Do you like Call of Cthulhu? Why?

[Dalebert]

I felt like I'm in this amazing world filled with fascinating magic and creatures and... I'm playing a muggle. The worst game ever would be set in the amazing Harry Potter universe but all the PCs are muggles. That's what it felt like.

I was told that people die a lot but it's no big deal. You just make up another character whom you also don't care about because he's a muggle too. So there are no real stakes. It's like playing Papers and Paychecks where we're workers and students in an industrialized and technological society, except there's a good chance something will kill you.

I spent about an hour making a character. I was asked my profession. "Can it be random?" Nope. "Okay, student. Whatever." He got crit by a vampire after about an hour. I was at -3 hp after my first time getting hit and was getting ready to make another character and someone stabilized me and got me up to 2 hit points (crit on the first aid roll). So now I was back in the game but barely holding my guts in and useless so I got out my Kindle. Then someone finished off the vampire and the session was over fairly quickly. If I play next session, I need to make another character because this one will be in the hospital for a while because the game is realistic, almost like real life where if you get hurt bad you have to sit around in a hospital for a long time and you might be permanently impaired--a crippled muggle.

I play games to escape my boring reality. This game is just a worse reality than my real life. Am I missing something? I guess it's supposed to be scary and I like the idea of a horror game but for me to be scared I have to care about my character, but we're told up front they're basically disposable like tissues, and they're spectacularly ordinary to begin with and inherently hard to care about.

If I had to sum up this game to someone, I'd say "It's Paper and Paychecks where you play an ordinary person a lot like yourself, except you'll probably die soon."