Invited into Call of Cthulu, have some questions!

[Nytmare]

Here is a great example of a Lovecraftian story in animated comic book style: Nishere.com: Stephen King's "N." - An original video series It's 25 episodes long, and is well worth both watching, and reading.

The story was written by Stephen King, and is called "N." It is the simple tale of an innocent psychiatrist who inadvertently, and unfortunately "catches" his patient's insanity.

 

[malcolypse]

Here's how a typical CoC action sequence goes:

Player 1: I burst into the room, run and leap across the desk. When I get there, I demand that the librarian take us to any mysterious books over one hundred years old.

Player 2: I'm bolting the door behind us, and pouring a line of salt across the floor in front of it, just in case.

Player 3: I crawl under a table and weep quietly to myself, rocking and flicking the safety on my pistol on and off, on and off.

Player 2: I walk over to the table and take off my crucifix. I dangle it over the far side of the table. When Player 3 is distracted, I take his .45 away, so he doesn't shoot himself or one of us.

Two hours later...

Player 1: I've studied the ritual, and I think that when we start casting it, it will sense it and try to break into the library and kill us all.

Player 2: I apologize to the librarian for tying her up and for what she's about to have to see.

Player 3: So, what do we do when it comes in?

Player 1: Well, it should only take about 10 minutes, so unless it's right in the neighborhood, we might only have to hold it off for a minute or two. I say we give Player 2 his pistol and a molotov cocktail and pray he lasts that long.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

If its real (1920s/30s) CoC and you want to play the Big Damn Hero remember: the BAR is your friend. Also be sure to have a five gallon can of gasoline handy. One wrapped with a dozen sticks of dynamite. And a short fuse. A very short fuse! You will need it!

Honestly, I'm no big fan of the horror genre, and prefer playing the Hero too, but I've never turned down the chance to play CoC. It requires a different mindset, but you can have fun. Just accept that your character will, hopefully, go out in a blaze of glory and you should be fine. Fortunately it usually doesn't take long at all to make a character, so you shouldn't 'waste' more than half an hour making one, if that.

 

[Libramarian]

Read this, it's what the game is going for:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Dunwich_Horror

 

[Jhaelen]

Firstly I'd like to simply ask if a person like myself would enjoy a game like COC, I'm kind of an optimizer in most things due to how little I enjoy the idea of a character I spend 3-4 hours of time on character story dying, and I tend to not trust a dice roll that often, while I can really enjoy a good horror story and intrigue, I also have a mentality of "so the monsters evil and wants us dead?...why don't we just kill it and be done?" sorta 'big darn heros' thing. You know that Fighter who breaks down the door and lops heads like a boss? that's my guy(even if I love magic too), thus, unsure if CoC will be exciting.

That sounds as if you probably wouldn't enjoy playing in a 'typical' CoC game. In CoC monsters have a tendency to be unkillable and characters (who are called investigators for a reason) don't tend to have a high life expectancy, particularly if they choose to try to solve their cases by outgunning their opponents.

However, there are also game groups that prefer a "pulp" feel over the default "horror" feel in their games. In such games it can actually make sense to create a gun-toting character and expect to be able to survive and be somewhat successful for a while.

 

[wingsandsword]

It is the simple tale of an innocent psychiatrist who inadvertently, and unfortunately "catches" his patient's insanity.

I've seen that actually be a sort of "running joke" in an ongoing CoC game. It was a near-future CoC game with the investigators being part of a major metropolitan police department, investigating an increase in cult-related crimes.

The PCs would see horrible things, which would take a toll on their sanity. They would speak with the department psychiatrist for counseling regarding what they saw. The NPC therapist could make treatment checks to improve their sanity, but at the same time he would hear these unspeakable horrors, which cost him his own sanity.

Every so many sessions, the department psychiatrist would resign and they'd have a replacement.

Speaking of psychiatrists, and continuing on with my earlier Terminator analogy, Dr. Silberman is another good example of losing sanity.

At first he's 100% convinced that Kyle is insane, a violent crazy person with strange delusions about human-looking monsters from another time. Years later, he's working at a mental hospital, now treating Sarah since she seems to have developed Kyle's identical delusions. He knows Sarah is violently, dangerously insane. He's seen what she's willing to do because of her delusions.

Then, Sarah escapes from the mental hospital, as he witnesses what looks like a police officer just melts through a barred door, then takes multiple direct gunshots at close range (leaving strange, silvery wounds) while running inhumanly fast. He is left stunned by the experience.

Then, depending on which continuity you go with, he's lost a lot of sanity.

In Terminator 3: He's working as a grief counselor for the City of Los Angeles. He tries to counsel Katherine, but from his own words he's obviously hiding his own mental trauma, the moment he sees that face again, he is struck with horror and runs blindly into the distance.

In Sarah Connor Chronicles: He's resigned from his job and is living in a house in the woods. When an FBI Agent investigating the strange happenings he was tied to comes to knock on his door, he ambushes the agent and holds him prisoner, convinced that he must be one of those monsters from another time, come to finish him off as a witness.

Also, Miles Dyson is an example of losing sanity VERY fast. We see him late one afternoon as a devoted family man, two kids and a wife, nice big house, clearly a successful and happy man. Later that night, after being shown some impossible things, and being told what the explanation for those things is he's willing to quit his job and end his career. Then he's willing to destroy his workplace utterly and blow it up. He actually is willing do essentially suicide bomb his employer because of the impossible things he'd seen and heard.

The whole Terminator analogy is good to show that sanity loss in CoC isn't just spontaneously developing mental illnesses because you see a monster (although the raw shock of it is a little part of it), it's more the idea that you've learned horrible truths about the world and that now you see everyone and everything in a completely different way and acts that "normal" people would call crazy now make sense to you, and if you try to explain why you are doing everything you will sound completely mad.

 

[kitsune9]

To the OP, the fun of playing a character that is going to get wasted is just to see how long you can make him last. Each scene builds up tension from the last that will form a final culminating point. Maybe you'll complete the adventure alive, but will you be sane, or wind up in prison?

Awesome, awesome game and I'm a powergamer who loves to create one-trick ponies designed to kill stuff, but I love this game.

 

[Desdichado]

My experiences with the CoC game fall into one of three types:

1) One-shots, which are largely played for laughs and novelty value. These also often seem to be convention games. The death and insanity quotient is often overplayed, which makes it more silly and amusing when someone crashes and burns, rather than horrible. And if it turns out to be underplayed instead, then often the GM will compensate by making things happen arbitrarily near the end, because characters dying and going insane is what's expected. These types of games can be (and often are) quite fun, but very rarely are they even attempting to be horrifying, and even less rarely do they succeed.

2) One-shots or campaigns, either one, in which it's more like a guided tour of Lovecraftiana than anything horrifying. The Disneyfication of Lovecraft, if you will. You might go on a tour of Arkham, or other Lovecraftian locations, and you hit your quota of Deep Ones, Mi-Go, Elder Things, and other eldritch horrors, but because you're expected to, and that's the point of playing the game. More serious fans of the source material literature are probably more prone to this than others, where seeing stuff that's familiar from the source material is the whole point. It becomes comforting rather than horrifying when you see a Deep One or a Mi-Go. It's more like an esoteric in-joke or wink and nudge: fan service, if you will, rather than something that's actually terrifying.

3) The long term campaign where the Gamemaster and the players, mostly, come to the table with their expectations of horror, and willingness to play along engaged. Ironically, these kinds of game rarely have a high death or insanity count. They tend to become more about creeping, lurking dread with infrequent spikes of more immediate terror. And this is where Cthulhu can be its most fun.

If you are going to be a kick in the door type player, you may make game type #3 difficult to pull off. It all depends on what your GM is like and what he's going to pull on you, though.