I would love to try Call of Cthulhu. I have the boxed starter set and went through the tutorial solo adventure, but I don't know anyone else interested in it. For just the reasons you mention here (plus I am just a huge Lovecraft fan).
In my solo run-through, both times, trying different tactics, my character died a horrible death. I think many players would be frustrated by this. Instead, my reaction was -- this is awesome.
Dying an horrible death (or going insane) is part of the expectations you should have when you play CoC :-) It is (in my opinion) not a game very suited for campaigns, but it is fantastic for one-shots. I really hope you find some one to try it with, and as I said - it is a game that is perfect to spend one Saturday evening playing!
It can be very difficult, but Cthulhu can be done well as a campaign if the person running the game knows that they're doing and is very good at reading the group, if you can get a beat on what the players are likely to do in any given situation, you can make the spiral into insanity feel more natural and draw it out for a creepier experience.
I tend to avoid a lot of the pre-written adventures for that reason, plotting out a custom story allows me to have greater control over the pacing of the horror so that it starts off more subtle and gradually builds up at a pace that matches how many sessions the group intends to play the story for... usually I aim for around 6-8 sessions for a short Cthulhu adventure.
It's definitely a game where you really need to start off by telling the players that any combat is likely to be fatal and that it is highly advisable to flee from any danger or horrifying event.
Dying an horrible death (or going insane) is part of the expectations you should have when you play CoC :-) It is (in my opinion) not a game very suited for campaigns, but it is fantastic for one-shots. I really hope you find some one to try it with, and as I said - it is a game that is perfect to spend one Saturday evening playing!
I think if one has read a lot of Lovecraft (I am currently 2 short stories and a novella away from having read all of his fictional works), one would naturally expect the have one's character die or lose his/her mind.
There are a number of published campaigns, so clearly it is possible to run a campaign with it -- but my understanding is for most of these campaigns, one is recommended to have at least 2 backup characters. One person who has GMed all 6 of the published campaigns, some of them more than once, said that few campaigns ended with everyone playing the same character they started with, but all but one of them ended with at least one starting PC managing to survive to the very end. In fact he argued this made those campaigns "not Lovecraftian enough" because "too many characters survived." LOL...
Again most players would probably not like that but as a Lovecraft fan, I say, bring it on...
I've had a few games where one or two of the characters survived at the end of the campaign, however their characters did suffer some serious mental damage and ended with multiple phobias and manias which they needed to get treated.
When I start a new campaign with a group, if I'm going to tell the players to make more than one character I will advise them make those backup characters somewhat closely connected to the main one. That way if someone vanishes or dies, that'd give the backup character a reason to get involved and start investigating the area... making the backup a family member is often a good choice, especially a parent, as I feel they would be very incentivised to find out the truth of what happened.
Paranoia made me a much better DM. Interacting with players as friend computer, just misconstruing every little thing they say or do in a funny way it makes you think on your feet so so much more then I think any other roleplay system, you have a rough idea of a mission, set piece situations listed down, a long list of experimental equipment a load of forms (gotta have that paperwork) and then just let chaos commence and accept your along for the ride and just react to the players. I advise all DMs to just try running a one shot and you will learn so much.
It's definitely a great training exercise for a DM wanting to learn how to manage a chaotic group... if you can keep a storyline progressing at a reasonable pace in Paranoia then you can do it in any system.
I would love to try Call of Cthulhu. I have the boxed starter set and went through the tutorial solo adventure, but I don't know anyone else interested in it. For just the reasons you mention here (plus I am just a huge Lovecraft fan).
In my solo run-through, both times, trying different tactics, my character died a horrible death. I think many players would be frustrated by this. Instead, my reaction was -- this is awesome.
Dying an horrible death (or going insane) is part of the expectations you should have when you play CoC :-) It is (in my opinion) not a game very suited for campaigns, but it is fantastic for one-shots. I really hope you find some one to try it with, and as I said - it is a game that is perfect to spend one Saturday evening playing!
It can be very difficult, but Cthulhu can be done well as a campaign if the person running the game knows that they're doing and is very good at reading the group, if you can get a beat on what the players are likely to do in any given situation, you can make the spiral into insanity feel more natural and draw it out for a creepier experience.
I tend to avoid a lot of the pre-written adventures for that reason, plotting out a custom story allows me to have greater control over the pacing of the horror so that it starts off more subtle and gradually builds up at a pace that matches how many sessions the group intends to play the story for... usually I aim for around 6-8 sessions for a short Cthulhu adventure.
It's definitely a game where you really need to start off by telling the players that any combat is likely to be fatal and that it is highly advisable to flee from any danger or horrifying event.
One of the most emotional roleplaying moments was in a Cthulhu game, one player played a women who’s children and husband had gone missing. Turned out they had been kidnapped and sacrificed. We got revenge on the human elements of the cult, barely survived the horrors they had unleashed and then got out. The character discussed our next plans, said her goodbyes and thankyou s for finding out what had happened and then we all went to bed. The next morning the player described as we found her, hangin, in the room. A combination of the effects of knowing the truth and not having her children or husband had ripped her over the edge.
Never run Cthulhu because I don’t think I could quite get the horror elements down when we played it, I think it is something I would be tempted to run now. I do like the idea of just hinting enough as opposed to throwing a load of monsters at the players from day 1.
OD&D, AD&D and 2E prior to 5e: I haven't really returned to the old stuff (because if my copies are still around they're in a storage unit on the other side of the country) but I like playing 5e ... as a DM I do get a little bored underwhelmed by some of the mechanics (conversely "seriously?" was my response when a player went for an off hand attack bonus action).
But Beyond D&D (rimshot), I'd have to say my best game system experience had to be Leading Edge Games' Aliens adventure game which was basically the Aliens universe supported by a watered down version of Leading Edge's Phoenix Command tactical combat system. After doing some crunchy work creating our characters, our first adventure had a combat encounter, the first round (I think we're talking like three seconds in game) took about 45 minutes to resolve and I still remember saying to one character "Well, you're not "dead dead" but the sort of gunshot wound to the heart you just took, you'd have to have been shot in the operating room of a trauma center on one of the most technologically resourced worlds in the game, with a replacement heart ready to swap in, so you're basically dead." I kid, on the best experience, that injury and the level of detail in the resolution tables actually happened.
I probably played more Cyberpunk (original 2013 Blackbox boxed set and 2020) than D&D, I liked them both, but I missed the original Traveleresque life path to character creation that got dropped for basically point buy in 2020. I liked building characters in Traveller because of the character generation system, where you could actually die during character generation, but didn't like playing Traveller as much. I remember space combat being more like IRL submarine warfare but done at really high speeds and problematic turning around, which was intellectually interesting but if you're playing with folks who want Star Wars...sort of problematic. Back to Cyberpunk, around Halloween and every Friday the 13th we'd try to do a horror one shot, which actually worked (before Cyberthulhu was a thing, but yeah something about the "life is cheap" game mechanics and a Humanity/EMP(athy)/SAN system can pick up and run horror tropes pretty easily).
I liked playing Chill. Good horror game. I never owned the rule books but I seriously question the "innovation" WotC is being praised for with VRGtR when to me, like the Session 0 section in Tasha's, it's really just codifying best practices that have been in gaming for decades (and I have some theories on the "why" behind such publication moves, but that's a digression). With VRGtR I'm even more suspect of the praise since I think Chill actually did write substantially on audience sensitivity... like 30 years ago (another digression on the problem of the hobby's "trade journalism" really lacking a good grasp of the hobby's history and its default to simply recirculate the hype of press releases).
d6 Star Wars was fun. Never played the d20 iterations though understand if I was to look for it, to go for the Saga Edition. Instead of buying some Star Wars Art on May the Fourth, I figured using the same budget to basically binge on the FFG ruleset and sourcebooks was a more constructive purchase. The books are gorgeous, though I'm not entirely happy with the "three games" systems approach (with a lot of identical text on setting in each of the big books), it's basically a good role playing system published through the business model of a war-game, so is what it is, though I wonder if the format is one of the reasons the game is sort of in a sort of limbo in print status. I can't really say much to the actual rules since I've only done some superficial skims. I do like the character options and the skills and specialzation trees. The equipment system seems pretty Star Wars. The narrative dice, I now have a handful of polyhedrals I don't know how to read yet but from what I understand once you learn the dice reading, and it doesn't take that long to learn, the game itself moves pretty quick. Using conventional dice to translate into narrative dice seems like it would drag a bit. So haven't played that system, but I'm enjoying starting to learn it.
I have fond memories of playing Twilight:2000 (original edition, I was curious about the revised edition and Merc:2000 optional universe but never played it) but that game was a suffer fest. The group we played with kept rotating players in and out of it, and every player's first time had a "Well, despite what everyone around you was doing, you decided to act like your PC was in a movie instead of playing Twilight: 2000, so after standing in the clear firing the LMG from the hip and hitting nothing, you've been gunned down. You may be stabilized after the rest of the squad finishes with the threat, though they'll debate how much of a liability a wounded team member may be and casualties have bled to death during the debate in the past" moment. I guess what it comes down to is it was more the folks I played with that led to the enjoyment more than the ruleset.
Never really played it but making anthropomorphic mutant animal warriors from Palladium's TMNT and After the Bomb games was fun. Liked reading the Robotech books too because I was a fan of the show and liked the background, but never really played it nor did I ever get on the Rifts bandwagon.
Further cool systems: Deadlands, In Nomine (not GURPS version).
One of the most emotional roleplaying moments was in a Cthulhu game, one player played a women who’s children and husband had gone missing. Turned out they had been kidnapped and sacrificed. We got revenge on the human elements of the cult, barely survived the horrors they had unleashed and then got out. The character discussed our next plans, said her goodbyes and thankyou s for finding out what had happened and then we all went to bed. The next morning the player described as we found her, hangin, in the room. A combination of the effects of knowing the truth and not having her children or husband had ripped her over the edge.
Sounds like an amazing session, and a quite perfect example of why CoC might not be for every one, but what also makes it fantastic. It's a game where you can "win" (find out what happened to your family), but still decide that your character cannot live with the knowledge. Very Lovecraftian.
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Ludo ergo sum!
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It can be very difficult, but Cthulhu can be done well as a campaign if the person running the game knows that they're doing and is very good at reading the group, if you can get a beat on what the players are likely to do in any given situation, you can make the spiral into insanity feel more natural and draw it out for a creepier experience.
I tend to avoid a lot of the pre-written adventures for that reason, plotting out a custom story allows me to have greater control over the pacing of the horror so that it starts off more subtle and gradually builds up at a pace that matches how many sessions the group intends to play the story for... usually I aim for around 6-8 sessions for a short Cthulhu adventure.
It's definitely a game where you really need to start off by telling the players that any combat is likely to be fatal and that it is highly advisable to flee from any danger or horrifying event.
I've had a few games where one or two of the characters survived at the end of the campaign, however their characters did suffer some serious mental damage and ended with multiple phobias and manias which they needed to get treated.
When I start a new campaign with a group, if I'm going to tell the players to make more than one character I will advise them make those backup characters somewhat closely connected to the main one. That way if someone vanishes or dies, that'd give the backup character a reason to get involved and start investigating the area... making the backup a family member is often a good choice, especially a parent, as I feel they would be very incentivised to find out the truth of what happened.
It's definitely a great training exercise for a DM wanting to learn how to manage a chaotic group... if you can keep a storyline progressing at a reasonable pace in Paranoia then you can do it in any system.
One of the most emotional roleplaying moments was in a Cthulhu game, one player played a women who’s children and husband had gone missing. Turned out they had been kidnapped and sacrificed. We got revenge on the human elements of the cult, barely survived the horrors they had unleashed and then got out. The character discussed our next plans, said her goodbyes and thankyou s for finding out what had happened and then we all went to bed. The next morning the player described as we found her, hangin, in the room. A combination of the effects of knowing the truth and not having her children or husband had ripped her over the edge.
Never run Cthulhu because I don’t think I could quite get the horror elements down when we played it, I think it is something I would be tempted to run now. I do like the idea of just hinting enough as opposed to throwing a load of monsters at the players from day 1.
OD&D, AD&D and 2E prior to 5e: I haven't really returned to the old stuff (because if my copies are still around they're in a storage unit on the other side of the country) but I like playing 5e ... as a DM I do get a little bored underwhelmed by some of the mechanics (conversely "seriously?" was my response when a player went for an off hand attack bonus action).
But Beyond D&D (rimshot), I'd have to say my best game system experience had to be Leading Edge Games' Aliens adventure game which was basically the Aliens universe supported by a watered down version of Leading Edge's Phoenix Command tactical combat system. After doing some crunchy work creating our characters, our first adventure had a combat encounter, the first round (I think we're talking like three seconds in game) took about 45 minutes to resolve and I still remember saying to one character "Well, you're not "dead dead" but the sort of gunshot wound to the heart you just took, you'd have to have been shot in the operating room of a trauma center on one of the most technologically resourced worlds in the game, with a replacement heart ready to swap in, so you're basically dead." I kid, on the best experience, that injury and the level of detail in the resolution tables actually happened.
I probably played more Cyberpunk (original 2013 Blackbox boxed set and 2020) than D&D, I liked them both, but I missed the original Traveleresque life path to character creation that got dropped for basically point buy in 2020. I liked building characters in Traveller because of the character generation system, where you could actually die during character generation, but didn't like playing Traveller as much. I remember space combat being more like IRL submarine warfare but done at really high speeds and problematic turning around, which was intellectually interesting but if you're playing with folks who want Star Wars...sort of problematic. Back to Cyberpunk, around Halloween and every Friday the 13th we'd try to do a horror one shot, which actually worked (before Cyberthulhu was a thing, but yeah something about the "life is cheap" game mechanics and a Humanity/EMP(athy)/SAN system can pick up and run horror tropes pretty easily).
I liked playing Chill. Good horror game. I never owned the rule books but I seriously question the "innovation" WotC is being praised for with VRGtR when to me, like the Session 0 section in Tasha's, it's really just codifying best practices that have been in gaming for decades (and I have some theories on the "why" behind such publication moves, but that's a digression). With VRGtR I'm even more suspect of the praise since I think Chill actually did write substantially on audience sensitivity... like 30 years ago (another digression on the problem of the hobby's "trade journalism" really lacking a good grasp of the hobby's history and its default to simply recirculate the hype of press releases).
d6 Star Wars was fun. Never played the d20 iterations though understand if I was to look for it, to go for the Saga Edition. Instead of buying some Star Wars Art on May the Fourth, I figured using the same budget to basically binge on the FFG ruleset and sourcebooks was a more constructive purchase. The books are gorgeous, though I'm not entirely happy with the "three games" systems approach (with a lot of identical text on setting in each of the big books), it's basically a good role playing system published through the business model of a war-game, so is what it is, though I wonder if the format is one of the reasons the game is sort of in a sort of limbo in print status. I can't really say much to the actual rules since I've only done some superficial skims. I do like the character options and the skills and specialzation trees. The equipment system seems pretty Star Wars. The narrative dice, I now have a handful of polyhedrals I don't know how to read yet but from what I understand once you learn the dice reading, and it doesn't take that long to learn, the game itself moves pretty quick. Using conventional dice to translate into narrative dice seems like it would drag a bit. So haven't played that system, but I'm enjoying starting to learn it.
I have fond memories of playing Twilight:2000 (original edition, I was curious about the revised edition and Merc:2000 optional universe but never played it) but that game was a suffer fest. The group we played with kept rotating players in and out of it, and every player's first time had a "Well, despite what everyone around you was doing, you decided to act like your PC was in a movie instead of playing Twilight: 2000, so after standing in the clear firing the LMG from the hip and hitting nothing, you've been gunned down. You may be stabilized after the rest of the squad finishes with the threat, though they'll debate how much of a liability a wounded team member may be and casualties have bled to death during the debate in the past" moment. I guess what it comes down to is it was more the folks I played with that led to the enjoyment more than the ruleset.
Never really played it but making anthropomorphic mutant animal warriors from Palladium's TMNT and After the Bomb games was fun. Liked reading the Robotech books too because I was a fan of the show and liked the background, but never really played it nor did I ever get on the Rifts bandwagon.
Further cool systems: Deadlands, In Nomine (not GURPS version).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Sounds like an amazing session, and a quite perfect example of why CoC might not be for every one, but what also makes it fantastic. It's a game where you can "win" (find out what happened to your family), but still decide that your character cannot live with the knowledge. Very Lovecraftian.
Ludo ergo sum!