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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8805345" data-attributes="member: 4937">As a GM, I want to love CoC for a lot of reasons, but I am frustrated that neither the system nor the examples of seem capable of producing the results that I want and it's not obvious to me how to create a game that does accomplish what I want.  When I decided to focus on CoC as a system and run a full campaign with it, I was immediately struck even before running the game and just thinking through the game by problems I hadn't really thought about when I was a player or GM in one shots or other more casual exposure.  For example, I bought Masks of Nyarthalhotep based on reputation and was shocked by how "bad" the campaign was in every single respect on close examination.  (Compare with the actually excellent Two Headed Serpent that I discovered later, but which again understands what it is - pulp and not horror.)   When I went to the presumed experts on the game to get advice, I discovered that the experts themselves didn't understand the system and were trying to evade all my questions and concerns by promoting illusionism as the answer to all problems - in other words they ran their games almost entirely by fudging everything.  One of the few examples of an expert that isn't just pure illusionism is the peerless Seth Skorkowsky (who might be the best GM resource on the internet no matter what game system you play), but his CoC games definitely embrace the pulp feel with the intellectual horror being secondary and regardless of the system seem to turn into firefights regularly (which exactly matches my RL experience). My biggest problem with CoC as a GM is something you really hit on here heavily, which is the real foils in CoC are usually the police.  It's not the monsters or the cultists that prove to be the biggest problem, but the well-meaning authorities who live in a world where all this stuff happens, but they are clueless about it and so see the players as the villains.  Forget eaten by monsters or going insane, its usually the police that get you.  And that proves not to be a very fun game, which is one of the reasons I think Delta Green may be a functional adaptation to the game that is actually created rather than the one intended and described.This would matter a lot to me but I can tell that my current group of players don't love CoC or other gritty games so I've more or less given up on it as a system/style of play.</blockquote>

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