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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6076279" data-attributes="member: 82106">It is funny that you should say this... In the old days, sometime back in the early 80's, I ran CoC a bunch and it seemed from the standards of the time that it was a nice solid design. The skill-based mechanics, low durability of the PCs, and general simulationist bent of the system (outside the Mythos stuff) seemed the "obvious" design decisions. Now, after playing any number of more modern BW/PACE/etc RP-focused Drama/plot driven games going back to CoC's BRP skill-based simulationist system was so painful we just gave up. A bag of fairly arbitrary skill picks where you have some mushy 50-70% success rate on any task at a grab bag of things felt so poorly character-defining that I had trouble identifying (and remembering) what my character was ABOUT from week to week. The system seemed to do more to hamstring the proper development of the story than to add to it in any way. The players properly divined that they needed to go to the library to learn more information, but then what? Do they roll some skill checks? Naturally they failed the checks, what does that tell us? I ended up just rebuilding the whole scenario using PACE (a diceless system a bit like FUDGE/FATE where you define a couple of descriptive attributes for each character and then use plot points to leverage them to drive the story forward, perfect for scene framing I must say). THAT worked great. While I have fond memories of CoC I realize now that even in the day I was sort of aware of these issues, I just lacked enough conceptual framework to articulate them and had no idea how to devise a system that would overcome them (not being a game design genius in terms of pioneering anything new). Now that cleverer people have given me the tools I've realized a very nice little Mythos game. I get the impression that Gumshoe-based Trail of Cthulhu does something a bit similar.</blockquote>

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