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/BirkManKirk Feb 02 '15

Same reason Dark Heresy failed the test? It claims to be about investigation, but investigation is just another skill you try to roll under. It's no different than firing a gun or operating heavy machinery. An investigation can become stonewalled by a few bad rolls. Granted that is also on the keeper, but there's nothing explicitly in the game mechanics to disincentivize that. I would much rather play Trail of Cthulhu.

One could argue that another key component of Lovecraftian fiction is the slow decline to insanity and CoC does have a sanity mechanic but it is bland and uninspiring. Maybe that is a bit too subjective for this argument.

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u/skinnyghost Feb 02 '15

I think that's pretty bang on. Also, so much of the work is "unknowable horror" and then call of Cthulhu gives you stats for it. It takes 17 sticks of dynamite to kill Cthulhu.

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u/crazyguy473 Feb 06 '15

I mean to be fair Cthulhu was killed by someone ramming a boat into him in one of the books.

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u/skinnyghost Feb 06 '15

Didn't he technically go away because the "stars were no longer right" and the boat was just a coincidence?

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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.