Anatomy of Failed Design: Cthulhutech

[Avoraciopoctules]

Recently, we have had a couple of threads on Sci-Fi RPGs. It seems relatively noncontroversial that there are few good Sci-Fi games, both because of the increase in scope and complexity that comes with a scientifically advanced setting where you have to explain how things work and because of the wide variety of stories that can exist and still be classified as simply "Science Fiction". But Cthulhutech goes beyond "not good".

Cthulhutech is a big disappointment. The basic premise is that you take the Earth of the Cthulhu Mythos, have society actually start to figure stuff out and leverage Mythos lore into supertech and organized magic use, and then have a bunch of eldritch monsters show up to threaten the established order. Seems solid enough. But a number of poor decisions end up fouling the end result.

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1. Opaque Mechanics

Cthulhutech uses the FrameWerk system, sometimes referred to as "poker dice". You roll a number of d10s and look for poker hands. Then you add a fixed number to the one you get out of your dice rolls. It is complicated and makes determining the probability of an action's success more difficult. This makes both playing characters and designing challenges more difficult for little real gain.

There are many areas where the theme of unnecessary complexity for little clear payoff rears its head, especially when combat or piloting is involved. Conversely, many special qualities that can be purchased with points during character creation have a potentially huge impact on the game, but get very little space devoted to explaining how they get used (you could be really good at fighting, or merely average and spend extra points on being rich enough to pay a whole mercenary company to fight your battles for you).
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2. Underwhelming Magic

Cthulhutech divides PC-usable supernatural powers into Magic and Psychic. You are not allowed to have both. Magic lets you perform rituals that take tens of minutes at best, weeks at worst, which yield specific results. Psychic powers give you a themed powerset usable in combat time, which can be improvised to do some different things.

Unfortunately, magic doesn't do much impressive stuff at the level PCs can access it. An evil sorceror or daring investigator in Call of Cthulhu can produce more interesting and useful effects in a much shorter timeframe. There is no arbitrary distinction that keeps magic users from both cursing enemies with blindness in battle AND divining the will of Yig in some sheep guts out of it. If Cthulhutech is supposed to have ramped things up, it is unfortunate that its magic is so limited in comparison. There are some powerful effects available, but sorcery is generally a powerful NPC's game.
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3. Grimderp

When people talk about Cthulhutech's failings, the adventure where the PCs get railroaded into being raped by magical furries is generally front and center, followed shortly by all the factions that run rape camps for slightly different reasons. And indeed, this is a thing. Cthulhutech's fixation with showing that bad guys are bad because they run rape camps is high-profile enough to have drawn comparisons to FATAL.

The authors want to create an atmosphere of horror and dread, with humanity struggling against inscrutable and/or monstrously inhuman foes. They generally falter when it they try to execute this through any but the most hamhanded methods. Cthulhutech comes off as puerile, throwing repugnant stuff at the viewer haphazardly in an attempt to seem more mature. This is only furthered when you get to the sections on the super-duper secret police who go around with katanas and trenchcoats using dark majicks for the greater good.
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4. Overstretched conceptual space

Cthulhutech tries to be dozens of different games at once. Multiple flavors of robosuit pilot, multiple flavors of secret agent and police, scientists, "good" and "evil" cultists with various powersets, and civilians. The mecha are front and center, but the designers encourage people to try campaigns of all kinds. This means rules and setting focus that clumsily try to cover all these bases at once. GURPS, this isn't. There is no modularity, everything in ruleset is supposed to be active all the time. This means that people are forced to get creative if they want to do very complicated stuff with characters, and that all sorts of basic combinations can lead to unexpectedly broken results.
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5. "You're having fun wrong"

Cthulhutech's authors have repeatedly indicated that people shouldn't diverge from their vision for how the game should be played, and that they are bad people to do so. You are a horrible munchkin powergamer if you want your pilot to get precognitive flashes, your shapeshifter to make healing potions in downtime, or your arcanoscientist to put magical theory into use casting actual spells. The designers are so down on character-type miscegenation that they throw a bunch of half-explained bans into the rules to keep characters from getting too diverse. There may be over a dozen character types available, but you might get the fish eye for playing a type B pilot in a type A pilot campaign. Diverse parties are heavily discouraged.

Further, Cthulhutech approaches games from the perspective that there is a story, and it has a script. PCs can choose their lines and pick which scene to advance toward next, and they might even have multiple choices, but they cannot change the actual direction things go. Pretty much every important NPC the designers don't want to get killed by PCs carries a magic charm that gives them 5 minutes of contingent invincibility. When the designers want a scene of enemy success to happen, the antagonists are given arbitrary powers to bypass countermeasures and/or described as being "impossible to beat". Cthulhutech gives very little narrative control to players.
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That seems to be a decent overview of the five biggest areas where Cthulhutech falls on its face. They are pretty general, and they overlap a bit, but those are the highlights.

[icyshadowlord]

I find this thread especially hilarious because one asshole DM I had to put up with for quite a while frequently praised Cthulhutech as "teh best game everz".
After looking through part 3 I can easily see why, since he seems to have a grimderp fetish that he is in deep denial of even after ranting on and on about something like that.

Edit: Added some stuff after realizing it, and tried to write more coherently. Might also explain why he had an obsession to control the game when he was DM...

[Lago PARANOIA]

2, 3, and 4 -- while stupid to the point of being offensive -- aren't exactly dealbreakers for me. 1 is very close to being a dealbreaker (you pretty much have to get everything else right) and 5 is an automatic 'chuck the book in the trash'.

Got any more pontificating about point 5?

[Wesley Street]

Dhoanoid PCs aren't 'allowed' to behave in an altruistic manner even though the powerful mages who founded the good-guy Eldritch Society were cut from dhoanoid cloth.

Tagers aren't 'allowed' to be soldiers because they might be discovered and dissected by the United Earth Government. And yet an intro military adventure in the core book teams the PCs up with a Tager naval officer NPC.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head but, yeah, the book discourages you from pursing a character type that might compete with a metaplot NPC. If CthulhuTech marketed itself as a weird futuristic fantasy military-sim some of this might be more acceptable as you'd know restricted choice/war is hell/linear plot development would be what you're getting into. Ctech suffers from the SR syndrome of metaplot determining how the game is played.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Every time the authors have to deal with scientific advances that could revolutionize the setting, they cringe, go "that's complicated", and say that it's illegal. Cloning and nanotech both exist in fairly sophisticated forms, but fabbers don't change the way things work at any appreciable level. The authors basically just talk about how it makes getting trendy clothes at the mall easy and cheap.

Most of the superpowerful evil cults could be much more effective if they used cloning instead of rape camps, but that would risk making things less clearly-cut black and white.

[Red Lantern]

You forgot a couple big flaws.

One, the various types of PCs have a hard time interacting in a logical fashion. Tagers can't be mech pilots or soldiers, other PCs are usually mech pilots of soldiers, etc. Makes it hard to run a varied group without some twisting of the game setting.

Two, most published adventures for Ctech ate depressing, hopeless, no win scenarios where the players lose no matter what.

As to the rape camp issue, it doesn't really bother me that much. When HPL wrote his cthulhu stuff, notably "the shadow over innsmouth" where we get all our data on deep ones, the very notion of non whites having sex with whites was enough to horrify some people. Remember in america at the time anti miscegenation laws were almost universal. Even looking at a white woman could get a non white male beaten or murdered in parts of america.

So the whole issue of the deep ones having sex with humans was utterly horrific back then.

Now in an age where we have a biracial president (Hope to god we still do.) the issue of having sex with different people isn't as horrific, so they had to turn it up a little and make it mass rape, which is still horrific to a lot of people.

Also, from a story perspective, the rape camps make some sense. HPL never explained why the deep ones wanted to mate with humans and make hybrids in "Innsmouth", it was simply a horrific idea at the time.

Now with the deep ones no longer in hiding and openly at war they need soldiers. Hybrids make good soldiers for the deep one army as they can understand and use technology, understand tactics, etc. The EoD needs an army and voluntary mating with isolated human communities isn't filling the need anymore, so they have the rape camps.

it does make sense from a story perspective so I'm not offended by it.

In general I liked one thing about Ctech, that the human race didn't just collapse in terror at the sight of the mythos but fought back. I liked the idea of war against the eldritch horrors. The resat was "Meh" at best.

The system sucks.

[icyshadowlord]

If the general idea is to fight back, what's the fucking point if every pre-written adventure has a no-win scenario?

Kind of mixed messages / false advertising if you ask me.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I must actually go on the record as saying I don't really understand what the appeal is for various Lovecraftian games, whether this, or Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green or whatever. It's a fundamentally nihilistic universe, so by definition you can not help but lose. If your enemy is an impossibly old, insanely powerful pantheon of protodeities that regard humanity somewhat akin to how we regard insects or bacteria, and the only stage we can ever have hope to make an effect against are human- and human-level minions of those deities, why fucking bother? Put a bullet in your skull and let the cultists raise their mad patrons to wash the universe clean of human civilization.

[icyshadowlord]

I've had nice, long and somewhat angry debates about that with a friend of mine, who just happens to be a Lovecraft fan.

It usually boiled down to him saying "you don't get it" in one way or another, and both of us just declaring a rage quit on it.

[Fuchs]

I never got the appeal of the whole Lovecraft stuff.

[icyshadowlord]

Me neither, for a multitude of reasons.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

The Cthulhu Mythos is interesting as a setting for a novel or short-story, but reading is a fundamentally different experience than Role-Playing. You don't control the actions of a narritive protagonist, so when that protagonist ends the story gibbering unintelligibly in a padded room of a shitty, poorly-funded madhouse, you can appreciate it. Hell, given the differences between how narritive works in an RPG and a story, he might not have actually had goals that mattered. "The Rats in the Walls" was about a guy buying a house, who went insane because he bothered to check out the tunnels under that house.

There isn't any way you could have an RPG module that unfocused, and I don't believe that you could ever have a successful RPG module with stakes that small. And yet, I have been repeatedly assured that many CoC campaigns last multiple adventures without completely turning over the Party every adventure, much less every few sessions.

[Aryxbez]

I suppose in part, it goes in line with Post Apocalyptic fiction, there's an appeal to fighting, even when the word is dying (if it hasn't already). Though not Lovecraftian, Fallout is a Post Apocalyptic setting, which characters within it get to do things that matter to the world as an example. Though, I'm more into Pulp Horror, myself, so it'd be more like Arkham Horror Boardgame, where players can actually fight off Cthulhu if he comes around a knocking. Delta Green is kinda the cool idea that you're basically "Cthulhu-busters", ideally, in something like CthulhuTech, being in a giant gundam vs. Cthulhu would give reason to being able to fight back, plus it's also pretty awesome.

Though, aren't most Call of Cthulhu games meant to be like short term or one shot affairs anyway?

Me neither, for a multitude of reasons.

Would you be willing to list those reasons?, since apparently have debates about it enough.

[icyshadowlord]

You want reasons?

1. I find dark, hopeless stories boring.

2. The asshole I mentioned earlier has tried shoving similar stories down my throat, even after I have expressed my disinterest.

3. My mind's already a dark shitty mess thanks to diagnosed anxiety and depression issues, which contribute to my recent mood swings too.

4. All that rape brought just for shock value disgusts me both as a writer and as a friend of a rape victim, and it's also why rape jokes are not funny.

[Avoraciopoctules]

When I first heard about Cthulhutech, I envisioned 3 campaigns.

The first involves the PCs waking up in a dungeon cell in a sinister temple of Chaugnar Faugn. They have amnesia, and the players only know a little of what was on the character sheets for their PCs. There are about half a dozen character sheets made available for selection. It turns out that half of them used to be on Team Evil, including a couple Dhoanoids. The other half were a government task force that were doing something in the jungle. Chaugnar Faugn's cult were helping Team Evil, but suddenly turned on them because cultists are jerks. The memory-wipe somehow made the PCs better imminent sacrifices. Will the bonds of friendship established in Phase 1 continue to hold the group together in Phase 2? It will be difficult to escape without everyone working together.

The second involved a collection of random PCs stumbling upon a sinister cult that uses magic to disappear people. They bust up the cult, but end up disappeared themselves. When they recover from the teleport, they find themselves in one of the lost human colonies that the Mi-Go already swept through in the course of their invasion. First, they assure their own survival, then they discover valuable information that could change the course of the war. Eventually, they discover a way to contact home and are hailed as heroes.

The third was basically a mashup of Metal Gear, Metal Slug, and 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. The PCs are clones of 50 Cent, inheritors of his fell powers. They unravel a conspiracy, collect bling, and develop a vendetta against the Mi-Go midway through when the bugs steal a recently-looted jeweled idol. They drive a mech off a sweet-ass ramp and crash into the alien mothership, where they have a showdown with King Mi-Go. Then they take back their bling. Good end.

None of these worked very well with the game I got.

[Fuchs]

You want reasons?

1. I find dark, hopeless stories boring.

That reason is enough for me to dislike both CoC as well as probably most post-apocalypse settings.

[Zaranthan]

You want reasons?

1. I find dark, hopeless stories boring.

That reason is enough for me to dislike both CoC as well as probably most post-apocalypse settings.

The key to DMing a good "hopeless" story is to exemplify the extent to which the players' actions help people in the short term. Yeah, the sky's going to fall and the tentacled horror is going to eat everybody, but you saved the child who was going to be horrifyingly murdered and their family's grief about the kidnapping. You can't change the course of the world, you're only one person (or four people). What you CAN change is the course of events for your home town or your neighbors or your brother in law. That's a VERY human story that nobody will mind playing the hero of.

The problem that gets most people's panties in a bunch (my own included) is that people read Shadow Over Innsmouth, assume that's all there is to the mythos, and try to run games where the players know that their characters are helpless. That shit ain't fucking fun. Play some local heroes. Stop worrying about the human race.

[Red Lantern]

If the general idea is to fight back, what's the fucking point if every pre-written adventure has a no-win scenario?

Kind of mixed messages / false advertising if you ask me.

And I'm agreeing with you, that's one of the game's biggest flaws.

[Red Lantern]

You know, people talk about HPl's stories being all hopeless and mno win, with humanity doomed, etc.

I've actually read HPL, and speaking as such, I think that take is at least partially wrong.

Let's look at some HPl stories and see how they turned out, shall we?

DUNWHICH HORROR: Two avatars of Yog Sothoth, a very powerful entity, are born, wilbur whately and his brother, with the intent of opening the gateway to yog sothoth and destroying all humanity. Results? Wilbur whately is torn to shreds and killed by a guard dog at a museum. His big brother is destroyed by 3 old men using knowledge from a tome and dies screaming for his father to help him.

SHADOW OVER ISSNMOUTH: Humanity becomes aware of the deep ones and their infestation of innsmouth, plus the existence of a deep one city off the Massachusetts coast. Result: Innsmouth destroyed, most of it's populace killed on imprisoned, US government sends 1920's vintage submarine to attack deep one city, causing it great harm. if 1920's weapons could hurt a deep one city what would, say, a tactical nuclear depth charge do to one?

CALL OF CTHULHU: a 1920's vintage tramp steamer rams cthulhu itself head on as the big C attempts to attack it. Result: Cthulhu temporarily destroyed, must reform from gaseous state, tramp steamer unharmed, escapes and sails away.

In other stories ther Mi go could be killed with shotguns or rifles. One huge monster under a house was destroyed by having gallons of acid poured into it's pit.

If people read HPl they'll see that humanity isn't so weak and helpless, and often kicks mythos ass even in the stories HPL wrote.

[Silent Wayfarer]

The sad thing is that CTech had potential as a concept, but failed utterly in execution. Its association with tasteless rape is almost as bad as FATAL.

[Red Lantern]

I agree with half the above. The rape bit was blown out of proportion, and was explained as the EoD needing more troops that voluntary mating could produce. People decided to center their views of the game on rape camps and nothing else.

[tussock]

People decided to center their views of the game on rape camps and nothing else.

That's gunna happen.

Intesting view of Cthulhu though, that they're all big jelly-filled softies compared to forged steel, it's just that you have to not think about them too much or you end up a drooling mess with a distant stare. Well, Cthulhu is still really awesome, but getting hit in the belly with ten thousand tons should hurt most things that are trying to be material in nature at the time.

In the modern world, nuking Cthulhu is totally overkill, the real problem is it might have been whispering in the dreams of those holding the keys and codes. We can fuck up the elder evils, but we can also do the job of ending the world for them.

[Koumei]

The rape bit was blown out of proportion,

Isn't that was Akins and Mourdock are saying right about now?

So, blown out of proportion, or it actually is a big deal and people really are legitimately offended by it?

[Red Lantern]

The rape bit was blown out of proportion,

Isn't that was Akins and Mourdock are saying right about now?

So, blown out of proportion, or it actually is a big deal and people really are legitimately offended by it?

Don't compare me to republican retards.

I said that the rape camp meme made sense in the game was not gratuitous. In the context of the EoD needing lots of combat able soldiers in a hurry and the fact that deep one children take a long, long time to mature and can't work technology the mass creation of hybrids made sense. it was not put in for a gross factor or anything like that. Within the framework of the game it is a valid thing for the EoD to do.


people act like it was put in for shock value or something and dominates the game. Neither is true.

[Red Lantern]

People decided to center their views of the game on rape camps and nothing else.

That's gunna happen.

Intesting view of Cthulhu though, that they're all big jelly-filled softies compared to forged steel, it's just that you have to not think about them too much or you end up a drooling mess with a distant stare. Well, Cthulhu is still really awesome, but getting hit in the belly with ten thousand tons should hurt most things that are trying to be material in nature at the time.

In the modern world, nuking Cthulhu is totally overkill, the real problem is it might have been whispering in the dreams of those holding the keys and codes. We can fuck up the elder evils, but we can also do the job of ending the world for them.

reading the story call of cthulhu I doubt the vessel that head on'ed cthulhu was even 10,000 tons, and it sustained no damage in the collision.