Cthulhu Heartbreakers
Posted: Thu May 12, 2016 12:22 am
Previously, we have discussed Call of Cthulhu, its merits and and its flaws...mostly it's flaws. And we have discussed, here and there, a couple of its heartbreakers, though we haven't called them that explicitly. GURPS CthulhuPunk, CthulhuTech, Unknown Armies at a slight stretch. There are several more we haven't touched on much at all: Delta Green. The Laundry RPG. Call of Cthulhu d20. Trail of Cthulhu and Bookhounds of London. World War Cthulhu. Yellow Dawn we touched on once, I think.
The thing is, when you're talking about Call of Cthulhu Heartbreakers, there are a lot of them. Frank and I discussed it briefly, and we're in general agreement that the reason why has to do with the strong appeal of the concept and the incredibly flawed nature of the game itself - it's mechanics, its presentation and development, damn near everything, really. The thing is, people want a good Cthulhu game. And the name "Call of Cthulhu" is pretty much all that Chaosium actually owns of the game itself. So it lends itself very readily to heartbreakers. So why are all of them so fucking bad?
In large part, it's because they make the mistake of trying to follow the tropes of Call of Cthulhu or its system too much. Sanity as a damage track is a major offender here - it's a highly visible and characteristic mechanic, which gives the impression of a gradual slide into insanity. In practice, of course, it doesn't accomplish that at all, and on top of that it is both inaccurate to the source material and to how mental health works in the real world - and when you fail both simulationist and fanboy measures of success with a mechanic that doesn't work very well, you can pretty much be said to have failed completely. Which is why, of course, that games like Unknown Armies have variant takes on the Sanity mechanic and going insane. But far too many of the Cthulhu heartbreakers have made the mistake that this is a key feature of the game and strive to preserve it, or import it wholesale into this system - even the d20 folks did it.
Then, of course, there are all the other things that Call of Cthulhu generally does not do well. It does not import into other settings easily - yes, you can play Cthulhu by Gaslight, or Dark Ages Cthulhu, or Atomic Age Cthulhu, or Cthulhu Now - but those are all different supplements branching off the main game; they're not entirely compatible in any significant sense. You would have trouble transporting characters from one period to another. Skills don't match up. Hell, the setting doesn't match up. And that's why you have third-party groups like Pagan Publishing writing Mysteries of Mesoamerica, or Armitage House producing Delta Green.
It is, in fact, why you can have multiple publishers all pissing in the same corner of the same pond - The Laundry RPG, Cthulhu Britannica, and Trail of Cthulhu all produce material for a UK setting, with overlapping time periods. There's been more written for the UK in Cthulhu Heartbreakers than there has been about the two Tirs in five editions of Shadowrun, and you can basically take your pick as to what you want or don't - there's no "canon" setting, and little of it directly interferes with anything else. Not by design as much as happy circumstance: there's a lot of historical facts to shovel, and the odds of any two writers happening on the exact same thing to write about, absent a few major landmarks, is slim. I'm sure if I dug into it I'd find some kickball like Rasputin in the old World of Darkness, but for the most part it's just that...well, everybody does their own thing. Everybody has always done their own thing, right back to when Chaosium was partnering with Games Workshop.
There is quite literally no difference between a Cthulhu heartbreaker and the main game line, in terms of material. Quality? Call of Cthulhu has almost always looked like ass. Even in it's 5.6th edition, it was damn near a garage production. Many of the third-party heartbreaker products are noticeably nicer than the books Chaosium produces, in terms of art, layout, basic writing, even mechanics.
And yet...there are still some weird taboos. Magic, for example, is a weak point in Call of Cthulhu and its various heartbreakers. It seems impossible to get either a decent systemization of magic or a decent mechanical system for magic. Ghost knows it's been tried - Pagan Publishing but how The Golden Dawn, which was a crappy, skill-heavy system for basically giving PCs some low-level spells so that a shoggoth wouldn't eat their brains in the first adventure, and it's so compromised and flaky that it's a pile of ass. The Laundry RPG had an innovative idea for putting its magic on a rather firm organizational setting...and then crippled it by marrying it to the BRP POW rules...and then shot themselves in the dick by trying to import in spells from Call of Cthulhu. Even fucking GURPS struggled to figure out what the fuck to do with Call of Cthulhu's magic system.
But the thing is, people want to play a wizard. Or if not a wizard per se, they want to be able to cast spells from ancient, crumbling books of forgotten lore when the situation calls for it. It's an angle of play that gets routinely ignored and trampled over...mainly because the people that wrote Call of Cthulhu back in the 1970s didn't want you casting fireballs at the shoggoth. That's it, really. They wanted to avoid the D&D mindset, even though they were using a stripped-down, unfinished version of a 70s D&D heartbreaker to power the goddamned thing.
It's frustrating to me. And it's frustrating in part because I've been fiddling with my own damn Cthulhu Heartbreaker, Space Madness!. Which isn't going to be BRP based, at all, and I keep putting it down and working on other projects first. And the thing is, when working on a Cthulhu Heartbreaker, you need to define what that actually means, in terms of the setting and in terms of play. One of the great, usually ignored aspects of Call of Cthulhu is that its adventures are framed as investigations; they're detective stories where the PCs are the Scooby Gang...or a group of Space Marines investigating an outpost that has gone quiet...etc. It's a concept with some serious legs, is what I'm getting at, but one that doesn't get a lot of attention as people get wrapped up in the trappings of the setting.
The trappings are important. There are certain tropes of Lovecraftian fiction people expect, look for, want to interact with, and a Cthulhu heartbreaker has to supply them - even if not in exactly expected ways. Even the Hellboy RPG understood that people expect tentacles from beyond time and space.
The mechanics...aren't. Which is to say, the Basic Roleplaying Mechanics are not important. You want a set of mechanics that work, and BRP generally does not, and trying to get BRP to work is a heartbreaker trap that too many fall into.
More important than the mechanics is the gameplay. We don't talk about it much, but Cthulhu is a classless system, but beyond that it's a system that lacks a strong sense of player character roles. D&D is so combat centric, you can almost build it like a MMO raid: lancer, tank, healer, etc. Shadowrun, too, usually has clearly defined roles of muscle, magic, hacker, face, etc. Even Vampire, with its delineations of powers by clan, at least gives a division of abilities, if not a clear distinction of who-does-what. But Call of Cthulhu...it's not that your characters can't have roles, but the roles are not in any way defined. Do you need a librarian, a bootlegger, an ex-soldier, and a priest? What skills do they actually have that are critical to their supposed occupations? Actually, the skill system in BRP is warmed-over horseshit, and if you roll you fail, so don't do that. But you get the idea.
So you need, above all, some ability to give everybody a role. A chance to shine, something to do during the game.
And that is all I have for the night. More thoughts later, maybe.
The thing is, when you're talking about Call of Cthulhu Heartbreakers, there are a lot of them. Frank and I discussed it briefly, and we're in general agreement that the reason why has to do with the strong appeal of the concept and the incredibly flawed nature of the game itself - it's mechanics, its presentation and development, damn near everything, really. The thing is, people want a good Cthulhu game. And the name "Call of Cthulhu" is pretty much all that Chaosium actually owns of the game itself. So it lends itself very readily to heartbreakers. So why are all of them so fucking bad?
In large part, it's because they make the mistake of trying to follow the tropes of Call of Cthulhu or its system too much. Sanity as a damage track is a major offender here - it's a highly visible and characteristic mechanic, which gives the impression of a gradual slide into insanity. In practice, of course, it doesn't accomplish that at all, and on top of that it is both inaccurate to the source material and to how mental health works in the real world - and when you fail both simulationist and fanboy measures of success with a mechanic that doesn't work very well, you can pretty much be said to have failed completely. Which is why, of course, that games like Unknown Armies have variant takes on the Sanity mechanic and going insane. But far too many of the Cthulhu heartbreakers have made the mistake that this is a key feature of the game and strive to preserve it, or import it wholesale into this system - even the d20 folks did it.
Then, of course, there are all the other things that Call of Cthulhu generally does not do well. It does not import into other settings easily - yes, you can play Cthulhu by Gaslight, or Dark Ages Cthulhu, or Atomic Age Cthulhu, or Cthulhu Now - but those are all different supplements branching off the main game; they're not entirely compatible in any significant sense. You would have trouble transporting characters from one period to another. Skills don't match up. Hell, the setting doesn't match up. And that's why you have third-party groups like Pagan Publishing writing Mysteries of Mesoamerica, or Armitage House producing Delta Green.
It is, in fact, why you can have multiple publishers all pissing in the same corner of the same pond - The Laundry RPG, Cthulhu Britannica, and Trail of Cthulhu all produce material for a UK setting, with overlapping time periods. There's been more written for the UK in Cthulhu Heartbreakers than there has been about the two Tirs in five editions of Shadowrun, and you can basically take your pick as to what you want or don't - there's no "canon" setting, and little of it directly interferes with anything else. Not by design as much as happy circumstance: there's a lot of historical facts to shovel, and the odds of any two writers happening on the exact same thing to write about, absent a few major landmarks, is slim. I'm sure if I dug into it I'd find some kickball like Rasputin in the old World of Darkness, but for the most part it's just that...well, everybody does their own thing. Everybody has always done their own thing, right back to when Chaosium was partnering with Games Workshop.
There is quite literally no difference between a Cthulhu heartbreaker and the main game line, in terms of material. Quality? Call of Cthulhu has almost always looked like ass. Even in it's 5.6th edition, it was damn near a garage production. Many of the third-party heartbreaker products are noticeably nicer than the books Chaosium produces, in terms of art, layout, basic writing, even mechanics.
And yet...there are still some weird taboos. Magic, for example, is a weak point in Call of Cthulhu and its various heartbreakers. It seems impossible to get either a decent systemization of magic or a decent mechanical system for magic. Ghost knows it's been tried - Pagan Publishing but how The Golden Dawn, which was a crappy, skill-heavy system for basically giving PCs some low-level spells so that a shoggoth wouldn't eat their brains in the first adventure, and it's so compromised and flaky that it's a pile of ass. The Laundry RPG had an innovative idea for putting its magic on a rather firm organizational setting...and then crippled it by marrying it to the BRP POW rules...and then shot themselves in the dick by trying to import in spells from Call of Cthulhu. Even fucking GURPS struggled to figure out what the fuck to do with Call of Cthulhu's magic system.
But the thing is, people want to play a wizard. Or if not a wizard per se, they want to be able to cast spells from ancient, crumbling books of forgotten lore when the situation calls for it. It's an angle of play that gets routinely ignored and trampled over...mainly because the people that wrote Call of Cthulhu back in the 1970s didn't want you casting fireballs at the shoggoth. That's it, really. They wanted to avoid the D&D mindset, even though they were using a stripped-down, unfinished version of a 70s D&D heartbreaker to power the goddamned thing.
It's frustrating to me. And it's frustrating in part because I've been fiddling with my own damn Cthulhu Heartbreaker, Space Madness!. Which isn't going to be BRP based, at all, and I keep putting it down and working on other projects first. And the thing is, when working on a Cthulhu Heartbreaker, you need to define what that actually means, in terms of the setting and in terms of play. One of the great, usually ignored aspects of Call of Cthulhu is that its adventures are framed as investigations; they're detective stories where the PCs are the Scooby Gang...or a group of Space Marines investigating an outpost that has gone quiet...etc. It's a concept with some serious legs, is what I'm getting at, but one that doesn't get a lot of attention as people get wrapped up in the trappings of the setting.
The trappings are important. There are certain tropes of Lovecraftian fiction people expect, look for, want to interact with, and a Cthulhu heartbreaker has to supply them - even if not in exactly expected ways. Even the Hellboy RPG understood that people expect tentacles from beyond time and space.
The mechanics...aren't. Which is to say, the Basic Roleplaying Mechanics are not important. You want a set of mechanics that work, and BRP generally does not, and trying to get BRP to work is a heartbreaker trap that too many fall into.
More important than the mechanics is the gameplay. We don't talk about it much, but Cthulhu is a classless system, but beyond that it's a system that lacks a strong sense of player character roles. D&D is so combat centric, you can almost build it like a MMO raid: lancer, tank, healer, etc. Shadowrun, too, usually has clearly defined roles of muscle, magic, hacker, face, etc. Even Vampire, with its delineations of powers by clan, at least gives a division of abilities, if not a clear distinction of who-does-what. But Call of Cthulhu...it's not that your characters can't have roles, but the roles are not in any way defined. Do you need a librarian, a bootlegger, an ex-soldier, and a priest? What skills do they actually have that are critical to their supposed occupations? Actually, the skill system in BRP is warmed-over horseshit, and if you roll you fail, so don't do that. But you get the idea.
So you need, above all, some ability to give everybody a role. A chance to shine, something to do during the game.
And that is all I have for the night. More thoughts later, maybe.