Going to church? Don't forget your sawed-off shotgun!

[painandgreed]

Pray tell what are the uses for an M1911? Hunting big game?

Yes actually. Hunters, especially big game hunters carried pistols with them to deal with animals and coup de grace. IIRC, magnum ammunition became popular because of the publicity of such a hunter killing an attacking bear with his pistol that used the new magnum shells.

Of course, in RL unlike an RPG, 9 out of 10 situations run like this:
Gangsters approach the archelogist and make threats.
Archelogist pulls sawed off shotgun and tells them to scram.
Gangsters say "Next time you might not have that shotgun."
Archelogist, "Ya, next time."
Gangsters walk away.

You have that the gangsters don't want to dei along with the archeologist not wanting to deal with police and san lose for killing them. Of course, such an incident will ensure that he'll have the shotgun next time also. Most role players however would just roll for intiiative.

 

[Wraith-Hunter]

Pray tell what is this 'san loss' and what triggers it? Is this supposed to relate to PTSD. Is it something that is temporary or permenant.

 

[Byrons_Ghost]

Pray tell what is this 'san loss' and what triggers it? Is this supposed to relate to PTSD. Is it something that is temporary or permenant.

One of Lovecraft's main themes was insanity caused by interaction with the supernatural. In the CoC rules, this is represented by SAN points, which are basically another form of HP, only with a death spiral attached.

San is ranked on a percentile scale from 0-99. When encountering a situation that threatens your sanity (nearly always a monster, spell, or other supernatural occurance), you must roll under your sanity in order to deal with the encounter. Failure usually indicates a random, but significant, loss of SAN points (sometimes as high as d100 for beings such as Cthulhu himself). Success may also cause a loss, but not nearly as severe.

A character's mental state depends on the amount of sanity lost in a scene. Five or more points lost is temporary insanity, which might just be blacking out or babbling for a while. 12-15 points (depending on circumstances) will usually result in a long-term mental disorder.

The original rules aren't all that "realistic", and were more meant to represent how people thought the mind worked in the 1920s. More recent books have expanded on them and filled them in, but the core is still the same.

 

[gizmo33]

I find it sad that multiple people at the table thought it would be perfectly reasonable to bring a loaded weapon to church.

OK, what's sadder:
1. bringing a shotgun to church
2. watching a zombie priest eat another priest inside church

If I woke up tomorrow and found myself in a world with zombies eating people in church, you can pretty much bet I'd start toting around a shotgun with me everywhere I went. In fact, it probably wouldn't take that much. I'd estimate that it would take about a 2% chance of me meeting a zombie in my daily life to cause me to carry a gun. Then again, I don't quite get CoC as an RPG.

 

[Harmon]

Couple things in this thread are starting to bug me-

Religious talk - forbid by the rules of EN World, and not really all that important to the question at hand.

PC takes shotgun to church - If the character had an idea that there might be trouble at the church then I say- "okay, he had reason to have the shotgun," but if he had no clue that there might be trouble then "he's meta gaming ("hay, this is CoC, there could be something nasty there!")

Firearms and killin' stuff - pretty sure that this too is against the EN Rules, but as it seems okay so far I am gonna chime in on this one. Guns do not kill people, people kill people and they will do so in any fashion they can find, whether its with a rock or a nuke. Also cars kill way more people then guns (43,000 vs 30,000 in 2003)

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/factsheets/injury.pdf

I think this thread is turned harsh, and people need to reread the OP, and forget the point that you are trying to make.

 

[takyris]

Frankly (to go wtih Harmon and try to get back on topic), I think it's a question of style. CoC is a game that you need to play with the right style, or else you're just playing D&D with an underpowered character and some bummerific rules about your sanity, and where it's going to be going quite soon.

In just about any game I run, I'm going to tell players not to bring guns to church. The only time I want to see guns in a church is if you're having a giant shootout with evil gangsters, blowing out pews left and right... while a little old woman says a rosary without looking up over on the other side of the room.

And when that old woman stands up and walks out, everyone has to stop shooting and wait respectfully until she's gone.

That is style.

Also, to reiterate what I said earlier, trying to disguise minmaxing as "playing a character concept that coincidentally involves making completely minmaxed choices" is bad. And tasteless. And likely to lead to repercussions in one of my games. (But not "having you get attacked", because that just shows that you were "right" to minmax in that way, and encourages you to do it next time. The repercussions of ignoring in-world logic to minmax based on your knowledge of the design of the game you're playing will be tailored to discourage such behavior.)

 

[phindar]

I would like take a moment and quote from an on-line comic starring the robots from MST3k.

Crow: You know, I once had a Call of Cthulhu character that lived three days.
Tom Servo: That's only because Gypsy was running the game and you hid the dice.
Crow: It was still three days!

I now return you to your regularly scheduled CoC debate, already in progress.

 

[ajanders]

You know, if someone asked me to pick which was more "realistic", a shotgun toting archaeologist or a zombie-eating zombie priest, I'd pick the archaeologist.

I might also suggest that it's "realistic" for a PI seeing a shotgun toting archaeologist to try and take the demented fellow in. Why didn't all our slaves to realism do that? It's not like their characters magically knew the archaeologist was a PC, right?

 

[Wraith-Hunter]

In the end why would it even matter. It sounds like PCs are extras in a horror flick and won't last more than 3 days tops anyway, no matter how much heat they pack.

 

[Wraith-Hunter]

In the end why would it even matter. It sounds like PCs are extras in a horror flick and won't last more than 3 days tops anyway, no matter how much heat they pack !!