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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 2345914" data-attributes="member: 1645">Mike Mearls actually made that same point years earlier in Ryan Dancey's forum at GamingReport.com, in a <a href="http://www.gamingreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=XForum&file=viewthread&tid=62" target="_blank">thread </a> on Call of Cthulhu d20, and I think his post there is extremely apropos (particularly when I think of my own early Gamma World experience): I see this as a problem with game design in general, not one confined to d20 CoC. Most RPGs are not designed in a particularly user friendly manner. Way back in the early 90s, I received my first exposure to non-D&D/TSR RPGs via White Wolf magazine. After reading over articles on Warhammer FRP, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, Ars Magica, and Millenium's End, I made an effort to spend my measly weekly RPG budget on new games. After a few weeks going without new BattleTech or D&D miniatures, all 5 of those titles were on my bookshelf. Of them all, we played CoC to a great extent, used WFRP material in our D&D games, and never really used the others. I think we played SR a few times, but the "adventures" were really nothing more than creating characters and running extended combats. Our characters would do things like blow up a nightclub full of monsters or engage in a running battle with a biker gang, but we never actually played through anything comparable with our CoC and AD&D games. Ars Magica looked really neat. The magic system was interesting, and the troupe style play was intriguing. Shadowrun's background was fascinating, and though the rules were confusing we managed to puzzle them out enough to run simple battles. Millenium's End had this funky template overlay hit location system. It used overhead transparencies to drop a hit table over a hit location template. Warhammer is a great fusion of CoC and D&D, with a great background and very easy to learn rules. But none of that mattered. Why? Simple: I and the other primary GM amongst my friends had no idea what the heck we were supposed to DO with those games. I clearly remember spending a week poring over SR, learning the rules, making up characters, and then sitting back on a Thursday evening and trying hard as hell to come up with an idea for an adventure that weekend. I couldn't think of one. I had no idea HOW I was supposed to use all this stuff. Same thing happened with Ars Magica. And Millenium's End. And Warhammer. When it came time to make up an adventure or plan a short campaign, I didn't have clue one about what I was supposed to do. Except with Cthulhu. Reading the rules and devouring a paperback of HPL's stories didn't help me at all, but the adventures in the back of the book made it crystal clear what we were supposed to do with the game. The classic haunted house scenario laid the entire game down in 4 pages: characters hear about weird events, go to investigate, uncover bizarre horrors, possibly go insane, gain sanity if they "win". I ran that adventure, along with the others in the book, a couple from White Wolf magazine, and then ran out and bought two more adventure collections while making up a bunch of my own. We were hooked. Contrast that with SR 1st edition. The sample "adventure" is basically a firefight in a convenience store. The characters go into the store, some thugs show up to rob it, and a fight breaks out. It has *nothing* to do with the archetypal Shadowrun adventure. In fact, it blatant discusses running the sample adventure between other adventures, and I distinctly remember literally slamming the book shut in frustration because I had no idea how to build the adventures that were supposed to bookend the sample "scenario." The problem with RPGs, IMHO, is that they all have a stereotypical adventure structure buried within them, but precious few take the time to actually spell out that structure. The old red box D&D basic set from 1983 did a good job with that. It basically gave you a sample stocked dungeon and a second dungeon map and said "fill this with monsters." CoC did that, too, though more by example with the half-dozen example scenarios it includes. Wampire is successful in this regard, too. It draws on the Anne Rice novels and with all that talk of theme, symbolism, and other literary devices it's easy for a new GM to figure out what he has to do to get his game going. The fiction snippets in the book make it pretty obvious what vampires do. I think the key to building a successful RPG doesn't begin with the rules or setting. I think it begins with creating an easily understood, highly customizable, and very flexible core scenario that a GM can duplicate again and again. The setting and rules are all window dressing on top of that core scenario. As for d20 CoC, it's an extremely well-done book. I plan on running a fantasy version of it after my Warhammer FRP and Dragonstar mini-campaigns wrap up. I agree with Ryan that it's a top notch product, but I really wish it had followed the Chaosim CoC example and included 3 or 4 short adventures.</blockquote>

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