Why Do You Hate An RPG System?

[overgeeked]

Or the DM just sends it in to kill everyone, because that's what it does...

Like I said, that's 100% on the DM, then. They're forcing the fight. That's bad DMing. If the dragon shows up and the PCs charge it...that bad playing.

I have had it happen, and not just Morrow Project, lost mine 5e game I was killed by arrows at a wagon because I failed a perception check, and couldn't react except get hit. I totally bailed on that game after that.

Probably for the best. If you can't handle a character dying, you shouldn't play games where there's combat. For someone with "Dying in Chargen" in your profile, you seem incredibly adverse to character death.

 

[dragoner]

Like I said, that's 100% on the DM, then. They're forcing the fight. That's bad DMing. If the dragon shows up and the PCs charge it...that bad playing.

Probably for the best. If you can't handle a character dying, you shouldn't play games where there's combat. For someone with "Dying in Chargen" in your profile, you seem incredibly adverse to character death.

Who isn't? And pointless wastes of time, like going through chargen, and dying right away. CT chargen is less than 15 minutes, even then I have only seen people want to kill their character when they didn't like it, and that as well seems a pointless waste of time. Just roll another, sheesh.

 

[pemerton]

I mean, we are talking about the premiere horror RPG and the premiere fantasy action-adventure RPG. Character death is quite possible in both, but especially in Call of Cthulhu. If you play a horror game expecting easy wins and no character death...well, that's a clear mismatch of expectations. You're clearly playing the wrong game.

I haven't read the whole of HPL's corpus, but have read multiple hundreds of pages. Is there a story where the protagonist dies? Not in Call of Cthulhu itself, not in The Shadow out of Time, not in At the Mountains of Madness, I think not in The Dunwich Horror. Maybe in Shadow Over Innsmouth, depending how you look at it.

So why would I expect character death to be a serious prospect in a CoC game?

If you're standing in the starting-village square and an adult red dragon shows up in front of your 1st-level character...what you do is up to you. Do you fight? Do you talk? Do you run? If you choose to fight, that's 100% your fault. If the DM forces a fight, that's 100% their fault. The options are not "fight and win" or "give up and quit". There's a literal world of options between those two. Negotiation. Talking. Seeing if the dragon wants to offer a quest. See if it makes a demand. Have a conversation. Most DM's aren't going to throw an adult red dragon at a 1st-level party expecting a fight.

Why do the players not have the information they need to know what the GM is expecting them to do? Either the GM could just tell them. Or the GM could provide sufficient context in the form of in-fiction information (eg rumours about the dragon) to enable the players to know what is expected.

Leaving this to be worked out by trial and error seems like poor GMing to me.

EDIT: Doubly so in a context where red dragons are, by default, Chaotic Evil, and where many GMs have a "no evil PCs" policy, and many players might reasonably feel that bargaining with an evil being risks violating that policy.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I came to hate AD&D because I found the classes to be too restrictive; I couldn't see a logic in the fact that knowing how to pick locks meant to you weren't really good at fighting, or knowing how to use magic meant you couldn't grasp swordsmanship or lock-picking.

GURPs should have been right up my alley, but every time I've examined their rules it has turned me away. I can't say exactly what I don't like about it, but I won't touch the game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'd suggest those people find a game that doesn't include violence and the implied risk of character death, then. D&D and Call of Cthulhu are clearly not games they'd enjoy.

Its not that simple, at least with D&D, and never has been. "Implied risk" they do want; they just don't want it to actually happen. That's because they are looking at it through the lens of fiction where there's death around the main characters with some regularity, but the main characters pull through. They're trying for the same effect. And I'd argue as D&D has evolved over the decades, it and its kin have, on the whole, leaned into that: death is still on the table (because a lot if not most people can't have that sense of risk unless it actually is) but the actual chance of it occurring has decreased markedly (as someone who got his start in OD&D this is very visible to me).

CoC is a bit of a different beast. Its based on a type of fiction where the survival of protagonists is not necessarily the default case, where the characters are chronically dealing with problems above their heads. Its not even a routine monster hunting genre (which by itself tend to be risky being at least horror adjacent), and people playing in it who don't expect there's a pretty good chance of loss have not engaged with the proper genre (which may be partly the GM's fault, since its a genre that in its purer forms really is out on the fringe of what RPGs usually address; horror games in general are, and true Lovecraftian horror is probably on the fringe of those).

 

[Thomas Shey]

It definitely drops off in proportion to how long it takes to make a character, and expected survival rate.

To a point. But, you know, back in the early days of Runequest, it wasn't exactly an OD&D level "roll a bunch of stats, pick a class, buy your equipment and go" character gen, and you can look a long time before you find a game as capable of killing off a character from bad luck early and often (most of the GMs I knew at the time had literally a sheaf of dead character sheets, since we were playing a lot of it with a lot of people), and people were kind of okay with it.

Its an issue of expectation and what you're used to. While it was more lethal at more advanced levels than what usually happened in OD&D, people were still used to losing OD&D characters at the bottom levels all the time because of how ridiculously brittle they were in practice. These days, fairly few games take that kind of approach, so people don't expect it even with simple character gen (though obviously games with a lot of decision making in character gen will make it even more unattractive).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Who isn't? And pointless wastes of time, like going through chargen, and dying right away. CT chargen is less than 15 minutes, even then I have only seen people want to kill their character when they didn't like it, and that as well seems a pointless waste of time. Just roll another, sheesh.

That's the intrinsic problem with overly random character gen; people can tout it all the want, but there enough people who want to play what they want to play, and if you force random generation on them, they'll either completely subvert the process in the first place, or just swordbush the characters they don't like so they have a "legitimate" reason to generate another one.

 

[dragoner]

To a point. But, you know, back in the early days of Runequest, it wasn't exactly an OD&D level "roll a bunch of stats, pick a class, buy your equipment and go" character gen, and you can look a long time before you find a game as capable of killing off a character from bad luck early and often (most of the GMs I knew at the time had literally a sheaf of dead character sheets, since we were playing a lot of it with a lot of people), and people were kind of okay with it.

Its an issue of expectation and what you're used to. While it was more lethal at more advanced levels than what usually happened in OD&D, people were still used to losing OD&D characters at the bottom levels all the time because of how ridiculously brittle they were in practice. These days, fairly few games take that kind of approach, so people don't expect it even with simple character gen (though obviously games with a lot of decision making in character gen will make it even more unattractive).

The ultimate challenge: The Keeper tells you your character died before you roll them up.

I play a decent amount of BRP with M-Space and CoC; I mean, I don't just randomly kill off characters, its too long of a process to generate them. Even with 5e, granted I don't play it all that much, it is longer than old D&D which was about as long as it took to roll the stats because we knew the spells and gear.

 

[dragoner]

That's the intrinsic problem with overly random character gen; people can tout it all the want, but there enough people who want to play what they want to play, and if you force random generation on them, they'll either completely subvert the process in the first place, or just swordbush the characters they don't like so they have a "legitimate" reason to generate another one.

It is also about being invested in the character, the whole role-playing thing. Random has the benefit of someone not playing the exact same character every single time, except yes, if they don't like that character, it circles back on their not being invested. Usually I have given out re-rolls, out points to build on, so it's more guided random. Though in games like 5e, with the ASI's and everything else, it is only a matter of leveling up.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It is also about being invested in the character, the whole role-playing thing. Random has the benefit of someone not playing the exact same character every single time, except yes, if they don't like that character, it circles back on their not being invested. Usually I have given out re-rolls, out points to build on, so it's more guided random. Though in games like 5e, with the ASI's and everything else, it is only a matter of leveling up.

You can have some random elements without producing this result (whether that's desirable is in the eyes of the observer); I don't think people would probably run into too many rocks with the character gen in Cepheus Deluxe for example.

But a lot of games in the first few years (maybe as much as a decade) of the hobby left you entirely at the mercy of the dice. And not all of them had as little relevance as OD&D attributes started out being.