Failure is not an option

As I stated in my essay 'Drifting to R'lyeh' most skill rolls in CoC don't matter much. The design of the prototypical CoC scenario makes play grind to a halt if the player's can't make their skill rolls, this forces the Keeper to hand the information out anyway, thus devaluating the whole conept of information gathering skills.

Soon after starting to play CoC it became abundantly obvious that the reason that we did this is that the flow of information in the game is like the flow of the blood in the body. Stop it and the whole works dies. Your heart doesn't pump when it makes a 'cardiac skill roll' the thing has to work ALL the time, and for a CoC scenario to stay alive the information HAS to flow all the time. It's not a bonus for good dice rolling. Which is why you have to give it out whether they roll good or bad.

Ian Charvill wrote:

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.

Hey,

I think you may have read to much into my suggestion, in terms of punishing the players, but that's neither here nor there. I do have a question though:

Where does the adversity come from in the investigation phase: I take it that you're saying that it doesn't. That is to say that the only function of the investigation phase is to generate colour? The investigators have to be succesful in their investigation for everyone to have fun, sems to be your starting point.

Hypothetical: no one's using their skills wisely and they've almost run out of investigation points. The final parts of the investigation will cost more than the points they have left: what the system call in this situation?

Hypothetical: no one's using their skills wisely and they've almost run out of investigation points. The final parts of the investigation will cost more than the points they have left: what the system call in this situation?

Ian Charvill wrote: Hey,

Where does the adversity come from in the investigation phase: I take it that you're saying that it doesn't. That is to say that the only function of the investigation phase is to generate colour? The investigators have to be succesful in their investigation for everyone to have fun, sems to be your starting point.

Hypothetical: no one's using their skills wisely and they've almost run out of investigation points. The final parts of the investigation will cost more than the points they have left: what the system call in this situation?

In the original thread, I'd thrown out this suggestion:

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 a post on investigative games in general, but I think it applies to the thread, as CoC is simply the most common investigative RPG.

Caveat: I love to run investigative games. I cannot remember the last game that I ran that was not an investigative game in some variety (that's not actually true, but it was a damn long time ago.)

I do not think that there need be radical, Karma based investigation techniques (although those who enjoy them can do so.) I think that this problem is entirely one of scenario design, and the illusion that prose fiction is at all like gaming.

In HP Lovecraft, the (lone) protagonist follows a single trail of clues to his doom, possibly saving the world and/or going mad in the process. It seems that this is the only possible way that the information could have been uncovered, and if it had not been the scenario would have dudded out (the world ends or nothing happens -- either is dull.)

This is doomed as an RPG design, because an RPG is not authored by one person, and often includes fortune-based success/failure mechanics. The following are very important mystery design scenarios:

1) No single piece of information is vital.
In other words, no Old Tome in the library that Must Be Found. Perhaps similar tidbits can be extracted from the Creepy Old Groundskeeper, the Kidnapped Cult Victim, or even the Reclusive Author. Perhaps it is Inscribed on the Ancient Stone that Can Only Be Seen in Dreams. This is not necessarily illusionism -- these don't need to be the same pieces of information, they merely need to all be information which can advance the plot.

2) There is never a single path to any piece of information. This is similar to the previous, and really more of an extrapolation thereon.

3) Even if the scenario is not progressed by the PCs, it continues to progress on its own such that more information is revealed. In short "make sure things stay interesting." An example might be a hideous book which tells you how to make zombies.. This has many possibilities
a) If the PCs find the tome and burn it, it becomes "thank heavens no unscrupulous scientist found that." But what if one did...
b) If the PCs find the scientist and stop him, it is "Thank heavens we stopped that madman before he unleashed Unspeakable Horror Unto the World. But what if they fail / can't find him...
c) It become "investigate the creepy claims of dead relatives returning and track them to their source." But what if the PCs are dense / inept and can't do this.
d) It becomes "night of the living dead" survival horror, trying to stop the source of all the hordes of dead rising up from their graves. If they fail here, they probably die. But it's still been a long strange trip.

All of these are fun games. Moving from one to another is not a "failure" as a play group or as a GM.

So, in short, I think the whole thing comes down to the wild, screaming differences between plotting a prose story and plotting an RPG. I do both on a semi-regular basis, so I can at least claim experience on my side.

yrs--
--Ben

You know I bumped into this problem with another game I was running in a similar vein. Essentialy the players missed a major clue and all the sudden my campain was dead in the water. Fortunaly it happened towrds the end of the night so I was able to save face and give myself time to think. First of all I realized a couple of things, there is a whole bloody world circulating around the PCs. My NPC is this really cool badass and he dose not need the PC's in order to do something. Thier presense is unessisary for his actions. So the bad guy wins. It happens and it just gives the players something more painful to deal with later. After all more people than just the PC's can possibly have a vested interest in the outcome. For example other cultists might need a book that is being used...or materials, or even the location. Someone might of noticed something odd and the police could of been called and the whole group could of been arrested. In fact all the sudden it can turn into a mad dash by serveal interested forces to get ahold of the book in question. Then there could be the added problem of a police station gone insane.

Anyway besides, so the players screw up. Is it the end of the world? If so just don't make it instant. Since the players are gonna go insane and die they can watch the planet go with it. It could be a new unexplored avenue of play. Eitherway, world events do not start or stop with the players. Presumably the earth still turns without their presense so just because they screw up dosn't mean that someone else won't. Even Indiana Jones needs lucky break sometimes.

Another possibility is to get people to make such rolls, then award the information to whosoever made the best success. Makes that person worthwhile for (presumably) having invested in Library Use (to use a Cthulu example) or Spot (to use a D&D one) and means the game can keep going.

If the rolls are all so crap that you just can't justify this, mitigate it to partial success, meaning they take some extra time or do extra legwork or something.

If you need things to go in a certain direction for things to work, this is a good way to get them to do so.

Hi all:

Let me preface this by saying I love CoC - for many years it was pretty much my only game. But I also loved b_bankhead's essay and thought much of it was spot on. And I think that people's natural desire to stick up for a game they love might be leading some to miss the point of what that first post said.

There is some good advice in this thread for GMs (or Keepers) who want to play CoC better without changing it. But I wonder if people see that the advice being given here in many ways goes directly to prove b_bankhead's original point.

He said that CoC games tend towards Illusionism, in particular because Investigation rolls don't really matter; the need to keep play moving forces the Keeper to dispense all the necessary clues anyway.

Much (not all) of the advice that people have offered to correct this problem has amounted to: various ways for the Keeper to dispense the necessary clues. (!)

"If the players don't get clue a, make sure they get clue b. Or move clue a so they do get it." -- That's time-honored Illusionism. I believe it's known around here as All Roads Lead to Rome. It works, it's not an invalid way to play, but it is exactly what the original essay and the original post in this thread said: failure in the investigative phase is not really an option.

"Award the clue to the person who rolled best." Another variation on the above, one that makes it even more obvious that the players don't have real power to affect things. So all clues are always given out, and all we're really rolling for is bragging rights.

I'm really intrigued by the idea of letting players trade Sanity for knowledge--a resource-based investigative mechanic--it seems to me like it would be supported by the genre, it would keep attention on what we love about CoC (and the original essay was dead on here, too--it's all that great great mythos color), and I think it would be hella fun to play.

There are probably other ways to breathe new life into the investigative RPG--but to me, honing the Keeper's Illusionism skills is not the way to go. (Your Madness, of course, May Vary.)

Rob

Hi, Rob. On the whole, a good post. But I take personal issue with it, because I don't think my advice is particularly illusionist. Not stopping the game because of problems is not Illusionism, it is the opposite thereof.

Rob MacDougall wrote:
"If the players don't get clue a, make sure they get clue b. Or move clue a so they do get it." -- That's time-honored Illusionism. I believe it's known around here as All Roads Lead to Rome. It works, it's not an invalid way to play, but it is exactly what the original essay and the original post in this thread said: failure in the investigative phase is not really an option.

Ben Lehman wrote:
BL> I never said anything close to All Roads Lead to Rome. In fact, I tried very specifically to point out the differences between my suggestions and this type of play.

Say, to keep the zombie book example from above, the players miss all the clues about the Dark Tomb in which the Book is Contained. Do they get thrown any bones? Nope. Do they "find it anyway?" Nope. Does the book auto-locate to some place that it is easier to find? Nope.

All that you need to assume is that there is a world outside of the PCs -- a world full of people who might be interested in such a book. All it needs to do is (quite reasonably) fall into their hands. Bang. Adventure starts again. Is the road still going to "Rome" (a big showdown in the tomb with Unspeakable Horrors.) Nope. Now its going to Carthage (a showdown with mad cultists in their secret encampment.) Perhaps it will even take a right turn to Damascus.

--Ben

I'm going to just sound a brief note of incredulity: of all the solution's suggested the original one - especially with the modification that the skill used doesn't matter - is probably the most illusionist facilitating.

I would suspect the way to avoid this would be to make it out in the open: everybody at the table knows that it they're just contributing colour to a fixed end-result:

That they discover the clue or clues that they are meant to.

Which merely exchanges a participationist technique for an illusionist one.

Now, my guess is what everyone is actually saying is that if you set up an adventure to have a specific clue train that people need to ride to get to the end, then there are a variety of techniques that can be used to make that fun. Most people have suggested illusionist techniques. Suggesting participationism instead is not a revolution it's a half-turn at best.

To nail my own colours to the flag: I'd tend much more towards Comte's view. Cthulhu is a horror game: player failure is not the same as deprotagonization because in the source material failure, madness and death are part of the protagonist's role.

As for Mr. Lehmans post , I must confess to simply not understanding it. The whole point of dispensing the information is that unless you do so nobody will know that they are supposed to go to Rome, Carthage or anywhere else, or how to get there.

So suppose some other NPC group gets the book. You've just moved the same problem to a different place. Now they need to find information about this new group, what they are doing and so forth, BANG! back to square one in the investigation.....so you make the book 'fall into their hands' , laboratory reagent grade illusionism at work.

b_bankhead wrote: As I stated in my essay 'Drifting to R'lyeh' most skill rolls in CoC don't matter much. The design of the prototypical CoC scenario makes play grind to a halt if the player's can't make their skill rolls, this forces the Keeper to hand the information out anyway, thus devaluating the whole conept of information gathering skills.

Ben Lehman wrote:
BL> Okay, when one person doesn't understand what I'm talking about, I can take offense. When too people don't, it's my fault for not explaining things clearly.

What I read in this thread is essentially looks, to me, like this:

"In all mystery stories, the investigator moves along a string of clues until he reaches a final showdown. Since any success / failure RPG (and, I would say further, any RPG where players have decision making power over most of their character's actions) will clearly fail at generating this exact plotline, we should just admit that the whole thing is a set up, speed through it in some fashion to get to the real meat of the game, which is the final showdown."

But there is a problem here. While I agree that the standard RPG will fail to produce exactly this plotline, I think that the investigation, the tension, the Not Knowing What Is Going On is the heart of a good mystery story. So the above solution is unsatisfying to my tastes. Further, I run investigative stories quite often without running into above mentioned problems in any way. So what am I doing that's different?

BL> You seem to assume that any investigation roll will, absolutely and completely, fail. Okay, let's work from that assumption.

Nonetheless, the game continues to progress interestingly. In the beginning (Book buried in Tomb), there are whiffs of some ancient Evil, but the PCs can't find out much about it. Then (Antagonist Evil Cult finds Book), they begin to see evidence of cult activity, but can't track it to its source. Then (Antagonist Evil Cult Starts Using Book), their dead relatives start to come back, but they can't figure out why. Finally (Squamous Horror Contained In Book Is Unleashed), all the dead are rising, the sun has gone black, and they are fighting to survive in an post-apocolyptic, zombie filled wasteland. If they fail to notice that this last part is happening, this is because they are all playing characters who have no sensory perception whatsoever, in which case there isn't much that the GM can do.

Ian Charvill wrote: I'm going to just sound a brief note of incredulity: of all the solution's suggested the original one - especially with the modification that the skill used doesn't matter - is probably the most illusionist facilitating.

I would suspect the way to avoid this would be to make it out in the open: everybody at the table knows that it they're just contributing colour to a fixed end-result:

That they discover the clue or clues that they are meant to.

Which merely exchanges a participationist technique for an illusionist one.

To nail my own colours to the flag: I'd tend much more towards Comte's view. Cthulhu is a horror game: player failure is not the same as deprotagonization because in the source material failure, madness and death are part of the protagonist's role.

Mike Holmes wrote: Just for the record, I want to pose another sort of CoC play that contradicts this. Really Gamist CoC. In that sort of play, the monsters are just D&D monsters, and if you fail to find the clue, then the scenario is over, you lose. I'm not inventing this style, I've played in such games. That's right, the big bad doesn't ever appear unless you're good enough to look in the right places. This works "best" with a locational scenario, where it's not really up to the luck of the player rolls, but physical investigation.

Mike

I'll admit right up front that I've never played CoC or read much Lovecraft, but I was considering a slight augmentation to the original post's system suggestion.

If the information being given out is taken as a guarantee, then the protagonization may be able to come in the form of how the information is gathered. One way, if I read the original post correctly, is to simply have a single effort pool, base costs for the most relevant type of info-gathering and higher costs for less-related types of info-gathering.

Another way is to make each skill its own effort pool, so to speak. For example, if you want to gather information by performing an autopsy, spend an "autopsy" point and gather the secrets. If you want to get the information through physical intimidation, spend an "intimidation" point and gather the secrets. If effort points are depleted, or if the character is forced to gather information in a manner for which she has no relevant skills, she must spend SAN in place of effort points.

b_bankhead wrote: Actually illusionism is where the fact of player choices being irrelevant is NOT known(otherwise it wouldn't be an illusion...!). Illusionism is exactly when it ISN'T in the open. My proposal is exactly that is doesn't pretend that the scenario's investigative phase is anything but color. This is explicit to all concerned given how the mechanic works.

Once the investigative phase is complete there is still plenty of opportunity for failure in the confrontational phase. Plenty of occasion there to get your head bitten off. Player failure is not an option in the INVESTIGATIVE phase because player failure there is boring. Failure IS an option in the confrontation because it's exciting. Failing your library use roll in the Miskatonic U reading room is boring. Failing your shotgun roll when raiding the cult ceremony in the catacombs isn't.....

Ian Charvill wrote:
Sure, which is what I was saying: it's a participationist - i.e. illusionism without the illusion. It's similar to certain styles of White Wolf campaign. What your PC vampires do doesn't matter because the metaplot is going to play out the way the metaplot is going to play out and all the players provide is colour on the way

It stops Cthulhu being a game about investigating the supernatural and makes it about the final confrontation with the supernatural, which is an absolutely valid design choice, and I look forward to your endgame mechanics.

I'd like to suggest a form of play that I don't think I've seen suggested on this thread yet (or else I'm blind). It's a gamist approach, and a bit odd, but I think its a way to avoid illusionism and maybe even inject a bit of fear, but at the cost of short-circuiting narrative structure.

The point of the investigative phase is to prevent there from ever being a confrontational phase. If you know where the cultists will meet for their horrid rite, you can rig the place with dynamite and save yourself from having to face whatever they are trying to summon. In a sense, to win the scenario you either have to win the investigative phase or the confrontational phase, the later being a whole lot harder and with much greater risks of death or madness. Varying degrees of success in investigation may not remove the need for a confrontation but might give you a better chance of surviving it, but it should be possible to completely avoid it. This induces some urgency in the players as they are aware of this aweful fate towards which they are being slowly drawn, and their actions to avoid it become quite meaningful. All the while they are getting hints and whispers of what's to come (brushes with mythos critters, struggles with cultists, etc), sapping them of sanity and hp. The investigative phase definitely doesn't have to be safe.

And if they fail? They probably croak, flee (abandoning those they were trying to help), or go mad and the next batch of investigators can try to pry clues from their insane babbling in the asylum. And unless you've built up the scenario as a Save the World thing, you don't even have to wreck your campaign. Lots of Lovecraft's stories end poorly for the protagonist without ending the world. So the cultists summon a shoggoth? It eats them, ravages the town and the nearby countryside, eliciting bizarre accounts on the news, and then leaves for its own inscrutible reasons, because The Stars Aren't Right Yet. Failure gives you a dress rehersal for the apocalypse, and maybe someday, when the Keeper's ready to wrap up the campaign, it'll be for real.

And all of this for the low, low price of locking your inner narrativist in the closet while you play (this goes triple for the Keeper, he has to be willing to abandon the fireworks he's got planned for the end).

Alex

b_bankhead wrote: This could work but only if the players have a very limited range of places to look ( I once played in a scenario on an ocean liner, this premise would work in that kind of environment)
Hmm Locational scenario sounds like jargon for 'dungeon crawl' to me.

The precise reason that dungeon crawls work as gamism is because there really is no investigative phase to botch. The monsters jump out like the animatromic beasties in a carnival spook house, which is what a scenario like this would resemble(adn would make a good slang term for it). Most D&D fans would be pretty mad if they had to make search rolls just to find some monsters to beat up, and even madder if they couldn't!

Again failure is an option only if it isn't boring. Losing in this kind of gamism would be.

b_bankhead wrote: On a more practical level , are you so committed a gamist that you would be satisfied to drag your cheetos and mountain dew half way across the county to some guy's house and have your night of Call of Cthulhu end there?

You see CoC is trying to capture the quality of a style of narrative, it is striving to be narrativist. And one of the less discussed aspects of a truly narrativist game is that <snipped the intersting bit of the paragrpah>

And that goes for all horror stories. They never fail to find the monster. (and if they do it comes looking for them...).

You know I was thinking about this thread the other day. It reminds me of a thread we had awhile ago discussing player deaths and how disruptive they were to game play. The main problem of the thread is when dose the GM allow the player to re-enter the game. By and large the main problem wasn't the issue but the inflexablity of the gm's to alter thier story to accomodate player blunders. I remeber feeling the same sense of "nothing is going to be accomplised here". I don't know the game seems so set in its way, its almost like there is a formula for doing it.

Someone suggested bringing the monster to the player. I also disagree with that. My sugession was simply altering the events so that the stakes are uped and the investigation phase can be tried again. This time the danger is slightly scaryer. However, that dosn't invalidate the game it just gives the players a second or third or fourth chance. Is that really so bad? I mean just change the story. It isn't made of stone. There is no reason to end the game/world just because of a couple of bad rolls. I find the idea silly. I also think that if there is concern over the players not bothering with investigation because the gm will just hand it to them is also silly. If the players don't enjoy that part of the game to the point where they will cheat/weasle out of doing it then maybe it is time to discuss how to change the game better, not force the players to do things they don't want to.

I don't know I come from a very limited player base. So I tend to try to make them happy because I can't just swing by the player store and pick up new ones.

I think my 'replace fail/pass with pass/greater pass' must be too simple a fix to discuss.

Noon wrote: I think my 'replace fail/pass with pass/greater pass' must be too simple a fix to discuss.

I've heard it called 'dramatic failure', eg if the group fails to find the secret way into the base, some monsters step out of it (on a hunt) and the players find it that way...after some drama.

But really, what's the point. Most CoC characters are usually quite proffesional or skilled. It seems to actually go against tone for them to go to a library and come away with as much as a child might. Surely they'd come away with more than that?

Personally I only see failure/failed rolls as a dramatic build up, a drum roll before the 'ta da' of a pass.

However, if a fail stops you from moving on and getting to any 'ta da' or anything else for that matter, it's not forfilling its purpose.

I suppose the other purpose of failing skill rolls is to ground players in suspension of disbelief. Failure happens in RL, ergo it should happen in the game. But personally, I've never seen many movies where they concentrate on RL facets like sitting on the toilet, sleeping comfortably or watching TV quietly. But a failed pass here forces you to concentrate on it, as it stops the show. Its a strange story focus that game mechanic causes.

Really, the idea of a CoC character finding out a lot of info at a library but is still missing one important piece, seems to fit the genre to me. More than a CoC character going to a library in a story, then coming out saying 'nup, this really had no bearing on the story since I've got nothing'.

I do like dramatic failure...failure generates more drama (and the drama helps remedy the failure). But the GM will have to insert it every time a failure happens, and may be hard pressed after several times to do it without having a subtle CoC game a little over full with drama/action.

Actually, I just finished playing a CoC one-shot over the weekend. Having scanned through this and the Drifting to R'yleh thread ("http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8459"), I kept many of these points in mind in order to observe how these issues came into play in our group.

Essentially, I found most everything that b_bankhead said turned out to be true for our group.

A couple of failed skill tests early on led to a logjam for the Narrator. She was really stumped. She was running from a scenario and I could tell, from her frantic page-turning, that a logjam had occured. From the players' side of the table, I found many of my fellow gamers were pleased. They had averted the scenario through ignorance and, thus, saved their precious Sanity and Hit Points.

Gaming the mechanics of Cthulhu actually, IMO, resulted in play that ran *counter* to the source material. I'm a fairly big Lovecraft fan, however, and I did not intend for H.P. to go down like a chump.

By acting out the role of a Lovecraftian investigator and doing the things that investigators do in the stories, which we all know run counter to good sense, I (almost single-handedly) got the game back on track. I took the plot-bait and followed the story to its inevitable conclusion, despite the protestations of my fellow gamers. Eventually, I too ran across a failed skill roll at a crucial point in the story. The Narrator politely advised me to ignore that skill roll and proceeded with the story. I got to ignore a couple more skill rolls too that evening.

From the efforts of myself and another player who also jumped on the "Let's Die and Lose Sanity" bandwagon, we played through the entire scenario dragging 5 or so protesting gamers all the way. Those of us who pursued our demise with tenacity were involved in the story and pivotal (somewhat) to it. Those of the group who boarded themselves up in a safe room and spent their time counting bullets and making molotov cocktails were not. The more gamist oriented players later complained that they didn't have enough to do, which was ironic because the spent the entire session avoiding conflict.

At the scenario's conclusion, the Big Bad was brought low not by my investigative skills or by my Cthulhu Mythos but, rather, by a Chain Gun. He took 121 points of damage and died. Thus ended our evening of Cthulhoid horror. It was very Rambo. Stallone would be proud. I think Lovecraft would appreciate the joke.

It's worth noting that, when I ran Call of Cthulhu adventures in the late 80s, early 90s, they were rather spooky affairs but I never EVER used the rules. I kept track of each player's hit points and Sanity. The only stat the players had were their occupation, their wealth and...well... that's about it.

They never rolled. We didn't use dice. If your Occultist was trying to find x, y, z in a Library, it was likely they found it. I narrated the effects of Sanity loss (rather than tell the players outright). The players narrated what their characters did and how they reacted. It was freeform and diceless. It was also infinitely more terrifying than last weekend's session (which had a humorous mood akin to Paranoia).

I'm not sure how one could get CoC to work out with the existing rules. Sure enough, if you stat out Cthulhu someone's going to try and kill him. I suspect some modification of my old diceless approach or some modification of a game like The Pool or My Life With Master might work out. But the rules as written, IME, support the game in the exact same way as b_bankhead describes.

Scripty wrote:

I'm not sure how one could get CoC to work out with the existing rules. Sure enough, if you stat out Cthulhu someone's going to try and kill him. I suspect some modification of my old diceless approach or some modification of a game like The Pool or My Life With Master might work out. But the rules as written, IME, support the game in the exact same way as b_bankhead describes.

Hey Scripty

Couple of questions that would really help orientate a response:

What scenerio was run - a prewritten one or one the GM made up? If a prewritten one, what was the title?

From the players' side of the table, I found many of my fellow gamers were pleased. They had averted the scenario through ignorance and, thus, saved their precious Sanity and Hit Points.

Ian Charvill wrote: What scenerio was run - a prewritten one or one the GM made up? If a prewritten one, what was the title?

Ian Charvill wrote: How many of the players had played CoC before? What was the general play experience of the group (mostly mainstream games, indie stuff, naming some systems would be a real help here)? You mentioned passim turtling behavior from the other players - have they shown similar tendencies in other games?

Ian Charvill wrote: You said you and one other player got into the Lovecraftian spirit. Do you and the other player have different gaming backgrounds to the rest of the group, or are you all pretty much the same, gaming-history-wise?

Ian Charvill wrote: Lastly, how experienced in the GM? Has she run much Cthulhu before?

Ian Charvill wrote: Damn, that's more like an interrogation than a couple of questions, but I'd be interested in the answers.

Marco wrote:
I sounds like my experiences weren't standard--but the question posed is, IME, pretty simple: don't base the adventure on a roll continuing and don't set up the situation to be arbitrarily terminal early on (i.e. a big fight with a tough monster as an opener)

....

-Marco

Scripty wrote: From the efforts of myself and another player who also jumped on the "Let's Die and Lose Sanity" bandwagon, we played through the entire scenario dragging 5 or so protesting gamers all the way. Those of us who pursued our demise with tenacity were involved in the story and pivotal (somewhat) to it. Those of the group who boarded themselves up in a safe room and spent their time counting bullets and making molotov cocktails were not.

John Kim wrote: The question is how the game compares with the same group using different mechanics. You mention that this group has played using The Pool, I think. How does play compare? Can you extrapolate what this same scenario played with The Pool might come out like?

Scripty wrote:
In other games, it often seems this group's M.O. it to break the session by turtling. Typical D&D games involve having to yank the players around by the neck most of the time.

Essentially, the players seemed to be turtling because they *knew* what Call of Cthulhu was about, IMO. They interpreted "winning" as making it through the most games with their Health and Sanity. Therefore, they were not curious about anything, left the area at the first sign of wierdness, wished out loud for failed skill checks, and one even rejoiced because he determined his character was illiterate (and thus could not lose Sanity from reading Mythos texts). Where, in the Window game, the group was playing to the genre, I found them to be "gaming the system" in Call of Cthulhu. Presumably, one could speculate that this may have been because there was very little system to game in The Window.

Scott

I agree broadly, that there are examples of very bad mystery scenario design in the Call of Cthulhu ouvre. It's strikes me that it would be interesting to anatomize such a design - to look at a specific scenerio that had lead to the whiff and dead end pattern that's being cited.

I've come to the conclusion that in order to enjoy Cthulhu as it stands you have - the players have - to buy into into a particular style of play which I would guess fall into two specific camps: functional solve-the-mystery gamism and sim, exploration of colour. These two styles may be helped by specific scenerio design and minor drifting of the rules.

This requirement to buy in either - depending how you look at it - limits the market or defines it.

I don't buy the turtling behaviour as the fault of CoC, though. Unless someone wants to argue that turtling didn't exist before Cthulhu hit the scene or that turtling became much more common because of Cthulhu I'm not sure there's much mileage there. Turtling is a desire to play gamist coupled with a refusal to Step-on-Up.