Call of Cthulhu

Rev Hellfire

Call of Cthulhu
Just wondering if anyone is playing Call of Cthulhu, whats your opinion of it ? Good bad, indifferent

Also just out of interest any old fart roleplayers in the Drogheda area ?

LoLth

I used to play CoC. Dont knwo what the D20 version of it is like, I used to play the chaosium version. What I thought of it? Excellent. Well deserving of the many best rpg awards it received.

It's difficut though to get out of hte D&D attitude of "quick, lets kill it" as most of the time you're either insane by the time you've realised what it is or squished rather quickly.

One of my favourite memories is of Hank, an ex lawyer turned PI that wound up his mythos career fencing with a star vampire to keep it occupied while the rest of the group bulldozed the theatre and laid demolition charges (stolen from a building site across the road). Blaze of glory and all that.

Worst moment: The DM spent weeks perfecting a haunted house adventure set during WW1. The squad turned up, hopped out of the back of a jeep to investigate the house where we knew the cultists were casting a dark ritual (no, not the 3 extra mana one). Splitting into two squads we charged in and stormed the attic and basement simultaneously. The cultists didnt stand a chance against tommy guns and grenades poor Dm went nuts (must've failed his san check!).

You should check out an expansion called Delta Green. Modern day x-files type stuff but done sooooo much better.

lordsippa

CoC was possibly the most detailed and sensical system I've ever played. You were hideously underpowered by normal game standards, yet so were all the people you were likely to face. Monsters and the like were terrifying but if you were meant to beat them there were ways for you to. It was a challenge to play but never irritated because IT MADE SENSE. Not only that but it was easy enough to play after a quick looking over of the system.

Probably my favourite system of all time. Oh and if you liked it try World Tree for a similarly detailed, yet playable fantasy system.

Rev Hellfire

I had the chaosium version myself, and was just wondering what the newer wizards version is like.

Specky

I bought the Chaosium version when it was very first released (many many years ago) and was absolutely captivated by the whole thing. Stayed up the whole night reading the rule book and all the other bits of material I picked up with it.

I have to say I'm not really into rules and don't like at all games that are solely based around a combat system and a magic system. More interested in the roles than the rules, and CoC gives a fantastic opportunity to play more realistically than most other games I've played....i.e. avoid getting killed and avoid things that frighten you, and if you don't manage these things you have to live with the long term consequences.

Haven't seen the d20 version, like I said, I'm not into rules. Got totally dissillusioned with the rpg industry years ago when Games Workshop started taking over everything and bending the whole industry towards hormonal 15 year olds who wanted to kill everything, so haven't looked at new games in a long time.

But the H.P.Lovecraft genre is beautiful, I particularly like the fact that people have well established stereotypical character types for the 1920s/1930s and there's lots of good "real" source material that you can use to build scenarios around (like actual newspaper reports etc)...I'm also not really into playing "shop bought" scenarios 'cos I'm too lazy to learn them well enough to play them well, prefer to prepare a skeleton of a game idea, dress it up with some nice source background material then bring it to life by playing all the NPCs how I feel like playing them on the day.

Ooooo!! Get all shivery just thinking about it!!

Yay Coc!

Specky

Definitely an old fart....but not in the Drogheda area, shame!

For some reason that made me think of a mug my dad used to have that said on it "Old plumbers never die they just go round the bend".....strangely apt given the CoC context

Nevyn

the d20 system thinkers with the mechanics of the game but not the " Spirit " of it .

You are still going to be able to send some one with a pistol up against ,
Tcho-tcho, deep ones and star vamps if you are feeling nasty and they have not yet learned that to runway is good thing.

Nothing like switching a gaming group to
CoC esp after a butching D&D or WHFRG
game.

Nasty but damn fun

Specky

Nothing like switching a gaming group to CoC esp after a butching D&D or WHFRG game.

In a way this is a perfect illustration of why I don't really like rules systems. Players get familiar with them and come to expect certain things from them that I find very un-realistic.

Like the "level" system (AAGGHH!! HATE HATE HATE!!). There's not enough mystery to it. When did you last have someone chat to you in the pub and tell you they were a level 3 accountant?? (....actually I think this may be a bad example...last one I met had Pocket Calculator 11 and Make You Yawn 13)

...but you know what I mean.

Yes, you have to have character progression and advancement and you have to give players the sense that their long surviving character is "better" (not a good word) than some novice just joined the game, but there are so many more realistic ways of doing this.

Same with magic. It's treated in the majority of RPGs like it's the ability to play table tennis or something. Some character just says "oh, I cast Enormous Blinding Monster Flash with Transform Enemy Into Small Cowering Toad" and everyone just goes..."right, where's the next monster?"

Where is the awe and the fear we ought to feel if we were walking down the street and someone suddenly did something like that right in front of us?

That's where CoC works so well. It is set in the world of the expected, the orthodox and the normal (i.e. our own world) but brings players into contact with the abnormal the unexpected and the paradoxical, and rather than players just chopping heads off they react the way you'd expect. That is what makes it such a good game. Other games in different genres can be just as good as long as people don't come to know what to expect all the time.

OK, this is a rant about my own personal opinions on gaming. Lots of people love the mechanics in the same way that people love playing soccer or whatever, but I always believed RPG was about stretching the imagination and experiencing aspects of a life that isn't yours in a world that isn't yours.

Within my last gaming group we played a very big, very long campaign based on a very few simple rules that were devised simply to resolve certain aspects of combat and to keep track of player character's personal characteristics.

Medieval technology, no monsters, no magic.

...or was there? Lots of pretty odd things happened and often they'd happen around the same people time and again. Several times people thought they saw "things" lurking but we maintained the mystery throughout by keeping the mysteries mysterious.

I think I've wandered off topic. Must be holiday fever creeping into my blood.

Specky

...and another thing!!

Just to illustrate how it takes more than just the idea of "scarey monsters" to make a good game did anyone ever play Chill?

What a pile of crap.

Nevyn

arrgh game mechanics should never ever
interfer with rping.

I will not toleratre players ( usually blokes)
who are that anally retentive that they argue for 20mins over the weighting on a dice roll quoting the rule down to the flaming page numbers.

GM also stands for GOD mode and if i say they have failed a roll they fail if they dare get stroppy about it , it will be come a crit fail and that when things can get nasty.

Magic can fail and that can be rather nasty, some times you need to make complacent players die .

Switching from game to game is another way to change things about currently we have active vampire and SLA chars but what is played depends on the mood and who can attend.

I always give more xp for reactions that
are correct for the sistuation and the charchter. and well I never let players update thier sheets when leveling occurs they just get handed a new one
at the next gaming session

plus you have to punish the idiots that
think they can take on a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath with saftey goggles and a chainsaw.

Specky

plus you have to punish the idiots that think they can take on a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath with saftey goggles and a chainsaw.

lol...yeah, safety goggles, that'll work...