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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8805175" data-attributes="member: 4937">That may be what the intent is, but in fact the rules don't support it.  In the rules and examples of play, combat is basically unavoidable.  At some point the investigators end up confronting the horror.  Most scenarios don't provide examples of defeating the horror without some combat, and the rules do not call out the need for the keeper to do so.  As such, it turns out the play loop of building character ill-suited to combat and being thrust into combat is the only thing that does support the idea where combat is a failed state.  As soon as the players break that loop, then they are actually playing the game as written and not as intended.  And as for extended campaigns not making sense, well the rules and examples of play strongly suggest you are wrong.  The rules are built to provide for the characters winning a scenario, possibly gaining back much of the sanity they may have lost as a reward.  And CoC is famous for its published examples of play in the form of long form campaigns like Mountains of Madness, Horror on the Orient Express, Masks of Nyarthotep, etc. that seem to encourage long form campaigns and which in practice will be more like Investigators as well-trained military commandos than they will be like doddering antiquitarians if the PC's are going to survive for any length of time.  (And frankly, I've been playing D&D since the early '80s and I have no idea what you mean by old school D&D being a game where combat is a failed state.  I can think of many games where that is true but D&D is not one of them.)Again, I see them more as embracing the rules as written and the play as it actually happens.Absolutely you did.  In the 1920's in the USA there were basically no federal gun laws.  Automatic weapons like BAR Rifles, submachine guns, etc. could be ordered without any sort of restriction through mail order catalogs or purchased from local general stores.  Many localities still had people go around routinely armed.   My Grandfather, who grew up in this era, carried a .45 Colt Peacemaker until he grew so feeble, we had to take it away from him.  Dynamite was somewhat more restricted, but still could be easily purchased by most landholders for ground clearing purposes or disposing of pests like beavers.  I'm not sure about grenades off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been that hard even to buy a box of grenades.  The main thing that prevented widespread ownership of these weapons was solely the relative lack of wealth.  People had to buy necessities.  They couldn't afford guns as a hobby.  If they owned guns, they owned them for practical reasons.  So most people owned relatively simple and unspecialized weapons, but literally anyone could upgun to military weapons if they wanted to.  (That said, there was basically no difference between the battle rifles carried by common soldiers and medium game hunting rifles.)  Local jurisdictions differed on whether you were allowed to walk around with them under "States Rights" theories (still used by say New York State to justify its modern gun laws), but basically everywhere you could own them.</blockquote>

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