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Is he running a pre-packaged campaign? Lol if this is Beyond the Mountains of Madness.
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Jul 16, 2020 22:52
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Vengarr posted:How long has Arkham Horror 2e been out of print? It’s amazing to me how expensive the expansions are online. I should have picked up a few of the small-box ones when I had the chance. I got most of them in french back in the day. I got the core game for cheap used, but since it was in french I had to get the expansions in french too or it would clash. So I think it ended up costing me mroe overall. It's weird how despite iving in Montreal, if we want our gaming stuff in french we need to import from France so it's more expensive than jsut buyign the english versions. Even for games that where originally in french like Qin.
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Jul 17, 2020 01:08
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Yeah, Honestly these posts are so long cause I start out reasonable length and I just keep remembering stuff that pissed me off at the time but didn't rise above the frustration noise level. Goddamn it. Literally lost touch with one of the 3 members of this once kinda tight group cause I blew up on him when he was being (wildly) unsafe during the (relatively) not that bad Corona of May while crashing on my couch. Been trying to not to be a big rear end in a top hat twice in rapid succession, cause when you have two big beefs (or are tempted to) with your friends so close together, usually means you're being the rear end in a top hat. Nessus posted:Is he running a pre-packaged campaign? Lol if this is Beyond the Mountains of Madness. I dunno but its of a piece with this Cthulhu in 20s Berlin setting and it has been a real annoying problem with it's grimdark adult content nonsense. Like there's some Slaanesh type god we're on the trail of, Abzu, so all this sexy-time nonsense starts happening. Guy's reading the script "a young woman in a skimpy negligee answers the door. She is barely seventeen -" I cut in "Or she could just be eighteen, or even 20!". And get mostly ignored, even though this is clearly bothering the lone female in the group. She got legit pissed when he had his character blow coke up her nose to revive her after she got knocked out (he's been just REVELING in the opportunity to do drugs, oh my god can you imagine!? How Adult!). Why indeed would somone object to getting dosed while unconscious. This would all be the kewlest most twizted poo poo ever if we were 14 or so, but we're goddamn mid-30s. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 01:48
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What? Who is blowing cocaine up the female character's nose? What is going on here? Is your GM just the grandmama from the Dr. Tran videos? "Oh heavens me the underage girl's got her cocaine out! Would you like a bump? How about you, Susan, you're bleeding from sixteen gunshot wounds. Here you go, toot toot, white light white heat" e: Low humor aside I think you need to hit eject on this game and red card hard because this poo poo all sounds INCREDIBLY gross. Can you find out what module this GM is working from? I have resources and can at least try to investigate, because if that GM is spinning "underage cokehead" out of, say, "young woman in negligee" then you may just need to throw this fellow out! Nessus fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 02:09
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PipHelix posted:. Been trying to not to be a big rear end in a top hat twice in rapid succession, cause when you have two big beefs (or are tempted to) with your friends so close together, usually means you're being the rear end in a top hat. As someone who has been this rear end in a top hat before, no it doesn't, it can very much just mean your friends are assholes. Or maybe you're all assholes but you're changing and they're not. I know it's the goon stereotype to  and I can understand why especially now that doesn't feel like a good time but it sounds like you're miserable playing in this game and you're not alone. Grab the people who are good and bail, the creep factor won't get better and it sounds pretty gross already.
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Jul 17, 2020 02:17
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I'm guessing he's running Berlin the Wicked City which actually looks like a cool as heck module set in the aftermath of the Great War.
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Jul 17, 2020 02:26
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yea if he's running the Wicked City module he's taking some...deep liberties... You gotta do what all our Cthulhu characters aren't smart enough to do and get the gently caress out of the house before you lose your mind.
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Jul 17, 2020 02:53
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moths posted:I'm guessing he's running Berlin the Wicked City which actually looks like a cool as heck module set in the aftermath of the Great War.
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Jul 17, 2020 17:30
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MonsieurChoc posted:I got most of them in french back in the day. I got the core game for cheap used, but since it was in french I had to get the expansions in french too or it would clash. So I think it ended up costing me mroe overall. Were the expansions worth it? I got AA and Dunwich back in the day and only found a group to play them with recently. Adding more mechanics to a game this complicated doesn’t seem like a positive.
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Jul 17, 2020 18:23
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Vengarr posted:Were the expansions worth it? I got AA and Dunwich back in the day and only found a group to play them with recently. Adding more mechanics to a game this complicated doesn’t seem like a positive. I had the King in Yellow expansion and never even took it out of the box. I traded the game and some Blessed Dice and the expansion for something actually playable. You’re better off just running the RPG, as it’s lighter in rules and takes the same amount of time as Arkham Horror.
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Jul 17, 2020 18:35
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Downside is I would have to be the DM. At least this way I get to play.
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Jul 17, 2020 18:55
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Dr. Lunchables posted:You’re better off just running the RPG, as it’s lighter in rules and takes the same amount of time as Arkham Horror.
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Jul 17, 2020 18:56
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Vengarr posted:Were the expansions worth it? I got AA and Dunwich back in the day and only found a group to play them with recently. Adding more mechanics to a game this complicated doesn’t seem like a positive. I love Arkham Horror, making me a bad judge of this. I had a lot of fun with the Kingsport and Lurker at the Threshold expansions. The rest I feel like I didn't get to try much, either too diluted when playing everything at once or just bad luck.
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Jul 18, 2020 06:07
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I liked the idea of Arkham Horror but found Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu to be basically that but tighter, better balanced, and ends before everyone gets bored. It's not a clone, but AH was definitely an influence.
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Jul 18, 2020 11:48
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moths posted:I'm guessing he's running Berlin the Wicked City which actually looks like a cool as heck module set in the aftermath of the Great War. Yeeeup. There's all these insane rules for drugs and this guy, again, military so all this stuff is forbidden fruit to him (he freaks out if anyone smokes weed *near* him IRL, though probably with reason.) I'm just like, it was funny at first, but once I realize I gotta roll all this nonsense for stat bonuses/penalties, and for addiciton on the literal first bump... It's very Satanic Panic. "Oh no! you did a line, now you're addicted and get miserably sick you cant get a fix every three hours!"
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Jul 19, 2020 02:40
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Is your friend a 14 year old who lied about his age to enlist?
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Jul 19, 2020 23:54
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I cross-posted this over on RPGnet, but wanted to hear thoughts from people here: I've been reading some CoC books sitting in my backlog, and I began thinking how a Keeper would run the game. CoC has emphasis on investigation, although it's kind of a joke that the ideal play style is to be intentionally ignorant: "burn all the books, avoid looking around the corner with the horrible noises, etc" that seems counterproductive in the accumulation of clues and solving of mysteries. I understand that this is a sort of stereotype engendered by genre-savvy players, but it does bring to mind how to fight or plan around such courses of action as play proceeds when the surviving investigators grow ever more risk-averse. Furthermore, the "use a magical ritual to banish the evil" seems an unreliable course, as the mechanics for learning spells from a Mythos tome are hampered by what looks like a lengthy study time (most tomes require weeks to learn the contents). While a useful tool, it seems that setting up adventures which require some kind of magical solution is a risky railroad. What are some necessary elements and bits of advice for running Call of Cthulhu? Are there any things to consider that may not be an element in other horror/mystery RPGs?
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Jul 20, 2020 19:21
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Sometimes the best tool for dealing with alien evil is a stick of dynamite. Source: The Thing
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Jul 20, 2020 20:35
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Part of the problems can be avoided by getting a good session zero and/or a same page document https://bankuei.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/the-same-page-tool/ and having players make characters that are going make the "wrong choices" that are part of the game as well as prepare them for what might happen to them during the game. Players are always going to be genre savvy to one extent or another but making choices that run counter to that knowledge should be part of the fun, that's why you'd play a horror game in the first place, instead of something else. Emphasize that and inform your players and they'll pick up those corrupting books and walk down those dark corridors. You can keep your players on their toes by playing hard to the wrongness of the mythos, don't stick too close to the "stock" monsters, tomes, spells, and deities in the books. If players think that they have all the answers in their own heads then they won't feel like they have to go through the world to get information. If you don't like the long study times of the tomes then either largely ignore it, provide the players with different "tomes" that are easier to read, or structure the story to allow for breaks in the plot. The mythos moves at its own pace, for the most part it doesn't care about humanity, so a cult trying to bring a shard of a god through a hole in reality or a monster that feeds on the hypothalamus' of coeds can operate on long time frames. Just allow players blocks of time to allocate to pursuits during those "downtimes" to learn or recover. While it can be tempting to use rituals as a capstone to a plot you're absolutely right, it is railroady and if nobody wants to do the magic thing then you're kinda stuck. Instead of preplanning on a certain ritual just be open to players making their own ritual up, essentially making it a force of will/power of friendship/spontaneous use of the Cthulhu Mythos as a kind of hail mary move against the problem. If they instead use more physical means to solve the problem then let them do that too! And speaking generally, I've found that CoC games feel slower than other games, with explosive moments of danger and drama. A more pulpy or action orientated game probably wouldn't be so slow, especially if the emphasis of the game was more about mechanical survival (like a zombie game) and less investigative where there's more chances for "losing" narratively (your character has survived but the real murderer got away).
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Jul 20, 2020 21:23
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Libertad! posted:CoC has emphasis on investigation, although it's kind of a joke that the ideal play style is to be intentionally ignorant: "burn all the books, avoid looking around the corner with the horrible noises, etc" that seems counterproductive in the accumulation of clues and solving of mysteries. I understand that this is a sort of stereotype engendered by genre-savvy players, but it does bring to mind how to fight or plan around such courses of action as play proceeds when the surviving investigators grow ever more risk-averse. I recall the keeper's guide for the game saying basically that if people do this kind of thing, they should not be rewarded, because they are essentially refusing the call to action. I would personally say that if people were being "heavily" genre savvy like that, especially if it was going to make the in-setting routes to the solution impossible ("I throw the book in the river and shoot the witness!") I would say, "Kyle, stop being an rear end in a top hat." However, "moderate" savviness, such as not splitting up or using the buddy system when investigating a site in person, is absolutely fine and should be rewarded (in the sense of, it will make you more likely to succeed). On using magic solutions, I think that you have a good point here. What is probably a better way to do it - in addition to keeping in mind things like Rudecat said - is if you either give the players an access to abridged/elided text that can make any direct consultation of the text way faster. An example here would be the aggressive request by Wilbur Whateley to consult a certain section of their Necronomicon, followed by his attempted break in: this makes it clear that Dr. Armitage wants to really check out what the gently caress that mutant weirdo was willing to die to obtain. The one piece of advice I would give is to look at the Sanity rules chapter - not the stuff about whatever they say for psychological syndromes but the core underlying ideas. The ones written in by default are I think pretty good and will tend to produce a gradual decline with a big flare-up when a really great gribbly comes up, but you can adjust and season to taste. RudeCat's also correct that you should avoid sticking too close to the "stock" content, especially if you're dealing with people who have marinated in pop-culture Yog-Sothothery.
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Jul 20, 2020 22:44
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Libertad! posted:I cross-posted this over on RPGnet, but wanted to hear thoughts from people here: CoC seems to be a game where the game itself isn't as important as the culture around playing it. The "genre-savvy" player isn't something I see much in the games I've been in, for example. Not because people aren't genre-savvy, but because they don't want to derail the scenario by blowing everything up and lighting it on fire based on information they don't have in character. Scenarios are often structured around a mystery where staying ignorant of the mystery won't help, and it's instead a careful balancing act between curiosity and caution. (In con modules, which is where CoC shines, the mystery is often forced upon the players. My first CoC experience, Cthulhu on the Subway, basically starts with the players dead, with the players playing their ghosts.) Acting in incomplete information can make for very tense climaxes: you have the magic statue in your hands and are being pursued by a Hound of Tindaloo - will it leave you alone if you give it the statue, or do you have to destroy the statue to banish it? You make a choice, and you live with the consequences. Actually running the game often involves giving the players a bunch of things to investigate, and then revealing parts of the mystery as the players to investigating. Clues should be handed out liberally, often without skill checks at all, but players should also have clues dangled before them that they'll have to do something risky to get, like climbing somewhere dangerous to look at the glinting thing. The combination of the players caution and the difficulty in covering every possible avenue of investigation will then typically cause the players to arrive at the climax with the aforementioned incomplete information and be forced to scramble for a way out. The investigative part of the scenario can also work as a form of tension-building: the players walking around and choosing what to look at gives the players time to soak in the atmosphere and get into the mindset of horror. One of the better scenarios I've played is Ghost Lights in Terrors From Beyond. I recommend taking a look at it.
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Jul 21, 2020 00:22
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Libertad! posted:CoC has emphasis on investigation, although it's kind of a joke that the ideal play style is to be intentionally ignorant: "burn all the books, avoid looking around the corner with the horrible noises, etc" that seems counterproductive in the accumulation of clues and solving of mysteries I would say absolutely use your discretion to skip the 'roll for listen/spot hidden/intelligence... OH NO YOU HAVE GAZED ON THE ABYSS ROLL FOR SAN!". I'm a newbie and I'm already sick of it. It's obvious and boring and since SAN is the fuse that is constantly burning on your character it shouldn't be necessary. I've made it clear how unsatisfactory my current game setup is. At this point I just sit back silently when there's a coffin in the room and we need to roll listen and a pit and who wants to look in it. Nevertheless I had a character lose six Sanity in one go and 10/44 total in the last session, bringing things to a screeching halt while we rolled up sanity tables and all this stuff except I eventually rolled INT and repressed it or something? Always bail if the book seems dumb or not fun. Game can be fun, it just requires the DM to exercise a lot of judgement. Personally I'd save SAN rolls for times it makes sense. Last module I ran, I had characters who had seen dead bodies/magic stuff in previous modules get a pass on rolling SAN while new, 'virgin' PCs had to roll. It's just massively dumb that someone who's fought zombies needs to roll for SAN everytime he sees a corpse.
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Jul 21, 2020 03:46
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One thing I do that really keeps things moving is to sketch out a timeline of what would happen if the PCs weren't there. Then think of the game more-or-less like a time travel movie. Adjust your events' timeline based on what the players did or didn't do. For this to work, openly keep track of the in-game clock / calendar. This is effective at helping focus players - PCs are less likely to waste time on opium den / gin joint tangents when it gives the antagonists free time to act. Make time a resource, and stress it. Open scenes with the time and location. Keep track of how long things take. Second, try to work something for extra senses into stuff you want players to recognize as important. The mummy smells like old leaves and cologne, and your mouth goes dry looking at it. Third, rip off your memories. Recycle the town you grew up in into a fictional city. Tweak it for the period, obviously. Then just keep note of what's different. The CVS is Doc Boyardee's Pharmacy and Tonics - you already know where it is, what they stock, what the employees are like, etc. You've already got a whole setting memorized, so use it.
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Jul 21, 2020 04:57
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PipHelix posted:I would say absolutely use your discretion to skip the 'roll for listen/spot hidden/intelligence... OH NO YOU HAVE GAZED ON THE ABYSS ROLL FOR SAN!". I'm a newbie and I'm already sick of it. It's obvious and boring and since SAN is the fuse that is constantly burning on your character it shouldn't be necessary. I've made it clear how unsatisfactory my current game setup is. At this point I just sit back silently when there's a coffin in the room and we need to roll listen and a pit and who wants to look in it. Nevertheless I had a character lose six Sanity in one go and 10/44 total in the last session, bringing things to a screeching halt while we rolled up sanity tables and all this stuff except I eventually rolled INT and repressed it or something? What on Earth is this GM doing if you have lost 6 SAN to a dead body. Did it get up and inform you you would be "dead by dawn"?
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Jul 21, 2020 06:24
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On the topic of using rituals to defeat antagonists -- one really good suggestion is not to have antagonists that require a ritual to defeat. Either allow the players to toss a stick of dynamite down the tunnels where your elder god lives and leave it ambiguous as to how long that'll hold them there... or don't have an elder god as your primary antagonist at all. Call of Cthulhu works better, to my mind, when the enemy you're up against is a human using primarily mundane resources, and where the supernatural elements are either a mcguffin to fight over, a distant untouchable puppetmaster, or a bogeyman to chase the players for a bit and then disappear again.
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Jul 21, 2020 07:40
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What I think are heavily overlooked, both in terms of when they're used well and in terms of people innovating, are the aliens in the Mythos - they're thick on the ground, more prominent than a lot of the gods, but people all go to the gods and cultists and such. What would probably be a completely novel mind-gently caress is to make people think there's a cult but, surprise, it's the mi-go, or even some novel species. You do not need a ritual to banish the mi-go.
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Jul 21, 2020 07:52
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Whybird posted:On the topic of using rituals to defeat antagonists -- one really good suggestion is not to have antagonists that require a ritual to defeat. Either allow the players to toss a stick of dynamite down the tunnels where your elder god lives and leave it ambiguous as to how long that'll hold them there... or don't have an elder god as your primary antagonist at all. Call of Cthulhu works better, to my mind, when the enemy you're up against is a human using primarily mundane resources, and where the supernatural elements are either a mcguffin to fight over, a distant untouchable puppetmaster, or a bogeyman to chase the players for a bit and then disappear again. Yeah, I've found this works really well. Having the more potent aspects of the mythos just being incredibly disinterested in humanity, like massive dark shapes drifting through the water that are so big we're not really even considered threats or prey, but can sometimes be tapped into by a person who's in the right place at the right time with dangerous results keeps the immediate threat level manageable while allowing players and their characters to grasp that there are greater yet insurmountable threats out there.
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Jul 21, 2020 07:59
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I used an insect from Shaggai as a solo antagonist for my last game and it still ended up killing the whole party, albeit in a way that was climactic and (I think) fun. Most of the adventure was investigating the bizarre chain of serial murders and the slow reveal that yes, multiple unrelated people were committing the same type of sadistic murders and then dying. I think the slow-burning investigatory part of a Cthulhu adventure is the real meat of any Cthulhu game, the monsters or gods are really just there to spice up the ending or to add a mid-session complication or something. It's also where you get to use the wide variety of skills in the game, like Accounting or Anthropology or Science skills. I think too many games limit the investigation to a few Library Use or equivalent rolls and then it's all shotgun dynamite town.
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Jul 21, 2020 18:01
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To everyone responding to my earlier post, thank you. You've given me a lot to think about and I feel more confident if/when I ever get involved with this RPG.
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Jul 22, 2020 00:51
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Oops, you thought about it, make a San test.
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Jul 22, 2020 02:30
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RudeCat posted:Oops, you thought about it, make a San test. Here lies Patches, thought of mi-go and died.
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Jul 22, 2020 03:47
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That's why horses in old Westerns just fall over but you never see them get shot: The foley artist startles them to death.
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Jul 22, 2020 04:08
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You're loving kidding me.
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Jul 22, 2020 04:08
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RudeCat posted:You're loving kidding me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRRRLApWOE0
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Jul 22, 2020 04:20
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Oh no, I know horses do that, I mean the interaction with the sanity rules
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Jul 22, 2020 04:34
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Dr. Lunchables posted:Sometimes the best tool for dealing with alien evil is a stick of dynamite. Whenever we play Cthulhu it inevitably becomes Hellboy Cthulhu and that's the way we like it.
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Jul 22, 2020 12:25
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Nessus posted:I think you have good instincts. The dead body rule, I believe, is more for when you abruptly encounter a dead body that you didn't expect. If you go to your elderly co-worker's funeral, it's grim and sad, but you expected it; now if you come home and find his body laying in your bed, that's a different story. Less bad than that but still annoying. We went through the portal to the orgyverse and like three times the DM was describing what we were being carried through, conveyor like, and each time it was a roll. So we got to the end and two of us had to roll indefinite right before, you know, squaring up against a god in the process of apotheosis, and there was obviously an 'oh gently caress I hadn't intended this' reaction and it was like, dude there were three rolls and one was a 1d8 when we look at the big three faced head. How did you NOT see this coming? Also, why *three* rolls? Why not just combine them at the end? Also, re the orgyverse, it's lame the DM is playing this, and he did choose the sourcebook, but what kinda dork WRITES this stuff? As a 13 year old virgin I feel like I coulda made wilder, less squicky 'adult' campaigns. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 02:53
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PipHelix posted:Less bad than that but still annoying. We went through the portal to the orgyverse and like three times the DM was describing what we were being carried through, conveyor like, and each time it was a roll. So we got to the end and two of us had to roll indefinite right before, you know, squaring up against a god in the process of apotheosis, and there was obviously an 'oh gently caress I hadn't intended this' reaction and it was like, dude there were three rolls and one was a 1d8 when we look at the big three faced head. How did you NOT see this coming? There are doubtless a lot of dogshit CoC modules out there, though. In terms of general adult material topics, I have rarely found anything in a CoC module published by Chaosium that was not at least broadly cognate to the source material (which, for all of HPL's many horrible opinions, were not typically very sexual or pornographic.)
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Jul 23, 2020 03:00
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Hey, btw, been meaning to say. I feel this could be a fun game, but without an example, it's hard to argue for trying something new when I'm just going on my gut here. Anyone running these games that someone could drop in on? E: I really can't recommend Berlin: The Wicked City little enough. Everything about it is fiddly and dumb and seems written by a really horny 14 year old. I also had my character, after winning a fight with a literal demigod in her home dimension get Poochied, because the evil breast milk you drink to go there makes evil bugs grow in your guts and you autodie after a roll for a number of months which, why a roll? We're guaranteed dead between this module and the next, why insert this faux randomness in a cheap insta-kill for doing a thing necessary to complete the module? I'm extra pissed cause I announced my Harpo Marx character was lactose intolerant the second the words 'breast milk' were first said. I then said he only swished it around his mouth and violently poo poo out anything he swallowed as soon as swallowing it, totally ignorant of the whole evil bug thing. This was not enough to clear the system. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 03:00
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PipHelix posted:I'm extra pissed cause I announced my Harpo Marx character was lactose intolerant the second the words 'breast milk' were first said. I then said he only swished it around his mouth and violently poo poo out anything he swallowed as soon as swallowing it, totally ignorant of the whole evil bug thing. This was not enough to clear the system. Why would you admit this.
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Jul 23, 2020 08:45
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