Selling Delta Green to my Players

[Stormborn]

Rather than Hijack the other thread about the new DG d20 I am going to start a new one.

I think a pure DG game will be a hard sell to my group, if we do it at all it would likely be as d20 M with SAN not CoCd20. Part of the problem is the decaying sanity of characters, my group tends to get attached to PCs, and PC death is rare in any of our games. So some barrier to quick insanity is going to be a must. One of the ways I have been thinking about doing it was to give each PC a Sanity Hardness Score or Dice - the idea being that DG agents have some degree of immunity to the mind altering horror of the mythos (which in turn may be a kind of insanity itself) that allows them to face the creatures a little better than the average person. I haven't sat down with the numbers and worked this all out but I was thiking somethign like 1d6+character Level of resistance for each triggered event, or maybe just character level.

Thus SAN checks would work as normal, but then the player would reduce any potential SAN loss by their Hardness, and I like the dice idea to make it variable. This will help them combat the more common mythos beasts, but still not be any real protection against the true horrors.

Since I would likely use d20 M I may want a spell casting class. One of the ways to do this might be to give Mythos Sorcerers a Resistance to ability score loss or drain by givien a level dependent pool of resistance points that they loose instead of ability score points, but these would regenerate at the same rate as ability scores - 1 per 8 hours of rest. This way we have no real combat mages, but we could have a class that was a little more at ease int he spell castign department. Still more likely to go insane, but viable.

Any thoughts?

 

[KaosDevice]

(SNIP)Thus SAN checks would work as normal, but then the player would reduce any potential SAN loss by their Hardness,
(SNIP)
Since I would likely use d20 M I may want a spell casting class.

It sounds like you are looking more for a Cthulhu flavored Special Unit 2 then a hard core DG campaign. (Not that there is anything wrong with it, it's just that that is two pretty different styles) Instead of a hardness thing you might want to just reduce sanity loss for seeing the same type of creature multiple times. Eventually seeing a dep one would mean very little for example, as they are common in some games and seen often.

As for adding a spell casting class and reducing sanity costs there, you might want to adopt a sort of Cthulhu Dark Ages sort of approach, i.e. tack on a 'Lesser Grimoire' of non-sanity costing spells but leave all the big ones as in terms of sanity reduction.

Just some thoughts.

 

[Committed Hero]

Instead of Sanity loss, consider a list of debilitating factors (alcohol or drug use, PTSD hallucinations, what have you) and have the players decide what best fits their characters. I wouldn't make them more then a penalty to ability scores or traits. This way they still get the notion that their investigations are still taking their mental toll, but the players have some measure of "control" over how this happens.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Have you thought about Grim Tales?

I think I say that about five times a day.

The horror mechanic there is CR/EL based ... so fighting one zombie, say, isn't as horrific as fighting 50 ... and seeing Cthulhu would be enough to blast the sanity from anyone. Plus you've got all the spellcasting you need, right there, and with d20CoC you even have a Spell Level Conversion chart at the back if you wanted to use the GT spellcasting rules as-is.

I've also had good experience with taking the CoC spells as-is and taking Sanity damage and roughly doubling or tripling it and applying it as NL damage. Keep the ability score damage as well.

The GT sanity mechanic is built more like a type of saving throw, so it might be a little more palatable to your players, rather than watching a finite score ticking away as the adventures progress.

Ahhhhhh ... I want to play. Hopefully the book will be available soon.

--fje

 

[VorpalBunny]

I think a pure DG game will be a hard sell to my group, if we do it at all it would likely be as d20 M with SAN not CoCd20. Part of the problem is the decaying sanity of characters, my group tends to get attached to PCs, and PC death is rare in any of our games.

If that's the case, ANY CoC is *definitely* not for your group. In this case I'd run a straight d20 Modern game using "fear saves" (DC = 1/2 HD + Cha mod) instead of SAN checks - and following the fear rules straight out of the d20M rules. Characters may still run away, faint, and/or swoon in an encounter, but it's a lot less debilitating. And as they increase in level, the chances of the failing their saves decreases - they get "used" to the things man was not meant to know.

No muss, no fuss, and a hell of a lot less converting to do.

 

[The Human Target]

I'm actually going to be playing in a DG game set in the 30s using the new Spycraft 2.0 rules in a month or so. I'm not sure what kind of Horror/Insanity system were going to be using, but I'll check and get back to you.

I'm running a d20 Modern with lots of Fantasy and Sci-Fi bits in it, and I decided to just let my players decide how to change their characters after they see messed up stuff.

 

[Stormborn]

Actually my group has played CoC, both as GURPS and as d20, and both times, while memorable and fun, were a bit frustrating I think.

I will look at Fear Saves from Grim Tales - I have it, I just think that the group as a whole would like d20 M better.

As for magic use, I am still undecided. But then this whole endevor may just be another example of So Many Game, So Little Time.

 

[atom crash]

We've got a long-running Call of Cthulhu d20 Delta Green campaign on the backburner -- we used to play regularly in the 'ham but not since the GM moved to Nashville -- that was going quite well. Our agents are slowly going insane, sure, but we're all having fun roleplaying that slow downward spiral.

Also, since we have access to therapy during downtime, no one has gone over the edge in a single night at the opera. Well, one agent actually snapped during one operation but he's better now.

The main thing to sell the players on is that it's not D&D -- meaning, the point of the game is not to kill things and take their stuff. A better way to describe the genre is to imagine you're someone who has just realized that the X-Files are real.