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DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
For one-shots, you can't really go wrong with the Haunting, which comes with the quick start rules.

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Lucas Archer
Dec 1, 2007
Falling...
Awesome, thanks for all the advice! I have the quick start rules, so I'll start by checking out The Haunting.

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006
The Haunting is mostly good, but the handouts suck by 2021 Chaosium standards and both times I ran it the... final confrontation kinda sucked balls. Maybe I was doing it wrong somehow.

Helical Nightmares
Apr 30, 2009

DrSunshine posted:

For one-shots, you can't really go wrong with the Haunting, which comes with the quick start rules.

Keep a tally of how many investigators die because of the flying mattress and report back please. :allears:

Dr. Lunchables
Dec 27, 2012

IRL DEBUFFED KOBOLD



Run the Haunting, to add to the body count. Then run Edge or Darkness, because it’s much better and more complete. Google for handouts, there’s a million high quality ones.

Finally, buy the Mansions of Madness book, because it’s amazing and run every adventure in there.

Lumbermouth
Mar 6, 2008

GREG IS BIG NOW


Dr. Lunchables posted:

Finally, buy the Mansions of Madness book, because it’s amazing and run every adventure in there.

Seconding this. I ran Cracked and Crook’d Manse and Mansions Of Madness in my 30s Los Angeles game and The Sanitarium in my 80s pulp game and all of them were winners.

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006

Lumbermouth posted:

Seconding this. I ran Cracked and Crook’d Manse and Mansions Of Madness in my 30s Los Angeles game and The Sanitarium in my 80s pulp game and all of them were winners.

The current edition's version only has Manse out of these three. That said, the other scenarios are pretty solid.

Single and LOVING IT
Apr 4, 2004
The monkeys are coming. . .

Lucas Archer posted:

Awesome, thanks for all the advice! I have the quick start rules, so I'll start by checking out The Haunting.

Besides echoing the suggestion for The Haunting, I wanted to recommend the Genius Loci scenario from the Doors to Darkness collection as a possible follow-up if your Haunting game goes at all similar.

From the infamous bed in the The Haunting, I had one investigator die and another receive a major wound and a severe sanity hit. The hook for Genius Loci (don't think I'm spoiling anything, it's literally how it starts) is a NPC "friend" of the investigators reaching out for help from inside a mental hospital. Rather than the stock NPC, I used the investigator that survived (barely) the mattress encounter in the The Haunting. This replacement worked nicely to keep the group very motivated and moving along with some urgency that I don't think they would have had with the stock NPC.

Potential spoilers for Genius Loci:

In the climatic scene where the friend is about to be sacrificed to the lloigor, as luck would have it, the investigator that saved the friend at the last moment was the person that played them in The Haunting. Made for a fun resolution.

Dr. Lunchables
Dec 27, 2012

IRL DEBUFFED KOBOLD



Megazver posted:

The current edition's version only has Manse out of these three. That said, the other scenarios are pretty solid.

Both versions of the book are winners. Real solid scenarios all around. If I had to recommend a single adventure book, that’s the one I would.

Imaginary Friend
Jan 27, 2010

Your Best Friend

Lucas Archer posted:

My group is taking a break from our current 5e campaign to do some spooky Halloween type one-shots for October. I've been wanting to run a CoC game for a while now and this is the perfect opportunity. I'm currently building a one-shot scenario, but since I've never run it before, I don't know how much is 'to much', so to speak. So I decided to look through some of the various scenarios I have and see if any of those would work as a potential one shot.

I have the Doom Train scenario from the Horror on the Orient Express adventure. If anyone has run that, does that seem like it would work as a one-shot or even a two-session shot?

"The Things we leave behind" has some great modern one-shots as well. "Forget me not" is great if you want your players to go in with blank characters and build upon them across the scenario.

Down With People
Oct 31, 2012

The child delights in violence.

Lucas Archer posted:

My group is taking a break from our current 5e campaign to do some spooky Halloween type one-shots for October. I've been wanting to run a CoC game for a while now and this is the perfect opportunity. I'm currently building a one-shot scenario, but since I've never run it before, I don't know how much is 'to much', so to speak. So I decided to look through some of the various scenarios I have and see if any of those would work as a potential one shot.

I have the Doom Train scenario from the Horror on the Orient Express adventure. If anyone has run that, does that seem like it would work as a one-shot or even a two-session shot?

Yes, you can absolutely run that as a one-shot. It depends on how long it takes the investigators to get the train set together and then think to run the train on the track. Once they get on the Doom Train itself, I think things will move along pretty fast. Watch out for the save-or-dies when someone gets dragged into the passenger carriage; ideally you want them to be saved just in the nick of time.

Down With People
Oct 31, 2012

The child delights in violence.
Just ran my DG crew through Music From A Darkened Room and one of the characters has decided to summon Nyarlathotep and sign the Black Book as soon as he can figure out a way to kill someone. Does he get a familiar right off the bat or how should I do this?

mellonbread
Dec 20, 2017

Down With People posted:

Just ran my DG crew through Music From A Darkened Room and one of the characters has decided to summon Nyarlathotep and sign the Black Book as soon as he can figure out a way to kill someone. Does he get a familiar right off the bat or how should I do this?
When the module was written back for the original Delta Green game, there was no assumption that doing the deconsecration ritual gave you a familiar. It was just a way to get rid of the Dark Man, at the cost of killing someone, temporarily summoning the baddie and letting him gently caress with you. So the way you "should" handle it according to the original intent is to not gently caress with familiars at all.

The way I recommend you handle it is give him a familiar, because familiars are loving cool. Come up with a new creature, like a possum with human eyes, or a huge beetle with a human face.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

mellonbread posted:

When the module was written back for the original Delta Green game, there was no assumption that doing the deconsecration ritual gave you a familiar. It was just a way to get rid of the Dark Man, at the cost of killing someone, temporarily summoning the baddie and letting him gently caress with you. So the way you "should" handle it according to the original intent is to not gently caress with familiars at all.

The way I recommend you handle it is give him a familiar, because familiars are loving cool. Come up with a new creature, like a possum with human eyes, or a huge beetle with a human face.

Specifically, John Lennon's face.

Warthur
May 2, 2004



Give them a Bond to the familiar. Let them choose, within sensible limits, the strength of the Bond (no more than 15 to start out with, say). Make it clear that the stronger this Bond is, the more potent the benefits the familiar gives are.

Once they have selected a number, siphon off points in their more wholesome Bonds to the number of points they put in. Every time their Bond to familiar goes up from here on in, their Bond to something less baleful goes down by a similar amount.

Charlz Guybon
Nov 16, 2010

PipHelix posted:

.

And I guess it makes sense. I can see why there was more interest in playing a scenario set in the modern world than Mideval-England-Plus-Dragons and that assumes a lot of familiarity and affinity with the culture and tropes. I'd have a hell of a time getting into a fantasy world that assumes I'm intimately familiar and super interested in inhabiting, like, the Sengoku Period.
The Sengoku period as portrayed in Inuyasha is pretty Eldritch and horrific.

Charlz Guybon
Nov 16, 2010

Hostile V posted:

That's kind of the hook for BLACKSAT in Delta Green. You're a bunch of astronauts who have to take some dangerously unqualified (in the sense that there's a nonzero chance liftoff will cause one of them to just immediately have a heart attack from stress and blood pressure and the other is a chronic smoker) nerds to space to fix a government satellite, there's some grim comedy from having to try and get them up to snuff and then you go up there and everything goes to hell.

I find it hard to believe there aren't astronauts who can fix whatever is wrong. These guys are ridiculous renaissance men. Like Jonny Kim is a navy seal sniper & combat medic who went on a hundred missions, has a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a medical degree from Harvard and was doing his residence as a surgeon when he got accepted to astronaut school. There has to be some astronauts who are mechanical/electrical/whatever engineers.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Charlz Guybon posted:

I find it hard to believe there aren't astronauts who can fix whatever is wrong. These guys are ridiculous renaissance men. Like Jonny Kim is a navy seal sniper & combat medic who went on a hundred missions, has a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a medical degree from Harvard and was doing his residence as a surgeon when he got accepted to astronaut school. There has to be some astronauts who are mechanical/electrical/whatever engineers.

The satellite in the scenario is powered by forces beyond conventional engineering.

Could you train an astronaut to wield eldrich blood sacrifice magic? Maybe. Or maybe the same traits that make them good, level-headed, lucid astronauts would make it hard for them to let their brain crack enough to let in that particular wavelength of sickly light.

Also the scenario stronly suggests TPTB are incredibly reluctant to read the astronauts in fully to magic and elder Gods and poo poo. As I recall the head of the mission is incredibly tight lipped and just alludes to the technology being "exotic."

Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Oct 4, 2021

tanglewood1420
Oct 28, 2010

The importance of this mission cannot be overemphasized
To even apply, let alone be selected, for NASA astronaut training you need at a minimum a masters in a STEM subject and a pilot's license. The majority of successful applicants are US military combat pilots who studied some kind of engineering, computer science or applied physics. The civilians who get chosen are all 'after my PhD in Marine Biology at Stanford, I got my EMT certification and volunteer as a paramedic, which I fit in between my hobbies of rock climbing, flying small planes and writing poetry'.

In other words, they are perfect Delta Green PCs.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos
Chaosium bought The Dhole's House, the free online resource for character creation, handout generation, etc.

Charlz Guybon
Nov 16, 2010
Dhole house looks like a great resource.

Here's something I came across that could serve as some inspiration. Some guy modded in a big freaky centaur monster that can go invisible into his GTA roleplay server. Would use a fancy soundboard to lure people into isolated area with creepy messages then kick their heads in. Then would use recordings of the things they said to troll the next folks, Predator style. Some really dedicated role players. When you finally see what the monster looks like from the players perspective it's creepy as hell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztHdyGQFOZM

PipHelix
Nov 11, 2017



tanglewood1420 posted:

To even apply, let alone be selected, for NASA astronaut training you need at a minimum a masters in a STEM subject and a pilot's license. The majority of successful applicants are US military combat pilots who studied some kind of engineering, computer science or applied physics. The civilians who get chosen are all 'after my PhD in Marine Biology at Stanford, I got my EMT certification and volunteer as a paramedic, which I fit in between my hobbies of rock climbing, flying small planes and writing poetry'.

In other words, they are perfect Delta Green PCs.

PhD haver in a science, lifelong endurance athlete, multiple applicant to NASA, zero time selected. There's two tracks. One is for the Hoorah Navy Flyboys, your chuck Yeager types, who were the original astronauts and until recently traditionally the ones in charge of flying and maneuvering the shuttle. In the age of just riding up on a Russian rocket, I can't imagine they have all that much to do. Their physical requirements are insane.

Then you get the full-on science types. They need you to be in shape, but pilots license isn't a necessity. Physical requirements are much laxer, height, weight, eyesight can all be much further from optimal. We had one, a MechE, come to our university while I was in grad school. He was a big guy but I wouldn't call him in any kind of shape. 'Burly' is as kind as you could be to him. I've also taught at West Point, with Military masters' and PhD havers in science and as I've said in other threads... it's really actually not that hard to get one, especially if you bring your own funding which all military do. Dumbest guy I have ever met has a PhD in a nuclear physics related field. He was a civvie, but none of the military folks I taught with were a patch on the civilian instructors. Nice guys but no one who considers science a vocation pursues it through the US military. GI bill is one thing, these guys are lifers which is another.

Basically, a civilian astronaut is top-of-their-field smart, and in very good shape for a non-athlete, a military astronaut is an absolute unit, and very well educated for a jarhead. Both flavors are apparently way more impressive across the board than I am, obviously never even got a callback, but yea, they're mortals. They would definitely make great PCs though.

Anyway came here to post. I want to make a module with an Among Us flavor, called 'Who Do You Think You Are!? I Am!" And yes I thought of the title and worked backwards.
Basic idea is... it's the Thing. It's exactly The Thing. A Shoggoth is for some reason weak and vulnerable enough to not just eat the party outright, gets caught impersonating a PC real early and decides to just bud off a clone for every member. Basically the only NPC characters are copies of the PCs, played by the DM. One of whom is the original human character. The PCs play themselves except one player gets told they are a Shoggoth clone. So like, one bad PC all the rest are good, all NPCs are bad except for one PC temporarily hostaged to the DM. One assumes that would keep them from just burning all characters voiced by me.

Basically, there's still plenty of shoggoth plasm left to gently caress with stuff, so there'll be interlocking crises that the team will have to split to address. Which is obviously the bad guys plan.

2 Things I've got to think on:
1. This might not even be close to the best way to approach this, if anyone has a better way lemme know.
2. Human PCs will obviously yell at their comrades to roast any copy I play. I need the player running the shoggoth to be as enthusiastically murderous towards their own DM-run character so as to avoid suspicion. I don't see a way around this other than to have the players use newly-rolled characters, and treat it as a jumping off point for a new campaign.
Otherwise there's too much invested to get a player to try honestly and enthusiastically to encourage the murder of a character they rolled and developed. I thought about promising the player the opportunity to play AS a shoggoth-fragment in future modules but that seems either OP, or artificially lame if I de-power them enough to make them just a tough PC. Also what's their motivation at that point?

Anyway, I want the energy halfway between this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDwpwVylj8I and this https://twitter.com/bransonreese/status/856719449155657728

Thinking about Lost Highway has me thinking... If I tell the PC's that ONE of them is a Shoggoth, but do not tell the Shoggoth character, like write bad guys name on a slip of paper, fold it, put it in the center of the table, and that's that, that might keep all the players a little off balance. Odds are they're human but they don't know until they decide to kill one. Dole out clues, and the climax comes when they decide to burn the first NPC. All the remaining bad NPCs merge and attack, and if the player who was secretly a shoggoth had their PC killed, well, now there's nothing for them to protect, and they can play a monster and attack the party members who killed their guy. Where are the holes here?

PipHelix fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Oct 5, 2021

PipHelix
Nov 11, 2017



Ok here's what I've got so far:
The investigators are tapped by a joint US/Norwegian firm. An Antarctic research station has gone dark under suspicious circumstances, and as land ownership on the continent is it's own special jurisdiction, whichever nation can send a team to spend one night in the haunted research station will inherit it.

They meet with the two NPC team leaders/guides already on the ice, a day's journey out. There's a helicopter for fast travel/survey and an IceCat for supplies. Team has to split up for the travel out there, with the helicopter team touching down first and doing early reconnaissance and the Cat team doing some ice road trucker poo poo to get around crevasses and mountain passes and such. This is all so that I, as DM, can determine when a PC spends time with one of the guides without eyeline on the other team members.

Once the team is assembled on site, just before sundown, the guides are explaining how they'll spend the night and what's in the facility, a doppelganger of one of the guides walks in. He pulls the Mystery Man bit, tells the one guide he's back at base with the second guide, both of whom speak on the radio confusedly, they thought the PCs never showed. Cut to screams and the radio shuts down. Around this time the SECOND Guide's doppelganger is discovered, half dead and freezing, locked in a closet. HE starts yelling about the original guides are some kind of beast, killed and ate everyone on the original station, and is going to eat everyone, the usual. "MacReady who? His name is Childs. If he told you his name is MacReady he's lying. And your names, what the gently caress are your names?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIvClGlWiz8

Team's first job is to decide what to do and who to kill, if anyone. Whoever and however many they decide to kill, they are rewarded with the Thing style transformation and meltdown.

If the team starts exploring they'll discover - or if they stay put they'll be discovered by - a team of investigators identical to them, coming across the ice on foot, all frostbitten with different stories about how they ended up there, all claiming they were doublecrossed by the guides.

It's at this point that I announce that one of the PCs - or maybe 2, I'm still not sure on how this would play with different numbers of 'bad' PCs - is a playing a replicant. Name is written and sealed away. I explain that the PC playing the replicant doesn't know they are one - they're basically this thing's fingers, and are therefore as self-aware as a finger. Which means one of my characters is an actual human, and if that human is killed, that PC character is gone for good. And that one of the PCs is some kind of infection they can't bring back to the world, so they have no tension between how the unkowning monster PC behaves and its motivation, every player GENUINELY wants to escape alive, whether they are real or fake. So ya know, be careful who you roast, there's a 25% chance it's someone you don't want to, also you can't just nope right out.

Thing is, ALL of the guides were ALWAYS shoggoths, right from the jump. It just wants to lure nourishment back to its pit, the bit with the doubles is basically playing with its food. Along the journey, the shoggoth guides (canonically - PCs need to discover this) attack at least 1, maybe 2 PC characters, who escape, but are replaced with doubles before anyone notices. This is how I end up controlling that PC. They flee the the monster guide, they run out onto the ice, and are approached right before death by a team of doppelgangers all seemingly close to death who all tell the same story of being attacked and rescue him/her, and make for the base. And that is how a gang of doppelgangers with one PC who would have no reason to doubt the authenticity of its team end up controlled by me.

Basically, I need to come up with alibis for the doppel members that do not hang together - the more I think about it the harder it is, since it's all made up anyway. I know the 'truth' about which PC is the true one, I need equally plausible but disproveable alibis for everyone else.

As far as gameplay I think certain things make sense - the guides would have been instructing the teams to break off and turn on the generators for power, check the labs for notes, repair the radio tower to establish residence. Assuming the party wants to just bug out, they'll still need to refuel the helicopter and Cat both. Neither can hold the entire party, (certainly not two parties) and both aren't fueled enough for the return trip. No matter what they do they'll need to split off and that leads to some chicken/fox type stuff. Like if all the players just leave all my characters, that means instadeath for the PC I've taken over, with the doppel group claiming they saw her transform and had to roast her. They don't want to leave the escape vehicles unattended, and if they only leave one person, is that opening themselves up to sabotage? Anyway, to make it a quick one-shot, the team decides to roasts either one of my guys or the PC they think is bad, they find out what they did, the remaining shoggoths merge and attack. If they killed an actual doppelganger I'll say that it's weakened enough they stand a chance and if they hosed up and are fighting it at full strength with one PC already down? They better have a fuelled escape vehicle.


I think this could be fun!

PipHelix fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Oct 5, 2021

NutritiousSnack
Jul 12, 2011
Seems more The Thing inspired

Charlz Guybon
Nov 16, 2010
Legitimate criticism? :thunk:

https://www.enworld.org/threads/cthulhu-guns-and-a-sanity-check.596522/

quote:

Call of Cthulhu very famously declares that knowledge of archeology or the Dewey decimal system is at least as important for ensuring the survival of investigators as being well armed. This is supposedly because of the alien, inscrutable nature, of the foe and its nigh immunity to the weapons with which humanity might arm itself. But consider the following case taken directly from the 5e RAW:

A big game hunter on safari with considerable skill in firearms (80% rifle), accidentally startles a black rhino at a range of 30 yards. The Rhino, immediately charges. Fortunately, our intrepid hero already has his heavy rifle in his hands, having just exchanged his lighter weapon with the one his native rifle bearer was carrying precisely because he feared this sort of circumstance. Now, in reality this is truly a life threatening scenario. The hunter must make this shot or in all likelihood he will die. Fortunately, the hunter is very skilled and the player throws a 40 on his dice indicating a hit. So the player dutifully throws 3d6+4 with the result of 15 damage. The GM marks this down to 5 on account of the animals 10 point hide. But the hunter is well equipped, this being a double barreled rifle, he lets fly the other barrel with the rhino now at point blank range and rolls a 16, indicating a an impaling attack. He again rolls, this time indicating 30 damage, which the GM marks down to 20. The rhino, wounded but still not dead, gores the hunter for 20 damage instantly killing him.

From this example, it can be seen that the black rhino is emphatically as immune to firearms in the system as almost all alien horrors. Only a fool would hunt such a beast with less than a 1920's era vehicle mounted heavy machine gun, since less than that certainly favors the rhino. All the .38 caliber police specials, .25 caliber vest pocket guns, .45 caliber Colt M1911's and the occasional double barreled shot guns that the investigators normally carry are no better at protecting them in this situation than they would be against the alien horrors that they are supposed to be afraid of. Indeed, where the whole party equipped with elephant guns they might be only slightly better off. In the game world created by these rules, a 1890's or 1920's investigator ought to be just in horror of animal life as they are of things from beyond.

The reality of course is that even armed with spears and arrows, humanity has been quite able to eradicate to the point of extinction any normal life it chooses to hunt much bigger than a rat, and that by the 1920's the balance of power had shifted to the point that no more than a few thousand European hunters would nearly drive the megafauna of Africa to extinction all on their own. In the game, an elephant gun has only about 50% chance on the first ball of killing a lion or tiger, yet in reality such powerful weapons are generally not used against game as small as the big cats, as the impact will quite literally rip the animal apart and thereby completely ruin your trophy. In reality, the worry with a charging rhino would be that you did not have time to switch to your heavy gun, thereby leaving you needing to a make a perfect shot through a thinner part of the skull or that in the excitement you would not be able to train such a heavy weapons as your elephant gun accurately and that you'd miss, or that the weapon would misfire. Against a rhino, that you'd strike the target and not kill it was not so much of a worry. Against an elephant, that was a more real worry, but even then the elephant gun was 50% likely to get the job done even with the low velocity 4 and 6 bores of an earlier age, much less the large caliber nitro express weapons available from the 1890's on.

In short, two things are completely clear, either the black rhino is vastly overrated, or guns are vastly underrated. The reality may be some of both, but of the two it's the firepower of the guns that is more obviously lacking. One thing that is immediately obvious looking at the firearms rules, is that the writers know nothing about guns. Guns are at times mislabeled, misidentified, poorly described and sometimes given the wrong calibers, or at least the wrong standard calibers. Worse, they seem to have no real clear understanding of the difference in stopping power and lethality of different sorts of guns. For example, let's suppose that the number given for 9mm parabellum of 1d10 damage is believable. If that is the case, then the number given for .25 caliber ACP or .41 caliber short for vest pocket guns of 1d6 is also believable, as is the 2d8 damage assigned to 5.7mm NATO. But the authors seem to have absolutely no understanding how much less stopping power 5.7mm NATO has than high caliber hunting rifles or earlier age battle rifles like the .303 Lee, .30-06, or 7.92x57mm Mauser - all of which do but 2d6+4 damage despite having more than twice as much energy. The minimum damage on these weapons goes up, but the maximum damage doesn't change, which is rather the opposite of what we'd expect of a projectile with more energy since getting clipped through a thin portion of your body is about the same in both cases, but hitting bone or going through thick masses of flesh or punching through armor is a very different proposition. Even crazier, weapons as extreme as the .50 BMG or the 13.2mm TuF meant to destroy vehicles and which are complete overkill versus human targets, only do in the system 2d10+4 damage. In reality, a shot by such weapons have about 5 times the energy of even a hunting rifle, blast a man sized target apart - killing with hits that would not otherwise be lethal - and a single bullet would go through the skull of a charging elephant and travel the 12-18 feet to rip out of the other side.

Musing on this leaves me with tons of questions.

1) First, even with the rules unchanged, the game seems to assume that the players with futz around with .38 colt revolvers, .25 vest guns, sharpened fencing foils and broken table legs as weapons. I think that in reality - especially in the long run - this is unlikely, and we'll see the whole party arrive on site with elephant guns, 10 gauge shot guns, high powered rifles, Tommy guns, braces of Remington model 1890 revolvers firing 44-40, Colt 1911's, boxes of dynamite and 40 gallon drums of gasoline. You wouldn't go hunting even deer or elk with the sort of weaponry they seem to expect investigators to carry, why would you go hunting monsters with such popguns. Even with the rules unchanged, I think this more 'realistic' and 'ruthless' approach vastly changes the dynamics of most published scenarios. All of that is pretty much legal and readily available in 1920's America, which might be why you don't see many mythos creatures around now. Anything less than a Elder God has learned to keep their head down. The reality is that even in the 1920's, mythos creatures appear to be endangered species.

Has anyone had experience with investigators that don't cower in horror and instead take this realistic and ruthless approach to scenarios? If so, what's it like?

2) If we change the firearms rules even slightly to make them more realistic - say changing the damage from a high caliber hunting rifle or battle rifle from 2d6+4 to 3d6+2 so that it realistically can kill a great cat - then the 'ruthless' approach gets even more favorable. Running gun battles might become even less desirable of a thing for investigators to get involved in regularly, but the approach of gunning down mythos monsters starts to become really viable. Lesser races generally would go down in a hail of bullets. Although there are still some great old ones you wouldn't want to fight with less than a pre-sighted artillery barrage, shooting up certain great old ones is not out of the question if the investigators have enough firearms and enough firearms skills. The fact that mythos creatures are largely unknown to society seems in this case to do more with the face that avoiding open warfare with the primitive but savage and dangerous humans is not a bad idea.

Is this scenario all that different than the way the game could actually play now, or would changing the firearms rules to make them more realistic with respect to hunting just be a bad idea all around? If we made the firearms rules more realistic, would we need to tweak the mythos creatures to compensate or would eventual sanity drain and the general doom that comes to anyone that gets within tentacle reach of a mythos creature still get the job done?

Any advice by an experienced keeper would be appreciated.

drrockso20
May 6, 2013

Has Not Actually Done Cocaine
Honestly critters in the Mythos are often plenty vulnerable to bullets, heck sometimes even just some vicious dogs will do plenty against them

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Charlz Guybon posted:

Legitimate criticism? :thunk:

There's some legitimate criticism to be made of how weapon lethality contra survivability is handled in Call (as with the rhino, which cannot be killed by good hits from the weapons that clearly should be able to kill it) but basically everything about "stopping power" and "energy" and otherwise non-lethal hits becoming lethal with big, powerful rounds is nonsense. There's an element of truth to it but the short version of the story is that we still don't actually know what makes one bullet kill and the other not. People survive hits from immensely powerful rounds in real life (as they do in Call) and die to squirrel guns (surprisingly difficult in Call). (The long version is that what kills is slightly better understood, but an incredibly complex process the statistical details of which classified state secrets because of their value to armies.)

Also, you know, does realistic firearms lethality actually make for a good Call of Cthulhu experience?

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

quote:

Has anyone had experience with investigators that don't cower in horror and instead take this realistic and ruthless approach to scenarios? If so, what's it like?
:rubby:

HerpicleOmnicron5
May 31, 2013

How did this smug dummkopf ever make general?


LatwPIAT posted:

There's some legitimate criticism to be made of how weapon lethality contra survivability is handled in Call (as with the rhino, which cannot be killed by good hits from the weapons that clearly should be able to kill it) but basically everything about "stopping power" and "energy" and otherwise non-lethal hits becoming lethal with big, powerful rounds is nonsense. There's an element of truth to it but the short version of the story is that we still don't actually know what makes one bullet kill and the other not. People survive hits from immensely powerful rounds in real life (as they do in Call) and die to squirrel guns (surprisingly difficult in Call). (The long version is that what kills is slightly better understood, but an incredibly complex process the statistical details of which classified state secrets because of their value to armies.)

Also, you know, does realistic firearms lethality actually make for a good Call of Cthulhu experience?

My personal take is to just skip or obfuscate damage rolls so that if bullshit happens, you can just handwave it and maintain the tone.

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

Anyway that inspired me to put together a playlist of old military combat training films I've run across on youtube. Mostly US stuff from the forties, oddly enough, but they might illustrate the kind of skills your investigators would have learned in boot camp.


https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyIShWdwyUtmLI504S34IFXZoIPfcvmtN

As far as I can tell, a lot of this stuff sucks by modern standards. :mil101:

Charlz Guybon
Nov 16, 2010

LatwPIAT posted:

There's some legitimate criticism to be made of how weapon lethality contra survivability is handled in Call (as with the rhino, which cannot be killed by good hits from the weapons that clearly should be able to kill it) but basically everything about "stopping power" and "energy" and otherwise non-lethal hits becoming lethal with big, powerful rounds is nonsense.
...

Also, you know, does realistic firearms lethality actually make for a good Call of Cthulhu experience?
It's seems an issue of simple mathematics. If a .303 or 30-06 hits with twice the energy of NATO 5.56 mm and the later causes 2d8 of damage than the former should do 4d8.

If that makes things a little too easier. Have more cultists with guns or make the swarms of monsters more numerous or use tougher monsters.

Charlz Guybon fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Oct 11, 2021

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Charlz Guybon posted:

It's seems an issue of simple mathematics. If a .303 or 30-06 hits with twice the energy of NATO 5.7mm and the later cause 2d8 of dame than the former should do 4d8.

Why should damage scale linearly with energy? Is getting shot twice with 5.7 mm really as lethal as getting shot once with .303?

Charlz Guybon
Nov 16, 2010
Force equals mass times acceleration. It would seem axiomatic that the more force a person is hit with, the worse it will go for them.

Also, for someone complaining about errors, I just noticed a huge one by that author. It should be 5.56mm NATO.

Drone
Aug 22, 2003

Incredible machine
:smug:



On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of people playing these games have no idea what those different calibers even are, let alone why one should be more damage than another, let alone actually care about it.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



I'm glad to know ZARDOZ's thoughts about the Call of Cthulhu engine, but we only ever focus on one half of ZARDOZ's message.

Did those big game guns work reliably on charging animals?

Drone posted:

On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of people playing these games have no idea what those different calibers even are, let alone why one should be more damage than another, let alone actually care about it.
I am not sure about "overwhelming" majority but I would say 'majority,' yeah.

There is probably some room for looking at damage numbers that were originally put down in the Reagan administration if you are going for realism but I have thought CoC was always pretty clear on the idea being: A gun or two, or even a gat for every investigator, is potentially useful but will not actually solve the problem, and the game doesn't try to model it in a granular basis. Hell, I thought this might be part of the appeal of Delta Green, but I'm not sure how Delta Green engages with the Gun.

Nessus fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Oct 11, 2021

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

Charlz Guybon posted:

Force equals mass times acceleration. It would seem axiomatic that the more force a person is hit with, the worse it will go for them.
Good news! The game already increases damage when you go up in gun size. That's sufficient to fulfill this rule, and the rest is quibbling over the level of abstraction. Or would you like different die values for different powder loads?

Trying to simulate gunshot wounds, stab wounds, the physical consequences of fell and eldritch magic, etc. with a single number is going to require some abstraction, okay.

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

Nessus posted:

I'm glad to know ZARDOZ's thoughts about the Call of Cthulhu engine, but we only ever focus on one half of ZARDOZ's message.

Did those big game guns work reliably on charging animals?
I tried googling how big-game hunters of the day hunted rhinoceros but all I found was this one big-game hunter wanking about caliber.

He does mention this one encounter with a rhino:

quote:

Almost immediately the vicious old beast could be heard tearing through the grass straight towards us. I meant to fire my first shot into the movement as soon as it became visible, and to kill with my second as he swerved. At a very few paces’ distance the grass showed where he was and I fired into it, reloading almost instantaneously. At the shot he swerved across, almost within kicking range, showing a wonderful chance at his neck. I fired, but there was only a click. I opened the bolt and there was my empty case.

Nessus posted:

Hell, I thought this might be part of the appeal of Delta Green, but I'm not sure how Delta Green engages with the Gun.
Pistols do 1d10, rifles do 1d12 and machine guns have a percentage chance of killing you outright. :mil101:

Siivola fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Oct 11, 2021

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Drone posted:

On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of people playing these games have no idea what those different calibers even are, let alone why one should be more damage than another, let alone actually care about it.

I'm something of a moderate gun nerd and for 99% of tabletop purposes you only really need to model small arms cartridges to the granularity of maybe "light/heavy pistol, light/heavy/antimateriel rifle." And with modern defense/duty loads making even the much debated .45 vs 9mm luger a horse a piece as far as putting down people/deep ones, you might not even need "light/heavy" for pistols.

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

Thinking about this more, the actual weird oversight with the rules is that IRL, handguns are pretty difficult to aim compared to rifles.

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Dr. Lunchables
Dec 27, 2012

IRL DEBUFFED KOBOLD



That’s why they separated handguns from rifle/shotgun. Separate skills for separate tasks.

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