Analyse von Call of Cthulhu

[Guest Gast]

Hallo zusammen.

 

Ich poste normalerweise nicht in diesem Forum (nur im GroFaFo), aber ich habe zwei interessante Threads auf The Forge gefunden, die sich mit Call of Cthulhu befassen. Ich finde, es handelt sich dabei um eine interessante Analyse von Cthulhu. Schaut rein, es lohnt sich (vorsicht, lang und englisch!):

 

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8459

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8482

 

Grü?e

Fredi der Elch

[oleg1364424405]

Ich komme da nicht rein. Schade, haette mich mal interessiert.

[Guest Dr.Armitage]

Zitat auf obigen Link, Teil 1

 

Drifting to R'lyeh: An Autopsy on Call of Cthulu

 

Introduction

 

Call of Cthulhu is one of the simplest rules systems around. The Cthulhu Mythos is popular among the members of the gaming subculture. And the published scenario rank IMHO as some the best ever designed for any rpg ever.

One of the first difficulties in gaming CoC is overcoming the resistance to play. CoC has a baleful reputation among rpg gamers. According to WOTC marketing surveys only about 1% of gamers play CoC. The game has the well know rep of being an excercise in futility and unsurvivable (although when I have played the death rate is no higher than that of low level D&D campaigns!). I have had gamers actually CRINGE at the mere MENTION of CoC. So I have learned when bringing the game up to segue IMMEDIATELY to my discussion of how I have drifted the rules.

 

Why is this? And how has the game survived (albeit barely) in spite of all this?

 

The Great Sucking Sound is Your Game Being Pulled Toward Illusionism

 

There are a number of reasons why the Keeper is drawn toward illusionism. These reasons have to do with the fundamental mismatches between CoC rules and the structure of the typical game.

The 'onionskin' structure of the classic CoC scenario is mediated by skill rolls. Penetrating to the deeper levels of the onion requires making skill rolls to acquire the information to do so. The problem is, what happens when Lady Luck is on the rag and your players can't roll their way out of a paper sack? What is the keeper going to do? The sensible keeper will of course maintain a matrix structure to the gathering of information so if your Archeologist can't make his rolls, then the con artist might get the information with his Fast Talk, but what if your whole group is having a bad dice day?

 

You will be faced with the same problem as all other similarly structured scenarios will. You will be sitting across the table from players who are milling around ,accomplishing nothing and getting more bored and frustrated by the minute.....

 

The keeper then has to make a choice, if he is particularly rigid he will simply sit there and let them stew...I've seen this happen and it can kill the campaign,much less the game......

 

Or you will intervene with some game world eventuality which will essentially drop the needed info into their laps. But the problem is that if you do this, what were the skill rolls for? Whats worse some players will figure this out, and then just sit on their hands and try to wait the keeper out and avoid the whole messy business of wandering about the game world gathering the info themselves, and why should they ?

 

This creates an interesting paradox. Although CoC as a game has a supposed bias against combat, in practice they are the only skills that really matter, in the sense of having real consequences. Miss a comabat roll and you can lose your character! But as I have shown missing the other skill rolles doesn't necessarily have any real consequences in the play of the game.

 

Player effectiveness

The issue of player effectiveness in CoC is confused. In CoC the basic character stats don't change Hit points in CoC do not inflate like they do in D&D. Sanity is notoriously ablative in CoC. The only real form of sytemic player effectiveness that increases are skill rolls. And as i just pointed out skill rolls don't really matter...

Another bug in the issue of player effectiveness is the Cthulhu Mythos skill.

You would think that this would be a very important skill except that since it sets a cap on sanity, it actually reduces player effectiveness. Since skill rolls themselves are irrelevant the mythos skill is of actually less value than any other skills! Plus to get it you almost always have to contract sanity loss. While it may help tell you what you are up against, it increases the chance you will go nuts when you actually encounter it...

 

Since mythos knowledge is of little real value, and almost all use of magic entails loss of effectiveness (sanity) the only good way to deal with the problem is load up the shotguns! Once again the 'anti combat' game shows that it really rewards Ramboism (and it's a myth that guns don't do you any good, lesser servitor and independent races come apart under gunfire just about as well as human cultists and constitute the bulk of the mythos encounters.....). The real hidden truth about Call of Cthulhu is that bigger guns are the only real road to increased character effectiveness.

 

 

GNS of Cthulhu

 

Gamist- It is very difficult to play CoC in a gamist fashion. The game has essentially no reward system at all, , virtually no real way of accumulating player effectiveness, in fact the overewhelming tendency is for player effectiveness to be reduced . ' Game Balance', certainly doesn't exist, at least not without extrememly carefull drift by the Keeper. The very idea of metagame min-maxing is a bad joke (other than 'load up on library use and spot hidden). Many of the published scenarios although well written are wildly imbalanced from any gamist perspective and often must be extensively drifted for a player to have any chance of resolving the situation with their skin intact or indeed often at all. (Masks of Nyarlathotep for example).

 

Narrativist- More than any other aspect, Call of Cthulhu strives to be narrativist. Over and over the rhetoric of the game stresses plot and story over consideration in other issues. The rules do seem well designed to create a particular tone of helplessness and inevitability, and toward that end support a particular theme. (Unfortunately the same thing could be said of a 'Dilbert' rpg...... ) The narrative structure of the game is in fact highly stereotyped, essentially a detectvie story with specialized elements of color and setting. Yet there are no rules for the players as co-authors not even as threadbare a device as 'fortune points'. The universe of Lovecraft is distinctly amoral so moral issues don't seem to make much difference in the play of the game. Put simply the antagonists in the typical CoC game are either completely inhuman or partake of so much inhumanity that few players feel much of a problem with 'dropping the hammer' on them. The actual rules in Coc are prototypically simulationist in content.

 

Simulationism- CoC is a consumate sumulationist game. The rules are well designed to produce an outcome not unlike that of the (stereotyped) Lovecraft story. And great care is given to the quantification of the game world. But Coc is deceptive with regards to how well it deals with many aspects of Exploration.

 

Exploration of Color- This is arguably the biggest factor drawing people into playing the game. There are few people going 'Call of Cthulhu? hyuk hyuk thats a funny name, lets play this and see what it's about'! Overwhelmingly people get into playing the game because they have read some Lovecraft and like the color elements he created. The problem with EoS in CoC is that virtually everything you encounter, the lowliest deep one, the weakest spell, the most trivial historical tract, in some cases just the NOISE of something wierd in the attic ,all cause damaging sanity loss! So the more of the color you encounter the more your effectiveness is damaged. As one character in KODT exclaimed 'I've played a lot of K'chooloo and one thing I know is BURN THE BOOKS'. This is pretty good advice for the game but a bitter pill to swallow for someone looking forward to EoCo.......

 

 

Exploration of Setting-At first glance CoC looks like it's dominated by exploration of setting (history and location). But in fact call of Cthulhu can and has been played in a wide range of settings. What makes a game 'Lovecraftian' isn't really the setting but the color elements, the gods,the manuscripts, the spells, all of these are readily transportable to a wide range of settings. In essence setting really doesn't matter much in Call of Cthulhu.

Exploration of Situation- Call of Cthulhu is consumately a game of EoSi. After all the players arent' called investigators for nothing. Something is going on somewhere and something has to be done about it, is the invitable model for a scenario.

 

[Guest Dr.Armitage]

Exploration of Character- CoC does offer opportunities for EoC but very little real support for it in the game. CoC was one of the first gmaes to support a high level of character customization by allow free choice withing a well developed skill system, and the choice of player skill naturally implied a background which most players relish elaborating on.

The problem develops when this model comes up against the overwhelming concentration on situation. Put simply the game is almost never really 'about' the characters, and virtually any characters will fit so long as their nature makes sense within the situation (ie: if it's an archeological dig, you need archeologists , but any archeologist will do) Usually the well thought out player backgrounds are simply ignored. Sometimes ham fisted approaches to bolting elements of the situation on the character's background are made but this isn't really exploration of character as the same elements can often be bolted onto virtually any character in the game.

Some player find a certain enjoyable type of EoC in playing out the insanities that long time characters almost invetably develop, as well they might as it's the only aspect of character that has a mechanism in the rule other than skills, If only they didn't diminish player effectiveness......

Of course the biggest discouragement to EoC is the game's lethality. Because of this people start to avoid becoming attatched, become more distant, and less interested in actually exploring the character, this tendency gets worse the longer most people play the game (and the more characters they have lost). Since character identification is one of the most important pleasures in rpgs (and one thing that makes them unique among games) this is a telling disadvantage in Call of Cthulhu.

 

Exploration of system- This is a particularly trivial aspect of CoC because put simply there is so little system to explore! Besides customizing your character in his choice of skills, there is really little else for the player to do with the system.

 

In short CoC falls into the category of 'Simulationist play in which elements of situation and color are preferentially explored'. Indeed situation and color are so central that quite enjoyable 'Lovecraftian' board games and card games have been created! And virtually any narrativist structure can be made 'Lovecraftian by the injection of the righ color elements. This is, for example,the only thing needed to make a game of 'My Life with Master' or 'Inspectres' Lovecraftian .

 

 

The Horror out of Petersen: Why People hate Call of Cthulhu

This is the point of the discussion when the pro-CoC person grumbles about how the game is for 'real' role players and that 'maturity' consists of blandly accepting the limitations I have outline. This rhetoric is personally satisfying but worthless for my purposes.

If we accept the premise that all gaming modes are equally valid so long as they provide enjoyable play then this analysis provides excellent clues as to why the game in fact is so disliked.

 

Why everybody hates it

It must be extensively drifted to accomodate other GNS priorities, thus it is very easy to be a bad CoC keeper.

It is uniquely poorly suited to the traditional continuing campaign

It runs down violent solutions but the scenarios are mostly unresolveable without them

 

Why narrativists hate it:

It crossdresses as a narrativist game but is really solidly simulationist

.No player authoring, period

Lethality discourages player identification with character and the game has

no rules to ameliorate this

 

Why gamists hate it.

No min-maxing

Radically unbalanced

No increase in character effectiveness

Confused issues regarding character effectiveness ,generally

No meaningful reward mechanic

 

 

Why Simulationists hate it

Skill rolls look important but really aren't

Supports only Narrow simulationist priorities well (situation and color) and

then punishes you for exploring them (sanity loss).

 

So we see why CoC in practice is so unpopular. It really does have something for everyone to hate.

 

Call of Cthulhu is popular in convention tournament play. There ratio of people hosting Coc games at conventions is widely divergent from what sales figure dictate to be the actual popularity of the game. This is because the games disadvantages are a lot less signifigant in one-shot scenarios.

 

Indeed the question when discussing Call of Cthulhu is 'why has the game lasted so long"? There are several reasons, uniqueness (there have been hundreds of fantasy games but CoC has had few imitators) and the fact that it does cover the color elements quite well. This makes it useful for extracting these elemenst for play in other games. This is the 'secret weapon' behind the viability of the GURPS line and to a lesser extent Palladium. Those setting guides are so good even if you don't like the game they are worth buying.... Plus the better scenarios are enjoyable just as Cthulhu Mythos stories in their own right.

 

At this point my autopsy of Call of Cthulhu is concluded. Now the next step, taking this cadaver and like Herbert West, sewing on the parts that will make it better.

 

My first essay on this subject will be 'Cthulhu's Clues: New approaches to information in Lovecraftian scenarios'.

 

 

/Zitat

[Guest Dr.Armitage]

Zitat auf dem 2 Link von oben

 

failure is not an option

 

As I stated in my essay 'Drifting to R'lyeh' most skill rolls in CoC don't matter much. The design of the prototypical CoC scenario makes play grind to a halt if the player's can't make their skill rolls, this forces the Keeper to hand the information out anyway, thus devaluating the whole conept of information gathering skills.

 

Soon after starting to play CoC it became abundantly obvious that the reason that we did this is that the flow of information in the game is like the flow of the blood in the body. Stop it and the whole works dies. Your heart doesn't pump when it makes a 'cardiac skill roll' the thing has to work ALL the time, and for a CoC scenario to stay alive the information HAS to flow all the time. It's not a bonus for good dice rolling. Which is why you have to give it out whether they roll good or bad.

 

 

Ian Charvill wrote:

 

 

For example, the players fail their Library Use rolls and don't know to go looking at the Old Marley House. But the Inhabitant of the House knows the investigators are on the trail and sends one of its minions to firebomb one of the character's houses and leave a warning to Stay Away From the Old Marley House. The character's failed roll doesn't deprive them of the information - it puts them in a worse situation. The cars gone, and Jimmy's got third degree burns all up his left arm is no one's definition of success but the game won't stall out.

 

 

 

I think this is surpassingly poor advice for several reasons, first this approach inherently causes another ratcheting down of player effectiveness in a game which hardly needs this, secondly if you drop an anvil on your players every time they whiff a skill roll, they'll want to stop making them (!), finally the primary reason this is an issue is that whiffing rolls in CoC is very common, play this way and you'll waste half the party before they ahve a chance to meet the 'big bad'!

 

After all whats the point for punishing them when you do something you are going to have to do anyway?

 

Since the information must flow, the only issue remaining is doing so in an interesting and entertaining fashion. The bost interesting way is to role play it out. And since the Keeper is dispenser of secrets rather than keeper of secrets (maybe we should call him a dispenser!) First the Keeper must make a careful list of what information is relevant to the scenario and the skills relevant to iunraveling them. When information is relevant, the keeper announces what skills can be used. Then the players spend from a pool of points for the right to request a 'revealation' scene in which the discovery of the information is roleplayed out.

 

In 'forgeish' this would translate (approxiamately) as 'Karma based scene framing' rather than 'fortune based rewarding' as the model for dispensing information

 

Some information could be doled out only as the result of effort, that is to say time spent on a particular activity, whether slaving over a stack of newspapers in a library or a cadaver in a morgue.

 

Every piece of relevant info could be given profile formated like this (effort)(skills) (content) for instance

 

(2 hours)(fast talk, letter of reference,Library use) ( Unpublished feature story ).

 

Now this is where it gets tricky. Lets assume a player doesn't have the requisite skill. He could spend extra points to purchase a scene where a skill that he does have for example , Fast talk or even credit rating.

For example the Doctor player might spend a point to purchase an autopsy scene, while the conman might spend 2 points to purchase a scene where he worms the facts out of a doctor who performed the autopsy.

 

This model is not only applicable to Call of Cthulhu. Any game with strong investigative component that uses a fortune model for information will be beset by the sam inherent problem as Call of Cthulhu. Now as an exercise for the student, consider what a drama mechanic solution for the sam issue would look like.....

 

....and stay tuned for my next essay 'Chtulhubabe and darkest secret of Call of Cthulhu'.

 

/Zitat

 

So, hoffe geholfen zuhaben, ich hatte auch schwierigkeiten am anfang. Die antworten der Posting, würden aber den Rahmen sprengen

 

Grüsse

Dr.Armitage