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I haven't played the latest edition, but I've always found running Unknown Armies to be really easy to pick up. The game is in general about weird postmodern occult horror, but the rules for your players having their own magic powers can be easily discarded to just run a game about mundanes trying to investigate weird mysteries. What Unknown Armies doesn't do, and standard CoC doesn't do much of, is have rules for managing and structuring a mystery -- it leaves all of that in your hands as a GM. There are other systems -- Gumshoe is one of them -- which build their rules very specifically around the idea that your players are going to be unravelling a mystery, so you might also want to look into those.
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Sep 9, 2021 09:21
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Fill Baptismal posted:Would any of you all have any recommendations for a pretty noob friendly detective/possibly horror-ish setting/system to run? Couple of friends and I have been tossing around the idea, but none of us have ever done a tabletop RPG before. Ideally something that is relatively mechanically simple and won’t require buying a ton of stuff to start. Check out the free Call of Cthulhu Quickstart and if you like that, grab the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set. If you play through the stuff in it and want more you can grab the Keeper's book (it has everything you need, the Investigator's book is optional) and the Doors to Darkness and Mansions of Madness I collections. Also, I believe these adventures have been written to be playable even if you skip buying the rulebook and stick with the Starter Set rules. Good mystery scenarios are somewhat hard to write, which is why CoC is the 800lbs gorilla of the genre - it has a huge library of solid adventures to run. But there are a few more contenders. Another big player in investigative RPG scene is Pelgrane with their GUMSHOE system. It's been adapted for a variety of genres, so check their site out and see if anything catches your eye. Their main Cthulhu game, Trial of Cthulhu, kinda needs an update at this point, IMO, but there is shinier newer products available. Finally, look into City of Mist. It's more of a urban fantasy investigations game with a system that's a mix of PbtA and FATE and it has a lot of adventures as well. It has a free quickstart and a Starter Box as well.
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Sep 9, 2021 11:27
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Did City of Mist fix its death spiral problem in the new edition?
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Sep 9, 2021 12:57
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I have no idea. I've only played a few sessions and I haven't noticed one, but I dunno.
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Sep 9, 2021 13:40
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Whybird posted:I haven't played the latest edition, but I've always found running Unknown Armies to be really easy to pick up. The game is in general about weird postmodern occult horror, but the rules for your players having their own magic powers can be easily discarded to just run a game about mundanes trying to investigate weird mysteries. The caveat I always throw in here is that Gumshoe is best for implementing a very particular philosophy of investigative games, which makes some very major assumptions as to what is fun about them. John Tynes did a good article contrasting it with the approach of CoC/Delta Green here: http://www.johntynes.com/2018/07/21/narrative-sandboxes-delta-green-the-labyrinth-coc-and-gumshoe/ Basically, the Gumshoe approach works great if you approach it as a pacing mechanic and you are interested in an investigative game in the sense of "the players feel like their PCs are badass investigators and follow a sequence of breadcrumbs to a setpiece conclusion", less so if it's in the sense of "the players get to figure out a puzzle themselves and the story is shaped as much by the clues that they miss - and the twists and turns that their journey goes through as a result of them missing them - as by the clues they find". (I also think it creates some interesting game philosophy wrinkles. If it's never OK for the game to grind to a halt because of a failed investigative skill check, why would it be OK for the game to grind to a halt because of any other failed skill check?) Later iterations of Gumshoe seem to recognise and lean into this; they talk less about how the investigative mechanics are meant to be a bulwark against bad scenario design and refereeing (it is still wholly possible to ruin a Gumshoe game with sloppy scenario design and refereeing) and more about how they are a pacing mechanic, and The Yellow King's combat system neatly takes combat out of the "definitely TPK/definitely fine" binary. I do agree that CoC and UA don't have much in the way of systematised game mechanics for mystery construction, but that said 7E CoC does have much much better discussion of the art of investigative scenario design than previous editions did. (Plus it has the new Idea roll mechanic, which is *perfect* for those "poo poo, we really are going to have to wait for the killer to try and strike again aren't we?" moments which are a) great cool dramatic parts of investigative stories, at least for me and b) the sort of thing which the Gumshoe system actively mitigates against, which is why it loses me.)
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Sep 9, 2021 13:41
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Also if you use CoC for a detective game you should steal the rule from Delta Green of "having a high stat in a thing means you shouldn't have to roll for basic info, just more info". Like if you've got Anthropology at 70% you're just generally on the ball with that but specific nuance and details should require chance.
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Sep 9, 2021 13:46
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Fill Baptismal posted:Would any of you all have any recommendations for a pretty noob friendly detective/possibly horror-ish setting/system to run? Couple of friends and I have been tossing around the idea, but none of us have ever done a tabletop RPG before. Ideally something that is relatively mechanically simple and won’t require buying a ton of stuff to start. Esoterrorists. Trail of Cthulhu is also good and is basically a crunchy version of the same system. Gumshoe system games are the only ones I've ever seen that properly handle the actual mystery part.
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Sep 9, 2021 14:06
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Megazver posted:I have no idea. I've only played a few sessions and I haven't noticed one, but I dunno. What I recall reading is that unlike most AW games, in CoM when you take damage you get a Weakness tag which then reduces all your dice rolls, including the dice rolls you make to avoid getting future tags. This makes it very easy to end up with big negative modifiers in anything that you're not specialised in doing.
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Sep 9, 2021 15:02
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I've not played it, but Gumshoe's basic premise of, "The players will find all the clues in the mystery by the time they have to solve it, the skill will be in fitting them together" was always very attractive to me. Too many unsatisfying investigations where skill rolls meant we didn't see large chunks of the actual story.
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Sep 9, 2021 15:44
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Yeah the basic idea in gumshoe is the players always find the core cannot-be-missed-or-the-mystery-doesn't-work clues, but they have limited resources that they can expend to discover extra clues that help them analyze the core clue, or figure out how the core clues fit together.
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Sep 9, 2021 15:56
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The Idea roll is really good for helping the keeper get the story back on the rails. Often an investigation scenario gets stuck over a miscommunication, and Idea lets you just flat-out tell them what they missed. Couching it as an in-game mechanic is icing, because statically someone will pass and the experience is my character figured something out before I did instead of we're too dumb and the dm had to cheat.
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Sep 9, 2021 16:00
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moths posted:The Idea roll is really good for helping the keeper get the story back on the rails. Often an investigation scenario gets stuck over a miscommunication, and Idea lets you just flat-out tell them what they missed. It wants to be icing, but a roll is never icing. The problem is that the PCs miss the idea roll and then the GM has to be like "uh well you can wander around aimlessly for half an hour real time and then try again." Gumshoe also uses the method of having a card for the GM to reveal when all core clues in a scene have been discovered, to avoid this kind of thing to some extent.
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Sep 9, 2021 16:18
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This is one of the specific reasons that I love Mage the Awakening as a mystery game. With the way the magic system works, even the most bare-bones and purposely non-optimized starting character has so many ways of getting information that as a GM you quickly learn to just have a summary off available information and trust the players will figure out 6 different ways to get the clues that you couldn't anticipate ; when everyone can look back in time, speak to the dead, turn on magic CSI hyperlab vision or just straight up politely ask a nearby spirit of literally anything what happened, good luck stopping some wizards from learning things. It wasn't an ideal learning curve but the game basically forces you to have all of the information in bullet points and then you wing it how they get it. Also if we're talking rules-lite games that can do a mystery with good horror, we gotta mention Dread. Is it a perfect game? Hell no. But you can explain on the rules in exactly one breath and the only thing you need is a Jenga set, something that the universe seems to accrete if a child has ever lived in a house.
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Sep 9, 2021 17:27
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hyphz posted:It wants to be icing, but a roll is never icing. The problem is that the PCs miss the idea roll and then the GM has to be like "uh well you can wander around aimlessly for half an hour real time and then try again." It's not a real roll, since if the whole table manages to fail you can do it again with a Know check. And if that somehow fails you just tell them what you were going to anyway but imply that there was something else too.
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Sep 9, 2021 17:47
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fool of sound posted:Yeah the basic idea in gumshoe is the players always find the core cannot-be-missed-or-the-mystery-doesn't-work clues, but they have limited resources that they can expend to discover extra clues that help them analyze the core clue, or figure out how the core clues fit together. If you are not constructing your scenario as a series (or a branching tree) of scenes for the players to go between, this will not work so well. If you are very comfortable with improvising an unexpected situation due to the players taking a road not travelled, and are willing to throw out new clues on the fly if their chosen route appears sensible ("Hm, Big Rituals Inc. probably would have left behind some kind of paper trail from those properties they've bought up, I'll have the players discover X's address via the city hall records since they missed that previously...") or if their actions would have meaningfully provoked a response from NPCs ("Hmmm, the players got rough with X and discovered nothing... but X's next move is surely going to be calling Y, so let's see how the players handle Y's goons and maybe they can find something out that way..."), it won't seem useful because it's a scenario design/gamemastering nudge which you've probably already adopted as best practice. If, however, you specifically want your players to move briskly through various planned scenes to a climax, it's golden.
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Sep 9, 2021 19:33
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moths posted:The Idea roll is really good for helping the keeper get the story back on the rails. Often an investigation scenario gets stuck over a miscommunication, and Idea lets you just flat-out tell them what they missed. Essentially, someone in the group makes an Idea roll. The difficulty of the roll depends on how much of a break the players deserve, based on the clue which the referee decides will work best at getting the scenario back on track. Let's say the clue is that Old Man Crenshaw's farm is a major hub for the cult. If they have been repeatedly shown evidence that Old Man Crenshaw's farm is central to the mystery, and have repeatedly set that aside or ruled it out, or if they have generally been kind of lazy and are asking for an Idea roll despite having a bunch of fresh leads in front of them they can't be assed to chase up, then the roll will be harder. If they have never even heard Crenshaw's name so far (perhaps because they have had appalling luck at rolls, or because the referee hosed up and made Crenshaw too obscure) and it's not for want of trying on their part, then the roll is easier. If they make the roll, then the piece of information falls into their lap in some benign fashion. ("You sit down in Veronique's front room and look over all your clues, plotting the sites of the killings of the map. Finally you make a breakthrough: looking over the CCTV footage again, you notice that one of the vehicles which went past the scene of the second murder shortly after the event has "CRENSHAW SLAUGHTERHOUSE" stencilled on the side, and checking the map you realise that the Crenshaw farm is fairly central to all the kill sites.") If they fail the roll, then the piece of information falls into their lap in a dangerous, threatening fashion. ("You sit down in Veronique's front room and look over all your clues... then Veronique's front window shatters in a hail of shotgun blasts. As you all dive for cover, you notice that the gunmen attacking the house have piled out of a van with "CRENSHAW SLAUGHTERHOUSE" stencilled on the side...") It's great because the Idea roll is right there, whenever the players want to ask for it, and it will definitely give them the essential clue... but there's the potential that it'll hose the party. You never want to rely on it, which in practice means as a group you're only likely to go for that option if you're reaching the point where "Someone bursts in with a gun" would be more fun than "the PCs investigate/revisit another lead".
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Sep 9, 2021 19:42
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Holy crap, I love that. I've been sleeping on 7th even though I bought it.
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Sep 9, 2021 20:00
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That's a great idea and I'm definitely going to keep that in mind for fail-forward situations that come up.
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Sep 10, 2021 00:13
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I see some threads mentioning that people have set games up on discord, or expired discord invite links. Is there a goon trad games discord that people are using?
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Sep 10, 2021 08:26
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Awesome, thanks goons. I’ll look into Call of Cthulhu and gumshoe games and see if I can find one that’s a good fit for our group, I’ll let you guys know how it turns out.
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Sep 10, 2021 09:57
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We should do a compare and contrast between this "recommend me an RPG" discussion and the one two weeks ago
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Sep 10, 2021 11:33
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Trail of Cthulhu has some bits I find mechanically clunky, that mostly got smoothed out in Night's Black Agents. I'm talking about stuff like "The target number to hit you in combat is 3, unless you have Athletics 8+ and then it's 4." In NBA they made it a standard thing to get some benefit for having a skill at 8+, and clearly marked it in the text. I would still like them to take the "Skills" that don't work like Skills (Health, Cover, Stability) and put them in a little separate category. Saves explanation. I haven't read the rules for Bubblegumshoe or the new one-on-one rules, so AFAIK they did.
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Sep 10, 2021 14:26
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Halloween Jack posted:Trail of Cthulhu has some bits I find mechanically clunky, that mostly got smoothed out in Night's Black Agents. Gumshoe One-2-One uses a whole different system for Skills and doesn't really track Health or Stability (since, of course, having your sole PC die or have a psychotic break derails a game in a way that having one of three to five PCs doesn't). Bubblegumshoe doesn't use Health, you just have a four-step damage track that work more like conditions, but social conflicts still knock points out of your Cool (General Ability) pool as "damage."
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Sep 10, 2021 15:01
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Warthur posted:Idea roll description I'm going to steal this for D&D as an alternative usage for inspiration points.
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Sep 10, 2021 15:03
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change my name posted:I'm going to steal this for D&D as an alternative usage for inspiration points. Fair since 7E COC kind of stole the advantage/disadvantage mechanic from 5E D&D.
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Sep 10, 2021 16:04
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Splicer posted:We should do a compare and contrast between this "recommend me an RPG" discussion and the one two weeks ago It was how specific the request was, op.
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Sep 10, 2021 16:05
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Remember when this little guy and his Badger made certain gamers lose their loving minds? Those were the days
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Sep 10, 2021 16:50
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Warthur posted:Fair since 7E COC kind of stole the advantage/disadvantage mechanic from Let's not credit 5E with innovation here, dis/advantage came pretty much straight out of 4e's luck based suite of bard powers.
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Sep 10, 2021 18:31
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It would be a great alternate usage for hero points too; characters would get a limited resource per level that could either be used to swing the tide of combat or reveal plot information and would have to decide how to best spend them. Too bad I've only played one D&D game with them and don't use them in my own campaign
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Sep 10, 2021 18:38
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moths posted:Let's not credit 5E with innovation here, dis/advantage came pretty much straight out of 4e's luck based suite of bard powers. It's the Avenger's core class feature.
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Sep 10, 2021 18:42
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dwarf74 posted:Remember when this little guy and his Badger made certain gamers lose their loving minds? I still quote those commercials from time to time.
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Sep 10, 2021 18:54
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theironjef posted:It's the Avenger's core class feature. Oh yeah! I think also the halfling's racial ability, too. I wonder if 6e is just going to be 4e with a spoon full of sugar.
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Sep 10, 2021 19:10
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moths posted:Oh yeah! I think also the halfling's racial ability, too. Not if Mearls is still around.
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Sep 10, 2021 19:12
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Well, at least there's always literally every other system.
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Sep 10, 2021 19:24
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IIRC, Pelgrane actually did make a version of Gumshoe's investigator rules for Pathfinder (called Lorefinder). Never heard anything about it, pro or con, but someone did try bring those mechanics into the D20 world.
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Sep 10, 2021 19:33
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FMguru posted:IIRC, Pelgrane actually did make a version of Gumshoe's investigator rules for Pathfinder (called Lorefinder). Never heard anything about it, pro or con, but someone did try bring those mechanics into the D20 world. I have a copy on my shelf. They work pretty much exactly like you'd expect - it's a good adaptation of the skill/investigation rules, but that's a comparatively minor part of Pathfinder, so it gets largely overshadowed. It's also kind of awkward to use now since Lorefinder requires a bunch of skill replacements and midway through Pathfinder 1e Paizo revamped a lot of the skill system (in Unchained).
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Sep 10, 2021 19:54
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dwarf74 posted:Remember when this little guy and his Badger made certain gamers lose their loving minds? 4e gnomes were the best gnomes. <3
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Sep 10, 2021 20:14
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Halloween Jack posted:I would still like them to take the "Skills" that don't work like Skills (Health, Cover, Stability) and put them in a little separate category. Saves explanation. I haven't read the rules for Bubblegumshoe or the new one-on-one rules, so AFAIK they did. I really like what I've seen of the King in Yellow RPG and the simplified GUMSHOE rules, but I'm not 100 percent on the custom cards. I understand wanting scenario specific mechanics rather than loading the core rules down with special cases and exceptions, but I also play most of my games online and hate having to create/load assets into a VTT.
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Sep 10, 2021 20:52
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HyperHopper posted:I see some threads mentioning that people have set games up on discord, or expired discord invite links. Is there a goon trad games discord that people are using? https://discord.gg/S6RtcmX
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Sep 10, 2021 21:28
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change my name posted:It would be a great alternate usage for hero points too; characters would get a limited resource per level that could either be used to swing the tide of combat or reveal plot information and would have to decide how to best spend them. Too bad I've only played one D&D game with them and don't use them in my own campaign Having a fungibility between in-combat and plot-based economies has never worked in D&D because that requires a meaningful, regular exchange between them. And D&D still has the difference between two characters able to be "this character has more of the stat that makes them good". This is a bad idea.
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Sep 11, 2021 01:17
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