I’m inclined to believe that it’s wholly imported from warhammer fantasy rp
I don’t have first edition on hand but 2nd edition definitely had extensive and fun spell failure rules and DCC’s use is totally riffing on WFRP
2 Likes
Apparently now have a weekly date to DM my 11 year old solo while my wife takes the 8 year old to soccer. Just making stuff up completely on the fly. He left my BBEG hints on the table in preference to stealing from rich people because he is taking his urchin background extremely seriously, so I bullshat a heist from a local knight’s plantation manor. He roleplays so well with no experience and takes the world and its stakes completely seriously, it’s absolutely heart-melting
10 Likes
People lose this ability from playing in bad games. Everyone is a natural roleplayer otherwise
8 Likes
“Soccer” used to be the euphemism we used for our d&d game around outsiders. Might have borrowed that from someone here?
2 Likes
I wish my boys’ psychotic attachment to soccer was euphemistic
7 Likes
Shadowdark report: it worked great as a way to get people with only 5e experience into an osr style dungeon crawl. As a GM, the thing I appreciated most was initiative in exploration, which was the only way I could’ve ever managed 8 (!!) players.
This is the first time I ever GM’d for anyone who wasn’t my own son, and my third time GM’ing period, so I guess I’ve just jumped into this kind of thing with both feet, which is the way I tend to do things. No one seemed any more than a little bored so I think I did ok.
10 Likes
i fell in a hole and almost died
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We had our character creation session over the weekend, and already I had to bring in some classes external to the original 3 plus 2 in white box. One of the players seems deadset on playing a 5th edition shapeshifting style druid, so I’m going to roll with it but make him work for it. Might become a long term adventure goal.
2 Likes
Have time scheduled this weekend to run a DW game with three others completely new to RP. Having lots of fun reading the manual and Perilous Wilds. I totally did not understand this game the first time I encountered the rule book. But I feel that I do now (at least, as much as one can without having played and really only read it). Excited to discover the story we are going to tell.
I got a bit of an itch for RPGs and started looking into other systems as well.
A friend of mine wanted to play that Bunnies & Burrows game, which is like Watership Down. But I found a game that uses the PbtA rules with the same theme, whcih is apparently a good system for scary stories, called The Warren.
And though I have experience running and playing Call of Cthulhu, I’ve always struggled with the historical setting. Just like, I feel way too distracted wondering what sorts of technologies were around at the time. The 1920/30s feel very heavy in my mind as I run that game. So I’m looking into Delta Green sort of as a replacement that is easier for me to relate with. Though, CoC 7e is great, and I would love to continue to play it. I just know I’ll need to dedicate a lot of prep when I decide to.
And I got a couple cheap copies of those Moldvay rule books and a module too! Hoping to convince a friend of mine to join me and my partner for a real meat and potatoes dungeon crawl experience this Fall.
5 Likes
i’ve played coc with multiple groups, and taking a break every now and then to look up if a certain technology or whatever was available at the time is generally seen as part of the fun for all of them
1 Like
It is fun. Maybe this is another aspect of my inexperience with GMing. Trying to make things smooth to keep them engaging, but smoothing out the wrong parts is something I want to stay alert for.
There’s also this friction I have with CoC adventures in that they’re just really hard for me to create. The balance of adventure and horror just tends to make a flavor that doesn’t really taste like Lovecraft’s stories for the most part. There are a few standout stories or moments in his work, but to me a Lovecraft story is like about a dude going into a submarine and seeing ancient shit and running out of oxygen or weird stones in a jar.
Call of Cthulhu is more like noir detective fiction with shit brimming at the edges and eventually bursting out. So I need to come to terms with that also and learn how to work with that genre.
2 Likes
This game is good with some caveats
It leans a lot more on the freeform/minimal rules end of pbta, so I think its only worth playing after you’ve cut your teeth on the more accessible versions of pbta
The Warren works best if the GM is as brutal as an OSR GM. The constant peril of being a prey animal needs to be felt imo.
2 Likes
CoC adventures are written more from the perspective of the active agents in a lovecraft story rather than the “main character” who is often just the observer of things that already happened.
To use the titular story as way of explanation, you’re playing the crew of sailors who ram a boat into cthulhu’s head, not the dipshit reading the journals of the only survivor
Lovecraft’s technique of triple distancing, ie reading the account of someone reading the accounts of someone who heard a rumor, doesn’t work in tabletop play unless you have a clever GM who uses that as a sort of frame story for narration (I don’t think I’ve seen anyone do this but I think it could be really fun)
What I mean is having the gm narrate and facilitate events as if they are reading the accounts of the player characters after the fact of their adventure, embedding the whole adventure as a ‘flashback’
2 Likes
Oh and if you ever feel like the call of cthulhu rules are too much for what you want to do, I can humbly recommend the Cthulhu Dark ruleset, it’s only 4 pages long and its a great example of how to do horror gaming with minimal rules
2 Likes
This was my suspicion too. And the subject matter seems a bit tense to spring on any of my players without some warmup anyhow.
Does anyone here have any experience with Brindlewood Bay, btw? I’ve been meaning to give it a shot because I hear from all quarters that the mystery building rules are great but I was kind of turned off that it’s a lovecraftian horror game instead of a straightforward “murder, she wrote” simulator
1 Like
Snake the rogue died tonight, fried instantly to death by a high level wizard’s fireball when he tried to steal his shit right in his face. Rip.
My kid instantly was like, cool, I get to roll a new character. Totally accepted his character’s fate at face value with no whining. What an absolute champion.
10 Likes
Chase rules always make me laugh when I read them. Put in all that effort to measure time and distance covered and ability round by round? As if!
But I’d be curious if there’s like a chase game. A cool way to make a story with lengthy chases, like something out of an action movie.
1 Like
funny you should say this, I borrowed a copy of Torq recently and it seems to be exactly this, something of a hybrid between a board game and a story game
6 Likes