Call of Cthulhu

Edit: as this turned into a huge wall of text: TL;DR, a lot of talk about role playing games and game systems, might be posting a multipart story here that "documents" a Call of Cthulhu campaign I'm gamemastering during the summer.

After the rant that is my previous point, how is it relevant to anything? Well, I kicked off a Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG adventure today. Now, let's break that previous piece of jargon down into human speech.

Kick off, verb: (idiomatic) to start, to launch. It's rather confusing how kick off can also mean to shut down or turn off suddenly - the problem with idiomatic slang is often that it's a kind of a double entendre to language that approaches the meanings from completely different angles. This time, we're talking about starting. There might be a point worth cultivating about language functions here, but not today. Moving on.

This next part needs to be taken as a bigger whole and then sliced down to smaller chunks, the big picture being the whole of "a Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG adventure". Let's start from the bottom: what's a tabletop RPG adventure? The letters RPG come from Role Playing Game, which might give some of you a mental image of prepubescent teens running around in woods waving wooden swords, wearing capes and talking funny. This image, while relevant, is not exactly the whole truth: what you've just envisioned is LARP, short for Live Action Role Play, which includes physically taking you character's place, putting on clothes to match and acting out the role of you play to be.

Tabletop role playing, on the other hand, (usually just shortened to role playing, but the tabletop part is there to prevent excessive confusion) is the more "modest" father of role play as a genre of self expression, where the characters whose places players take are fleshed out on paper, often with numerical values to represent their specific abilities and skills and work as a playing aid: this is a game after all, more so than LARP is, as might be evident from the G representing "game" at the end of RPG. What's usually needed is pen, paper, possibly a rulebook and some dice, some adventuring spirit and a lot of creativity.

An RPG adventure, on the other hand, is sometimes synonymous with a campaign or a story, meaning a longer sequence of events that create a coherent whole. While sometimes synonymous, an adventure can often be a smaller part of a campaign, which can then be a part of a story, thus creating a rather huge, complex entity of entwining tales. An adventure has some universal parts, however: a beginning, and an end. It might not always be satisfactory, or follow the rules of drama, but it is a self-contained entity, or atleast it should be. There can be open ends and storyhooks for later use, but the main story itself should be brought to a close, kind of like a single book in a series.

Now, I'm not gonna go into much details about Call of Cthulhu here, since my previous post, "Necronomicon" explains the Cthulhu mythos in some detail. The players of a Call of Cthulhu RPG are usually unwitting individuals who stumble upon the greater secrets of the Mythos and the uncaring universe and often end up needing to outwit or outrun an entity of the Mythos simply to survive - outgun isn't really the thing in Call of Cthulhu, since the mood is that of an uncaring, vastly powerful universe that you can mostly try to hide from.

Now, after all this, I get to the beef of my post: what I like (and don't like) about Call of Cthulhu as a system. It has it's downfalls, as the amount of random-generated parts of the character (most everything) make for rather unbalanced characters. This, for most parts, isn't a problem: people are different and excel in different fields, and vastly different characters make the game all the more interesting, just as it would with real people.

Unfortunately, the game system puts quite a bit of weight on two mental stats, as the game is more bent on the intelligent part of it: research, knowledge and such most of the time counting for much more than raw strength, which means that these stats, Intelligence and Education, outweight everything else. While defining two of the game's three most important rolls (Know and Idea rolls, with Sanity being the third) these would also comprise the amount of skill points you have. Thus not having relatively high numbers on these would make you stupid, slow-witted, ill-educated, mostly useless and, in addition to all this, suck at everything.

The system actually makes characters so that if you're not smart, you can't be physically good at much anything either. I changed this so that they count for less, but the absolute oversight irked me: how is your ability to learn how to climb affected by your booksmarts? Of course all game systems are abstractions, and such oversights often get left in the final products. This is exactly the reason why the game master can and should make changes: no system is perfect.

What I really like about Call of Cthulhu, however, is the mystery and the intelligent aspect of it. The whole point of the game system is to create a sort of an intelligent challenge to the players, who, through their player characters, try to solve and outwit it. Most of this can and should be shrouded in a supernatural aspect of horror and fear, giving the game an eerie feel. The point of the game is to try to give the players an intellectual challenge and, if possible, some terror chills.

After the first night of play I feel rather good about the game, as my investigators (the name Call of Cthulhu uses for player characters) seem to be rather baffled by what's been thrown at them. It'll be interesting to see where this game leads and I might indeed try to write it into a story of sorts (I've tried this with campaigns where I've been a player, but the point of view is a bit problematic then). If I manage this, it'll be a sort of a multipart story that will be appearing here approximately weekly. We'll see. For now, it seems summer will be holding some cheap thrills in the form of mythic spooks.

Edit: Gah, what a wall of text. If anyone fought through it to the end, sorry about excessive mouthyness.