Disconnect Between Designer's Intent and Player Intepretation

[Celebrim]

Dont do extended campaigns as they dont make sense. Characters more likely to go insane (even armed to the teeth) than die from being ripped apart, but even that's still common. The point isn't to go around killing monsters, I've never really gotten that as intent. Its akin to old school D&D where combat is a failed state. You want to avoid it if possible.

That may be what the intent is, but in fact the rules don't support it. In the rules and examples of play, combat is basically unavoidable. At some point the investigators end up confronting the horror. Most scenarios don't provide examples of defeating the horror without some combat, and the rules do not call out the need for the keeper to do so. As such, it turns out the play loop of building character ill-suited to combat and being thrust into combat is the only thing that does support the idea where combat is a failed state.

As soon as the players break that loop, then they are actually playing the game as written and not as intended. And as for extended campaigns not making sense, well the rules and examples of play strongly suggest you are wrong. The rules are built to provide for the characters winning a scenario, possibly gaining back much of the sanity they may have lost as a reward. And CoC is famous for its published examples of play in the form of long form campaigns like Mountains of Madness, Horror on the Orient Express, Masks of Nyarthotep, etc. that seem to encourage long form campaigns and which in practice will be more like Investigators as well-trained military commandos than they will be like doddering antiquitarians if the PC's are going to survive for any length of time.

(And frankly, I've been playing D&D since the early '80s and I have no idea what you mean by old school D&D being a game where combat is a failed state. I can think of many games where that is true but D&D is not one of them.)

Now I think things like Delta Green, Cthuhlu Pulp, Cthulhu Tech, etc.. are designed to give the extended campaign experience, but they move away from base assumptions.

Again, I see them more as embracing the rules as written and the play as it actually happens.

Did I miss the chapter that says folks in the 1920's had easy access to B.A.R. Rifles, sub-machine guns, and grenades?

Absolutely you did. In the 1920's in the USA there were basically no federal gun laws. Automatic weapons like BAR Rifles, submachine guns, etc. could be ordered without any sort of restriction through mail order catalogs or purchased from local general stores. Many localities still had people go around routinely armed. My Grandfather, who grew up in this era, carried a .45 Colt Peacemaker until he grew so feeble, we had to take it away from him. Dynamite was somewhat more restricted, but still could be easily purchased by most landholders for ground clearing purposes or disposing of pests like beavers. I'm not sure about grenades off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been that hard even to buy a box of grenades. The main thing that prevented widespread ownership of these weapons was solely the relative lack of wealth. People had to buy necessities. They couldn't afford guns as a hobby. If they owned guns, they owned them for practical reasons. So most people owned relatively simple and unspecialized weapons, but literally anyone could upgun to military weapons if they wanted to. (That said, there was basically no difference between the battle rifles carried by common soldiers and medium game hunting rifles.) Local jurisdictions differed on whether you were allowed to walk around with them under "States Rights" theories (still used by say New York State to justify its modern gun laws), but basically everywhere you could own them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't see one good reason why it wouldn't count! Bring it on.

I'd argue that happened with D&D3e, and probably some incarnations of Shadowrun then; when you see the early responses of the D&D3 designers, they clearly expected certain things to happen in play, whereas the frequent (I'd go as far as to say usual) way things played out were very different.

I've seen this quite a bit with games that had limited playtest outside their designer(s)' group(s). There's a game called Wicked Pacts which is an urban fantasy game focused on mages. Its quite a good little game in its way. But there are certain problems with it that are clear to me are a consequences of the fact the author only playtested with his local group and with pre-gens at cons (and I know this is the case because I'm fairly good online friends with him) so he didn't get to see the implications of the potential starting money and how it broke his magical materials economy.

 

[payn]

That may be what the intent is, but in fact the rules don't support it. In the rules and examples of play, combat is basically unavoidable. At some point the investigators end up confronting the horror. Most scenarios don't provide examples of defeating the horror without some combat, and the rules do not call out the need for the keeper to do so. As such, it turns out the play loop of building character ill-suited to combat and being thrust into combat is the only thing that does support the idea where combat is a failed state.

As soon as the players break that loop, then they are actually playing the game as written and not as intended. And as for extended campaigns not making sense, well the rules and examples of play strongly suggest you are wrong. The rules are built to provide for the characters winning a scenario, possibly gaining back much of the sanity they may have lost as a reward. And CoC is famous for its published examples of play in the form of long form campaigns like Mountains of Madness, Horror on the Orient Express, Masks of Nyarthotep, etc. that seem to encourage long form campaigns and which in practice will be more like Investigators as well-trained military commandos than they will be like doddering antiquitarians if the PC's are going to survive for any length of time.

(And frankly, I've been playing D&D since the early '80s and I have no idea what you mean by old school D&D being a game where combat is a failed state. I can think of many games where that is true but D&D is not one of them.)



Again, I see them more as embracing the rules as written and the play as it actually happens.

Not my experience, but you are correct the rulebook accounts for many of these things.

Absolutely you did. In the 1920's in the USA there were basically no federal gun laws. Automatic weapons like BAR Rifles, submachine guns, etc. could be ordered without any sort of restriction through mail order catalogs or purchased from local general stores. Many localities still had people go around routinely armed. My Grandfather, who grew up in this era, carried a .45 Colt Peacemaker until he grew so feeble, we had to take it away from him. Dynamite was somewhat more restricted, but still could be easily purchased by most landholders for ground clearing purposes or disposing of pests like beavers. I'm not sure about grenades off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been that hard even to buy a box of grenades. The main thing that prevented widespread ownership of these weapons was solely the relative lack of wealth. People had to buy necessities. They couldn't afford guns as a hobby. If they owned guns, they owned them for practical reasons. So most people owned relatively simple and unspecialized weapons, but literally anyone could upgun to military weapons if they wanted to. (That said, there was basically no difference between the battle rifles carried by common soldiers and medium game hunting rifles.) Local jurisdictions differed on whether you were allowed to walk around with them under "States Rights" theories (still used by say New York State to justify its modern gun laws), but basically everywhere you could own them.

While federal regulations were loose to non-existent, many states regulated these weapons heavily. There actually were quite a bit of restrictions on these types of firearms, and even regular weapons' such as saw off shotguns at the time. What you post here is not accurate.

 

[Thomas Shey]

(And frankly, I've been playing D&D since the early '80s and I have no idea what you mean by old school D&D being a game where combat is a failed state. I can think of many games where that is true but D&D is not one of them.)

By the 80's it was drifting away from that pretty strongly, but early on there were massive counterincentives to getting into combat except when you absolutely had to, as there were all kind of mechanical and structural things to make that go wrong, whereas only a very small amount of your experience came from combat (most of it came from gold). So if you could get the treasure and get out without ever engaging with the opposition it was an absolute win, whereas getting into combat was seriously risky (it was not difficult for the first few levels to lose characters regularly).

 

[prabe]

when you see the early responses of the D&D3 designers, they clearly expected certain things to happen in play, whereas the frequent (I'd go as far as to say usual) way things played out were very different.

I'm curious about specifics, here. Can you share, or at least link?

 

[Celebrim]

While federal regulations were loose to non-existent, many states regulated these weapons heavily. There actually were quite a bit of restrictions on these types of firearms, and even regular weapons' such as saw off shotguns at the time. What you post here is not accurate.

I'm the sort of guy that actually looks up the statutes of a State from the 1920's so that I know whether or not a player could obtain a concealed carry permit in the State of New York, etc.

 

[Blue]

I've never ever played CoC this way. Ever. Though, I can totally see the D&D playloop drift making players want to do this.

The Pulp CoC game I'm in has drifted harder into murderhobo then any D&D game I've played since AD&D. Like half the characters don't even have regrets about killing captured cultists in cold blood.

 

[prabe]

The Pulp CoC game I'm in has drifted harder into murderhobo then any D&D game I've played since AD&D. Like half the characters don't even have regrets about killing captured cultists in cold blood.

This is consistent with my experience of the game, as well.

 

[Celebrim]

By the 80's it was drifting away from that pretty strongly, but early on there were massive counterincentives to getting into combat except when you absolutely had to, as there were all kind of mechanical and structural things to make that go wrong, whereas only a very small amount of your experience came from combat (most of it came from gold). So if you could get the treasure and get out without ever engaging with the opposition it was an absolute win, whereas getting into combat was seriously risky (it was not difficult for the first few levels to lose characters regularly).

I feel like this is at best a half-truth. Yes, it is easy for the first few levels to lose characters regularly, but at those levels characters are also easy to replace. Yes, if you could get the treasure without fighting that would be a win, but the trouble is that there are almost no published examples of play that show that as a viable option (even among early modules such as the A or G series) nor do the guidelines in 1979's DMG give us examples of dungeon construction that make combat avoidable and non-viable. Yes, paths are provided to evade pursuit or to negotiate with non-hostile creatures, but you don't get XP for that. Yes, it was necessary to be tactical and thoughtful in how you approached combat, but that's not the same tng. The normal D&D cycle for as long as I've been playing was always, "Kill things and take their stuff." Killing things was often the only viable way to take any things stuff, especially at low levels where thievery was basically impossible. And even then, most character concepts weren't particularly stealthy.

Yes, it is true that a majority of your XP would come from treasure, but a tiny minority of treasure could be taken without a fight of some sort. And what percentage of your treasure came from XP depended very much on the campaign you played. If you took the rules for treasure in the Monster Manual as gospel, only about 2/3rds of your XP would come from treasure. Published modules made treasure much more abundant than the rules for treasure types, but again, published modules - especially Gygaxian modules - as examples of play strongly privilege combat as the means of victory.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm curious about specifics, here. Can you share, or at least link?

Not any more. But there were statements made where they expected D&D3e to play, outside of the specific issues of having a longer level range and more options, rather like AD&D2e. Needless to say, the difference was far more profound than that.