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Call of Cthulhu as a Horror Game
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7544277" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I had heard really great things about Masks, so I bought a pdf copy of it intending it to be the basis of my campaign. I was so disappointed with it, that I kept putting off playing it, and never ended up actually using it. </p><p></p><p>It certainly isn't scary, and while I considered running it as a more Pulp action adventure, if you are going to do that then IMO the CoC sanity rules actually get in the way since so much of the adventure is "Yogsothoth in a Closet" in that any attempt to actually even watch much less participate in the big climatic scenes involves so much potential SAN loss as to cripple the investigators permanently. This often happens without due warning, and not merely as a climax of the entire campaign since after leaving New York there is at least one 3d10 to 1d100 SAN loss scenario at the climax (or more likely, anti-climax) of every location where the closet door is open. </p><p></p><p>[sblock]The easiest approach to the whole scenario is to avoid investigation entirely, and simply overcome the problems and NPC villains by the liberal application of military grade firepower. (Indeed, this is actually explicit to the text of the climax scenario, where the best solution provided by the text seems to be requisition some howitzers and never know or see just quite what you blew to smithereens. Here, not knowing is half the battle.) This ironically makes the agents of law and order the biggest obstacles for most of the campaign since if you are dragging around a Vickers machine gun and enough firepower to equip a WWII platoon, it's the police that are a bigger problem for you than most of the villains in the campaign, and therefore made me want to introduce a CHILL style global anti-mythos organization for the PC's to join to smooth over the disjoint between the scenarios and the setting.[/sblock]</p><p></p><p>The big problem with investigator crippling SAN loss aside from it ending a campaign, is precisely that I'd be OK with investigator crippling SAN loss if there was corresponding basis of horror in the player. But jump scaring "You open the door and you see Yogsothoth." (or in this case Nyarthalhotep) doesn't in any fashion do that. Sure, maybe opening a door and seeing Yogsothoth would blast any shred of sanity from your mind, but HPL knows better than to pace his story in that fashion and there are far better ways to deal with "what you see can kill you" going all the way back to Medusa story.</p><p></p><p>So sure, you could run "Masks" as an Indiana Jones pulp action adventure, but if you do, it probably works even better in a different system than CoC.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7544277, member: 4937"] I had heard really great things about Masks, so I bought a pdf copy of it intending it to be the basis of my campaign. I was so disappointed with it, that I kept putting off playing it, and never ended up actually using it. It certainly isn't scary, and while I considered running it as a more Pulp action adventure, if you are going to do that then IMO the CoC sanity rules actually get in the way since so much of the adventure is "Yogsothoth in a Closet" in that any attempt to actually even watch much less participate in the big climatic scenes involves so much potential SAN loss as to cripple the investigators permanently. This often happens without due warning, and not merely as a climax of the entire campaign since after leaving New York there is at least one 3d10 to 1d100 SAN loss scenario at the climax (or more likely, anti-climax) of every location where the closet door is open. [sblock]The easiest approach to the whole scenario is to avoid investigation entirely, and simply overcome the problems and NPC villains by the liberal application of military grade firepower. (Indeed, this is actually explicit to the text of the climax scenario, where the best solution provided by the text seems to be requisition some howitzers and never know or see just quite what you blew to smithereens. Here, not knowing is half the battle.) This ironically makes the agents of law and order the biggest obstacles for most of the campaign since if you are dragging around a Vickers machine gun and enough firepower to equip a WWII platoon, it's the police that are a bigger problem for you than most of the villains in the campaign, and therefore made me want to introduce a CHILL style global anti-mythos organization for the PC's to join to smooth over the disjoint between the scenarios and the setting.[/sblock] The big problem with investigator crippling SAN loss aside from it ending a campaign, is precisely that I'd be OK with investigator crippling SAN loss if there was corresponding basis of horror in the player. But jump scaring "You open the door and you see Yogsothoth." (or in this case Nyarthalhotep) doesn't in any fashion do that. Sure, maybe opening a door and seeing Yogsothoth would blast any shred of sanity from your mind, but HPL knows better than to pace his story in that fashion and there are far better ways to deal with "what you see can kill you" going all the way back to Medusa story. So sure, you could run "Masks" as an Indiana Jones pulp action adventure, but if you do, it probably works even better in a different system than CoC. [/QUOTE]
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