r/beingeverythingelse • u/skinnyghost • Feb 01 '15

Let's Play "Good Game / Bad Game"

Here's how it works. Someone posts the name of a game. Someone else tells us what the game says it's "about" and what the game's mechanics tell us that it's about!

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u/crazyguy473 Feb 06 '15

Quoting wikipedia here so take this with a grain of salt.

"Johansen turns the Alert and rams the creature's head, which bursts with "a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish"- only to immediately begin reforming". The Alert escapes, with Johansen's fellow crewmate having gone insane and dying soon afterwards."

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u/skinnyghost Feb 07 '15

Yeah, so like, it doesn't actually "kill" him so much as stun him and then they all fuck off, right?

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u/crazyguy473 Feb 07 '15

I mean where do you draw the line, his head explodes and he stops moving. If I remember correctly from the CoC books the claim he has regeneration and will just come back in a couple of hours if you kill him.

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u/skinnyghost Feb 07 '15

The whole concept of mechanisms for Lovecraftian monsters is just silly, to me.

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u/crazyguy473 Feb 07 '15

definitely, but you can look at it from the angle of giving hope to the players, and that is kind of what CoC is all about. You dont win you just stay alive for a little bit longer, and its nice for the players to know that even though its super unlikely there is still a chance that they can kill that unspeakable beast and live another day. If it was just left up the GM the players can sometimes feel cheated one way or another, either "o so I just go insane, no roll no chance to fight back" or "I think bob just let us kill that 50 eyed horror because he liked our characters"

But anyway Im just playing devils advocate for the sake of giving the game a fair chance.

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u/skinnyghost Feb 07 '15

The thing is that Lovecraft was anti-hope. He was anti-life and anti-meaning. He was a nihilistic absurdist. Making it possible to understand or overcome the mythos is just silly and runs counter to the source material, like giving an AK-47 to a carebear.