I have the Gumshoe SRD and Mutant City Blues. I'm really grooving on it lately, but I'd like to know how others feel. Would you run it, or run it again?

Nope.  

Foundational reason for the system (delivery of clues) wasn't ever a problem in the first place with a good GM.

Approach to using skills is too OOC for my tastes.

I picked up Trail of Cthulhu because I was interested in Ken Hite's take on a mythos based game. A nice read and a good source of ideas, but I've never actually used the system. Like CRKrueger, I find that Gumshoe sets out to solve a problem I never had.

I've played it several times in its Trail of Cthulhu incarnation. The gameplay is swift and fun. I feel like the resource management of your skills gives each character moments to shine, and is quite satisfying.
Now would I like it as a GM? Not sure about that.
Something in my gut still likes Call of Cthulhu better. It feels more authentic. Just old associations playing in there probably.

We played out an arc of Night's Black Agents, and I had mixed feelings about it. I really liked the conspyramid, but that's a GM prep tool the players don't encounter directly.

The investigative skills economy is very meta; you're occasionally in a situation where you want to do something your character knows how to do, but you're out of points.

I find the right headspace is to think of it as a highlight reel of investigative drudgery. It's not that you've used up everything you know about Budapest, it's just that, when all was said and done, your knowledge of Budapest didn't happen to contribute.

It works at sharing the spotlight, both between players and between their favored and less-favored skills. Dropping your tommy gun and drawing your knife as you close in for the kill is kinda badass, but it's a bit mechanically bald to do it just because you're out of gun skill points.

Recharges and so on are a nice idea, but the GM has to notice that your 'technothriller monologue' is a disguised request for points, and that doesn't always happen in the heat of battle.  After saying something thematic, "Hey, can I have a point for my role-playing?" is really lame.

NBA's combat system strikes me as a pile of house rules in dire need of an edit. I usually prefer a hard copy of a game, but this game was built for Ctrl-F'ing your way through the PDF trying to remember how depleted uranium rounds work since every weapon and ammo has a totally different mechanic (and DU ammo has three) for no reason I can discern.

Frustratingly, most of the heavy options don't have any intrinsic value, but are instead opportunities to spend points to do more damage.. except for flamethrowers. For some reason, flamethrowers are completely cheaty and bypass the point economy entirely. Always carry two.

Apart from that, it's whiffy, and reminds me of a bunch of 1HD characters rolling d20 and missing a lot. It seems to be designed to give everyone a chance (just a chance, mind you) to shine, rather than being particularly deadly or decisive.

Frankly, I'd rather scrap the whole combat system and treat it like investigative points spent in the style of Amber stats, treating weapons like force multipliers. You're a martial artist with a pen knife? Great, spend a point and you can kill that guy. Have an SMG? Well, you can probably take out two or three of them. Trapped in an elevator with only your bare hands, surrounded by the kingpin's thugs? Spend big, or you're going to wind up on life support.

By the time we got to the end of the arc, we'd advanced enough to do some serious damage, but this translated into insane head-kill burst shots on round one, and then slappy fights with the remaining mooks as we flailed around without any points.  (The system wants you to save your points instead of doing this, but anyone who lets a vampire run around for more than one round when they don't have to is just asking for death.)

All in all we really enjoyed the campaign, but the system isn't my cup of tea.

That's interesting. Sounds like combat is a big hole in the system. The games I played in had almost zero combat, but I can see how it would work out very counter intuitively with an early point-spend ...

Quote from: CRKrueger;888340Nope.  

Foundational reason for the system (delivery of clues) wasn't ever a problem in the first place with a good GM.

Approach to using skills is too OOC for my tastes.

This.

Quote from: CRKrueger;888340Nope.  

Foundational reason for the system (delivery of clues) wasn't ever a problem in the first place with a good GM.

Approach to using skills is too OOC for my tastes.

This was my reaction too. That and the first few pages for the "Great Revelation!" of why Call of Cthulhu sucked and thus needed "fixing" came across as 'pretentious twattery' as someone else put it so eloquently.

Their setting books like Ashen Stars and Esoterrorists were interesting though.

I've actually GMed about 40 - 50 sessions in Trail of Cthulhu. My thoughts?

Yay and nay.

Investigative system? Very yay, not as OOCly as most would here post. In practice, almost not at all, though my players actually enjoyed the narrative possibilities of spending points to introduce, for example, an NPC or a new subclue that'd provide the answer. The approach as described definitely helped develop me as an investigation - running GM.

The big nay?

As mentioned before - combat, and any sort of checks that could be failed...well, for me it was a reason to move back to CoC and just use ToC's mentality while running it (and might move soon to 7e as I have a bit of money for new books, because to me 7e seems like a perfect blend). The combat was simply bland and emotionless, and generally the General Abilities (no pun intended) just feel badly designed, much less elegantly than simple percentages of CoC.

So, to summarize - for me the perfect blend'd be to take Investigative Abilities, and General Abilities in those systems with separate, percentile based mechanics.

Quote from: markfitz;888349That's interesting. Sounds like combat is a big hole in the system. The games I played in had almost zero combat, but I can see how it would work out very counter intuitively with an early point-spend ...

It is - very odd, clunky, unemotional and rather distracting from IC.

Quote from: CRKrueger;888340Nope.  

Foundational reason for the system (delivery of clues) wasn't ever a problem in the first place with a good GM.

Approach to using skills is too OOC for my tastes.

Count me as another person who agrees strongly with this.

I've got Ashen Stars and there are parts I like, but I really didn't care for skills. And clues have just never been a problem when I ran investigative games before. When I run Cthulhu games I actually use Realms of Cthulhu (though I may soon try using Silent Legions), and I think Savage Worlds is a much better system overall.

I think it is definitely worth checking out. For me it resolves a problem with investigations that I don't have, but it produces a lot of interesting mechanics and ideas toward that end. There are some aspects to it that, if you run it completely as written, could muck with certain styles of play or GMing. But it is a very light and easy system, one with a few tweaks can easily fit to another style and it has that 'fades into the background' feel when it does fit.

Also, from what I've gathered from others, Gumshoe has evolved a lot in each version of the system. Most of my experience with it is from Esoterrorist (which is a pretty rudimentary form of the game). The game feels very scene focused, which tripped me up initially, since I don't think in terms of scenes. But another GM who runs it a lot helped explain other ways of thinking of the system to me and that shed some light on running it in a way that fit my style better.

One thing I have seen with this game is that for people that it clicks with, it works great. I know people and have spoken with people for whom it has really made a big difference.

I've played two sessions of Esoterrorists and about a dozen of Trail of Cthulhu.

The telling point with skill point spending that turned me off was this:  A character has a loaded gun, but their best choice is to club an enemy with it because they are out of Firearms points, but still have Weapons points for boosting. This happened several times, and seemed utterly nonsensical.

I also agree that the investigative skill issue is a solution to a problem I don't have. In Gumshoe, you don't know what you're buying when you're asked to spend a skill point, so it isn't really a useful choice at all. I'd prefer to just roll dice rather than make an arbitrary choice.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;888364The game feels very scene focused, which tripped me up initially, since I don't think in terms of scenes. But another GM who runs it a lot helped explain other ways of thinking of the system to me and that shed some light on running it in a way that fit my style better.

That's one aspect in which adventures produced for Trail of Cthulhu seem to have improved over time. When I first started checking out material produced for ToC (for running with CoC rules) the way everything was presented in little pre-digested "scenes" really grated on me. It felt like I was reading someone's unfinished screenplay rather than an RPG product. I've noticed that more recent material has backed off of that presentation a bit, which, for me, makes for easier use.

I'm not entirely sold on the system... but on the other hand, the sourcebooks and settings that have been produced for it have been pretty great.  I'm a big fan of Bookhounds of London as an idea, for instance.

Nay.

I started reading Trail of Cthulhu and stopped when I saw the writer/editor can't or won't use English pronouns correctly.