I'm going to be running classic CoC for the first time soon (foolhardily jumping straight in with my own scenario...) and one of my favourite plot devices is the classic "diary entries descend into madness".
Obviously investigative games are going to be slower paced than your average dungeon crawl/bash, but I'm still wary of what seems like it could just end up as another form of the dreaded "boxed text".
Some of these can be quite long if they are to be effective enough, and I don't want anyone getting bored. Is it better to hand them to the players and have them work through it, or read it aloud myself?
Quote from: AndrewSFTSN;703822I'm going to be running classic CoC for the first time soon (foolhardily jumping straight in with my own scenario...) and one of my favourite plot devices is the classic "diary entries descend into madness".
Obviously investigative games are going to be slower paced than your average dungeon crawl/bash, but I'm still wary of what seems like it could just end up as another form of the dreaded "boxed text".
Some of these can be quite long if they are to be effective enough, and I don't want anyone getting bored. Is it better to hand them to the players and have them work through it, or read it aloud myself?
Hand outs.
Newspapers, diary entires letters, note books etc all better as physical props but they take a bit of time to prep.
they will ignore most of it one guy will read throuygh the others will plow on with action....
Handouts. Especially if the players mirror their characters mental and deductive faculties. Thus if they breeze through or come to the wrong decision then that is their own fault.
But.
Think ahead to the players mentalities. Whos going to be reading most of the notes? One? Several? Will they divvy up tasks to go faster then compare notes? How well will they RP the whole deal?
Things to take into account before hand as sometimes you need to tailor to the groups capacity.
Handouts are the way to go if you are representing actual items the PCs discover. This lets them re-read parts and put things together instead of trying to recall what was said as boxed text.
I'm very much in love with handouts, but usually I am too lazy to prepare them. So if you won't have time/motivation to make one, just shorten the depiction of the journal to, well, a description of a journal depicting a descent into madness. If you do have time to actually write the journal up, just give it to players to read, they won't be bored, I assure you.
I'm going to agree with the handouts suggestions as well, but try to make them look somewhat authentic. Even if you key the content, print it out in a script font to look handwritten, create margins on the page and cut the paper to look like a diary size rather than letter or A4. Another trick -- stain the final pages with tea, even burn the edges to make them look old, crumple them up a bit.
Then be prepared to give them a synopsis of the content based on hours spent reading in game time (don't slow your game down to have them read the stuff then and there) but let them take the stuff home if they want and read off-line. Even hide little bits to reward diligent players.
I used a descent into madness diary with prophecies in game. I think it is best when one player reads it versus the GM.
Another helpful thing I found is that I made the relevant through out the Campaign so that every 5-6 sessions someone would read through them to see if some new passage had knew meaning with the information they had discovered since. They did so up until the last few sessions when everyone knew them back and forth and it led directly to the final campaign ending session where they saved the world (From their perspective).
The notes were only about 7 pages though they were the relevant passages from a much bigger diary.
Handouts are better. What would usually happen in real life is one or a couple of people will read the article then explain the gist to others in the group. Plus it lets them dub in their own mental voices for the reader.
I can never read box text in anything but the stilted voice from the Dead Alewives D&D sketch, so yeah - handouts.
I use handouts a lot (you can see some scanned examples on my blog). What I do is have the players take turns reading out different pages of the handout, passing the journal pages or whatever round the table and reading out different parts - even if their PC isn't present.
In my experience if the entries are decently written finding and reading the journal entries is the opposite of boring. My players seem to get very absorbed in the handouts and start trying to puzzle out meaning from them, planning based around them, discussing and debating their content, etc. I'd argue that handout-reading can actually be more engaging than combat a lot of the time.
Quote from: Steerpike;703983I use handouts a lot (you can see some scanned examples on my blog).
I can see why those handouts might engage the players, you certainly seem to have plumbed the depths of phrenology and early psychiatry! Awesome stuff, the texts have a fine tinge of horror too.
Thanks! 19th century psychiatry and medicine generally incline themselves pretty well to horror as it is. Throw in a few Intellect Devourers, Grimlocks, and crazy grafted types and the adventure almost wrote itself. Just finished the 3rd session of it so far.
I can't bring myself to make handouts.
Handouts are cool. Much better than just reading some boxed text out verbatim. But, I definitely don't bother making it look authentic, I just write it out by hand on a sheet of paper. Done.
Here's a good trick for making handouts more interesting. Write out the text verbatim as above, then explain that the in-game text itself is somehow unreliable or incomplete - a tattered and crumbling old scroll, a corrupted datafile, a partially intercepted transmission, etc. Get the players to roll a d6. Count that many words across, and then scribble that word out completely. Get them to roll another d6, count across from the word you just removed, and scribble that one out too. Continue until you get to the end of the document, then watch the players speculate like mad about the missing information. :)
Handouts of several sorts, but specifically of the "diary of people going crazy" sort, have been used to great effect in our group, specifically for CoC.
Don't read aloud, ever. Let the players keep the handouts only if their characters get ahold of the diary or text; if they want to see the handout again, they have to gain access to the text again. Smart players will take notes and possibly start PC diaries of their own, that you can use in another game with another group, et cetera ad infinitum (that's how it happened with our group).
If you can do a similar thing for Mythos tomes (not the whole book, of course, just one or a few relevant passages), even better. We did that too, complete with gibberish magical alphabets with pronunciation key, and the expectation that the player (poor old me) would memorize and recite the verbal formula of the spell to cast it. Thankfully I have great short-term memory.
Another great quasi-handout medium for creepyness: phonograph recordings. They were represented out-of-game, prop-wise by pieces of paper rolled into cylinders. Look up "creepy chant" on YouTube or Google for recordings of rituals, or just see if you can find a real creepy avant-garde electronic atonal piece for Sound Bites From Beyond (Carcosan soirée, hideous piping for Azatoth or whatever).
I guess I could just show them some selections of my own magical diary...
I made some handouts for the OD&D game I ran last night. I put together a village notice board with various "wanted" and "missing" notices attached written in different font scripts and attached with tape. The players have it to look over and they can follow up on the ones they find most interesting.