D&D + CoC

[coyote6]

If it were me, I'd consider doing Sanity as something tracked sort of like a 4e disease: certain events may require players to make checks to avoid "worsening," and other events may allow players to make checks to see if they can "improve." The nature of the check? Tricky. Wisdom is tempting but that gives a certain edge to divine-type characters.

As long as you're borrowing from 4e, you could use the better of two stats -- Wisdom and either Intelligence or Charisma, depending on which makes more sense to you. (Intelligence could be rationalized as having the reasoning ability to rationalize what you see into a palatable form; Charisma includes strength of personality, so the better your Cha, the better you are at holding onto yourself.)

You could even let them use the highest of the three.

The poor fighter who dump-statted every mental attribute will be doomed, of course, but that's probably appropriate.

 

[Voadam]

I typically described my 2e ravenloft game as a combination of D&D and Cthulhu. They fought things and ran away from things, many fights were very close things.

Let the players know up front that there are things much more powerful than them lurking out there that they will occasionally encounter as well as things much weaker than them.

Have them in-game encounter things not appropriately balanced for their power, both above and below.

Describe things based on senses instead of labels where you can.

Have lots of exploration, investigation, and discovery plots.

Have charlatans pull tricks and sometimes be exposed.

Foreshadow evil and bad things.

Have opportunities for them to expose and hang themselves for benefits (in my game some of the party knowingly bought addictive psionic and physical boosting drugs with side effects).

Lots of uncertainty, (the fallen paladin was not entirely sure the divine messenger telling him the path to redemption was really from his god).

I'm not a fan of horror mechanics, I aim for mood out of my style of DMing.

 

[Desdichado]

I'm not a fan of horror mechanics, I aim for mood out of my style of DMing.

I'm not really either; some quick and dirty reminder of what kind of game we're playing (a la Sanity) is mostly all I'd consider. This is mostly a style thing, I believe.

 

[Desdichado]

Player buy-in will be critical. Not only to avoid mangled expectations, but it's a major plus, as Zak explains here.

It's the only way to make such a game work at all, I think.

Still: he puts things very eloquently, doesn't he? Nice read.

 

[Barastrondo]

Still: he puts things very eloquently, doesn't he? Nice read.

I feel weird when I tell other people that "D&D With Pornstars" is probably my favorite D&D blog out there, but there you have it. I don't always agree with Zak, but he's a very smart guy and just about always entertaining to read.

 

[Desdichado]

I don't always agree with him either, but he does have a knack for interesting writing nonetheless.

Although that post was, perhaps, a bit longer than it should have been to be truly effective.

 

[Janx]

I've been following this thread for a bit. It's interesting.

one of the last few pages mentioned being interested in players starting out confident, and growing increasingly wary. To me, that sounds like Dread, the jenga-horror game mechanic. Though Hobo mentioned being interested in a d20 game platform....

For myself, one concept I'm not too confident is the Sanity mechanic. I never played CoC, though I've heard from friends who had. It struck me (and it could be the groups' fault), as being rather silly and debilitating.

In a way, the OP touched on this in the first post, when talking about the 2 modes of CoC, long lived and short lived.

I'm less keen on a mechanic that makes your PC unplayable long term (barring the occasional failure or stupid play).

It also struck me that the implementation was less than "realistic". I didn't get the general sense from reading Lovecraft that every character was going insane from being exposed to the horrors, so much as they WERE insane.

I guess I'd prefer to see a fear mechanic in the sense of a short term debilitation, seperate from long term side effects of seeing that which man was not meant to see.

I think part of the problem, is most of us haven't seen anything truly horrible, and are trying to model Lovecraftian insanity based on our real world understanding of it.

I would think something like PTSD would be more akin to what Investigators might suffer. What NPCs that mingle with Horrors have is the Crazies. That's not for PCs.

I like the idea on page 3, to have the player determine pre-game what his response to stress/horror will be. Basically outline some basic responses, so that he can role-play it realistically, rather than be strapped with some random insanity that is ridiculously role-played.

On a side topic, somebody mentioned that the fighers would probably use the mental stats as dump stats, and thus be more susceptible.

I would bet it would be the inverse. People who don't think too much, don't tend to be bothered as much by what goes on in life. The football jock is more likely to experience a Fight or Flight moment in the face of horror, than the whizkid, who is seriously going to have his mind blown by the possibilities being revealed to him.

The jock will get over it, and in the retelling, "won't know what it was he saw that night". The Buffy effect. Whereas, the whizkid will be haunted for life and question everything he knows, and probably start a secret conspiracy web site, and then get rather paranoid.

 

[Desdichado]

Though Hobo mentioned being interested in a d20 game platform....

Yeah, pretty much. Although I've noodled around with ways to make Dread work as a ruleset for a campaign (and even a play-by-post game!) at the end of the day, I dropped both affairs as unrealistic. Dread is, fundamentally, a one-shot game.

For myself, one concept I'm not too confident is the Sanity mechanic. I never played CoC, though I've heard from friends who had. It struck me (and it could be the groups' fault), as being rather silly and debilitating.

I love it. And, it's kinda traditional.

It also struck me that the implementation was less than "realistic". I didn't get the general sense from reading Lovecraft that every character was going insane from being exposed to the horrors, so much as they WERE insane.

It's not necessarily true to Lovecraft. A lot of what the CoC conventions are are based on an interpretation of a subset of Lovecraft's stories. To me, it's not so much about emulating Lovecraft as it is just a gamist element that's included to evoke a certain mood and tone.

I guess I'd prefer to see a fear mechanic in the sense of a short term debilitation, seperate from long term side effects of seeing that which man was not meant to see.

Although I haven't looked at it in a while, if I remember right, Darkness & Dread has a fear mechanic, rather than a Sanity mechanic.

I do like the long-term sanity challenge, though. Yeah, in a way, it's just a mini-subgame of resource management, but somehow in play it doesn't feel that way. It just seems to work, in spite of the theory behind it sometimes. Or, at least it has with the groups I've played with. Especially in campaign games, where each encounter; each tome of mystic knowledge that you shouldn't know about; each horror; has an impact. You just don't have the sanity to spare after a while, and yet you can't stop. I dunno; the horrific pathos of it all just seems to work most of the time for me. Even in games where the players start off kinda silly.

What NPCs that mingle with Horrors have is the Crazies. That's not for PCs.

Why not? That's the whole premise of CoC. I mean, I get it if it's not for you, but you've gotta trust me; it really does work. The game has a lot of fans.

 

[Obryn]

For myself, one concept I'm not too confident is the Sanity mechanic. I never played CoC, though I've heard from friends who had. It struck me (and it could be the groups' fault), as being rather silly and debilitating.

It really adds to the game, honestly. It's a very visible reminder that your investigator is dipping his toes further and further into insanity.

Without a sanity mechanic, the bizarre and horrifying stuff in a typical CoC scenario is just window dressing. With sanity, what's scary to the PCs is also kinda scary to the player. It adds a sense of dread whenever the unknown or unexplainable comes up in play, and makes mythos creatures scary in the long term, not just in the short term.

-O

 

[Janx]

It really adds to the game, honestly. It's a very visible reminder that your investigator is dipping his toes further and further into insanity.

Without a sanity mechanic, the bizarre and horrifying stuff in a typical CoC scenario is just window dressing. With sanity, what's scary to the PCs is also kinda scary to the player. It adds a sense of dread whenever the unknown or unexplainable comes up in play, and makes mythos creatures scary in the long term, not just in the short term.

-O

From my experience, if the players are vested in their PCs, when they face the threat of something apparently more powerful than them, they act cautiously and frightened.

I would also acknowledge, that without the "silly" insanties I've heard piled on PCs, the permanent loss of Sanity Points would still impact a player as risks they undertake could do permanent damage to their PC (unlike physical damage) given that when SP hits 0, you lose your PC.

I'm thinking I would prefer a more "realistic" list of sanity loss effects, perhaps picked out in advance for the PC as somebody else talked about a page back.