Godammed SDN

[Zod]

So what do you do in that RPG, is like a fucked up scooby doo investigation?

it can be

it's up to the GM

[Djinnkitty83]

So what do you do in that RPG, is like a fucked up scooby doo investigation?

It pretty much mimics Lovecraft's stories: You get word of weird goings on, investigate them, and try to protect people from mind-shattering truths of the greater universe while not losing your own sanity in the process. At least that's their espoused ideal, your mileage may vary depending on GM and players.

[Civil War Man]

So what do you do in that RPG, is like a fucked up scooby doo investigation?

Usually. Being smart, well-educated, or charismatic is usually better in most scenarios. Focusing on combat stats beyond the basics isn't often useful. Most seasoned players will avoid getting into fights because combat tends to be messy and not worth it, plus pretty one-sided if the investigators find themselves in a fight against something that isn't mundane like people or animals. It's easy to get injured, while healing those injuries requires lots of time since the players will almost never have access to healing magic. And when they do it usually comes with some dreadful cost because that's the whole point of the system.

[Djinnkitty83]

Put everything into dexterity, dodge and climb. When in doubt, running away is almost always the best course of action.

[Aaron]

Lol, sounds like fun.

[Bakustra]

Let me explain Call of Cthulhu better: it really is fucked-up scooby-doo.

I'll try to remember it in full. It's a worst experience, so it fits in here.

A friend of mine, one of my regular players, borrowed my Call of Cthulhu material and decided he was going to run a game at the gaming society we both attend. This was a bad idea for a couple of reasons, the first being that it's hard to do evocative horror when you have a busy, happy background going on around you (unless you're specifically playing up the social alienation angle). The second, and more important, reason it was a bad idea was because he invited Donnie to play.

Donnie is a good guy. I ran a Blue Rose campaign, he played in it, and it was great fun for all involved. However, Donnie is not a subtle guy, and he's not the sort of guy who can experience horror or exercise fearful judgement when it's required. As evidence toward this, when the group was rolling up reasonable, urbane, ordinary Call of Cthulhu characters, he decided to make a doctor.

With maximum ranks in the "headbutt" skill. More points in "headbutt" than he had in "medicine", and his character was a doctor. My friend convinced him to at least make his "medicine" skill equal to "headbutt", and the game proceeded on track.

You know the old saying, "Give a man a hammer, and everything looks like a nail?" Well, when you turn a man into a hammer, the same thing is true. Donnie tried to headbutt everything even vaguely problematic. It started with a door that wouldn't open, escalated to an ATM (which he scored a critical success against, and landed some free cash) and climaxed with him headbutting a skeleton after stumbling out-

Let's wind it back a bit. During the course of the adventure, when they started encountering horrific skeletons that stalked their every move during the night, the party decided to tool up on weaponry. They visited a mall, broke in, and decided to ransack some of the shops to acquire weapons. Someone got a fire axe from a hardware store. Most got guns from a gun store. Donnie, since he liked fireworks, decided to drive to the local mining supply depot while this was happening, and after headbutting his way into a badly locked supply shack he made off with a backpack full of dynamite.

Eventually they tracked the skeletons down to an old well in the back garden of a manor house, and after a bit of research discovered that it had a cursed stone in at the bottom. Being pro-active, Donnie suggested they lower him into the well with a flashlight and his dynamite, and he'd rig it to blow. It sounded plausible, so they lowered him down with the flashlight and a pistol, and waited until he was in place.

Messing around in the thick mud at the bottom, his flashlight soon failed. Not alarmed, Donnie started feeling around to find the cursed stone, and was in the process of feeling its edges when the cursed blood he was sloshing around in began to form into yet more skeletons, as it was so dark down there it might as well be night. A skeleton grabbed the rope and pulled it down, and then began wrestling with him, dragging him into the mud.

Donnie let out a shout. Up at the top of the well, the rest of the party thought he was asking for the dynamite, and tossed it down. Desperately, Donnie began to headbutt the dynamite, hoping to set it off before the skeleton flayed him alive. Cue the following exchange:

"He's taking a long time down there."
"Can you see what's going on?"
"No, my flashlight isn't working."
"Give me those matches."

The player fumbled and dropped the match, and Donnie simultaneously landed a critical hit with his headbutt.

A massive explosion blew the well to smithereens. Rolling on the resistance table, Donnie survived the initial explosion, was thrown several blocks away, and crashed into some lady's house, breaking his legs. Understandably panicked, the lady called an ambulance, and five minutes later it turned up. At this point Donnie regained consciousness, and rather than be taken to hospital, he held the ambulance crew up with his pistol and stole the ambulance.

Meanwhile, a horrible, rapidly decaying, muddy skeleton made from blood and charred, broken stone clawed its way out of the well in the shadow of the (now wrecked) house and began to advance on the party. Cue a massive combat that grew rapidly more tense, until it was interrupted by the sound of...

Sirens? The ambulance crashed through the fence, ran over the skeleton and screeched to a halt. Donnie, his legs broken, staggered out of the ambulance and fell to the ground, right beside the pinned monster. It proceeded to try and grab him, and he responded the only way he knew how.

With a headbutt.

Edit: and remember, it's Doctor McHeadbutt. He worked long and hard for that PhD in Aggressive Phrenology.

talkin' about mah cthulhu game

i think i would split sanity into "sanity", a measure of how much you adhere to the norms of society, which would be linked with a "truth" or "mythos" stat that measures your knowledge of the secret world alongside this one. as one goes up, the other goes down. when sanity hits zero you retreat into the other world entirely

you need a certain level of truth to use magical/psychic powers. some of them (rare ones) will actually knock you down when you use them. you lose sanity as you uncover more about the secret world, and you get it back by either forgetting it (slow recharge between sessions) or else reconciling it with reality (requires difficult stat checks and lowers the other half of it)

stability would be the other half. stability measures how well your character is holding up. characters roll stability to deal with weird, disturbing, or terrifying events. if they lose they can either freak out and be useless for the rest of the scene or else burn a point of stability to hold together. when stability hits zero, they suffer a nervous breakdown or sustained panic attack or lapse into a coma, and require some time of mental care to put back together- they're out for the session, and if this happens in a bad environment, they may end up dying. stability recharges with periods of prolonged rest and recovery from traumas (between-session), or by performing certain tasks in-session. certain things can boost stability temporarily- eg a crucifix or bible for a devout christian. burning that point causes the object to be damaged, destroyed, or lost.

That's actually pretty close to the Call of Cthulhu RPG by Chaosium. The Sanity score measures how well the character's mind is able to cope with scary, unusual, or startling things, whether it's a monster or, for an unstable WWI vet I played in one game, even sudden loud noises or unexpected dead bodies depending on his state of mind.

There are also Sanity points, which more of a measure of the current state of mind, ranging from 0-99 (since most of the system is based on percentiles). Sudden large drops in sanity points makes your character temporarily freak out, black out, go berserk, etc. Hitting zero means your character goes insane and either needs to spend extended time in an asylum or becomes permanently unplayable. Rest, therapy, or accomplishing important tasks in-session restore sanity points. 99 is the max number of sanity points anyone can have, but increasing the Cthulhu Mythos skill, which represents knowledge of the secret world, reduces the maximum number of sanity points. Someone with 40 Cthulhu Mythos, for example, could never have more than 59 Sanity points. Someone who somehow manages to get 99 Cthulhu Mythos would be permanently and irreversibly insane from a human perspective.

It's not the same as your idea, but there are a lot of similarities.

well my idea was to take coc and make it less beholden to 1980s game design and also less sucky in its implementation of lovecraftian ideas- characters should be rewarded for pressing on, but risking a lot as they do so

[Djinnkitty83]

Topic shift:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/econom ... ali,28718/

Were it posted on TEO, would they get it?

[Crazedwraith]

Arguing with DW too long still gets you banned. Who knew.

[Zod]

think i'mma make the forum more accurate

[adr-admin]

in order to pretend that I'm going against Dawkins, even though Dawkins was using that phrase to describe something else entirely:



LOL "going against Dawkins" that just strikes me as worship

(and of course dawkins used that phrase to describe something else entirely. Dawkins used the actual, accepted definition, not the random shit Wong made up)

[Bakustra]

Dear Mike Wong,

If you didn't want to continue the discussion any longer, there was no need to ban me. You could have simply said "I'm afraid I don't have the time for this right now, would you mind breaking off" and, despite all the nasty things you're thinking about me, I would have gone "Sure!" and broken off.

Sincerely,

Bakustra

PS: If anthropological studies are anything to go by, the first 80-90000 years of existence of anatomically modern humans operated under anarchic societies without any formal hierarchies of power. So you're wrong on that, but interestingly would never admit it, or would rephrase, or would do anything to avoid admitting error on your part, and then hand the blame to me. But what do I know? After all, I'm posting on a "troll board" alongside one of your fuckin' moderators, after all.

in order to pretend that I'm going against Dawkins, even though Dawkins was using that phrase to describe something else entirely:



LOL "going against Dawkins" that just strikes me as worship

(and of course dawkins used that phrase to describe something else entirely. Dawkins used the actual, accepted definition, not the random shit Wong made up)

bring that up

let's get the ban train rollin'

(attention oxygen-deprived lurkers: this was not a serious statement)

EDIT: i'm going to puff my ego up a bit and suggest a title for the inevitable banthread: "Bakustra: Religious Fifth Columnist Who Hated Science, Especially Evolution."

[adr-admin]

i want to see alyrium answer the fmri thing first tho

where i'm going with it is the fmri might show us how human beings reason about a concept

but the concept is still independent of us

so studying the brain doesn't matter



i expect the response will be something like "but morality comes from the brain therefore this is objective real science"

but meh

[Aaron]

Arguing with DW too long still gets you banned. Who knew.

That was pretty sad.

[adr-admin]

btw which post was the anarchist ethics?

i think i missed it

[Aaron]

Oh, I see we're still the TEO scapegoat! Warms my heart that does.

[Oxymoron]

Huh, hmm, what ? They banned Bakustra ? Really ?

[Aaron]

Yeah, in the moral nihilism thread.

Interesting that it never occurs to Mike to just not argue.

[Losonti Tokash]

looks that way

weirdest thing to me is how he wrote out a big long post responding to baks and at the end just goes on a rant and bans him

like what's the point of that, it looks like he just worked himself up so much writing it out and only then decided to ban baks when he finished

which is probably a symptom of line-by-line-it is where someone dissects a post they're responding to without even having read the thing as a whole and writes like they're in a conversation with increasingly angry "i already responded to that earlier in this exact post you literally can't read yet"

[Oxymoron]

Man... That's... pathetic

[Oxymoron]

That place is an intellectual wasteland

I don't even have the motivation to participate in the SDNW5 thingy...

[zhaktronz]

Wah you bad men said mean things about me wah - dw

[Aaron]

That place is an intellectual wasteland

I don't even have the motivation to participate in the SDNW5 thingy...

Yeah. I was thinking of seeing if we could get a Call of that thing I can't remember how to spell going but fuck it.

[Losonti Tokash]

cthulhu

[Civil War Man]

weirdest thing to me is how he wrote out a big long post responding to baks and at the end just goes on a rant and bans him

like what's the point of that, it looks like he just worked himself up so much writing it out and only then decided to ban baks when he finished

To me it looks like he's just trying to get the last word in the argument. It's easier to believe that your points completely destroyed all opposition if you remove the opposition's ability to respond to any of them.

[adr-admin]

lol b&wagon here i cum