Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
Merged Merric's more recent thread with my older thread. Ninja'd you!
Call of Cthulhu reviewed by Sandy Peterson
- Thread starter Plane Sailing
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Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
I think CoC is a game which can have two very different styles. I've only ever played it as one-off convention games, where typically there is a dire situation and the question is whether these innocents abroad will be able to save the situation before dying horribly (or while dying horribly). Great fun!
For a campaign though, I can't see that working as well as the kind of situation you guys mention, with nuanced investigators who want to avoid sanity loss .
Cheers
P
PaulofCthulhu
Guest
Maybe have a listen to some of this? Horror on the Orient Express Game Audio Recording - CthulhuWiki
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Celebrim
Legend
Well, honestly, with its hit points and conventional attributes, conventional damage dealing, added critical system, added skill systems, variant spell system, and slightly more complex derived abilities in many ways CoC is a straight forward fantasy heartbreaker. Where it differs from them is that CoC seems to know where it is going and stops there with a system that still manages to be elegant. In fact, in many ways its more elegant than D&D itself. I still think it has the most elegant experience system of any RPG game I've seen or played.
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
Remember of course that CoC is basically a simplified Runequest; RQ 2 is still my favourite rpg rules of all time.
Runequest, CoC, Stormbringer etc don't especially appeal to me for campaign play, because of the austerity of their PC build rules.
But with pregens, for one-shot play, they are (in my experience) terrific games. The PC just leaps of the character sheet, and the action resolution mechanics support the sort of intense, high stakes conflict that a Stormbringer or CoC one-shot should be focused on.
Very, very elegant system.
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
Interesting - my longest campaigns have been Runequest ones.
I always felt that their first stormbringer rules lacked somewhat because they were based on the looser 'basic roleplaying' rules which they had for CoC. However, the fact that in these games, RQ2 particularly, you had pretty much infinite choice in the combinations of weapons, armours, skills and spells you would use... in which way did you find this 'austere'?
Was it that in the dragon pass genre everyone were variations of 'general adventurers', perhaps eventually specialising as priest or rune lord, rather than being able to create from scratch the classic D&D classes?
RQ2 was much richer, and not only in the rules for the PCs but also (especially) the interlocking cults - it meant that characters developed in particular skills or weapons and spells and also developed in relationships with one another as a result of cultic affiliations, which added to a roleplaying depth which never existed with simple LNC/GNE axis in traditional D&D.
Altogether it made for compelling 'farm boy to rune priest lord' adventures, with the kind of organic growth of characters over time which is more common in classless, skill based systems.
Cheers
I always felt that their first stormbringer rules lacked somewhat because they were based on the looser 'basic roleplaying' rules which they had for CoC. However, the fact that in these games, RQ2 particularly, you had pretty much infinite choice in the combinations of weapons, armours, skills and spells you would use... in which way did you find this 'austere'?
Was it that in the dragon pass genre everyone were variations of 'general adventurers', perhaps eventually specialising as priest or rune lord, rather than being able to create from scratch the classic D&D classes?
RQ2 was much richer, and not only in the rules for the PCs but also (especially) the interlocking cults - it meant that characters developed in particular skills or weapons and spells and also developed in relationships with one another as a result of cultic affiliations, which added to a roleplaying depth which never existed with simple LNC/GNE axis in traditional D&D.
Altogether it made for compelling 'farm boy to rune priest lord' adventures, with the kind of organic growth of characters over time which is more common in classless, skill based systems.
Cheers
Achan hiArusa
Explorer
Okay,
The basic one is CoCd20 which using Sanity hardening to give the characters a level of immunity to insanity (if I ran a D&D/CoC game I would only give it to Paladins and remove their Immunity to fear).
Kult combines sanity with increasing levels of power (much like the powers checks of Ravenloft) with a good path and an evil path. As you become more insane you start to warp both yourself and reality until you become more than human.
Unknown Armies breaks madness up into four scores: Violence, Unnatural, Helplessness, and Isolation. And if you make your madness check you become hardened to one of these triggers and you begin to lose your empathy.
Trail of Cthulhu uses another score called Stability. Only after stability is gone do you start losing Sanity. It mimics cultists who are quite mad but can appear to function in normal society.
Don't rest your head uses Sanity dice. These can add to any die roll you make, but if you have more successes on the Sanity dice, then madness predominates and you go insane. Sanity dice are required when doing anything superhuman (especially psionics).
And of course, Dread uses the Jenga tower.
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G'day, folks!
Sandy Petersen has continued with a "review" of Masks of Nyarlthotep. Less of a review than some personal anecdotes, you may still find it interesting.
Oh, and he's also covered The Spawn of Fashan. Never heard of it? You're probably not alone...
Cheers!
Sandy Petersen has continued with a "review" of Masks of Nyarlthotep. Less of a review than some personal anecdotes, you may still find it interesting.
Oh, and he's also covered The Spawn of Fashan. Never heard of it? You're probably not alone...
Cheers!
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When I describe RQ/BRP games as austere, I've got in mind the "truthfullness" of the character sheet - there is the skill with its percentage chance beside it, and there are no tricks or knacks to amplify this (nothing like Feats in 3E, or the gonzo magic of D&D that can often provide automatic successes in place of needing to rely on skill rolls) and no subtleties of action resolution to exploit (contrasting with clever use of OB/DB splitting in RM, or a group of players doing clever things with the initiative sequence in 3E or 4e).
It's just about confronting the situation, with only those percentage chances to fall back on. And you can't even metagame your PC's development, because of the "use and roll under" skill gain rules. So the percentage chances themselves are generated through this very austere procedure. (And if I recall correctly, Stormbringer and at least some versions of RQ have Traveller-style lifepath PC building, don't they? - rather than initial point allocations.)
This is not at all a criticism of the system - just an attempt to describe the impression I have of it. Does it make any sense?
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