Real RPGs, none of that new fangled computer bullshit

[The Brain]

I've never tried Trail of Cthulhu. I'm a Call of Cthulhu guy and happy with that.

[The Brain]

I got the Dune RPG rulebook, but I haven't read it yet.

[jimmy olsen]

I've never tried Trail of Cthulhu. I'm a Call of Cthulhu guy and happy with that.

Try something new old man!

[11B4V]

I'm with Brain, but ordered it just cause. 

[Jacob]

My current project is to kludge together my own preferred collection of OSR rules for (maybe one day) running a sandbox style campaign.

Right now, I'm looking at attaching the skills and character backgrounds (lightly tweaked) from Worlds Without Number to Old School Essentials. Looking to use race-as-class, but allow old fashioned multiclassing (so you could, f. ex. multiclass as Dwarf & Magic-User).

I thought about using the magic rules from GLOG, but I think that'll be getting way too much into the weeds and increase the risk that I'll abandon the project before completion. I do think there's a lot of potential there, though. Maybe I'll run a straight up GLOG game instead one day.

We'll see how far I get....

[Neil]

Got the Colonial Marines book for the Alien RPG. Like the others it's a nice book. Has background info and a 7 part campaign. Some comments though:

Alien/Aliens (my short for the good parts of the Alien universe) has monolithic and faceless non-monster enemies (The Company etc). Describing the setting and organizations in detail kind of takes away the "only put in the background parts necessary for the story" principle that works very well for Alien/Aliens.

My guess is that the makers of the RPG had to take the whole license, ie even the crappy later Ridley Scott movies. Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection were not good movies, but at least they stuck to the relevant stuff, the xenomorph. The later Scott movies though are very bad from a pure movie perspective and what's worse in this context the whole Engineers BS is thematically completely disconnected from Alien/Aliens. The Engineers stuff could have worked in its own setting, but bolting it onto Alien/Aliens demeans them both. I assume Scott had Engineers ideas and just wanted to cash in on the Alien name, and that's why he made them Alien movies. Fair enough, I respect the hustle, but it didn't make for a great product. So, they had to include Engineers stuff in the campaign. Luckily the adventures are built in a way that makes modifying them fairly simple, making it easy for the GM to do some cleaning (so the players won't have to relive the cringe of Scott making the super cool fossilized alien in the first movie having been literally a guy in a rubber suit, for instance...).

Scott wanted to tell a story that was about humans in space and the idea of meeting your maker, with some of the themes from the Alien movies.  Fox basically mandated that it had to be a prequel.  This is especially apparent in Covenant, where the movie spends huge amounts of time on David and what he's been up to and how it contrasts with Walter, but once the familiar Xenomorph appears, it's quite obvious that Scott doesn't give a damn and is only doing this to get the money from the suits to do what he really wants to do, and the sooner it's over with the better. 

Having leafed through it a bit, it seems to me that it tries to be as agnostic as possible.  I even detected hints of Dark Horse influence here and there.  The problem is that increasing setting descriptiveness helps with sales, and the Alien canon is such a horrendous mess. 

[The Brain]

Dunno if it's been linked already on Languish, but a pretty handy tool if you need portraits for PCs or NPCs: https://artflow.ai/

Example: i did "100 years old man with a mischievous grin", and this was the result:

[Syt]

Interesting, but it seems hit and miss on more detailed descriptions.

[The Brain]

It's definitely not perfect. And it doesn't have items, like glasses etc.

[Barrister]

estimated wait time - 225 minutes

[The Brain]

  Yeah they're getting pretty overwhelmed when many people are awake.

Some other examples I did:

[jimmy olsen]

Legitimate criticism? 

https://www.enworld.org/threads/cthulhu-guns-and-a-sanity-check.596522/

Call of Cthulhu very famously declares that knowledge of archeology or the Dewey decimal system is at least as important for ensuring the survival of investigators as being well armed. This is supposedly because of the alien, inscrutable nature, of the foe and its nigh immunity to the weapons with which humanity might arm itself. But consider the following case taken directly from the 5e RAW:

A big game hunter on safari with considerable skill in firearms (80% rifle), accidentally startles a black rhino at a range of 30 yards. The Rhino, immediately charges. Fortunately, our intrepid hero already has his heavy rifle in his hands, having just exchanged his lighter weapon with the one his native rifle bearer was carrying precisely because he feared this sort of circumstance. Now, in reality this is truly a life threatening scenario. The hunter must make this shot or in all likelihood he will die. Fortunately, the hunter is very skilled and the player throws a 40 on his dice indicating a hit. So the player dutifully throws 3d6+4 with the result of 15 damage. The GM marks this down to 5 on account of the animals 10 point hide. But the hunter is well equipped, this being a double barreled rifle, he lets fly the other barrel with the rhino now at point blank range and rolls a 16, indicating a an impaling attack. He again rolls, this time indicating 30 damage, which the GM marks down to 20. The rhino, wounded but still not dead, gores the hunter for 20 damage instantly killing him.

From this example, it can be seen that the black rhino is emphatically as immune to firearms in the system as almost all alien horrors. Only a fool would hunt such a beast with less than a 1920's era vehicle mounted heavy machine gun, since less than that certainly favors the rhino. All the .38 caliber police specials, .25 caliber vest pocket guns, .45 caliber Colt M1911's and the occasional double barreled shot guns that the investigators normally carry are no better at protecting them in this situation than they would be against the alien horrors that they are supposed to be afraid of. Indeed, where the whole party equipped with elephant guns they might be only slightly better off. In the game world created by these rules, a 1890's or 1920's investigator ought to be just in horror of animal life as they are of things from beyond.

The reality of course is that even armed with spears and arrows, humanity has been quite able to eradicate to the point of extinction any normal life it chooses to hunt much bigger than a rat, and that by the 1920's the balance of power had shifted to the point that no more than a few thousand European hunters would nearly drive the megafauna of Africa to extinction all on their own. In the game, an elephant gun has only about 50% chance on the first ball of killing a lion or tiger, yet in reality such powerful weapons are generally not used against game as small as the big cats, as the impact will quite literally rip the animal apart and thereby completely ruin your trophy. In reality, the worry with a charging rhino would be that you did not have time to switch to your heavy gun, thereby leaving you needing to a make a perfect shot through a thinner part of the skull or that in the excitement you would not be able to train such a heavy weapons as your elephant gun accurately and that you'd miss, or that the weapon would misfire. Against a rhino, that you'd strike the target and not kill it was not so much of a worry. Against an elephant, that was a more real worry, but even then the elephant gun was 50% likely to get the job done even with the low velocity 4 and 6 bores of an earlier age, much less the large caliber nitro express weapons available from the 1890's on.

In short, two things are completely clear, either the black rhino is vastly overrated, or guns are vastly underrated. The reality may be some of both, but of the two it's the firepower of the guns that is more obviously lacking. One thing that is immediately obvious looking at the firearms rules, is that the writers know nothing about guns. Guns are at times mislabeled, misidentified, poorly described and sometimes given the wrong calibers, or at least the wrong standard calibers. Worse, they seem to have no real clear understanding of the difference in stopping power and lethality of different sorts of guns. For example, let's suppose that the number given for 9mm parabellum of 1d10 damage is believable. If that is the case, then the number given for .25 caliber ACP or .41 caliber short for vest pocket guns of 1d6 is also believable, as is the 2d8 damage assigned to 5.56mm NATO. But the authors seem to have absolutely no understanding how much less stopping power 5.56mm NATO has than high caliber hunting rifles or earlier age battle rifles like the .303 Lee, .30-06, or 7.92x57mm Mauser - all of which do but 2d6+4 damage despite having more than twice as much energy. The minimum damage on these weapons goes up, but the maximum damage doesn't change, which is rather the opposite of what we'd expect of a projectile with more energy since getting clipped through a thin portion of your body is about the same in both cases, but hitting bone or going through thick masses of flesh or punching through armor is a very different proposition. Even crazier, weapons as extreme as the .50 BMG or the 13.2mm TuF meant to destroy vehicles and which are complete overkill versus human targets, only do in the system 2d10+4 damage. In reality, a shot by such weapons have about 5 times the energy of even a hunting rifle, blast a man sized target apart - killing with hits that would not otherwise be lethal - and a single bullet would go through the skull of a charging elephant and travel the 12-18 feet to rip out of the other side.

Musing on this leaves me with tons of questions.

1) First, even with the rules unchanged, the game seems to assume that the players with futz around with .38 colt revolvers, .25 vest guns, sharpened fencing foils and broken table legs as weapons. I think that in reality - especially in the long run - this is unlikely, and we'll see the whole party arrive on site with elephant guns, 10 gauge shot guns, high powered rifles, Tommy guns, braces of Remington model 1890 revolvers firing 44-40, Colt 1911's, boxes of dynamite and 40 gallon drums of gasoline. You wouldn't go hunting even deer or elk with the sort of weaponry they seem to expect investigators to carry, why would you go hunting monsters with such popguns. Even with the rules unchanged, I think this more 'realistic' and 'ruthless' approach vastly changes the dynamics of most published scenarios. All of that is pretty much legal and readily available in 1920's America, which might be why you don't see many mythos creatures around now. Anything less than a Elder God has learned to keep their head down. The reality is that even in the 1920's, mythos creatures appear to be endangered species.

Has anyone had experience with investigators that don't cower in horror and instead take this realistic and ruthless approach to scenarios? If so, what's it like?

2) If we change the firearms rules even slightly to make them more realistic - say changing the damage from a high caliber hunting rifle or battle rifle from 2d6+4 to 3d6+2 so that it realistically can kill a great cat - then the 'ruthless' approach gets even more favorable. Running gun battles might become even less desirable of a thing for investigators to get involved in regularly, but the approach of gunning down mythos monsters starts to become really viable. Lesser races generally would go down in a hail of bullets. Although there are still some great old ones you wouldn't want to fight with less than a pre-sighted artillery barrage, shooting up certain great old ones is not out of the question if the investigators have enough firearms and enough firearms skills. The fact that mythos creatures are largely unknown to society seems in this case to do more with the face that avoiding open warfare with the primitive but savage and dangerous humans is not a bad idea.

Is this scenario all that different than the way the game could actually play now, or would changing the firearms rules to make them more realistic with respect to hunting just be a bad idea all around? If we made the firearms rules more realistic, would we need to tweak the mythos creatures to compensate or would eventual sanity drain and the general doom that comes to anyone that gets within tentacle reach of a mythos creature still get the job done?

Any advice by an experienced keeper would be appreciated.

[Habbaku]

Treating CoC as a monster-hunt seems like a failure on the part of a GM. 

[jimmy olsen]

Treating CoC as a monster-hunt seems like a failure on the part of a GM. 

Not every game is a one shot where you gaze upon the true form of Nyarlathotep and get mind blasted into permanent insanity.

Plenty of minor to midsize monsters out there that are material enough to kill and won't drive you completely crazy immediately. Just drip, drip, drip gnawing at your mind over a few years until there's nothing left.

[Habbaku]

I'm not sure how your response has anything to do with mine. Maybe I missed the part where I wrote that CoC was supposed to be a one-shot.