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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8397167" data-attributes="member: 6801252">A COC-genre Freeform? If you mean, like a freeform RP based on the same milieu as Call of Cthulu, my experience would expect that to simply be the player pacing a portrayal of their character falling into insanity, with the other players prodding them if they don't seem to be effected by things they should be. Introducing a mechanic to decide when could be a good addition (and I think, that's when you're starting into get into something like Fizzy Bubbles, which is such a delightful case because it demonstrates a completely different lineage for what is essentially the convergent evolution of a TTRPG style system, unless people had way more TTRPG experience than they let on) but it would have been unusual back in the day. But to be clear, I'm talking of forum play-by-post fandom roleplaying, which is likely a bit different than what you're thinking of.Interestingly though, this style of game matches the origin story for 'OC' or 'Neotrad' from the six cultures of play blog we've been talking about so much, so to my mind, understanding where the narrative drive comes from, and what mechanics are for from that line of thinking is actually a super interesting demonstration of how it really is its own animal and we're seeing that mentality play out in terms of the new players of 5e and their expectations for how the game should work. In my eyes, modular systems are the way to go, where the players of the game ARE playing freeform in the abstract, but are pulling in things that are useful to the kind of game they're playing as necessary, kinda like your COC mechanic lycnhpinning an otherwise freeform game.To understand what I mean, the way we played 4e, was actually very roleplay heavy, because we (I, from my forum roleplaying days, and I could teach others) only needed the system for its combat simulator for the extensive combat scenes from the media we wanted to emulate and the tactical experience of that, simple action resolution to handle uncertainty if it comes up,  and freeformed the narrative drama between encounters, giving our characters applications of powers the game system implied they have from what they took, but doesn't actually give us-- e.g. my swordmage could teleport every round of combat, but it required a marked target to attack someone other than me to do in am echanical context... but it made sense that in the fiction, my character could do a short range teleport every six seconds, and that made its way into my casual roleplaying, and into my animations for other powers, and so forth.</blockquote>

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