On Yearblogs and DOGAS

[Ancient History]

So on the Farcast "review" thread, I mentioned that I was thinking about doing another yearblog for 2015, but I was sort of losing the juice to do it. Well, I've lost it. Completely. I think I was on the fence about it for a while, and then the review with Frank brought back to mind all the badness in the system and the hidebound nature of CoC fans...

The thing is, I could totally do a yearblog dedicated to Call of Cthulhu roleplaying in any given edition. I can make my length 366 entries. Not a problem. I did it with Eclipse Phase, and I can do it again. But I don't want to just do Farcast randomness one more time, I want to do...more. I want to make it better. Which is why, a couple months ago when I was seriously contemplating this thing, I sat down and wrote a design document.

Which is nothing new for me. If you're going to be creating a lot of content on a regular basis, one of the little tricks is to divvy it up and create sequential patterns - so I made thirteen four-week "months," each month and week got their own theme to help inspire me, and then I divvied up the content so I'd get two NPCs, one location, etc. each "week." Then you just fill things in...and eventually write it out. Nothing's set in stone, so I shifted plenty of entries around, changed things I didn't like, fiddled with things here and there...but as a practical exercise, I consider Farcast a general success, in part because of the design document.

But like I said, I wanted the 2015 yearblog project to be...better. So I wrote a more elaborate design document: Link. I showed it to a few people, got some feedback, and revised it. Then I revised it again. On my fourth go-round, I filled out a bunch of entries in the calendar, just to get a feel for the thing.

...and that's where my DOGAS pretty much ran out. I've generated lots of content for Call of Cthulhu before, but it's all been rather cheesy artifacts and tomes, crappy add-on rule systems, that kind of thing. I never made an effort to put together something cohesive - and, to be fair, it's not like CoC offers a lot of great examples for the kind of thing I was going for. I probably should have written the whole thing out as a campaign instead of trying to map it as a yearblog. But this gets into the other rub: I don't think there's an audience for it.

Farcast, despite my best efforts, is an incredibly niche product. It's more niche than the Ancient Files. The audience is probably comparable to a very game-specific fanzine, and even then nobody does a page-by-page review of a 366-page product. That's insane. It's like looking forward to a running commentary on every weapon in Arsenal or the Cannon Companion. So while I was glad for the feedback and response I got, I can understand why it didn't get much...attention. Fan material, no matter how good or bad, is generally ignored. But at least the audience it did get was appreciative of it; I know people have used some of the NPCs and weapons and locations and concepts for Farcast in their games. But what's the audience for Cold Start?

Because I didn't want to do a traditional CoC game, where the PCs arrive once more in Dunwich in the 1920s and blow shoggoths up with dynamite. I didn't want to include the Necronomicon or any of that. I wanted - I still want, in many ways - a game which is about Lovecraftian roleplaying. A little more True Detective, a little something to keep the players guessing.

But it's not a campaign, at least not as conceived. It's...more like what you would hope to see as online supplements to a campaign, or maybe snapshots from a lengthy multi-book campaign. Individual NPCs, individual locations, some adventure seeds and short scenario concepts, some definitively non-Mythos tomes...yeah, a good Keeper could stitch it together, but would they? And would they want to use any of it in their "regular" flavor CoC campaigns? I kind of have my doubts. So that's a large part of it. If it's not going to be what it arguably should be - if it's not going to serve the audience - and if I'm not liking it before I even start properly writing it, then probably I shouldn't write it.

So, that it's it. I declare this project dead.

[JigokuBosatsu]

We talked about this offline, but what does DOGAS stand for? This is what I got on google:

[Ancient History]

Degree Of Give A Shit.

[Ancient History]

Some of the CoC fans are giving me shit for posting this.

[virgil]

Apparently I haven't met any actual CoC fans, because I am at a loss for seeing a problem with your work.

[Josh_Kablack]

Do what you wanna do man.

You'll have my moral support whichever way - and you know I'm always happy to say mean things on the internet about people giving you grief.

But the rub is that none of your propsed projects are things I'd spend my own cash on.

[Ancient History]

But the rub is that none of your propsed projects are things I'd spend my own cash on.

True for most people, I'd imagine.

[Harshax]

I'm definitely not your target audience, but I certaintly would benefit from your work. I avoid CoC blogs, because I prefer to be a player. Of all the games I've ever been exposed to, CoC is one of the few where I refused to consider running or even read the Keeper's section.

You mention that you want to write something more detectivey. That strikes a cord with me. No matter how mild mannered or non-combative I try to make a PC, it always ends up dual wielding .45s and foaming at the mouth. I've wanted to try a more investigative game for a while, but CoC doesn't really encourage that.

I've heard Gumshoe does the investigator side of Cthulhu adventures better than CoC, but I don't know anything bout the system. Have you considered writing your blog for an alternate ruleset? Excuse me if I'm missing the point of your work. As a CoC player, I'd hate to see good resources for my Keeper discontinue.

[Ancient History]

I hate Gumshoe. I don't feel I really need to qualify that. It is what CoC nominally aspires to be, an actual rules-lite system. It's not particularly good though. It's flexible only because there's not a lot there to flex. Some of the permutations on it are sort of interesting - Bookhounds of London for Trail of Cthulhu for example - but it always amounts to a really vast simplification of the game.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I believe that Gumshoe has essentially managed to make its entire system not matter. The much-touted investigative portion starts with the premise that the PCs will be spoon-fed the core clues regardless of their inputs and so the entire rest of the text is basically pointless; and the action portions are barely-there and shitty because the style of gaming it's based on doesn't really give a fuck about the outcomes of action scenes.

The action rules are relatively simple to fix: write actual action rules. Figure out what the desired inputs and outputs are for various badasseries of investigator against various degrees of cultists, cops, and monsters; wargame it and implement it.

The investigative portion is, I think, a step in the right direction. There need to always be leads. But those leads need to vary more in quality and type depending on PC skills and player inputs. The 'spine' structure is simply too restrictive, it needs to be more of a web. That doesn't mean that the investigative mechanic has to be more complicated, but it does mean that writing a scenario will require a deal more work.

***

That out of the way, I am sad to hear that your dream has withered, AH. It's clear that you care a lot about the literature and gaming related to it. I think that material like you've posited could be extremely enjoyable, and I hope it can be reincarnated in a form that you find exciting again.

[Harshax]

That does sound terrible. Thanks for saving me some money. Robin has made a lot of interesting games, but this does not sound like one of them.

[virgil]

But the rub is that none of your propsed projects are things I'd spend my own cash on.

True for most people, I'd imagine.

After reading the document, if there was a better system than Chaosium, it's something I would seriously consider spending cash money on the project.

We know that Gumshoe is meaningless, Chaosium is bad, and the d20 conversion is a bad fit. Are there any *good* systems for Call of Cthulhu tabletop? FATE, Fiasco, Munchausen Horror?

[Lago PARANOIA]

From what I've seen from the Call of Cthulhu OSSR, I think it'd work best as a Shadowrun or Earthdawn conversion. If you're using Shadowrun you'll have to repurpose a lot of the skills and change the magic system up a little bit (to allow teleportation and resurrection and shit) but for a quick-and-dirty conversion you could do worse.

[virgil]

Would a re-purposed Mouse Guard engine work?

[Username17]

Münchhausen isn't a bad platform for horror mystery cooperative storytelling. It fulfills the 'mystery' requirement of the audience not knowing the answer to the mystery until the end - because it hasn't been written yet. Of course, the fact that 'what's really going on' has no answer if the game ends before the story does is problematic for some.

Then there's that game played with a jenga tower. Dread, I believe. It successfully manages to have people die at random times, and does a decent enough job doing the monster/slasher movie thing. Kind of gimmicky, and only really worthwhile as a one-shot, but it is what it is.

I can't honestly recommend any rules-heavy games on this front. The tend to be a bad fit even when they aren't just bad. This is not to say that I think you couldn't make a rules-heavy game for human level investigators dealing with supernatural threats, just no one has. Games that work even as well as Vampire are centered on superhuman protagonists and get seriously wonky if everyone has human strength.

Certainly it's a problem that there are damn few RPGs that can handle human-level characters without choking. Low level d20, Shadowrun, and GURPS are the only ones that come to mind as even being in the ballpark. And let's be honest: you aren't going to play an antiquarian and a botanist being harassed by a poltergeist in any of those systems without rewriting a lot of it. If you go rules-lite or even full mtp you can play the game at all, which compares favorably to the 'here are my hundred pages of house rules' you'd be in for trying to use a solider game as a base.

-Username17

[JigokuBosatsu]

I suppose there is something to be said for the CoC LARP rules... at the very least it has a pretty good hit/miss ratio with its players becoming TV stars.

[Mistborn]

Since Frank is posting in this thread would some hack on After Sundown work for Cthulhu. It seems like AS has a pretty good mundane humans in a modern horror setting skeleton. Could you could hack off the part where the players get to be horror monsters and sprinkle in some Cthulhuy stuff and have a workable game?

[Username17]

I think that you're between a bit of a rock and a hard place as regards luminaries in After Sundown. On the one hand, characters with Edge can two guns blaze their way through a lot of problems that might undermine the genre. On the other hand, the game's combat engine is pretty geared towards monsters ripping through mooks, and if the players don't get edge they get to play the mooks in that equation. And that could be frustrating.

But basically at that point you're playing a non-futuristic Shadowrun hack, which as noted by Lago is not a bad place to start.

-Username17

[fbmf]

So why not just lay out a coc adventure? Why does it have to be 365 daily entries? Why not weekly? You're right, 366 pages is a lot to write for so little ROI, but 52 wouldn't be so bad.

Game On,
fbmf

[Username17]

So why not just lay out a coc adventure? Why does it have to be 365 daily entries? Why not weekly? You're right, 366 pages is a lot to write for so little ROI, but 52 wouldn't be so bad.

Game On,
fbmf

I don't speak for AH, but I'll tell you where I am on that. I don't think I can write a CoC adventure. I don't think those things really exist.

Going back and looking at Call of Cthulhu with fresh eyes was a massive disappointment. The game I remember playing as a teenager doesn't exist and never did. We weren't playing the game as written, we weren't even playing a heavily house ruled game based on what was written. We were fucking around and playing magical teaparty. The only thing we really took away from the books was the inspiration to try to play a game of cooperative lovecraftian storytelling. We had some cargo cult trappings of the game the book tried to convey, but basically we were compiling a game as we went along and it wasn't really any more codified than Ryan's homebrew game where you got almost as much armor from having a cool skater hat as you did wearing a Boba Fett hat.

And that's not unusual. Fuck, the authors of the game suggest that rather than even trying to figure out how to resolve actions in the rules that you should just go reverse engineer something from half-remembered RuneQuest mechanics and play it on the fly. Not only were we not playing that game, basically no one has ever played this game, not even the people who wrote and playtested the game, because the authors never gave a fuck in the first place and had no intention of ever making a complete game.

Which brings us to "adventures" "for" "Call of Cthulhu." There's no such thing, because the game they are for is fake. It's an elaborate hoax. You can write some story prompts and hope that people who are fucking around thinking they are playing Call of Cthulhu might pick them up and run with them long enough to convince themselves that a game happened. But that's not really the same thing, is it?

I would be more able to write a game from scratch than to write material for this "game" as it exists, because it doesn't exist. We could seriously write Sentai Ftagn or a Lovecraftian After Sundown hack more easily than to build on this ephemeral foundation.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

write Sentai Ftagn

<3

[JigokuBosatsu]

Ryan's homebrew game where you got almost as much armor from having a cool skater hat as you did wearing a Boba Fett hat.

Isn't that how armor works in the modern Fallout games? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

And as far as a windmills to tilt at, "working Call of Cthulhu" is definitely as worthy a goal as "optimal D&D".

[Shatner]

write Sentai Ftagn

<3

Yes. This. THIS!

[Ancient History]

I don't speak for AH, but I'll tell you where I am on that. I don't think I can write a CoC adventure. I don't think those things really exist.

Going back and looking at Call of Cthulhu with fresh eyes was a massive disappointment.

Yeah. The degree to which CoC fails to gel on any level is really bizarre in hindsight. The player and NPC stats are laughable. The skills rules are functionally unworkable, and sometimes contradictory. The monster stats are ridiculous. Sanity is just not a terribly good mechanic. Character generation is so worthless that the third-party supplement on cats offers far superior and more attractive alternatives.

The only thing vaguely close to a working subsystem is really magic, and that is just a heapin' helpin' of "fuck you" and wishful thinking. If you take the time to go through a half-dozen books and fan supplements, you can maybe cobble together a half-decent system to play a PC magus...which is something that players actually want to do...and you're still going to suck hard, because none of the rules are designed to work together, it's all chance, similarities, optional rules, and fuck-you-players-for-trying-to-have-working-magic. It's really easy to go through the exercise of trolling yourself trying to cobble together a working game from the vast number of options put out because the game as it exists sucks.

Sorry. Still burned out over this. And bitching at CoC fans that take it personal when I tell them their game sucks.

[Harshax]

And as far as a windmills to tilt at, "working Call of Cthulhu" is definitely as worthy a goal as "optimal D&D".

RQ6 + Modern Firearms (free RQ6 supplement) + CoC Stat Blocks for mythos = actual RPG. You would have a game that's close enough to CoC to run existing material, but actual rules for contests and character development.

But I don't think this addresses AH's desire to write material that is true to the investigative portion of Lovecraftian Horror adventures. I think the big reason that CoC fails has its origins rooted in Supplement IV of OD&D. Lots of gamers looked at Deities & Demigods as an extension to the Monster Manual. Truly it was. The stat block for a Zeus and a Gelantinous Cube are almost exactly the same format, except you know Zeus' ability scores, class levels, and psionic potential. So the books serves to place him along the same paradigm as player characters, except at the very far end of the spectrum. You could, with the right tactics, kill O/AD&D Zeus in melee.

I think this same problem exists in CoC. Once Cthulhu's Hit Points are quantified, player's can calculate how much dynamite is required to blow her to pieces. More importantly, I think it incentivizes players to do so. She's might be the toughest creatures defined in the book, I honestly don't know. But if you can survive the first encounter with SAN intact, you might have enough time to light a fuse and drop an Ellen Ripley reference. So why wouldn't you?

I think to be true to Lovecraft, you have to accept that that Cthulhu is beyond the power of PCs to destroy. In fact, it would seem lots of mythos creatures are beyond harm. The best you can hope to achieve is catch a glimpse of the mythos out of the corner of your eye while destroying the pinions that are keeping the mine shaft open so you can make your escape and live to die another day.

That is, unless you prefer August Derelith style play with players using yellow signs as wards, summoning byahkee for transportation, and generally kicking Cthulhu in the cooch. Which I surmise is not what AH wants.