Cthulhu Dark is a complete and elegant game...but how much of the work is being done simply by the inclusion of the the word "Cthulhu"?
As for the amount of work genre does for Cthulhu Dark -- very little. The system doesn't really care what scenario you put it up against, it will work to generate an answer. If you play a game with CD with NO mythos, it still works
Initially I clicked "Like" for Ovinomancer's post, but then I reread the bit I've quoted and changed it to "Love".
I've run two sessions, one-offs, of Cthuhu Dark. I'm confident I could run more. The only Mythos element I've used is, in one, a shoggoth - and then only as the label for an implied horror that was carried in the hold of a vessel from Scotland to Boston and then from Boston to Newfoundland. The only time the PCs interacted with it was when I described something they couldn't see rushing past them - in my mind, an invisible horror.
In the other game the horror theme was one of mysterious deaths, madness in an asylum, addiction to laudanum ("nerve tonic"), and were-hyenas.
What carries the weight of the horror themes, as I experienced the game, is the Insanity die and associated rating for each character. I haven't tried, but I think the game could be drifted towards Wuthering Heights just by relabelling this the Passion die: and when it reaches 6 instead of going incurably mad, the character comes to a dramatic or tragic end as their passion dictates.
Phrases like "high trust" might be unhelpful if they imply a character flaw. But I'm not claiming that, I'm not sure who is.
I appreciate the appeal of freeform roleplay. I just wish these assumptions were spelled out more clearly. I especially wish the rhetoric surrounding it did not feel the need to appeal to being part of a truer, more ancient tradition. I also really do not like all the rhetoric around trust that seems to imply that the rest of us value game design out of a lack of trust for each other.
Here Campbell picks up on the same thing that I have done in the rhetoric around
trust and some of the associated rhetoric.
I would argue (and have been saying) that the loop is like an outline with basic steps that can be expanded upon via resolution mechanics, rules, procedures, worldbuilding/prep, principles/advice, and the somewhat more nebulous play expectations/culture. 5e, which lists the above explicitly as its gameplay loop in the opening pages, follows this up with hundreds of pages of rules which codify how to use dice to resolve uncertainty and outlines specific rules that the dm and player can refer to to help narrate the result of player announcing actions. So I can say, "I would like to stab the guard in the throat," and the rules outline how the dm should handle that declaration (or at least the stabby part; there are no rules for the throat part. Further there are lots of rules for the stabby part, almost no rules for determining how the world reacts, which is then left up to whatever the dm finds reasonable given the situation). So characterizing that gameplay loop as "zero agency" is confusing at best and in bad faith at worst.
To the extent that it's not zero agency, then it's incomplete.
But in fact it's also inaccurate. For instance, suppose that - in a game of 5e - my PC and my friend's PC come to blows. We can use the combat rules to work out what happens next without needing the GM to tell us what happens next. The only difference when it's me vs an Orc rather than me vs my friend is that the GM happens to be the one in charge of the Orc's hit point tally and action declarations.
I guess the alternative to what my previous paragraph asserts is what
@overgeeked said upthread, which I took to be that
My PC and my friend's PC can't fight one another unless the GM signs off on that shared fiction. In which case we have a dramatic demonstration of how it
is a zero payer agency play loop.
Or to look at it from another perspective, here's the "loop" for
submitting an essay as a university student and
giving your draft novel to your friend to read:
* The writer gives their work to the reader;
* The reader reads it;
* The reader tells the writer what they thought of it.
And so submitting an assignment for examination is just like getting your friend to tell you what they think of your story, yeah? That's such a misleading equivalence that it shows us something has gone wildly wrong in our presentation of the loop: it's missed out that the whole process, and even point, in the university case is governed by a completely different set of standards, expectations and purposes from the case of the friendly critic.
Or, here's the loop for competition chess and competition singles tennis:
* The two players and the umpire take their places in the competition space;
* The players alternate in performing bodily movements in response to one another;
* The umpire declares the winner.
Everything that might explain how those two competitions work is missing from my "loop".
My interest is in how many of those rules, procedures, etc, do you really need?
Do you mean
need to use? Do you mean
need to adhere to?
Let's take the first.
Rolemaster doesn't really tell us how to play the game? Does it need to? Maybe not - most players extrapolate from prior experience of D&D, plus the implicit logic of the game's presentation, and muddle through.
Classic Traveller's statements of how it is to be played are incomplete and in part contradictory (eg in some places it characterises the referee in the same sorts of "neutral" terms as are found in Moldvay Basic's advice about good dungeon mastering; but in one place it says that the referee has a
duty to introduce encounters so as "to further the cause of the adventure being played"). When I first read the Classic Traveller rules, c 1979, I couldn't work out how to play it. When, later, I played it by importing expectations formed from playing D&D and reading some White Dwarf articles, it was a bit of a mediocre experience (character gen was great, but play itself a bit lacklustre). When I came back to it a few years ago with my understanding of Apocalypse World, and also having reread things like that remark about the referee's duty through the lens of both AW and my experience in scene-framed RPGing, I was able to make it work.
So did Classic Traveller "need" better, clearer advice on how to play? I think so, yes.
Let's take the second. Do we need to adhere to rules, principles, etc? I dunno. What sort of experience are you looking for? We're in the realm, here, of hypothetical imperatives, not categorical ones. But I can tell you that I will not play a game that is adjudicated in the fashion implied by
@overgeeked's posts in this thread, and by some of what I've read from the FKRers. I've experienced that sort of RPGing, in both club and tournament contexts. And I personally think it's a waste of my time.
I've seen with a game like Cairn, which is 20 pages, mostly random tables, that you can remove an awful lot and still have basically the same play experience (e.g. do you need six ability scores?). Meanwhile some OSR advice argues that players looking at their character sheet or needing to roll dice to determine whether an outcome is successful is a kind of failure state (Maze Rats (12 pages, mostly tables) says that its mechanics are set up so that if you need to roll dice you most likely will fail, so as to avoid players referring to their character sheet).
What are you driving at here? Obviously we don't ned six ability scores. Rolemaster has ten, plus (just as D&D does) various derived and further attributes eg movement rate. Cthulhu Dark has one: Insanity. Plus a freely-chosen occupation descriptor. In HeroQuest revised, a PC has as many descriptors as are needed within the 100-word PC gen limit.
If the game play will all be the GM directly adjudicating fictional positioning unmediated by any dice rolls, then maybe nothing is needed. (What's the PC sheet even for, then?) The play loop for that game might be a stripped-down version of the dungeon crawl loop I posted upthread:
1. The DM describes the environment.
2. The players describe what they want their characters to do.
3. The DM refers to the map and key.
4. The DM extrapolates from the map and key where the PC goes (if moving) and/or what bits of architecture, furniture or similar that the PC discovers and/or touches. If the DM is not clear about what the PC is doing relative to the geography and architecture, the DM might seek clarification from the player.
5. The DM extrapolates the immediate result as faithfully and neutrally as they can.
Why do we need to pretend the loop is something different? Why do we need the rhetoric of
trust, which does no special work in that play loop? And why do we need the language of
need? I mean, if you want to play that game then that play loop will give you what you need. If you want to play a different game - eg if I want the sort of experience I have playing Burning Wheel - then I will need a different play loop. As I said, we're in the realm of hypothetical, not categorical, imperatives.
