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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 9386624" data-attributes="member: 75787">Different genres of games, in my experience, do have their own pitfalls. For Call of Cthulhu, I have been at a number of tables with similar experience to yours. CoC is strong on narrative, and so it attracts GMs who want to tell a story, and tend to forget about the "game" part of roleplaying games. And those GMs, as yours was, are great at the "presenting a narrative" side, but they neglect to let the players join in. They have a compelling story, and dammit, you are going to experience it their way.Some of my best con experiences have been CoC, but also it has had some of the worst. I've been on a spaceship where I made one roll to fix something (if I had failed it would have taken longer ... with no other effect) and decided to hide when the monsters came and so they went away. End of scenario. I've followed the GM through Berlin and into a time-shifting pyramid where the only consequential rolls were to see if you escaped death. This mode of failure seems common in CoC.For more gamist systems, the failure mode is more of very slow GMs who don't know the rules well, or who are unwilling to risk a "wrong" call or allow you to do anything not listed in the powers on your sheet. I've never had as great games playing Pathfinder as I have with CoC, but not as bad ones either. At least in a gamest system you have agency and can have some fun with that.So now, when I go to cons, I try and look for systems that have a good narrative / gamist balance (I have zero interest in accurate simulation games) like Fate Core, 13th Age and GUMSHOE. They don't seem to attract the extremist story-telling GMs nor the "if it's not in the book you cannot do it" GMs that others do.</blockquote>

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