Disconnect Between Designer's Intent and Player Intepretation

[Thomas Shey]

I feel like this is at best a half-truth.

Think so if you want, but its very clear from the way people talk about having played around the original designers that was how they expected it to work; and it was kind of trivial to not only lose individual characters but whole parties early on at the bottom levels. Yes, you still had to get into combat occasionally, but it was abundantly clear that Gygax and company considered combat (especially at all fair combat) the thing you did when you absolutely couldn't avoid it and still get things done.

 

[James Gasik]

Going back to the V:tM disconnect, I think the most telling mechanics here are Golconda and Diablerie (as much as you can call Golconda a mechanic), and how Humanity itself functions.

So by maintaining a high Humanity and dumping points into your Virtues, it's remotely possible (if the Storyteller even wants this in their Chronicle; many I've talked to feel this is hokey and if it ever happened, should be a one time deal) to achieve a state of enlightenment which either makes your a godly vampire, with no trait maximum for Disciplines and the ability to go much longer without blood....or become mortal again! You know, give up your clinical immortality and cool powers so you can retire your character, while the rest of your Coterie continues being powerful bloated ticks.

Meanwhile, by performing a miserable act of inhuman cannibalism, you can absorb the soul of another vampire (insert a cry of "There can be only one!" here) to potentially increase your trait maximum, blood reserves, ability to spend blood, and possibly free traits! It does cost at least one Humanity, makes it possible for people to find out your crime, and gives you a nasty tendency to want to do it again, but in a game as stratified as Vampire, where the Elders are the haves and you are the have nots, this is the only way to gain an Elder's power and respect (and no matter what the books claim about how other Elders see you, many powerful NPC's in the game's world have committed Diablerie and gone on to reach great heights in even the Camarilla!).

As if all this wasn't bad enough, then the Sabbat come knocking on your door, offering you another way to gain almost all the benefits of Humanity, and let you be as much of a monster as you want!

When you consider Humanity as a trait that rarely has a positive benefit (looking less monstrous, having more dice available during the day, and potentially preventing you from performing some monstrous act while in frenzy) and generally has a negative benefit (don't steal kids, or you might lose Humanity- and try not to think about what taking people's blood against their will really means!), it's no wonder players often decided having a Humanity of about 6 or so was ideal, and if they were really worried about the other negatives, eh, just spend a few points to get Blush of Health and Light Sleeper!

Too much stick, not enough carrot. And V5 is even worse about this, to the point it's not even really cool to be a vampire, since any time you use your powers (actually, just about any time you take any action, from my experience), you could suddenly find yourself unable to use them and enter a Hunger state where you have to get blood or else!

Imagine telling a D&D player "oh hey, if you roll three ones, you lose all your special abilities until you go murder someone"; I'm sure that would go over especially well.

It doesn't help that, while fictional vampires might brood and whine about the unbearable weight of their immortal existence, with it's incredible powers and often eternal sexiness, most of them are very happy to be vampires when you get right down to it, and this is exactly what drew players into the game!

But hey, it's still better than Werewolf, which, as a "horror" game consists of ludicrous gibs and jump scares, and you can do anything you want pretty much, with the only downsides being the scorn of your fellow werebeasts and some vaguely defined state of self-destructive depression.

 

[payn]

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.

Ok.

I'll amend my statement then. If the PCs are intended to be commandos that use automatic weapons and explosives regularly to promote an extended campaign in Call of Cthulhu, I don't get the intent of any Cthulhu based RPG.

 

[James Gasik]

Ok.

I'll amend my statement then. If the PCs are intended to be commandos that use automatic weapons and explosives regularly to promote an extended campaign in Call of Cthulhu, I don't get the intent of any Cthulhu based RPG.

The problem with Call of Cthulhu is that, in the fiction it's based on, protagonists are generally hapless witnesses or survivors of brushes with things beyond the pale- if they survive.

Since it's hard to sell people on a game where they play victims and their reward is to be the Final Girl in a slasher film, since most of the things you encounter are basically indestructible to normal things like punches to the head, knives, axes, or even chainsaws, of course people are going to make like Ash Williams!

Oh sure, you can have deus ex machinas like MacGuffins or rituals in the story as the intended method of sealing away the terror from beyond time, but to do this every single time I think might get old as well.

And sure, there's magic, if you have the ability to twist your mind enough to use it (and even then, you risk turning yourself inside out or attracting the attention of an Outer Horror- pretty much the same thing, really).

When I first tried CoC, I decided that playing a character who knows about the occult world would be selling myself short on the experience, so I made a regular person. That proved to be a serious mistake as I was basically completely useless for the entire story (a star vampire was going around killing people; I saw it kill my little sister, and actually knew it existed, but I was then arrested for her murder by the cops and spent half the session trying to convince people I wasn't crazy).

And of course, it didn't help that the star vampire was largely invisible and able to no sell being hit by a truck! In the end, everyone was reduced to making difficult rolls to figure out how to seal it in a well with a ritual (I couldn't help since, again, I didn't know anything about that stuff).

Now maybe, as my GM lamented, I just don't "get" CoC. But I was kind of annoyed by the whole experience (to say nothing of the disastrous second game, where we were ensconced in a hotel, there were murderous cultists around, and the police warned us to stay indoors....so that's what we did), and I can certainly understand players wanting to do something proactive like trying to find a weapon that can kill the creature that's immune to bullets.

 

[Celebrim]

I'll amend my statement then. If the PCs are intended to be commandos that use automatic weapons and explosives regularly to promote an extended campaign in Call of Cthulhu, I don't get the intent of any Cthulhu based RPG.

My entire point is that PC's weren't originally intended by the designers to be commandos that use automatic weapons and explosives, but that was the functional result of the mechanics they created and examples of play they published. Thus, CoC is an example under the OP's topic.

 

[Yora]

Think so if you want, but its very clear from the way people talk about having played around the original designers that was how they expected it to work; and it was kind of trivial to not only lose individual characters but whole parties early on at the bottom levels. Yes, you still had to get into combat occasionally, but it was abundantly clear that Gygax and company considered combat (especially at all fair combat) the thing you did when you absolutely couldn't avoid it and still get things done.

This comes naturally as a consequence of the mechanics.

Killing monsters gets you minuscule amounts of XP. Snatching treasure gets you big amounts of XP.
Snatching treasure without killing the owner first gets you slightly less XP, but the owner also gets to make a lot fewer attack rolls against you that could potentially instant kill.
Also, treasures are hidden away in the monster's stashes, not in a purse on their belt. So if you encounter a wandering monster and fight it, it will cost you hit points, spells, and potions for no real reward in form of XP and probably no magic items.

But then people wanted to play a Lord of the Rings RPG and AD&D was the only system they knew, and that got us Dragonlance and D&D was ruined forevar!

 

[Celebrim]

Now maybe, as my GM lamented, I just don't "get" CoC. But I was kind of annoyed by the whole experience (to say nothing of the disastrous second game, where we were ensconced in a hotel, there were murderous cultists around, and the police warned us to stay indoors....so that's what we did), and I can certainly understand players wanting to do something proactive like trying to find a weapon that can kill the creature that's immune to bullets.

As a GM, I want to love CoC for a lot of reasons, but I am frustrated that neither the system nor the examples of seem capable of producing the results that I want and it's not obvious to me how to create a game that does accomplish what I want.

When I decided to focus on CoC as a system and run a full campaign with it, I was immediately struck even before running the game and just thinking through the game by problems I hadn't really thought about when I was a player or GM in one shots or other more casual exposure. For example, I bought Masks of Nyarthalhotep based on reputation and was shocked by how "bad" the campaign was in every single respect on close examination. (Compare with the actually excellent Two Headed Serpent that I discovered later, but which again understands what it is - pulp and not horror.) When I went to the presumed experts on the game to get advice, I discovered that the experts themselves didn't understand the system and were trying to evade all my questions and concerns by promoting illusionism as the answer to all problems - in other words they ran their games almost entirely by fudging everything. One of the few examples of an expert that isn't just pure illusionism is the peerless Seth Skorkowsky (who might be the best GM resource on the internet no matter what game system you play), but his CoC games definitely embrace the pulp feel with the intellectual horror being secondary and regardless of the system seem to turn into firefights regularly (which exactly matches my RL experience).

My biggest problem with CoC as a GM is something you really hit on here heavily, which is the real foils in CoC are usually the police. It's not the monsters or the cultists that prove to be the biggest problem, but the well-meaning authorities who live in a world where all this stuff happens, but they are clueless about it and so see the players as the villains. Forget eaten by monsters or going insane, its usually the police that get you. And that proves not to be a very fun game, which is one of the reasons I think Delta Green may be a functional adaptation to the game that is actually created rather than the one intended and described.

This would matter a lot to me but I can tell that my current group of players don't love CoC or other gritty games so I've more or less given up on it as a system/style of play.

 

[Celebrim]

This comes naturally as a consequence of the mechanics.

I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree, because I have no idea really what you are talking about. I can't address hearsay. My experience is no more or less valid than someone else's experience. But I can address the written mechanics of the game and the provided examples of play. I would presume Gygax counts as a designer of D&D, so I can address in particular the modules he wrote and whether they reward snatch and grab and whether his designs privilege something other than combat as the functional way to "win". And I think all the textual evidence is on my side.

Given the harsh rules on disengaging from melee, the idea of snatching someone's purse or loot without killing them first is somehow optimal is... bizarre in the extreme and I never once saw it work that way in practice, even ignoring the problems of snowballing encounters that definitely would come up in Gygaxian designs if you weren't focused on killing a single encounter as fast and as stealthy as possible.

I think you and others are confusing a single principle of Gygaxian skillful play, that is, "Don't get into unnecessary combats" with the whole or primary focus of Gygaxian play. I think this is obvious from your textual example of wandering monsters, which you can proof text from Gygax's writings. Gygaxian play was very much taken from his experience as a wargamer and very much focused on combat as a central pillar if not the central pillar of RPG play. We don't have to text proof from later designs in the Hickman era like Dragonlance or Ravenloft (which are arguably more about avoiding combat than anything Gygax wrote).

 

[MGibster]

That would be difficult to support, given that Anarchs didn't appear as a player option in the core rulebook.

It’s been a while, but back then weren’t Anarchs just part of the Camarilla?

 

[Umbran]

It’s been a while, but back then weren’t Anarchs just part of the Camarilla?

That would depend on who you ask. As of the 1992 rulebook, the elder vampires considered every neonate to be an Anarch. But, the word "anarch" seems to appear in only two paragraphs that I can find, meaning that "being an anarch" means basically nothing. It isn't a thing the PCs can choose to be or not be.