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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9692665" data-attributes="member: 18">Oh re: mechanics again, I do think they matter, and like, as an example I'd contrast two mechanics from Mothership - Stress/Panic Checks and Saving Throws.In Mothership, your Stress start at 2, and mostly only goes up (usually when you fail a check), to a max of 20. Occasionally you'll be called upon to make a Panic Check, which means rolling under your stress on a d20. This is pretty effective - you start out easily making these checks, and it gets more and more likely you're going to fail. That's a good ratcheting tension mechanism, and it works well across a single adventure/one-shot in a way CoC's SAN doesn't.But Mothership also has saving throws, and these end up so you basically have a 25-35% chance of passing them (in general), and there's absolutely nothing you can do to increase that. So if the entire party makes them, pretty much 3 out of 4 PCs will fail any given save.But the way the game wants DMs to use them, is essentially as if they were passable and PCs could reasonably be expected to pass them. But they can't be. So you get these stupid-feeling situations where the game and adventure are written as if this was a D&D save, where you probably have an over 50% chance to succeed and might have ways to boost it, but that's just not the case. It also quickly becomes obvious that all the PCs are basically equally bad at all saves, so it's really just random, it's not like the tough marine will probably pass his Body save - the actual chance is barely different to the pencil-necked scientist a lot of the time (the one exception being androids usually pass Fear saves, but at the cost of making everyone else fail them). I feel like this mechanic doesn't really build the horror, and instead tends to feel a bit arbitrary and like, if you're making a save, you already failed it. But again, the writing and suggested way they're used doesn't really fit that. It's like they needed a better mechanism, but just didn't get one.</blockquote>

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