repeat-buy play. I'll also concede that raw numbers of people involved are perhaps low.

Since I claim that most role-playing experiences are short-term (two to ten sessions), counter to people's intentions or cultural expectations, that would make Call of Cthulhu more popular than the survey makes it sound. I also think that Situation/Color oriented Simulationist play can be extremely rewarding - again, speaking only personally, it's really the only subset of Sim play that I consistently enjoy.

The game certainly does seem to enter into the "screen" of each age group of role-players throughout the hobby's history. The late teens who join our campus club during their first year of college have always all heard of it.

Best,
Ron

b_bankhead wrote: At this point my autopsy of Call of Cthulhu is concluded. Now the next step, taking this cadaver and like Herbert West, sewing on the parts that will make it better.

What a great thread. I'd love to see a series of these. I'd add to the list of things to hate the extraordinarily high Whiff factor of the BRP system. I'd concur that the only attribute on the character sheet in any CoC game I've ever played in that mattered was the caliber of the weapon you were armed with. I also concur that the game works ok for Con play because you either go creepy horror movie (which needs to end at some point) or almost silly parody (at which point everyones laughing so who cares if the system is weak).

Very nicely done!

A few comments or quibbles:

Illusionism:
I'll admit that the book's general GM suggestions and assumptions lead strongly to the situation you describe, in which investigative skills fail frequently and so the GM has to negate their value by letting things continue anyway.

However, there are simple ways around it. For example, a trip to the library might automatically reveal the plot-necessary info (the old Jones Manor is haunted), but useful details can be obtained through successful skill checks (you might learn any of the following: the monster hates sunlight, the monster can be banished with a certain spell and the monster attacks with poison). This is probably still illusionism at work, but at least it hasn't totally devalued skillss, and it paves the way for much more flexible styles.

Gamists:
I think CoC can be highly effective for Gamists with certain expectations (or lack of them). The above example would fit beautifully in a Gamist-style scenario because characters are now better equipped to meet the final challenge.

Anecdotally, I know of a long-term CoC group who played very Gamist. The goal was simply to survive the Keeper's evil plot. It was a given that mistakes would be punished harshly and that PCs would die frequently and horribly, often without warning (thanks to failed rolls earlier). This group thought CoC was the best thing since Paranoia, which they also played regularly. The challenge had little to do with in-game rewards: it was straight up "Can I outsmart or outluck the GM today?" One player's great claim to fame was that one of his PCs survived for six sessions. Another player had such a reputation for using PCs as human shields they always stuck him at the front of the group.

However, this style of Gamist play doesn't appeal to a majority, so your criticisms of CoC in this regards are true for most people.

Number of Players
First off, 1% is still pretty impressive, especially given WotC's market size estimate in the same survey. Heck, I'd kill for 0.1%. I think CoC has a large following of people who use it for the occassional one-shots, whether at conventions or as a substitute game (such as when too few people show up to continue the usual campaign). Whether these folks showed up in the survey or not, I'm not sure.

b_bankhead wrote: An Autopsy on Call of Cthulu
(...long theoretical analysis...)
So we see why CoC in practice is so unpopular. It really does have something for everyone to hate.

I agree with John, CoC is one of the most popular and succesful roleplaying gams ever. It has run to 6 editions and hardly changed at all during that time.

The games that I've enjoyed the most are the ones where we've forgotten our dice and acted out the roles in a mixture of sim and narrativism, one eye on the premise of "what would you do faced with certain death" and one eye on making the characters work.

When I run CoC, I tend towards humorous games (Camberwick Green, CashCowSium) or pulp. My group like the action games so I give them action Cthulhu and combat roles don't really have that much effect, even in my d20 game. It's SAN rolls that count. For a view on SAN, I'll refer you to TUO # 14/15 and Steve Hatherley's article on why the mechanic is less than satisfactory, and why, given every knows what kind of game CoC is, that you don't really need it anymore.

I don't think we should get hung up on the empirical question of whether CoC is a popular game or not.

I think the original poster's analysis hits a lot of the limitaitons of the game on the head. If the game is an empirical success in spite of them that's important - especially, from a theoretical point of view, to understand why - but it seems like the GNS analysis itself was spot on, to the degree that I understand GNS so far anyway.

Let's not discuss the empirical popularity of the game - which I tend to agree with the last two posters is higher than the original poster suggested - but instead try to figure out why it works in spite of what appear to be massive theoretical limitations. (Limitations some of which one could have articulated, albeit not as clearly, without GNS terminology.)

Hi there,

My argument was and is that Call of Cthulhu is a very solid Simulationist-facilitating game design with incredibly high focus on Situation - to the point of being perhaps the high point in methods for creating Lovecraft pastiche.

I also think this is reflected in its astounding persistence in the role-playing landscape.

All of the above has been stated previously in my essays "GNS and other matters of role-playing theory" and "Simulationism: the right to dream."

Nothing about the theory or its application to Call of Cthulhu suggests that the game would be "unpopular."

Best,
Ron

Disclaimer: I've never even been invited to play a CoC game, I don't recall seeing what's being the cover (and at the moment can't envision the cover), and have an interest in Lovecraft that is purely theoretical--nothing about his work strikes me as frightening.

However, I do see an answer that was missed in one point in the analysis:

b_bankhead wrote: The keeper then has to make a choice, if he is particularly rigid he will simply sit there and let them stew...I've seen this happen and it can kill the campaign,much less the game......

Or you will intervene with some game world eventuality which will essentially drop the needed info into their laps. But the problem is that if you do this, what were the skill rolls for? Whats worse some players will figure this out, and then just sit on their hands and try to wait the keeper out and avoid the whole messy business of wandering about the game world gathering the info themselves, and why should they ?

Three tangents

First of all I think that a commitment to Sim exploration of Colour may well include taking a perverse delight in watching your character go mad: you're revelling in genre elements.

Secondly there's no problem in mystery scenerios with failed rolls. Have the characters discover the information second time round, but in disadvantageous situations.

For example, the players fail their Library Use rolls and don't know to go looking at the Old Marley House. But the Inhabitant of the House knows the investigators are on the trail and sends one of its minions to firebomb one of the character's houses and leave a warning to Stay Away From the Old Marley House. The character's failed roll doesn't deprive them of the information - it puts them in a worse situation. The cars gone, and Jimmy's got third degree burns all up his left arm is no one's definition of success but the game won't stall out.

Thirdly, CoC is popular with many prominent gaming figures - Hite and Tynes, frex - which means it will tend to punch above its weight in terms of visibility and influence.

These are, like I said, tangential. Like most people, I have players in my circle of friends who baulk at the mention of CoC, and would be interested in seeing articles which make the game more widely aceptible.

H'm,

I'm getting a little confused about the goals of the thread, and I'm beginning to think the whole "how many people like it" issue is something of a red herring.

What I'd prefer not to see: "Let's make Call of Cthulhu more GNS-generalized so more people will like it!" I consider this approach flawed in a variety of ways.

What I'd prefer to see: "Let's see if we can take Lovecraftiana and apply some game design ideas that facilitate different modes of play from the one that Call of Cthulhu does so well." That makes a lot of sense to me, and it's not a novel idea; several older Indie Game Design threads did just that. It also puts aside the uber-goal of increasing CoC's usage.

Best,
Ron

The gloomy assessment in the initial post of CoC's appeal to players with Simulationist preferences is, I believe, another instance of the deep fracture in the Sim domain between Exploration as "finding out pre-determined stuff about Situation, Setting, etc. through play" vs. Exploration as "participating in the creation of Situation, Setting, etc. through play." Those satisfied with the former will likely accept the limitations of scenario-based adventures, up to and including Illusionist presentational techniques. Those looking for the latter will likely chafe at those limitations.

To drift the game from one side of the Sim coin to the other, the fulcrum has to be the Sanity mechanism. I'd seriously consider reversing the associated causality altogether. Instead of the character experiencing something horrifying and loseing SAN, I'd trigger the SAN loss in some other way (e.g. occurring after a certain number of successes, with a random factor) at which point a participant must narrate a horrifying event to justify it.

- Walt

Walt you and I must be on the same wave length. I had been pondering what would make CoC more enjoyable a game for me and I think a complete revamping of the SAN mechanic (as well as a less whiffy resolution system) would be what I'd want to see.

Consider: loss of sanity should be an accepted, encouraged goal even one actively sought out by players seeking to recreate a mythos story. Instead CoC uses it like a hammer to punish careless or aggressive play. Its a kind of punishment that many CoC fans don't mind because they are interested in the color of it, but its still structured as a negative thing to be avoided.

SAN instead should be player empowering, not simply character depowering. Taking a hit to SAN should involve an opportunity for player narration like The Horror Revealed from MLwM.

Instead of a gain in Mythos triggering a loss of SAN...reverse it. Allow players to cash in SAN to acquire Mythos. How much more effective an investigation tool (from a game flow perspective) is that vs. "Make a research roll, you failed, you discovered nothing". The player wants to read through a musty old tome to discover some way to reseal the even slavering creature thing before its completely freed...fine...that's what CoC is about. How many SAN do you want to sacrifice? Some minimum SAN to find an answer, with more SAN giving more information (like: reading far enough to get to the part where it warns you not to cross the streams...).

Combine the two and let the player have input into the ceremony and nastiness required to make it work.

That would be far more interesting to me then the usual CoC "get on the train and look at the scenery" adventure.

Ralph, yeah, I was thinking about The Horror Revealed mechanism in My Life With Master too (but I wasn't completely confident in the comparison because I don't own the game). However, it should also be quite possible for the GM to be the one to narrate the horrifying revelations. For a closer to traditional play structure, the GM could do so all the time. (At least, I left that possibility open by saying a "participant" does so.)

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).

- Walt

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).

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).

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.

Ian Charvill wrote: 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.

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

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

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.

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

Ron Edwards wrote:
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.

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.

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

Valamir wrote: 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).

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.

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.

This may be apropos of nothing, and I know Ron's addressed it already, but I had a comment about the idea that 'nameless horrors' lose much of their punch when they're statted out with helpful illustrations.

I just wanted to point out that I've seen this sort of thing dealt with in quite a different manner, in the _Dying Earth_ RPG, based on Jack Vance's series of fantasy novels. In those books, the characters are routinely threatened by horrific creatures such as deodands, pelgranes, erbs, grues, and leucomorphs. (I love those names; evocative while revealing absolutely nothing.) Only one creature, the deodand, is described in detail in the source material, as a jet-black carnivorous humanoid. Another, the pelgrane, we know has large wings and a taste for human flesh, but that's it.

What the RPG does is to give vague capsule summaries of the creatures' abilities, along with *several* descriptions and theories about their behavior each. The idea being, no one's ever actually survived an encounter with most of them, and so the information is unreliable. (Two entries, for instance, use the same picture along with a caption indicating the latest research says this is definitively what that creature looks like. The dissonance is amusing.)

I'm not saying we should send someone back in time to rewrite post-Lovecraft Mythos stories, and the CoC RPG, to match this style, but I think it's something to consider when crafting scenarios or playing any horror game. Information about a Nameless Horror actually can build suspense, when the information is vague or even self-contradictory.

Andrew Norris wrote:

I'm not saying we should send someone back in time to rewrite post-Lovecraft Mythos stories, and the CoC RPG, to match this style, but I think it's something to consider when crafting scenarios or playing any horror game. Information about a Nameless Horror actually can build suspense, when the information is vague or even self-contradictory.