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View Full Version : First time playing Call of Cthulhu, seeking advice



AquilaRift
2011-02-23, 10:55 PM
A couple of the guys from my group have expressed interest in this particular system, and the PDF is available pretty inexpensively on the Chaosium website, so I thought I'd give it a try. Problem is, none of us have played the game before. I'll probably end up being the Keeper, as I'm the most familiar with the Mythos itself, and I don't want to go into this blind.
Having lurked here for over a year, I know there are some experienced shoggoth-baiters on this forum. I'm looking for advice both on rules (anything particularly broken I should steer clear of?) and story (how do you keep the game creepy and atmospheric without going over the top?)
Any help would be greatly appreciated. At the moment, this is what I know:
1) Character survival and continued mental health are by no means guaranteed or even likely.
2) Kicking down the door and going in guns blazing, D&D-style, is a good way to get your mind devoured by abominations from beyond the stars. With some monsters, the only viable battle strategy is running away.
3) Cthulhu's only stats are "devours 1d3 investigators per round."

WalkingTarget
2011-02-23, 11:15 PM
A couple of the guys from my group have expressed interest in this particular system, and the PDF is available pretty inexpensively on the Chaosium website, so I thought I'd give it a try. Problem is, none of us have played the game before. I'll probably end up being the Keeper, as I'm the most familiar with the Mythos itself, and I don't want to go into this blind.
Having lurked here for over a year, I know there are some experienced shoggoth-baiters on this forum. I'm looking for advice both on rules (anything particularly broken I should steer clear of?) and story (how do you keep the game creepy and atmospheric without going over the top?)
Any help would be greatly appreciated. At the moment, this is what I know:
1) Character survival and continued mental health are by no means guaranteed or even likely.
2) Kicking down the door and going in guns blazing, D&D-style, is a good way to get your mind devoured by abominations from beyond the stars. With some monsters, the only viable battle strategy is running away.
3) Cthulhu's only stats are "devours 1d3 investigators per round."

In reverse order:
3)Cthulhu has a full stat block, but there's no real chance of a group of PCs doing any appreciable damage to him anyway.

2) Very true: my standard warning is that combat is what happens when things go wrong and the players need to be aware of the different expectations in play style. Human (and even human-ish) enemies tend to be as fragile (or at least close) as the player characters, but there's often the hassle of dealing with the Law if things get that far. Also, players should be encouraged to think of their characters in terms of how the game presents them (which is fitting with Lovecraft): they are investigators. Even if they're not "professional" investigators the game goes better if they go in with the expectation that they're characters are too curious than is good for them. By all means, play smart and plan, but you still need to know, for example, what's making that noise in the basement.

1) Again, it's not guaranteed, but it is entirely possible to make it through a long campaign in this game. Play smart, plan well, know when to make a tactical retreat and you can generally get away. That said, as a Keeper you need to keep the differences between this game and, say, D&D in mind. Scenarios tend to be built around a mystery and there's often things that can be done beyond just killing everybody that will prevent the Evil from happening. Making sure that these non-combat options are available are part of your job as Keeper. Between story lines (or even chapters of one distributed story) let the PCs get some psychiatric time in to get their Sanity back up. They're fragile people, but investigators don't need to be handicapped too much.

Ok, now to general points. For atmosphere, don't describe things too much. If the characters can't get a good look at the horrible thing, just give a few quick impressions. To prevent metagaming, try to keep the players from getting too familiar with the book. Everybody sees the monster manual for D&D, the monster pages in CoC should be for the Keeper only. Of the people I ran a game for back in college, only one had read any Lovecraft and the uncertainty helped. If the players make a wrong assumption about what's going on, don't be too quick to correct them.

Also, as much as it's practical, try to split the group up if the PCs split up to cut down on OOC knowledge. Use notes passed back and forth if you can.

Oh, and develop a big grin. Let it develop slowly as the players describe a course of action. Make sure they see it.

Edit - Oh, also. A proud tradition of CoC is the use of prop handouts. Many if not most published scenarios have things you can print out to hand to players (heck, for one campaign I constructed a matchbox that the PCs found as a clue). Having something tangible for the players to hang onto for reference during a campaign can be neat. For my game I introduced the idea of a clue diary that they used to keep track of everything they had come across. At the conclusion of the campaign they cited that as one of their favorite parts of playing.

AquilaRift
2011-02-23, 11:39 PM
:smallsmile: Thanks, this is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.

Darrin
2011-02-24, 11:16 AM
Some tips/advice on running CoC:

1) Monsters, cultists, and chainsaw-wielding maniacs aren't scary. The *unknown* is what's scary. This is the "ten-foot-tall bug" problem. I think Stephen King wrote an essay about this in Danse Macabre (google for the gist of it), but horror works best when the character/reader/audience doesn't know exactly what they're dealing with. They may be told or have some idea that there's a giant bug on the other side of a door, but they don't really know what it looks like until they open the door. Once they open it and see it's a ten-foot-tall bug, they can say, "Oh, is that all, at least it wasn't a hundred-foot-tall bug." The less the PCs know, the more frightening things their imagination has to conjure up.

Another good example: a zombie is not scary, and most PCs will know how to deal with one of them without having to consult an ancient tome of forbidden knowledge. Not knowing how many zombies have surrounded the house, or if some of the zombies can suddenly sprint 60' or spit acid? That can be pretty scary.

2) One of the fundamental secrets about the success of CoC is it subverts the player's perception of control. In most RPGs, a PC's stats, equipment, spells/powers give them a great deal of control over the fictional world around them. In D&D, you can boil this down to just think of it in terms of HPs. A PC is allowed to change the world around him as long as he has positive HP and can reduce the HPs of everything around him. If a PC can reduce something to zero HP or below, he has absolute control over what happens to it.

CoC subverts this assumption: PCs have very few HPs, can't do much damage, and the monsters they may run into are extremely powerful if not outright unkillable. Sanity is another mechanic that works like HP, only Sanity Points dictate how much control the player has over his PC. Sanity Points are a limited resource that the player has to vigorously protect, and once they're gone you very rarely get any of them back. Can the PC risk looking out the window, or reading the ancient scrolls, or should he save his SAN for a the raid on the cultist temple? Is it worth blowing the rest of your SAN to complete the ritual and possibly save the world? If a PC loses too much SAN, the player loses control of the PC, and may get removed from the story altogether.

3) John Tynes (Pagan Publishing guru, designer for Cthulhu D20) calls them "gotcha" moments, when you isolate one PC or a small group and they briefly witness something that breaks all the rules: a kitchen sink fills will blood; a skeletal hand scratches the outside of a 3rd story window; a doorknob turns into a snake's head that lunges at a PC's hand; a bed suddenly immolates, filling the room with fire and smoke, causing the PC to briefly black out.

These are essentialy mini-cutscenes. The PC generally isn't allowed to interact (i.e., he briefly loses complete control over his immediate surroundings or is given a "fake" roll to give the illusion of some control), and after the event is over, there may be no evidence that anything happened or the evidence may be confusing or conflicting. The doorknob looks completely ordinary now, but whenever the PC opens any other door, he feels two sharp pinpricks of pain in his thumb (no damage or game effect, but now the PC has to wonder if opening any door is safe). The bed looks just fine now, but there's some discoloration at the bottom of the headboard, like it might have been blackened by a fire at one point. Perhaps the PC should research if there were any fires reported at this address in the past?

These "gotcha" moments are designed to startle the PCs, and sometimes give them clues, but they also create doubt and uncertainty about the world around them: Did what I just see really happen? If I go through that door, am I going to run into something that a shotgun can reasonably be expected to deal with? Can I assume the physical objects around me are going to behave the way I expect them to?

Be careful when you use these, though. Most players have watched their fair share of horror movies, and can anticipate the most common "gotcha" moments. If the players can predict these "gotchas", they are no longer scary, and can devolve into mood-killing jokes. Also, be bluntly honest when the entire party brings the full weight of their investigative resources to waste an entire week trying to study an ordinary doorknob. Tell them out-of-character it was a "gotcha" scene, and absolutely no amount of dice-rolling will result in any further information.

4) Library use, obscure/ancient languages, and research skills are the most powerful stats in CoC. A PC who maxes out these skills can exert the most control over the world around him, because he can maximize how much information the party can get their hands on. Experienced CoC "powergamers" can cut through hours of stumbling around by going directly to the local newspaper, police station, county hall of records, etc. You can restrict this behavior by parceling out the information slowly, dictating how much time it requires, or bury it behind thick layers of beauracracy (the clerk wants a bribe, is on vacation, those records are sealed by court order, the secretary misplaced the key to that file cabinet, etc.).

5) Most investigation scenarios break down and get stuck because they have a linear "trail of breadcrumbs" structure. If the PCs blow a spot roll or fail to search something and then miss that one crucial breadcrumb that leads to the next scene/clue/NPC/etc., they hit a dead end and have absolutely no idea how to progress. It's difficult to spot these plot bottlenecks beforehand unless you've been through or playtested a scenario before, but try to make sure there are multiple ways to discover each handout or clue. If a witness dies before the PCs can get to him, maybe he told his ex-wife about the event, made a statement in a police report, or was interviewed by a newspaper reporter. There are other tricks you can use to make sure the PCs get the information they need:

The "Teleporting Clue", for example. Problem: The PCs get spooked and kill an important NPC before he can give them the next clue. Solution: The clue was important enough that he wrote it down on a note in his pocket. Problem: The PCs forget to search the body, missing the note. Solution: A police investigator searches the body, finds the note, and runs into the PCs later, mentioning the clue they missed. Problem: The PCs were spooked enough that they decided to kill the NPC with a flamethrower, burning up the NPC along with his clothing, pocket, and the note. Solution: The NPC left the note on his desk in his office, where his wife or police investigator can notice it later, and pass it along to the PCs.

The "Spiderweb Plot": Rather than one single trail of breadcrumbs, the BBEG has left multiple threads that all lead back to him. He signed the commitment papers and is bribing a psychiatrist to institutionalize a key witness. He's blackmailing the mayor to keep quiet about a few shady real estate purchases. He's supplying drugs to a police chief trying to hide an addiction problem. He made sure a local journalist asking too many questions suddenly "disappeared". Each of these shorter threads leads back to the BBEG, so the PCs only need to pull hard enough on one thread to figure out who they need to focus on. If one thread dead-ends on a botched roll or bad decision, there are still other threads to investigate. Even if they blow all their leads and can't quite get into the center of the web, they may collect enough clues that by the preponderance of the evidence they can deduce the identity of the spider.

The "Mysterious Stranger": If the party is hopelessly, completely lost, then an NPC that has been secretly following the events steps forward and presents the PCs with the evidence they need and points them in the right direction. Yes, it's Deus Ex Machina and possibly blatant cheating, but if you handle it right you can still make the PCs feel that they "earned" it. The NPC can explain that the PCs failed attempts at investigation caused the BBEG to get distracted enough that someone else was able to succeed but he's not strong enough to foil the plot on his own, or that their dogged determination even in the face of failure impressed the NPC so much that it convinced him that they can be trusted with the truth, or maybe what looks like the PCs' most recent failure actually removed an obstacle that prevented the NPC from coming forward before.

6) One player invariably tries to build a combat-wombat, buffing up his physical stats, maxing out combat skills, or using the credit rating/deep pockets of the Rich Dilletante archetype to load himself up with tommy guns, grenades, explosives, bazookas, and what-have-you. This is the perfect PC to use a "possession" power or "dominate person" spell on to turn them against the rest of the party.

7) If a PC gets killed off early, you can get them back into the game by giving them an NPC to roleplay for a scene. You can let a player take over a Henchman or Cultist (the "I only do what I'm told!" variety) for a mini-boss fight. They can take over an antagonist (the "belligerant police officer looking for a bribe") or a potential ally (the "young idealistic journalist protecting a source" or "crazy town drunk that no one ever believes"). If you have time to prep, you can have a couple NPCs already involved in the story that can be brought in as an "emergency PC", like a "maverick police detective on administrative leave" or "concerned farmer with the Good Book and a shotgun".

8) If a PC is going to die, give him a chance to go down swinging. Sometimes dying in CoC is more memorable than surviving. If you're really clever, you can make the death meaningful by leading to an important clue ("these wounds are too clean and precise to be caused by a kitchen knife, maybe a surgeon's scalpel?"), or maybe it influences events later on: plant evidence at the scene to implicate/threaten another NPC, the bloody floor causes the villain to slip, the PC dropped a shotgun shell as he was trying to reload that comes in handy later, this ritual requires a fresh human heart, etc.

9) Aggressive PCs invariably run afoul of the Law, particularly if they get frustrated and decide excessive violence and/or explosives is the only option they have left. Never, ever allow the PCs to attack police officers unless it's an important part of the plot (or they are really, *really* good at hiding bodies). If things get to that point, just say "You're arrested and thrown in jail. Your bail is set at X amount. You get one phone call, who do you want it to be?" Use the police to shut down wild goose chases ("you cannot possibly find anything in that farmhouse that the 20 police officers who searched it yesterday couldn't find"), or put up a few beauracratic obstacles, but when the PCs are headed in the right direction, then the police are suddenly too busy with something else or decide to let them go with a "stern warning". Corrupt officials can have conflicting motivations, evidence can get lost, witnesses can change their stories or suddenly disappear, a friendly lawyer can call in a favor with a judge, etc.

10) If the PCs completely and utterly fail a scenario, it can be loads of fun to revisit the same events a few decades later. They can even interview their former PCs in the sanitarium.

WalkingTarget
2011-02-24, 12:26 PM
Some tips/advice on running CoC:

[snip of awesome proportions]

All good stuff.


10) If the PCs completely and utterly fail a scenario, it can be loads of fun to revisit the same events a few decades later. They can even interview their former PCs in the sanitarium.

Heh. My first ever gaming crew had two semi-concurrent games running. One standard 1920's game and one Delta Green game.

One player's DG character was the granddaughter of her other character and had the older character's diary. It counted as a Mythos tome. :smallbiggrin:

RTGoodman
2011-02-24, 01:15 PM
I've not played CoC before, but I am a cheap bastard who knows how to get cool free stuff. As such, here's a great resource with a TON of handouts and props: http://www.cthulhulives.org/toybox/propdocs/FreeProps.html.

It's got Miskatonic library cards and diplomas, insanity certificates, death certificates, and more. You can also buy the CD from them, but, like I said, cheap bastard here.