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Krytha
2007-06-18, 07:42 PM
So my friends are all into Call of Cthulhu d100 (ha... ha...) and yeah its neat and cool and interesting... but the characters just can't handle anything. Sure, nobody is supposed to be able to beat Cthulhu or any random elder god, but our characters can't handle ZOMBIES. The guns are more inaccurate than fists and do roughly the same damage on any given roll. Additionally, combat is inescapable in this game so towards the end of every mission, we end up getting slaughtered and our DMs are fighting tooth and nail to keep US alive. And failing.

Any similar stories on this ridiculous game?

Call Me Siggy
2007-06-18, 07:44 PM
As far as I know about the game, that's exactly what's supposed to be happening. The players are instilled with a sense of fear and hopelessness. They can't fight because it's more important to run from the scary, scary, things that are chasing you.

Krytha
2007-06-18, 07:59 PM
I know that's what supposed to happen, but then there's no point in ever playing. Why not just stare at the cover of the campaign and say... well, we could never take that thing, so let's stay home. Additionally, running from monsters in the campaigns tend to make the actual missions impossible.

For example: No cultist activity until night of summoning when Hastur comes into this world. Convinced police force to help set up an ambush at summoning location. Cultists begin ritual, stab people, PCs and police spring into action and fire with their fist-damage pea-shooters. Cultists summon 8 byakees and a large sized monstrosity. We run, police die, Hastur shows up, game over. There is no running. You have one shot to mess things up at a critical time and if you don't you don't get that chance again.

Call Me Siggy
2007-06-18, 08:02 PM
It's Survival-Horror. The whole thrill of the thing is in attempting just to live, not killing everything. It's definitely roleplay-heavy...and that doesn't really seem your cup of tea.

AngelSword
2007-06-18, 08:04 PM
So my friends are all into Call of Cthulhu d100 (ha... ha...) and yeah its neat and cool and interesting... but the characters just can't handle anything. Sure, nobody is supposed to be able to beat Cthulhu or any random elder god, but our characters can't handle ZOMBIES. The guns are more inaccurate than fists and do roughly the same damage on any given roll. Additionally, combat is inescapable in this game so towards the end of every mission, we end up getting slaughtered and our DMs are fighting tooth and nail to keep US alive. And failing.

Any similar stories on this ridiculous game?

Oh, I have many stories about Cthulhu. I love it.

I remember one game at D*Con '04, where we were on an island after a plane crash. The owner of the island was trying to summon shoggoths, and we were doing our best to prevent it. I managed to delay him pretty hard (getting a 10% roll with a shotgun, and blowing a giant hole in the semi real shoggoth), but it kept coming. Two of the other investigators had found something with the same sort of power output as a small nuclear device, and decided to force it to overheat, killing (among others) the cultist.

Combat is meant to be deadly. The characters are supposed to be normal people; not the same sorts of super people that D&D creates.

Seraph
2007-06-18, 08:17 PM
CoC is about role playing. this may not be understandable if you're used to DnD or something, but beating a problem until it stops being one is never, ever an option.

Belteshazzar
2007-06-18, 08:19 PM
Unfortunatly this does not seem to be limited to simply the pen and paper version of the game. While playing CoC: Dark Corners of the Earth I notice that apparently the sight of some guys who look like oversized frogs (the Cult of Dagon) can make a man go clear out of his mind. I can understand if they suddenly start chanting a foul rite or working world twisting magics but noOOOoo.

Apparently the average joe of the early 1900s would fall apart mentally if some guys in rubber fish suits jumped him. While they could make me jump if they stepped out of an alleyway the shock would wear off I think after the first few times one saw them. Especialy when you realize they can hardly see their hand in front of their face and a bullet to the brain kills 'em all the same.

I mean a zombie causing sanity loss for simply existing should not happen. If they were eating my friend alive while he screamed for me to make it stop maybe but Lovecraftian horror seems to take the effect of insanity so far that it looses all the 'newness' if you take my meaning. I don't mind loosing it if Cthulhu or Nartholoptep decide to sit down for a chat with me about 'how the universe really works' but a dead body of a stranger won't even destroy most children's insanity much less a hardened mythos investigator.

Krytha
2007-06-18, 08:22 PM
Well I'm glad you have nuclear plants. There aren't any where we live. And combat is deadly, yes, and generally lethal. Practically all the time we don't get to dictate the terms of the encounter, get ambushed, get death-magicked, get kidnapped in a cutscene - I don't know how youre supposed to finish a campaign properly but my persuade rolls vs. cthonians haven't been so brilliant.

AngelSword
2007-06-18, 08:38 PM
I mean a zombie causing sanity loss for simply existing should not happen. If they were eating my friend alive while he screamed for me to make it stop maybe but Lovecraftian horror seems to take the effect of insanity so far that it looses all the 'newness' if you take my meaning. I don't mind loosing it if Cthulhu or Nartholoptep decide to sit down for a chat with me about 'how the universe really works' but a dead body of a stranger won't even destroy most children's insanity much less a hardened mythos investigator.

I think you're missing something. Investigators are not hardened, and most are often just choosing the wrong day to follow their instincts. Think about it; how would you react if you found a corpse swinging from her neck in the far corner of the room? You're already on edge, as most of the people you've spoken to are strange, yet you can't figure out why. Their eyes are just…dead. Empty. And they dislike you on the sole fact that you're an outsider to their quaint town.

Essentially, you're playing you. You may say you can handle such horrors, but unless you actually have, you never really know.

Krytha
2007-06-18, 08:57 PM
What I don't like is that we are expected to die. Rolling up new character sheets is not fun and is time consuming. For people telling me to RP, tell me HOW I should go about doing this?

Example: We see an article in the newspaper about how a painter makes extremely vivid and disturbing paintings that he claims to see in his dreams. Our mythos meter going ding and we decide to visit him and talk about his craft. He's pretty clearly insane and being taken care of by his mother. After getting nowhere in talking to him and getting ushered out, we figure we can sneak in at night and take a look around. We make it in, the place is dark, we have no problems unlocking a door and being generally undetected. We head down into the basement and succeed on a spot hidden check for a secret door. Yay! Clues! Our lead person creaks the door open quietly and suddenly turns around and shoots another investigator. Then my character is suddenly seized with the insatiable need to gibber and curl up into a foetal ball for the remainder of combat. I ask if I get a save or if I can do anything? Nope, my dm tells me, you need a magic score of 36 or higher... which is impossible to get by character standards. So yeah, there was a lizardmagus hiding in the painter's basement with unsaveable instant death magic.

What were we supposed to do? Not break in? Go tell the police that this guy is insane and that he should have his civil rights stripped of him because we think he's up to something like... oh... dragging a dead god into this world and destroying humanity? You need proof to get anywhere and wild stories don't work in real life, which I think is roleplaying. We barely survive combat (killed him with fists of fury...) and try to send one of our mortally wounded investigators to the hospital. Then we go back upstairs and look at a painting in a closet that sends us back in time to be lizard sacrifices. I don't understand. What should I have done in these situations? Walked around with my eyes closed? learned lizard speak from the nearby LSL tutor? Gone to my local library to research a baleful polymorph spell so that I can pretend to be a lizard man and invite this nice guy to tea? You say "ROLEPLAY!" but I don't know what you think that would entail since I feel that we are already roleplaying.

Knight_Of_Twilight
2007-06-18, 09:06 PM
I loved Call of Cthulu. My hardboiled PI kicked down doors, always loosed a few shots at whatever came at him, and burned every old book the party ever found.

I think I killed one cultist with him, ever.

Belteshazzar
2007-06-18, 10:23 PM
In DnD the plot never survive contact with the characters which is fine as long as one is a good DM but in CoC the Characters never survive contact with the plot which makes for a very dull game. I mean if the only way to survive in CoC is to burn every book, kill every stranger, and nuke towns of cultists from orbit then what is the point. The DM is out of a job because everything he was going to describe is either on fire, in small pieces, or not being intentionally ignored because everyone makes a point of not investigating the vaguely disturbing painting lest they feel a sudden urge to spill blood for the blood god. I can understand if it is playing it safe to toss a stick of dynamite into a room of cultist before entering 'just to be sure' but when that becomes the only 'safe' option for entering every ominous basement or crypt then the description "you see several chucks of unidentifiable flesh with a smooth pasting of blood coating the walls" is going to become rather overused very quickly.

AngelSword
2007-06-18, 10:37 PM
You say "ROLEPLAY!" but I don't know what you think that would entail since I feel that we are already roleplaying.

There's your problem. You're looking at it as though it's identical to playing a D&D game. That's the problem; you're expecting a great wyrm, and getting a pseudodragon. Notice how you created the character; you have actual skills and abilities. No magic, no special attacks, nothing.

Krytha
2007-06-18, 10:41 PM
You ALSO don't survive encounters with the law. If you go around dynamiting everything, your campaign will end prematurely. Every time we run into someone who is a bit creepy everyone's like... CULTIST! KILL HIM! but we stop ourselves because we know that if we do without any proof we get the old "you kill him and are arrested by the police for murder. you're executed in jail."

I also don't like the way sanity plays an enormous role in the game but cannot be increased over time. You'd think that after seeing visions of nyarlothep for the 50th time you'd stop losing 1d20 sanity, but no. You're also pretty hard-pressed to get that sanity back too. In many ways, sanity is even more important than hitpoints (scant as they are) and people with 5 power basically need to never look at anything ever, lest they be driven instantly insane and attack their own teammates.


There's your problem. You're looking at it as though it's identical to playing a D&D game. That's the problem; you're expecting a great wyrm, and getting a pseudodragon. Notice how you created the character; you have actual skills and abilities. No magic, no special attacks, nothing.

And you'll look at the gaming stories and realize that's not the case at all. If I were expecting a greatwyrm, what I got was an army of balors. Again, you haven't suggested HOW to deal with this problem other than die.

Of course, the lack of special attacks and anything useful is painfully clear to me. The so-called actual skills and abilities? Useless 90% of the time. There are a set of main skills which are absolutely mandatory to get anywhere at all, but those 30 points you put into mechanical repair will surface maybe once every three campaigns (which you won't survive to get to) and even then, you might not even be the person in the situation that requires help. And as you said, now that our characters have NOTHING, what do you expect them to do when conflict is foisted upon them - as it always does in these missions?

Xuincherguixe
2007-06-18, 10:55 PM
My thought is that it's all well and good to make the game fairly lethal, there should at least be some options until the climax where you either get eaten, commit suicide, or turn into a Deep One.

Things could build up a bit. Rather than finding a Lizardmagus, maybe there was just some kind of 'strange green sphere'. There might be some more paintings in that room, or maybe it's just completely empty. It would be slightly unsettling to look at. If a character stared at it long enough though, things might start to happen.

Furthermore, I think reasonable to expect your players to be able to kill Deep Ones. Their real danger comes when they're in groups.

It seems to me that the best way to play the game, is that the players gradually uncover all manner of horrible, terrible secrets. A few characters here and there maybe can die along the way, but the team getting massacred in the first encounter is just stupid.

AngelSword
2007-06-18, 11:13 PM
Of course, the lack of special attacks and anything useful is painfully clear to me. The so-called actual skills and abilities? Useless 90% of the time. There are a set of main skills which are absolutely mandatory to get anywhere at all, but those 30 points you put into mechanical repair will surface maybe once every three campaigns (which you won't survive to get to) and even then, you might not even be the person in the situation that requires help. And as you said, now that our characters have NOTHING, what do you expect them to do when conflict is foisted upon them - as it always does in these missions?

Then the problem lies with the person running the game. Long Cthulhu campaigns hinge on a keeper who knows how to incorporate your abilities, and slowly drive you mad. If your keeper is forcing you into situations where he doesn't provide you with a valid escape route - even if that route is simply turning tail and running away - then something's wrong.

Krytha
2007-06-18, 11:21 PM
Are you creating your own campaigns? My friends just bought a ton of stock campaigns and are DMing straight out of a book.

AngelSword
2007-06-18, 11:38 PM
Perhaps that's it. I've never been in a stock Cthulhu game.

Though, I give you a bit of a reprieve. I would figure that, if I didn't start playing with people who were already well-versed in the game, the games I made would've needed some serious work.

Cthulhu is also the type of game that relies a bit on DM fiat. Not quite to the same extent as Paranoia (which is essentially how much you're willing to kiss Computer ass), but fiat is required, and often in the players' favor (or not, if they're utterly twisted [they should, slightly, be twisted, in order to create the proper environ, but still])

Yiel
2007-06-19, 12:42 AM
For me, the essence of a good Cthulhu game is the air of fear the room develops as the party traverses the world. If you faced and won every encounter you would be audacious, not trepidatious.

edit: I can't spell.

skywalker
2007-06-19, 01:04 AM
Some understanding of Lovecraftian horror is in order, first of all. You have to realize that in most of Lovecraft's fiction, everyone except for the guy writing the story is already dead. On top of that, the last bit of the story is about how he is being either silenced by the powers that be, arrested, or has finally gone mad.

As far as sanity loss:
Specific Case: No, seeing Nyarlathotep for the 50th time is not any easier than seeing him the 1st time. Do you really think it would get easier? I think it would get harder. It's like, well it's not something I can describe on these forums.

General Case: Seeing corpses is one thing. Seeing corpses the way they are generally mangled and destroyed in CofC is quite another.

Again, going back to Lovecraft's fiction, problems are always solved by taking a very risky maneuver with a very low chance of success against the big monster. If you can't run, then you should think(fast, like Lovecraft's protagonists) and come up with a unique solution. Most of the time though, you can run. The CofC I play is mostly d20, and in the d20 CofC manual, the starter mission is one in which, once the BBEG is summoned, you can only run and hope to save as many innocent bystanders as possible.

I do understand where you're coming from, and have said for quite some time that the perfect CofC investigator is blind and shoots everything that makes a noise he doesn't recognize.

I also understand that the primary human instinct is to say, problem, let's solve it, scenario, let's beat it. But the point of Lovecraft and CofC is that that is why most humans die in that type of situation, and that curiosity often DOES kill the cat.

Swordguy
2007-06-19, 01:23 AM
I do understand where you're coming from, and have said for quite some time that the perfect CofC investigator is blind and shoots everything that makes a noise he doesn't recognize.


Comedy Gold.

The rest of the post is correct as well. In D&D x.x the paradigm is to be presented with a problem or situation, and look through your group's combined abilities to find the one that best solves the problem at hand.

In Lovcraftian horror, the paradigm is simply to survive whatever's happening, because understanding it (or, heaven forbid, destroying it) is simply beyond human capability. As the quote says: "We live on and a placid island of ignorance in the black seas of infinity, and it is not meant that we should voyage far." Lovcraftian monsters are so alien that the simple sight of them drives the rational brain to insanity in an attempt to understand the how's and why's of the creature. Yet to survive and to temporarily defeat the encroaching remainder of the (insane) universe, you have to use your mind more than anything else. The paradigm of Cthulhlu is completely different than in D&D. If you can't make the mental shift, you'll never enjoy the game.

BTW, over time and with drug therapy, you CAN increase your SAN.

AngelSword
2007-06-19, 01:37 AM
"We live on and a placid island of ignorance in the black seas of infinity, and it is not meant that we should voyage far."

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. - Howard Philips Lovecraft

Swordguy
2007-06-19, 01:48 AM
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. - Howard Philips Lovecraft

Yes, yes...and "some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - Howard Philips Lovecraft

I mean, it's obvious, isn't it? :smallbiggrin:

OzymandiasVolt
2007-06-19, 01:49 AM
So basically everyone dies every time after failing in an especially pathetic fashion. Wow, what a great game. A game where it's really really HARD to win? Sure. A game where you CAN'T win? No thanks.

skywalker
2007-06-19, 01:54 AM
Yes, yes...and "some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - Howard Philips Lovecraft

I mean, it's obvious, isn't it? :smallbiggrin:


Haha, CofC is also damned depressing, now that I think about it.

Which is probably why I quit playing it as much.


So basically everyone dies every time after failing in an especially pathetic fashion. Wow, what a great game. A game where it's really really HARD to win? Sure. A game where you CAN'T win? No thanks.

No, no, not that everyone dies. Everyone but one person dies, almost every time. You CAN win CofC. It just takes a different mind-set from D&D, and most other RPGs. It also takes a much better GM, on average, and players who are much more willing to let their imaginations grasp the meaning of what the GM is describing. It can be quite the experience if you really let go and try to create a mental image of the horror being described to you.

AngelSword
2007-06-19, 01:55 AM
So basically everyone dies every time after failing in an especially pathetic fashion. Wow, what a great game. A game where it's really really HARD to win? Sure. A game where you CAN'T win? No thanks.

I think your perspective is flawed if you're looking to win at a game that has no set win conditions, Cthulhu or otherwise.

Tola
2007-06-19, 02:05 AM
...I've been reading through some of Lovecraft's works. Often, protagonists survive, but are eternally shaken by whatever experience. There's no 'insta-kills' or similar, and this, nor should there be in your role-play.

No encounter 'has' to be invariably fatal, or unstoppable.

The point of Lovecraft is 'educated sorts meet the Unknown/Mysterious'. No-where does it say 'and dies horribly'.

skywalker
2007-06-19, 02:14 AM
...I've been reading through some of Lovecraft's works. Often, protagonists survive, but are eternally shaken by whatever experience. There's no 'insta-kills' or similar, and this, nor should there be in your role-play.

No encounter 'has' to be invariably fatal, or unstoppable.

The point of Lovecraft is 'educated sorts meet the Unknown/Mysterious'. No-where does it say 'and dies horribly'.


However, *most* if not all of the protagonist's companions die horribly, which is part of the reason why he is eternally shaken by the experience. Quite often, the encounter is unstoppable, and the protagonist survives by leaving as quickly as possible. Therefore, most of the PCs should die, and the one who survives should survive by either thinking fast and ballsy to defeat it, or simply running away. That is how a game based on Lovecraft mythos *should* work.

Dervag
2007-06-19, 02:37 AM
It's Survival-Horror. The whole thrill of the thing is in attempting just to live, not killing everything.Yes, but if you can't do that either, the game is miscalibrated. If the party is getting wiped out on every mission, and failing, something is very wrong.


Combat is meant to be deadly. The characters are supposed to be normal people; not the same sorts of super people that D&D creates.Yes, I know, but there's "deadly" and then there's "we can't win because everything has us outgunned by orders of magnitude." The players have to have some chance of accomplishing whatever their goal should be, whether that goal is to survive or to stop the cultist from summoning something unspeakable or to kill the zombie (singular).


CoC is about role playing. this may not be understandable if you're used to DnD or something, but beating a problem until it stops being one is never, ever an option.Don't sneer. It ill becomes you. The problem is not that the game is about roleplaying and this guy doesn't like roleplaying. That has absolutely nothing to do with his complaint. His complaint is that the PCs cannot succeed, as far as he can tell. It's no fun roleplaying an endless succession of defeats and rolling up new characters every time.


There's your problem. You're looking at it as though it's identical to playing a D&D game. That's the problem; you're expecting a great wyrm, and getting a pseudodragon. Notice how you created the character; you have actual skills and abilities. No magic, no special attacks, nothing.No, that has nothing to do with what he actually said. The problem is not that he can't see how to win it like a D&D game. The problem is that he can't see how to win it at all. All the possible ways of winning the game lead to insurmountable challenges (getting disintegrated without warning by unstoppable instant-kill death magic, not having enough evidence to go to the police, et cetera). So there are no possible ways of achieving a given goal, because all the ways that exist are impossible. Which is a serious flaw in any RPG, because there's no point in creating a game with the sole purpose of making the PCs lose over and over.

If they almost succeed, that's cool. If they succeed at extreme cost, so that two thirds of the party is dead, that's frustrating but at least they accomplished something. But when every action they can take other than "we leave town now and never interact with anything you mentioned in this adventure ever again" leads to them getting taken out instantly by an enemy they never had any chance of resisting or avoiding, it's no fun for a lot of people. It's especially bad for real roleplayers, because roleplayers like to be able to, y'know, play a role. And if every character gets killed within ten seconds of entering their first challenging situation, there's not much of a role to play.


I also don't like the way sanity plays an enormous role in the game but cannot be increased over time. You'd think that after seeing visions of nyarlothep for the 50th time you'd stop losing 1d20 sanity, but no. You're also pretty hard-pressed to get that sanity back too.Well, no, that is actually part of the point of the game. People who expose themselves to the Mythos enough go insane. They do things that, by the standards of normal people, are utterly bughouse nuts, like attacking their teammates.

You never get over seeing a Mythos creature. The more times you see it, the more obsessed with it you become, or the more you hallucinate it when it isn't there. Eventually, you do something crazy, like blow your brains out to make the voices stop or join one of the cults. Where do you think all those cultists come from?


Are you creating your own campaigns? My friends just bought a ton of stock campaigns and are DMing straight out of a book.Ok, now I see the problem. Your DM isn't giving you enough warning that the threats exist, and isn't giving you a chance to back up and figure out a different angle of attack. So you stumble into a fight with an invincible enemy because your DM isn't giving you any hints to work with.


I also understand that the primary human instinct is to say, problem, let's solve it, scenario, let's beat it. But the point of Lovecraft and CofC is that that is why most humans die in that type of situation, and that curiosity often DOES kill the cat.OK, but the life expectancy of a character should be more than one mission. Otherwise, the game is no fun except for people who really really love rolling up characters as part of their gaming experience. There's no room for roleplaying because your character dies before you get the chance for character exposition, and there's no point in exploring different character concepts because they all get killed with equal frequency anyway.


I think your perspective is flawed if you're looking to win at a game that has no set win conditions, Cthulhu or otherwise.But if the game has no way to achieve any positive goal, including "we get away and most of us are still alive," then there the game's perspective is flawed, because it's no fun except for a negligibly small percentage of people.


The point of Lovecraft is 'educated sorts meet the Unknown/Mysterious'. No-where does it say 'and dies horribly'.Well, actually they do die horribly quite frequently, or other characters in the novel other than the viewpoint one die horribly (eaten by a Shoggoth, obliterated by a horrible entity from beyond the known dimensions, et cetera). But the point is that they don't always die horribly, and if they die horribly it's usually because they did something that they had some chance of figuring out not to do.

AngelSword
2007-06-19, 02:52 AM
Yes, I know, but there's "deadly" and then there's "we can't win because everything has us outgunned by orders of magnitude." The players have to have some chance of accomplishing whatever their goal should be, whether that goal is to survive or to stop the cultist from summoning something unspeakable or to kill the zombie (singular).


No, that has nothing to do with what he actually said. The problem is not that he can't see how to win it like a D&D game. The problem is that he can't see how to win it at all. All the possible ways of winning the game lead to insurmountable challenges (getting disintegrated without warning by unstoppable instant-kill death magic, not having enough evidence to go to the police, et cetera). So there are no possible ways of achieving a given goal, because all the ways that exist are impossible. Which is a serious flaw in any RPG, because there's no point in creating a game with the sole purpose of making the PCs lose over and over.

If they almost succeed, that's cool. If they succeed at extreme cost, so that two thirds of the party is dead, that's frustrating but at least they accomplished something. But when every action they can take other than "we leave town now and never interact with anything you mentioned in this adventure ever again" leads to them getting taken out instantly by an enemy they never had any chance of resisting or avoiding, it's no fun for a lot of people. It's especially bad for real roleplayers, because roleplayers like to be able to, y'know, play a role. And if every character gets killed within ten seconds of entering their first challenging situation, there's not much of a role to play.


Ok, now I see the problem. Your DM isn't giving you enough warning that the threats exist, and isn't giving you a chance to back up and figure out a different angle of attack. So you stumble into a fight with an invincible enemy because your DM isn't giving you any hints to work with.


OK, but the life expectancy of a character should be more than one mission. Otherwise, the game is no fun except for people who really really love rolling up characters as part of their gaming experience. There's no room for roleplaying because your character dies before you get the chance for character exposition, and there's no point in exploring different character concepts because they all get killed with equal frequency anyway.


But if the game has no way to achieve any positive goal, including "we get away and most of us are still alive," then there the game's perspective is flawed, because it's no fun except for a negligibly small percentage of people.

It seems that all signs are pointing to the same problem; the keeper running the game is seeing it as a game of "GM Kills Players," instead of, "GM Challenges Normal People." Any game will suck when the person running it is vindictive like that.

And I'm going to take offense to that last bit. That was your intent, no?

Dan_Hemmens
2007-06-19, 03:44 AM
To be honest, a lot of published Cthulhu adventures do suck. A lot of published adventures suck.

I think the problem here is probably your GM, or the scenarios he's running. I've never played a Call of Cthulhu game - published or otherwise - with more than one fight in it, and you *can* win if you're smart. Unless you're fighting a mythos entity, then you're dead.

A good Cthulhu game will be 80% investigation, 15% trying to stop the cultists and 5% dealing with the aftermath. It's only the last 5% that should have any chance of killing you.

Fascisticide
2007-06-19, 09:22 AM
In D&D the game is about developping the PCs and have them fight increasingly harder challenges.

But with CoC, it's all about the story. Just like we enjoy reading those great stories Lovecraft wrote where the protagonist is almost always doomed, when we play CoC we enjoy the story the DM tells and in which we participate even if most of the time the PCs are doomed too. The game is a success not when the PCs succeed, but when the players enjoy the story.

I guess you need to be somehow masochists to enjoy playing innocent investigators who will most certainly die horribly. Only 1 in 5 scenarios should end up in a upbeat for the investigators. Most often there is simply no real solution other than running away, and this hopelessness is in great part what makes the games fun.

You got to love roplalaying a feeling of hopeless horror...
O MY GOD! What is this abbomination? These things should not exist.. what am I doing here... After the shoggoth on the roof... I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

Yes, it's hopeless, if you dabble in the occult you will eventually die or end up spending the rest of your life in a small room with soft walls... of course, there are alternatives for clever investigators...
http://www.macguff.fr/goomi/unspeakable/WEBIMAGES/CARTOON/u58-migo.jpg

Tengu
2007-06-19, 02:57 PM
I agree with the point that the GM (wasn't he named The Keeper of Secrets in CoC RPG?) is throwing you against situations where you cannot do anything, and that's not good. In my opinion, creatures greater than cultists, zombies, deep ones and such (which should be beatable in combat) should appear extremely rarely in a CoC game - it's much scarier when the unnamed horror stays in the background, is mentioned in ancient scrolls and such, than when it suddenly pops out and shouts "boo! Ha, you pissed your pants from sanity loss!"

SpikeFightwicky
2007-06-19, 02:58 PM
For example: No cultist activity until night of summoning when Hastur comes into this world. Convinced police force to help set up an ambush at summoning location. Cultists begin ritual, stab people, PCs and police spring into action and fire with their fist-damage pea-shooters. Cultists summon 8 byakees and a large sized monstrosity. We run, police die, Hastur shows up, game over. There is no running. You have one shot to mess things up at a critical time and if you don't you don't get that chance again.

It looks like the problem is that your Keeper is just creating a Mythos dogpile for you to fight, with no possible outcome other than death. The CoC campaign flowchart is NOT meant to be: Create character => Investigate something => Get killed. That's more like Paranoia :smallwink:

Also, not every single game has to involve cultists trying to summon [Insert Elder God here]. I ran a successful CoC/Modern Setting game that started when the investigators were hired on as consultants to a small dig that was looking for the ruins of a Great Race city (long backstory as to why/how). Only one adventurer died before they got back out (and proceded to the next leg of their journey), but I'll be damned if it wasn't the most intense escape ever. And no, the investigators couldn't even dream of winning an enounter against any Mythos beings down there, but that didn't ruin the game for them, and even the player who had the croaked investigator was satisfied.

It seems like the big issue is that your Keeper is running the games on 'Elder God' difficulty level.

Dervag
2007-06-19, 03:14 PM
It seems that all signs are pointing to the same problem; the keeper running the game is seeing it as a game of "GM Kills Players," instead of, "GM Challenges Normal People." Any game will suck when the person running it is vindictive like that.I'm not sure it's vindictiveness. I think the problem is that their gamemaster is not experienced as a CoC Keeper and is simply running stock adventures without doing whatever 'tweaking' is necessary to make it semisurvivable for the players and to give them at least a chance of success.


And I'm going to take offense to that last bit. That was your intent, no?No, unless you are the game Call of Cthulhu, I had no intention of saying anything offensive aimed at you. The game is an abstract concept, and if it is fundamentally designed so that the players can never achieve a meaningful objective, then it IS flawed. That is a conditional statement, and the converse is equally true: if it is not so designed, then it is not so flawed.


I guess you need to be somehow masochists to enjoy playing innocent investigators who will most certainly die horribly. Only 1 in 5 scenarios should end up in a upbeat for the investigators. Most often there is simply no real solution other than running away, and this hopelessness is in great part what makes the games fun.To heck with 'upbeat'. All I'm asking for is "two thirds of our party died, but at least we accomplished something before we died" or "well, we died, but we died because we made a mistake that we could plausibly have foreseen before making it."

Kurald Galain
2007-06-19, 04:31 PM
It would seem that being the storyteller for COC is more difficult than the same in D&D.

Subotei
2007-06-19, 05:32 PM
Also, not every single game has to involve cultists trying to summon [Insert Elder God here]. I ran a successful CoC/Modern Setting game that started when the investigators were hired on as consultants to a small dig that was looking for the ruins of a Great Race city (long backstory as to why/how). Only one adventurer died before they got back out (and proceded to the next leg of their journey), but I'll be damned if it wasn't the most intense escape ever. And no, the investigators couldn't even dream of winning an enounter against any Mythos beings down there, but that didn't ruin the game for them, and even the player who had the croaked investigator was satisfied.

My group play modern/futuristic CoC D100 quite a bit - a good CoC campaign I think should come across like the X-Files - wierd happenings, lots of investigation, some action to keep things moving and for each adventure either an achivable low-level goal (if well played) or a (mostly) survivable encounter which hints at the 'truth' with future plots to come.

I agree not every encounter should be with summoned Elder Gods - that way lies true madness for the GM and PCs alike. Its a fundamentally different style of game from DnD (which I also enjoy), so the approach and expectations of both GM and players should be adjusted accordingly.

OzymandiasVolt
2007-06-20, 11:43 PM
I think your perspective is flawed if you're looking to win at a game that has no set win conditions, Cthulhu or otherwise.

I think your perspective is flawed if you can't see how being driven insane by horrible beings from beyond reality is 'losing'. :wink:

AngelSword
2007-06-21, 12:09 AM
I think your perspective is flawed if you can't see how being driven insane by horrible beings from beyond reality is 'losing'. :wink:

Did the Keeper make it fun? If so, I don't care if I was driven mad by the chittering of squirrels. Fun is the real win condition.

ShneekeyTheLost
2007-06-21, 01:06 AM
I will say that CoC is probably the most 'realistic' of the RPG's out there. Having said that, it's one of the reasons why I dislike it so much. I also don't like the whole Sanity system. Sorry, but once I've seen something scary multiple times, I'm not going to continue being scared about it. I'm going to get over it, much like anyone with a phobia can be cured of it by repeated exposure.

Sorry, give me shining knights, defenders of justice, reality-warping wizards who aren't crazy (except maybe Fizban), and skulking rogues any day of the week over being Mr. Joe Normal having to deal with the same situation. If I want to deal with situations in which my sanity is irrevocabally pulled from me... I don't need Cuthulu, I can just go work at Microsoft as a programmer.

Krytha
2007-06-21, 01:27 AM
If I want to deal with situations in which my sanity is irrevocably pulled from me... I don't need Cuthulu, I can just go work at Microsoft as a programmer.

hahahahaha THE HORROR!!

It's true though. You become inured to glabrous tentacle-faces after seeing them for the fourth time. BAD! Also, why do ordinary cultist shamans get neat stuff? When I read a book and lose 1d8 sanity, I get Moriarty's wheel of mist. This will conceal me in a blue mist which will render me invisible should I ever run into Nyarlothep in the fresh produce aisle - at which point, I would be driven bonkers immediately so he would quickly find out that someone was about to nab the carrots he was eyeing and kill everyone within a 3 universe radius.

THE CULTISTS on the other hand, lose some sanity sure, (not enough for them to become babbling incompetents like the investigators) but get spells like heart-explode-chant and summon Yog-Sothoth. I wanna become a member at whatever book club theyre part of. And of course, their magic points are 37+ which is impossible for your average investigator... are these guys human or what?

Kurald Galain
2007-06-21, 03:24 AM
get spells like heart-explode-chant and summon Yog-Sothoth.
Don't those spells drain like 2d6 sanity per casting?

blackout
2007-06-21, 04:29 AM
Hey, folks. Just got the game, playing a futuristic campaign. Lemme tell ya, it's freakin' creepy.

Krytha
2007-06-21, 04:30 AM
Maybe for investigators (if they find them) but cultists seem to have unlimited sanity points.

blackout
2007-06-21, 04:35 AM
That's because they don't need sanity. Their already bat**** crazy, otherwise they wouldn't be cultists.

Alveanerle
2007-06-21, 04:36 AM
It would seem that being the storyteller for COC is more difficult than the same in D&D.

I don't have personal experiences with CoC, but from my friends DMs it seems this sentence is true. Very true. At least an order of magnitude of "trueness". You need to immerse yourself in the world much deeper, in order to make if available for your players to get immersed too.

Dervag
2007-06-21, 06:17 AM
It would seem that being the storyteller for COC is more difficult than the same in D&D.Yes.

In D&D, the universe is morally neutral and isn't actively trying to kill you. In CoC, the universe is morally neutral and is trying to kill you, because almost everything in it is so alien and so far beyond your understanding that even perceieving it will reduce you to a gibbering wreck.

It's always harder to gamemaster a game where the universe is out to kill the PCs.


I will say that CoC is probably the most 'realistic' of the RPG's out there. Having said that, it's one of the reasons why I dislike it so much. I also don't like the whole Sanity system. Sorry, but once I've seen something scary multiple times, I'm not going to continue being scared about it. I'm going to get over it, much like anyone with a phobia can be cured of it by repeated exposure.Again, the catch is that the scary things of the Cthulhu Mythos are different from the scary things of normal life. Things like spiders or heights or blood are part of our world and we can cope with them as such. Therefore, you can overcome your fear of those things and be a sane person.

Things like the Outer God Azathoth, the timeless and mindless entity at the center of the universe, "that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemies and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes"...

...are not part of our world, and we can not cope with them, any more than we can travel in time, or calculate all the digits of pi, or rotate our right hand around to become a left hand. The only way to wrap your mind around something like that is to break it. You don't build up immunity to that kind of thing the way you would to a disease. You just get progressively more and more damaged by it, like you would get damaged by ionizing radiation. At best, the wounds on your consciousness fade and leave scar tissue; at worst you end up behaving in ways that any normal human would consider insane, because you have broken your mind to wrap it around a deeper reality.


THE CULTISTS on the other hand, lose some sanity sure, (not enough for them to become babbling incompetents like the investigators) but get spells like heart-explode-chant and summon Yog-Sothoth. I wanna become a member at whatever book club theyre part of.On the contrary, they go through madness and out the other side. No sane human being would summon Yog-Sothoth any more than they would release a genetically engineered virus guaranteed to obliterate all human life. You have to be crazy to contemplate such a thing; it's fundamentally incompatible with sane human nature.

The fact that you have to be crazy to be willing to do something like that doesn't mean that there are no people who are willing to do that, or that they will be too irrational to carry out their goals. Thus, the cultists are the CoC equivalent of an apocalyptic cell of nihilists who would release such a virus simply for the sake of the destruction it would cause. They're not sane, but they're not gibbering.

It is arguably a good thing that the investigators go gibbering padded-cell crazy, rather than developing the same sort of insanity that afflicts the cultists. It says good things about them as human beings that their minds break before bending that far.


And of course, their magic points are 37+ which is impossible for your average investigator... are these guys human or what?Do you really want to find out? The answer may be no, after all. See The Dunwich Horror for reference.

blackout
2007-06-21, 07:57 AM
Do you really want to find out? The answer may be no, after all. See The Dunwich Horror for reference.

:smalleek: Oh, man, don't even joke about that.

Dan_Hemmens
2007-06-21, 08:50 AM
Yes.

In D&D, the universe is morally neutral and isn't actively trying to kill you. In CoC, the universe is morally neutral and is trying to kill you, because almost everything in it is so alien and so far beyond your understanding that even perceieving it will reduce you to a gibbering wreck.


You see, this is the mistake people make with Cthulhu.

In Cthulhu the universe is *not* trying to kill you. The universe is just so unimaginably vast that it might kill you without noticing.

In the ideal Call of Cthulhu game, you should only die if you do something stupid. Much like D&D really. The difference is that in Cthulhu "attacking something that isn't human without a vast amount of prior preparation" qualifies as stupid.

AngelSword
2007-06-21, 09:36 AM
I will say that CoC is probably the most 'realistic' of the RPG's out there. Having said that, it's one of the reasons why I dislike it so much. I also don't like the whole Sanity system. Sorry, but once I've seen something scary multiple times, I'm not going to continue being scared about it. I'm going to get over it, much like anyone with a phobia can be cured of it by repeated exposure.

Y'see, that's just it. You're not supposed to see such maddening things often enough that byakhees (or whatever else) become, "old hat." In the original story, only one person is reported to have seen Cthulhu and lived, and his tale is a tiny portion of the story. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the original monkey paw story, the horrible element is never actually seen.

The threat of such horrors are meant to keep you on edge, and pity to you from whatever merciful being should you ever be unfortunate to be exposed.

lukelightning
2007-06-21, 09:51 AM
I had lots of fun with CoC. Sure, nobody in our party had much of a chance of hitting anything (I think the best attack % was my brother's guy with a 45% to hit with a revolver, followed by my 30-something% to hit with a knife).

In the classic adventure in the rulebook with the haunted house we had lots of touble... someone got knocked out the window (sucker!), my guy fell down the stairs into the basement, and when we encountered the Thing the third investigator went temporarily insane. We shot at and tried to hack at the Thing without much success, so then we ran away.

Then we burnt down the house. With our insane friend inside.

Good times, good times.

skywalker
2007-06-21, 10:28 AM
I had lots of fun with CoC. Sure, nobody in our party had much of a chance of hitting anything (I think the best attack % was my brother's guy with a 45% to hit with a revolver, followed by my 30-something% to hit with a knife).

In the classic adventure in the rulebook with the haunted house we had lots of touble... someone got knocked out the window (sucker!), my guy fell down the stairs into the basement, and when we encountered the Thing the third investigator went temporarily insane. We shot at and tried to hack at the Thing without much success, so then we ran away.

Then we burnt down the house. With our insane friend inside.

Good times, good times.


See, luke burned the house. With his friend inside. Sac the friend, save the world, acceptable losses. This is the type of thinking CofC encourages. Survivor thinking. But seriously, if you're worried about winning or losing, CofC is not the game for you.

Oh, and MY friend learned "summon yog-sothoth." He just natural 20'd on his mythos roll. Not THAT hard. But he did risk serious insanity if he had failed. That's the name of the game.

Krytha
2007-06-21, 01:52 PM
Well, if these cultists are so insane, why can they have perfectly lucid and misleading conversations when they're in police custody for questioning? Oh Cthulhu? What's that? I just run a small shop down the way *DEATHMAGIC* and open from 9-5. Would you like to stop by and peruse my wares sometime? *SUMMONSELDERGOD* I only just moved here, but the place is quite nice.

Apparently the line between gibbering wreck caused by sanity devouring magic and insane cultist with sanity devouring magic is quite thick.

SpikeFightwicky
2007-06-21, 02:08 PM
I don't have personal experiences with CoC, but from my friends DMs it seems this sentence is true. Very true. At least an order of magnitude of "trueness". You need to immerse yourself in the world much deeper, in order to make if available for your players to get immersed too.

I believe the term is 'Truthiness', to quote Colbert :smallwink:

Like you said, immersion is very important in a CoC game. If you don't have certain level of empathy for your investigator, it'll be bland. If you try to see things from your character's point of view, it gets better. That's why the system is more 'rules lite' than d20 (and has to be, to a certain extent). In D&D, you can't say: my character grabs onto the chandalier and swings to gain momentum and deliver a mighty blow against the antagonist, because every possible action your character can take written out in the PHB. It 'breaks the mood' when you're told: 'Ummm, I have to look that action up, but I don't think it's possible.... ok, you can do it, but you won't get any bonuses for it, and you have to make 4 seperate skill checks to make it' - in my opinion, at least.


Well, if these cultists are so insane, why can they have perfectly lucid and misleading conversations when they're in police custody for questioning? Oh Cthulhu? What's that? I just run a small shop down the way *DEATHMAGIC* and open from 9-5. Would you like to stop by and peruse my wares sometime? *SUMMONSELDERGOD* I only just moved here, but the place is quite nice.

Apparently the line between gibbering wreck caused by sanity devouring magic and insane cultist with sanity devouring magic is quite thick.

Because your keeper's playing them wrong? Sounds to me more like these cultists are more like actors who took too much LSD. Sanity loss caused by seeing a flying polyp ~= to sanity loss caused by casting The Dread Curse of Azathoth (at least, it should). An insane cultist should be of even less use to the cops as lucid and misleading one. Heck, even the good guys end up at the asylum often enough.

Kurald Galain
2007-06-21, 04:34 PM
Insane in Ctulhu can mean "seriously disturbed" rather than "frothing and gibbering", although the latter is also frequent.

Flawless
2007-06-22, 10:55 AM
I'm trying to DM a Silent Hill based d20modern campaign. Now I read there is a d20 version of CoC. Is it woth it? Can I modify it so that it fits the Silent Hill feeling?

Dan_Hemmens
2007-06-22, 11:15 AM
In D&D the game is about developping the PCs and have them fight increasingly harder challenges.

But with CoC, it's all about the story. Just like we enjoy reading those great stories Lovecraft wrote where the protagonist is almost always doomed, when we play CoC we enjoy the story the DM tells and in which we participate even if most of the time the PCs are doomed too. The game is a success not when the PCs succeed, but when the players enjoy the story.


Actually, I disagree with this. Cthulhu isn't about the story, it's about the investigation. The fun is in working out what's going on and trying (note the word "trying") to stop it.

Cthulhu players *are* expected to try and stay alive and sane, and the GM is *not* expected to try to kill them or drive them mad.

Mr Horse
2007-06-22, 11:26 AM
like some of the other posters have pointed out, the point of CoC (don't know about the d20 version but i don't see how it could be any different) isn't to "beat" anything! You're not supposed to "win". You may not even be supposed to survive! The point of the game is the telling, experiencing and taking part in a grusome story, and the whole process of getting to the climax of it. Whether or not you survive in the end isn't as important as the things you might have learned, seen and done.
In general though, i think that the closer you come to uncovering the truth and the story plot, the more gloriously horrendous your potential death should be.
Remember: In Lovecraft's mythology, there is no hope, there is no salvation, and most importantly, there is no happy ending. It's all just a matter of time before everyone is either dead, insane, dying, suffering eternally, mutating into unimaginably terrible monsters, or any combination of these outcomes - and the world, as far anything we know and love is concerned, has ended.

Story driven games are a lot different than D&D style combat oriented games, and certainly a lot harder to write. I'm guessing that might be why a lot of the socalled "stock" adventures suck outright. I think it's better to make your own adventures based on what original Lovecraft literature you can get your hands on, as well as some of the other authors that were inspired by Lovecraft. Basing your adventures on really bleak, lovecraftian themed horror movies isn't a bad idea either.

Most of the Cthulhu adventures i've been through didn't even have any combat at all. The last one I played in had one fight, and that was two of our group mistaking the only person who could possibly help us for the childkiller we were trying to arrest - and killing him. All it took was a bad roll when I attempted to shoot him in the leg as he was trying to get away from us, hitting him in the neck instead.
Strangely enough, all of us actually survived that adventure, even though the valley and its small towns that the killer was terrorizing was eventually swallowed up by an otherworldly ocean that streamed in through an open portal.
I doubt we'll survive the rest of the campaign, the way things are going. Hehe.

AngelSword
2007-06-22, 11:37 AM
I'm trying to DM a Silent Hill based d20modern campaign. Now I read there is a d20 version of CoC. Is it woth it? Can I modify it so that it fits the Silent Hill feeling?

If I were to run Silent Hill, I would definitely use d20 Cthulhu (mainly because I'm familiar with it). Although, I would think that making Silent Hill work would be ambient noises, barring the actual writing out of Silent Hill.

Here's a post (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=691728&highlight=Silent+Hill) on the Wizards of the Coast forums about that exact thing.

Flawless
2007-06-22, 11:46 AM
Here's a post (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=691728&highlight=Silent+Hill) on the Wizards of the Coast forums about that exact thing.

That is nice. :smallbiggrin: Thanks.

AngelSword
2007-06-22, 12:02 PM
No problem. Just keep your radio on :smallamused:

PMDM
2007-06-22, 12:17 PM
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the parralel o movies. In a horror movie, do you really think the point is to see if the characters will make it alive? No. The opposite in fact. The point of the movie is to see how the characters die. So asking why CoC is so hard is like asking why the characters in the ring don't survive. They're not supposed to survive.

Mr Horse
2007-06-22, 12:34 PM
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the parralel o movies. In a horror movie, do you really think the point is to see if the characters will make it alive? No. The opposite in fact. The point of the movie is to see how the characters die. So asking why CoC is so hard is like asking why the characters in the ring don't survive. They're not supposed to survive.

If you read my previous post again, you'll notice that I actually did mention horror movies.

And, anyway. I don't watch horror movies to see how the characters will die...

[EDIT]: in fact, some of my favourite horror movies involve few or no deaths at all.

i guess it's because i prefer the cerebral, mindf***ing type horror movie that's messes you up because it plays with concepts and ideas that are scary rather than graphic killing (even though that can certainly be fun too). Hey that's how I like my books too. Go figure.

TO_Incognito
2007-06-22, 01:32 PM
Look, P&P roleplaying games in which most of the characters die (or are eliminated in some other way) in nearly every session don't work. Absolutely, a game in which the conclusion is never to win or succeed can be extremely immersive and fun. Horror themed adventures in which the only goals are to survive and more deeply immerse yourself in the awful, incomprehensible mystery around you. Dying, however, does not work for a roleplaying game. This consideration is sheerly practical. Stating up new characters is time-consuming and repetitive; trying to create a completely new character and invest serious time and emotional energy in him every session is not fun. Watching a character die in a horror film is not watching a character in whom you've invested significantly energy get eliminated, nor does it necessitate rolling up a new character.

If CoC does require the death or elimination of the investigators nearly every game, then it sucks, regardless of how immersive the style and roleplaying are. However, it doesn't sound like it does; rather, it sounds like CoC is extremely good at maintaining an atmosphere of horror and hopelessness without necessitating the tedium of complete character recreation. If the atmosphere of absolutely hopelessness, mystery, horror, and insanity can be preserved well without that tedium, why would anyone defend PC slaughter?

AngelSword
2007-06-22, 02:03 PM
If CoC does require the death or elimination of the investigators nearly every game, then it sucks, regardless of how immersive the style and roleplaying are. However, it doesn't sound like it does; rather, it sounds like CoC is extremely good at maintaining an atmosphere of horror and hopelessness without necessitating the tedium of complete character recreation. If the atmosphere of absolutely hopelessness, mystery, horror, and insanity can be preserved well without that tedium, why would anyone defend PC slaughter?

Precisely. No one defending the game is preaching the demise of every single character of every single player.

The draw of Call of Cthulhu is because it scares you with what could be around the corner, instead of the adrenaline scare. For example, tricks like the scraping metal sound prevalent in Silent Hill 2 is indicative of the most fearsome monster in the game, yet you see very little of him throughout the game. Movies such as Saw don't work in this style of game, since a lot of that "scare" is reliant on showing the gruesome death, which is somewhat limited when the only way to show them involves your description and the players' imaginations.

Ferreon
2007-06-22, 02:33 PM
As regards the person complaining about so many tpk's. Your Keeper has fallen into one of two traps...either he hasn't fully adjusted to how different CoC is from D&D, and expects that you'll be able to deal with monsters like you can in D&D, or he fell into the PC's vs DM trap

there's very little as can be done about option b
however,a can be settled by pointing out to him that CoC is roughly equivalent to a D&D game where the PC's stay at 1st/2nd level FOREVER and that they cannot be expected to fight things like Dark Young (roughly equivalent to Trolls, at that level) or Cthulhu (think great wyrm red/gold dragon, or any deity of your choice) with any reasonable chance of success

Kurald Galain
2007-06-22, 04:15 PM
Look, P&P roleplaying games in which most of the characters die (or are eliminated in some other way) in nearly every session don't work.

Sure it does. In Paranoia, you die three to five times per session. Great fun for the entire family! Or it would, if fun were not above your security clearance.

Behold_the_Void
2007-06-22, 04:35 PM
Sure it does. In Paranoia, you die three to five times per session. Great fun for the entire family! Or it would, if fun were not above your security clearance.

Paranoia is a different game entirely where part of the fun is finding new and exciting ways to kill each other. It really shouldn't be compared with CoC in this case, and you still CAN win. That's what all your clones are for.

Great Ork Gods is the same, but rolling up a new character is such an easy process that it's really not that painful (you actually get penalized if you take more than 10 minutes to create a character, not that it ever takes even half that time to do so).

Dervag
2007-06-22, 04:56 PM
:smalleek: Oh, man, don't even joke about that.I wasn't joking.


You see, this is the mistake people make with Cthulhu.

In Cthulhu the universe is *not* trying to kill you. The universe is just so unimaginably vast that it might kill you without noticing.

In the ideal Call of Cthulhu game, you should only die if you do something stupid. Much like D&D really. The difference is that in Cthulhu "attacking something that isn't human without a vast amount of prior preparation" qualifies as stupid.OK, good point.


Well, if these cultists are so insane, why can they have perfectly lucid and misleading conversations when they're in police custody for questioning?Because there is an enormous variety of mental illnesses that don't impede your ability to hold a coherent conversation? For instance, you might be fundamentally insane in that you believe that summoning the Elder Gods is a good idea, but otherwise more or less functional.

The reason the investigators don't break that way, but instead become gibbering wrecks, is because that's the initial stage in Mythos madness. Some people never move beyond it. Others respond to Mythos madness by embracing the insanity; they're the ones who become the cultists. At the risk of tapping into a cliche, they've gone through what humans call insanity and out the other side.

PMDM
2007-06-22, 05:09 PM
I don't play CoC, so I thought it would be a good time to ask about what books I should buy if I am interested.

AngelSword
2007-06-22, 05:21 PM
As far as the roleplaying game, I'd go for the d% game. I think the latest edition is 5th Edition, and includes "The Call of Cthulhu," the original short story.

I'd also recommend "The Yellow Sign." But only because I like the King in Yellow, and everything related.

jamroar
2007-06-22, 06:02 PM
As far as the roleplaying game, I'd go for the d% game. I think the latest edition is 5th Edition, and includes "The Call of Cthulhu," the original short story.


6th, apparently.

tarbrush
2007-06-22, 07:16 PM
I don't play CoC, so I thought it would be a good time to ask about what books I should buy if I am interested.

I heartily recomment the Delta Green sourcebook. It's a modern era sourcebook about government conspiracies and the Mythos. I've never played a game with it, but I enjoyed simply reading the book. It was published in 96, but i've no idea which edition it was written for. Although the stats would be easy enough to adjust.

Krytha
2007-06-22, 08:13 PM
As regards the person complaining about so many tpk's. Your Keeper has fallen into one of two traps...either he hasn't fully adjusted to how different CoC is from D&D, and expects that you'll be able to deal with monsters like you can in D&D, or he fell into the PC's vs DM trap


Actually.. he's never played D+D... or any roleplaying game outside of Baldur's gates...

blackout
2007-06-23, 02:09 AM
Hey, guys, my little group's in a rut. But first, a little backstory.

We're a little warband of 11 former U.S commandos gone merc, and we're being paid alot of money to go into an abandoned town. We went to said town, and are already sweeping the place, when a guy with a chainsaw runs at us screaming something. We kill him, the town turns out to not be abandoned, the gunshots alert the whole town, the whole town runs at us. We've barricaded ourselves inside a building, and we're hearing gurgling noises and psychotic screaming and giggling from what we believe to be cultists and some kind of critter. No one's looked out the window yet, and we have all our weapons prepped.


Yes, this is in our futuristic campaign. We're talking laser rifles, plasma rockets, etc. And we have access to this kind of gear, so we have a bigger chance of survival.

Advice, please. Me likey my sanity.

Krytha
2007-06-23, 02:57 AM
Call for a dustoff and nuke the whole place from orbit.

The New Bruceski
2007-06-23, 03:49 AM
Call for a dustoff and nuke the whole place from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.

Irreverent Fool
2007-06-23, 04:18 AM
You ALSO don't survive encounters with the law. If you go around dynamiting everything, your campaign will end prematurely. Every time we run into someone who is a bit creepy everyone's like... CULTIST! KILL HIM! but we stop ourselves because we know that if we do without any proof we get the old "you kill him and are arrested by the police for murder. you're executed in jail."

I also don't like the way sanity plays an enormous role in the game but cannot be increased over time. You'd think that after seeing visions of nyarlothep for the 50th time you'd stop losing 1d20 sanity, but no. You're also pretty hard-pressed to get that sanity back too. In many ways, sanity is even more important than hitpoints (scant as they are) and people with 5 power basically need to never look at anything ever, lest they be driven instantly insane and attack their own teammates.



And you'll look at the gaming stories and realize that's not the case at all. If I were expecting a greatwyrm, what I got was an army of balors. Again, you haven't suggested HOW to deal with this problem other than die.

Of course, the lack of special attacks and anything useful is painfully clear to me. The so-called actual skills and abilities? Useless 90% of the time. There are a set of main skills which are absolutely mandatory to get anywhere at all, but those 30 points you put into mechanical repair will surface maybe once every three campaigns (which you won't survive to get to) and even then, you might not even be the person in the situation that requires help. And as you said, now that our characters have NOTHING, what do you expect them to do when conflict is foisted upon them - as it always does in these missions?

I have my opinions about H.P. Lovecraft as an author, but his style and vision is unique enough to have developed the immense 'cult' (puns yay) following it has today. I ask but one thing of you: READ SOME OF HIS BOOKS IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND. The only 'special attacks' in the game are the domain of those dark horrors beyond the limits of imagination: things which bend and twist reality around them and strain the human mind when experienced.

If you want to hack-and-slash, play D&D. It's fun, you're powerful, people worry about 'character balance'. CoC is about roleplaying, about hopelessness, about insanity, about trying to get into your character and see what they may see and sit awake at night with your lamp on fearing what portals your sleeping mind may open into those existences beyond ours.

Saph
2007-06-23, 06:25 AM
Y'know, reading this thread reminds me of why I like playing D&D. :P

Given the choice of being a Joe Average who's required to fight against things several orders of magnitude more powerful than him, and a magic-wielding hero, I have to say I prefer playing the hero.

I'd be a terrible Call of Cthullu player. My approach would be "There's something horribly evil going on involving creatures that are so powerful I can't even comprehend them? Call the FBI. They'll start listening after enough corpses show up in the morgue. In the meantime, I'm going to make sure I'm not one of them."

- Saph

Mr Horse
2007-06-23, 07:48 AM
Y'know, reading this thread reminds me of why I like playing D&D. :P

Given the choice of being a Joe Average who's required to fight against things several orders of magnitude more powerful than him, and a magic-wielding hero, I have to say I prefer playing the hero.

I'd be a terrible Call of Cthullu player. My approach would be "There's something horribly evil going on involving creatures that are so powerful I can't even comprehend them? Call the FBI. They'll start listening after enough corpses show up in the morgue. In the meantime, I'm going to make sure I'm not one of them."

- Saph


like many others have already pointed out, the point of the game ISN'T TO FIGHT against elder gods! It can be about many things, but generally it is about the process of learning the things you do throughout the game, and the actions you take. You CAN'T fight them. You can't even hope to.

Ironically enough, your description of what you'd do as a CoC player is actually what most CoC players would do if they were given the option to do so in the game. So, you would actually make a pretty decent CoC player. ;)

[ADDENDUM]
If you want to understand more about how a CoC gaming session is supposed to play out, and you don't want to bother reading several stories, try watching these movies instead:

In The Mouth of Madness (this couldn't possibly be closer to an actual CoC session!)
Dagon (ditto!)
Prince of Darkness (not a Cthulhu mythos movie per se, but is very much in the spirit of it)
The Thing (not a Cthulhu mythos movie either, but both movie and short story "Who Goes There?" were very inspired by Lovecraftian themes)

other movies of interest:
The Beyond
The Relic
Event Horizon (not Cthulhu either, but captures the reality-bending horror concept pretty well)

Dervag
2007-06-23, 08:18 AM
Actually.. he's never played D+D... or any roleplaying game outside of Baldur's gates...That... is really crippling. DMs should, wherever possible, have some experience actually playing some RPG in pencil and paper. Preferably the one they're DMing.

Re: Mr Horse:
"The Thing" is the one based on Campbell's story about a shapeshifting monster terrorizing an Antarctic base, right? I've read it. It isn't Lovecraftian, but it would definitely make a good CoC session.

Dan_Hemmens
2007-06-23, 08:19 AM
Y'know, reading this thread reminds me of why I like playing D&D. :P

I know what you mean. It's reminding me less of why I like D&D, but why I only like Call of Cthulhu when it *isn't* run by the sorts of people who insist that the "fun" comes from having your characters eaten by monsters.


Given the choice of being a Joe Average who's required to fight against things several orders of magnitude more powerful than him, and a magic-wielding hero, I have to say I prefer playing the hero.

Same here.

Although actually, D&D when it started out had a very similar sensibility to the way a lot of people play Cthulhu. Pointless arbitrary death was "part of the fun" for a lot of the original Gygaxian dungeons. Indeed there's a lot of early published campaigns where everybody is advised to make up five or six characters each, they were expected to be that deadly.

Cthulhu came out of the same era, but because it's a horror game, a lot of the "and then you all *die*" mentality stuck, when it evolved out of D&D.


I'd be a terrible Call of Cthullu player. My approach would be "There's something horribly evil going on involving creatures that are so powerful I can't even comprehend them? Call the FBI. They'll start listening after enough corpses show up in the morgue. In the meantime, I'm going to make sure I'm not one of them."

As Mr Horse points out, that's pretty much exactly how Call of Cthulhu works. It's "making sure you're not one of the corpses" that's your first priority. Calling in the legitimate authorities is often a very good strategy: in fact there Shadow over Innsmouth series actually ends with exactly that, the FBI raid the town and take out the Cultists.

I'd also point out that if you play Delta Green (the supplement-that's-bigger-than-the-core-rules devoted to a modern-day conspiracy version of the core game) you actually *play* the FBI. Which is cool.

doliemaster
2007-06-23, 10:31 AM
I actually play for the insanity and death scenes when my guy ends up the last alive, leaving a real lovecraft feel to it when I basically do whatever my character decides is the way to honor the dead allies before the apocolypse/suicide/death from something else.

tarbrush
2007-06-23, 11:28 AM
I'd also point out that if you play Delta Green (the supplement-that's-bigger-than-the-core-rules devoted to a modern-day conspiracy version of the core game) you actually *play* the FBI. Which is cool.
Plus, you're slightly less likely to die and can justify marginally more powerful characters.

On the other hand, you're in constant danger of getting whacked by your own team, which is always an anooying way to go.

blackout
2007-06-23, 01:14 PM
Call for a dustoff and nuke the whole place from orbit.

Wow, y'know, everybody I spoke to had the same answer.

So, we went with your suggestion, and when we called for the dustoff, we actually had to go outside. So, we did, and found ourselves face-to-face with a Shoggoth and a few tool-armed cultists. Everyone made the sanity check, and killed the Shoggoth, and then the cultists. We made it to the dustoff site, and called for an orbital strike on the town. Command complied, and there is now a smoldering crater where the town was.

Thanks for the suggestion, folks! Never would have thought of it! :smallbiggrin:

AngelSword
2007-06-23, 02:01 PM
Cthulhu came out of the same era, but because it's a horror game, a lot of the "and then you all *die*" mentality stuck, when it evolved out of D&D.

It was never there to begin with! Games run like that are never fun, and wouldn't have lasted as long as they have (barring Paranoia, but even that is not an "everybody dies at the DM's hand" game…all the time).

Dan_Hemmens
2007-06-23, 03:02 PM
It was never there to begin with! Games run like that are never fun, and wouldn't have lasted as long as they have (barring Paranoia, but even that is not an "everybody dies at the DM's hand" game…all the time).

It was there, back at the beginning. Look at things like the Tomb of Horrors. A lot of early D&D modules were absolute meatgrinders. The whole thing, let us not forget, evolved out of a skirmish wargame, and was expected to have a similar casualty rate.

Kurald Galain
2007-06-23, 05:37 PM
Pointless arbitrary death was "part of the fun" for a lot of the original Gygaxian dungeons. Cthulhu came out of the same era, but because it's a horror game, a lot of the "and then you all *die*" mentality stuck, when it evolved out of D&D.

There's also a difference between Ctulhu "the bad guys are summoning a monster that will eat your brain if they succeed" and D&D "you opened the chest with the key? Yes, that makes sense, but save vs. death anyway". Ctulhu death was never arbitrary.

SpikeFightwicky
2007-06-23, 11:25 PM
It's the only way to be sure.

Heh, nice reference. Though, the PCs may end up fleeing when 'There's movement all over the place!'


I'd be a terrible Call of Cthullu player. My approach would be "There's something horribly evil going on involving creatures that are so powerful I can't even comprehend them? Call the FBI. They'll start listening after enough corpses show up in the morgue. In the meantime, I'm going to make sure I'm not one of them."

Isn't this like saying in D&D: There's something evil in the crypt? Let's contact some high level NPCs so they can come deal with it. I don't want to end up some creepy necro's new minion...

Jack Mann
2007-06-23, 11:51 PM
The difference is that in D&D, you're supposed to kick the crap out of evil. In CoC, you're not there to fight evil so much as to thwart it. The difference between fighting the evil that comes through the portal and keeping it from being summoned in the first place. Once it's been summoned, your goal is more to survive it. With a well-run game, both of these are generally possible. Difficult, perhaps, but not impossible.

D&D is epic fantasy. You're larger than life, like Elric or Conan, facing odds that would make most mortals quail. CoC is the opposite. The Earth just isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. You're just a regular guy. You're heroic not for what you can do, but because of what you're trying to do, and the odds against you. You probably won't be rewarded, except insofar as the Earth will tick by another day with you on it. It's a much grimmer sort of adventure than in D&D.

SeeKay
2007-06-24, 12:08 AM
Wow. Lethality in CoC hasn't faded. I still remember when it was big news when they added healing charts (I think it was ver 3). The main problem the game suffers from is that if you don't have an excellent GM that is able to run more story driven RPG's (Like Vampire or Werewolf from White Wolf). TPK's are going to be the norm. Even if you have a GM able to handle it, every single pre-made module for CoC is down right deadly.

It's a great game if you have the GM to run it right. You feel like you are in an X-Files series trying to defeat "Cancer Man" only to find he's a small pawn. Of course, your party dies a gory death when you get to the real ring leader, but if you're lucky enough, you've stopped the BBEG from being summoned and maybe 1 or 2 of you wound up in a padded room screaming "The Horror!" instead of a grave.

Of course if you don't have that great GM, don't bother playing. You run into "Oops, I thought you guys could handle that" way too much. Rolling new PC's is rough for CoC and 2-3 times a night sucks. It's more a game you run for 7-8 full sessions and then "retire" (aka: bury) your PC's and make new ones.

Tengu
2007-06-24, 06:00 AM
Of course if you don't have that great GM, don't bother playing. You run into "Oops, I thought you guys could handle that" way too much. Rolling new PC's is rough for CoC and 2-3 times a night sucks. It's more a game you run for 7-8 full sessions and then "retire" (aka: bury) your PC's and make new ones.

That's true, though most of the time it's "put into an asylum" rather than "bury". The best Cthulhu campaign I've read (I've never played the game though) was supposed to end with no PC deaths, unless one of them did something stupid. Most of them probably would go insane at the end, though.

PMDM
2007-06-24, 01:30 PM
I believe the "best" ending to the CoC video game (for Xbox and PC) involved the protagonist hanging himself in a mental ward.

tarbrush
2007-06-24, 02:13 PM
There's a video game?

manda_babylon
2007-06-24, 02:44 PM
My group's played bastardized versions of CoC in the past, but we really weren't doing it right at all, since the people GMing didn't understand the rules very well. In the three or four games we played, not many died, which seemed unusual, given the reputation of the game. The two scenarios that were the most fun were the first and last ones that we played, for very different reasons.

Game one used plot and tone to make the mystery creepy and the role-playing itself was top-notch. We had a very diverse cast of characters whose meetings with one another were character-driven and made sense. [My character was a travel book writer who had been hired to create a tourist book for the New England town of Arkham. Once he arrived and headed to the mansion where his patron, a town councilman, lived, he was waylaid by a reporter who was investigating a rash of brutal murders he believed were related to the occult. Mister Councilman, whom he believed was behind it all, refused to meet with him, so he decided to kidnap the travel writer and show up in his place. The writer escaped, and made it to the house, only to find that Mister Councilman had been killed by a 'pack of wild dogs' hours before.
While touring the house, lots of weird and freaky things happened, including meeting the dead man's daughter, a little Gothic Lolita girl, another PC.] We eventually ended up in the woods with the monsters, as these games go, but my character lived, another one, an old American Indian we met in the woods, died of a heart attack when something scary showed up, the reporter went mad, but may have lived, and the little girl (who had killed and cannibalized her father) went off with the monsters.]

The other great game was highly unusual, as we were playing with our Vampire: The Masquerade characters, which was highly unbalanced, as was evidenced by the anticlimactic but hilarious ending. [The premise had a coterie of Camarilla vampires sent to Arkham to kill a vampire violating the Masquerade by running a cult where he publicly professed himself a vampire and claimed to have the power to destroy the Camarilla. Upon meeting the mad vampire, Malachi, we fight mythos monsters and as Malachi leaves to summon his god, my Tremere asks, "Wait, wasn't that the guy we were supposed to kill?" and promptly casts Theft of Vitae, which apparently killed Malachi instantly, since he had been using his blood to summon the creatures. ...Unfortunately, the blood passes over the seal Malachi had made on its way to my character, and activates it.The creature arrives, and we're reasonably okay, being nasty supernatural creatures ourselves, and ask him what it'll take for him to go back to where he came from.The god is pretty angry about being summoned, because he was in the middle of destroying another reality, and says he'll go back if we give him the person responsible. ...Everyone looks at me. I point out that Malachi made the seal, and everyone points out that my spell activated it.Finally, the necromancer Giovanni, whose life I had saved earlier, decides to summon Malachi's spirit and gives that to the god, who leaves. The sun rises and we go to ground. Mission accomplished.]

Unfortunately, we've found out we weren't filling out the character sheets the right way [intentionally so in the latter game] and our member who usually GMs CoC has a new plot that I personally hate.

She wants to have a game set at TJ Maxx, where she works. Each of us will be employees of the store working after hours, when creepy things begin to happen. I objected to this immediately, because it severely limits the sort of characters we can play. We can be either students or criminals, basically. I rolled a character with an 18 in education, and I find it completely unbelievable that a person with a masters would be working at a clothing chain. [I can't be a manager, either, because that wouldn't be fair to the others].

The real kicker about this game that makes me think I hate it, and CoC in general is that, the way she explained it, when we buy points in things, that's the number we have to roll UNDER in order to make the check.

For example, if we want to hide from something, we roll a D20. If we have 10 points in Hide, we can roll up to a 10 in order to make the check succeed. If we have no ranks in Hide, we can't do it, because we would have to roll under a one. She says this is what the rules say based on percentages. Is this true?

She and another player have told me it's a dumb thing to complain about, since we have the same odds of rolling low as we do rolling high, but it still seems incredibly stupid to me.

AngelSword
2007-06-24, 02:59 PM
My group's played bastardized versions of CoC in the past, but we really weren't doing it right at all, since the people GMing didn't understand the rules very well. In the three or four games we played, not many died, which seemed unusual, given the reputation of the game. The two scenarios that were the most fun were the first and last ones that we played, for very different reasons.

Game one used plot and tone to make the mystery creepy and the role-playing itself was top-notch. We had a very diverse cast of characters whose meetings with one another were character-driven and made sense. [My character was a travel book writer who had been hired to create a tourist book for the New England town of Arkham. Once he arrived and headed to the mansion where his patron, a town councilman, lived, he was waylaid by a reporter who was investigating a rash of brutal murders he believed were related to the occult. Mister Councilman, whom he believed was behind it all, refused to meet with him, so he decided to kidnap the travel writer and show up in his place. The writer escaped, and made it to the house, only to find that Mister Councilman had been killed by a 'pack of wild dogs' hours before.
While touring the house, lots of weird and freaky things happened, including meeting the dead man's daughter, a little Gothic Lolita girl, another PC.] We eventually ended up in the woods with the monsters, as these games go, but my character lived, another one, an old American Indian we met in the woods, died of a heart attack when something scary showed up, the reporter went mad, but may have lived, and the little girl (who had killed and cannibalized her father) went off with the monsters.]

The other great game was highly unusual, as we were playing with our Vampire: The Masquerade characters, which was highly unbalanced, as was evidenced by the anticlimactic but hilarious ending. [The premise had a coterie of Camarilla vampires sent to Arkham to kill a vampire violating the Masquerade by running a cult where he publicly professed himself a vampire and claimed to have the power to destroy the Camarilla. Upon meeting the mad vampire, Malachi, we fight mythos monsters and as Malachi leaves to summon his god, my Tremere asks, "Wait, wasn't that the guy we were supposed to kill?" and promptly casts Theft of Vitae, which apparently killed Malachi instantly, since he had been using his blood to summon the creatures. ...Unfortunately, the blood passes over the seal Malachi had made on its way to my character, and activates it.The creature arrives, and we're reasonably okay, being nasty supernatural creatures ourselves, and ask him what it'll take for him to go back to where he came from.The god is pretty angry about being summoned, because he was in the middle of destroying another reality, and says he'll go back if we give him the person responsible. ...Everyone looks at me. I point out that Malachi made the seal, and everyone points out that my spell activated it.Finally, the necromancer Giovanni, whose life I had saved earlier, decides to summon Malachi's spirit and gives that to the god, who leaves. The sun rises and we go to ground. Mission accomplished.]

Unfortunately, we've found out we weren't filling out the character sheets the right way [intentionally so in the latter game] and our member who usually GMs CoC has a new plot that I personally hate.

She wants to have a game set at TJ Maxx, where she works. Each of us will be employees of the store working after hours, when creepy things begin to happen. I objected to this immediately, because it severely limits the sort of characters we can play. We can be either students or criminals, basically. I rolled a character with an 18 in education, and I find it completely unbelievable that a person with a masters would be working at a clothing chain. [I can't be a manager, either, because that wouldn't be fair to the others].

The real kicker about this game that makes me think I hate it, and CoC in general is that, the way she explained it, when we buy points in things, that's the number we have to roll UNDER in order to make the check.

For example, if we want to hide from something, we roll a D20. If we have 10 points in Hide, we can roll up to a 10 in order to make the check succeed. If we have no ranks in Hide, we can't do it, because we would have to roll under a one. She says this is what the rules say based on percentages. Is this true?

She and another player have told me it's a dumb thing to complain about, since we have the same odds of rolling low as we do rolling high, but it still seems incredibly stupid to me.

Well, there's your problem. It seems you're playing a game where only the GM knows all the rules.

Neon Knight
2007-06-24, 03:31 PM
There's a video game?

Yes. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Released for Xbox and PC. Made by Bethesda. Quite good, quite faithful to the style of the classic Lovecraft stories.

PMDM
2007-06-24, 05:09 PM
Why TJ-Maxx? It sounds like a case of a DM (GM, sorry) trying to play out her own fantasies.

That being said, malls make for great horror settings. So many things can go on in a mall. It's spacious, and I'm sure it's creepy when you're by yourself. Plus, the DM has the advantage of limiting your space, so he can be extra detailed in his descriptions.

Xuincherguixe
2007-06-24, 10:17 PM
I rolled a character with an 18 in education, and I find it completely unbelievable that a person with a masters would be working at a clothing chain. [I can't be a manager, either, because that wouldn't be fair to the others].

Someone obviously isn't a philosophy major :P

SpikeFightwicky
2007-06-25, 07:11 AM
Yes. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Released for Xbox and PC. Made by Bethesda. Quite good, quite faithful to the style of the classic Lovecraft stories.

Definately a good game. Best played with the lights out and with headphones (so no sounds go unnoticed :smallwink: ). It's the first game that gave me constant jitters and actually made me jump once once (and I'm not even too far into it yet :smallbiggrin: ). So far, the escape from the hotel is the most intense escape scene I've had the pleasure of playing through in a video game. I don't have an X-Box, so I own the PC version. It runs really well, even if my PC isn't top knotch (though I have a good vid card), but it definately still feels 'console-ish' (the menu system and save system in particular). I'd highly recommend it to anyone who likes CoC and Lovecraft's works.

Dervag
2007-06-25, 07:45 AM
The real kicker about this game that makes me think I hate it, and CoC in general is that, the way she explained it, when we buy points in things, that's the number we have to roll UNDER in order to make the check.

For example, if we want to hide from something, we roll a D20. If we have 10 points in Hide, we can roll up to a 10 in order to make the check succeed. If we have no ranks in Hide, we can't do it, because we would have to roll under a one. She says this is what the rules say based on percentages. Is this true?

She and another player have told me it's a dumb thing to complain about, since we have the same odds of rolling low as we do rolling high, but it still seems incredibly stupid to me.The roll-under mechanic isn't actually an uncommon one. The d20 system takes a different approach (in which rolls are made against a difficulty that you want to be low). But wanting to roll low really isn't illogical or wrong, any more than wanting to roll high is.