This is one of the few phenomena Pundit yells about that I've actually seen happen. For a while, entirely shaped by my first games of CoC, I did in fact believe that the first spent shell casing meant you were all gonna die. I labored under this awful mindset for several years, before realizing that not only was this outside the source fiction, it wasn't much fun.

Look, I must disagree.  Everyone knows that confronting a Mythos horror with a firearm is inappropriate.

   You use a chainsaw and napalm.

Andrew

Quote from: SamarkandYou use a chainsaw and napalm.

Against Deep Ones and Shoggoths, respectively.

Quote from: GrimGentAgainst Deep Ones and Shoggoths, respectively.

   Chainsaws and napalm are pretty much universally useful against your mid-level Mythos horror.  So are explosives, to be frank, but the current political climate tends to make the acquisition/use/improvisation of plastique a bit problematic.  Whereas with the aforementioned measures, effective defense of the earth from horrors eating away at the supports of reality is just a combination of a hardware store and service station away.  

    I will allow that shotguns are one exception to the caveat about firearms.  One is the traditional aspect of a boomstick-wielding monster hunter.  The other is that, while trying to hit center of mass with pistol or rifle caliber bullets is problematic in a writhing mass of tentacles, the application of double ought buck or a slug will hit *something*.  Worries about overpenetration are beside the point because, hey, anyone you hit on the other side is a) a cultist or b) probably better off dead anyway if things go south.

     Mind you, the use of a double-barrelled shottie is inadvisable.  Stylish and concealable by sawing off the barrels, yes, but in any mythos confrontation rapid and above all *frantic* emptying of large capacity magazines is de rigeur.  The Saiga-12 with 8 round magazine has become a favoured tool in the discerning investigator's arsenal.  

Remember: support your Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms against abominations from beyond space and time.

Quote from: Christmas ApeThis is one of the few phenomena Pundit yells about that I've actually seen happen. .

I've seen it as well.

Quote from: JongWK*insert evil GM laughter here*

Yah well fortunately he's a shifty bastard...with 7 Edge. I was rolling for crap last night, all night long. :/ Fortunately in that particular instance the Lone Star officer rolled really crappy for frisking me. Gave us time to get a connected contact mobilized and to bail us out.

Anyway, all in all, I'm not sure why the complaining about CoC D20 being killed. If Col. can play for a year that says to me the game is pretty much complete asis. I'm pretty sure there are at least a couple dual stat setting books beyond the inital CoC D20. I don't know if Chaosium has continued on that with that. That might have been their initial plan, to continue with both? So they sub-license to WotC to build the base of the second line for them. *shrug* I know some publishers have found dualstating books to really cut into their bottomline and generally not be worth. Maybe they realized it wasn't going to be worth it and picked the system they were most comfortable with....one that last I checked still had weapons.

EDIT: That would certainly fit with not letting WotC release supplement books with CoC IP.

Quote from: blakkieAnyway, all in all, I'm not sure why the complaining about CoC D20 being killed. If Col. can play for a year that says to me the game is pretty much complete asis.

Yeah, it is. The single core book is enough, really. I have the Keeper's screen for the game, and I looked at some of the dual-stat books, of which I had most of the original versions. I have a ton of the BRP version's books, and I don't see that there is all that much difficulty in adapting them for the d20 version. This is both because the d20 version covers most of the contingencies covered by the BRP version, making plug 'n' play pretty smooth, and because the BRP books are really, really rules-light.

Quote from: blakkieI'm pretty sure there are at least a couple dual stat setting books beyond the inital CoC D20.

Yes, I remember seeing a few. Let's see...the Dunwich, Kingsport, and Arkham sourcebooks all had dual-stat versions published.

Quote from: blakkieI don't know if Chaosium has continued on that with that. That might have been their initial plan, to continue with both?

That's how it seemed to me at the time. It looks like they dropped the dual-stat thing after just a few tries.

Quote from: blakkieSo they sub-license to WotC to build the base of the second line for them. *shrug* I know some publishers have found dualstating books to really cut into their bottomline and generally not be worth.

The dual-stat releases Chaosium did seemed generally lackluster. The original source material was good, sure, but as I said above, there wasn't much to adapting those books to CoC d20. It seemed like they did the absolute bare minimum required, rather than actually trying to expand upon the game.

Quote from: Christmas ApeThis is one of the few phenomena Pundit yells about that I've actually seen happen. For a while, entirely shaped by my first games of CoC, I did in fact believe that the first spent shell casing meant you were all gonna die. I labored under this awful mindset for several years, before realizing that not only was this outside the source fiction, it wasn't much fun.

You see that sort of attitude all the time in Shadowrun Dumpshock forums too. It isn't even entirely misplaced, it is just that the ideal is quiet and lowkey in most urban civilized settings. But crap happens. Just is a few people get more bent out of shape about failing and don't like the guns blazing aspect that the rules mostly support, and some GMs feel it is their duty to really punish making a "mistake". A nice idea taken overboard. *shrug*

The "weapons are useless in CoC" argument is a fucking stupid thing. Cultist die when shot. Almost all the minor races die when shot, and many mid-level beast can be destroyed by gunfire.

Also, in canon stories people shot, bomb, burn or ram the fucking things with fucking ships. If you enter the cult's den and sweep them with gunfire, you're emulating the inspector John Legrasse.

The point against weapons is don't think that weapons alone will save you. Guns won't prevent you from going insane, or make you dodge better. Some monsters are not damaged by them, actually. And most important, guns may be illegal depending on the time and place you play.

And that's all.

It's been a defining characteristic of Lovecraft's stories that humans are not the centre of the universe. That they are not the most powerful, important or influential beings on Earth. Characters in those stories don't "succeed" because they are better, stronger or smarter than the other side. They usually just get lucky.

I think it's difficult to give players a fulfilling game experience, if they cannot win through skill or smarts, but only mere luck. So you either keep a solid game going, where skill and intelligence makes all the difference or you run a game where beating the Mythos isn't achieved through actual player skill. I'm not sure if the two are compatible, but I really don't think I'd enjoy the latter.

It'd be interested to find a CoC game that is not about whether you can beat back the Mythos, but how much you have to sacrifice to do so. The players would have to achieve goal X, but will try to keep their character as intact as possible. That might be the only way to combine actual player contribution with Lovecraft's feel of "humans aren't the be-all and end-all of life".

As a long-time keeper, I'd say that guns have a perfectly legitimate use in CoC. If you want to keep your investigators sane and alive for more than one session, you have to focus your scenarios on their human opponents and only let the beasties make guest appearances (unless the PJs fuck up big time, of course). In this perspective guns are extremely useful to the investigators. Of course, said opponents may take being fired at very personnaly and the various law enforcement agencies may strongly object to their use, so...

Concerning d20 CoC, I'd say its 'failure' is due primarily to CoC being a niche market and d20 CoC not offering enough incentive to make the switch to BRP players. I made it, but  I was already dissatisfied with BRP, particulary with the way it handled action scenes.  This said, from what I read at the time on various French boards, there was also a sizable minority of CoC players who had made 'I'm not a D&D player' a big part of their identity and reacted quite badly to the idea of the new CoC using D&D's system.

I don't know anything about Gumshoe, but I'm definitely in the idea of a private eye game with the Mythos tacked on. I'm even optimistic about it when I remember that tacking the Mythos on X-Files gave us the gem that is Delta Green.

Quote from: WeeklyI'm even optimistic about it when I remember that tacking the Mythos on X-Files gave us the gem that is Delta Green.

Just to be pedantic (and fair to John Tynes & co.), the first Delta Green material published in The Unspeakable Oath preceded the original airing of The X-Files by some months.  It appears to have been a case of parallel evolution.

!i!

Hite and Laws are the exact people I'd trust for an endeavor of this sort. I'm not worried about this at all.

Quote from: WeeklyI don't know anything about Gumshoe, but I'm definitely in the idea of a private eye game with the Mythos tacked on. I'm even optimistic about it when I remember that tacking the Mythos on X-Files gave us the gem that is Delta Green.

I looked through the blog a bit that was linked and they have some playtesting notes on Gumshoe. It looks very mystery centric with adhoc tools to create clues (I think?) rather than starting out with hard set truth and having players try find that, potentially grope around and/or stumble onto it blind.  But that's just an initial impression.

The playtest also notes an effect I thought was interesting. There were more complaints of percieved "railroading" when the GM was letting the players steer things more.  I've seen something like that once. It was like the player didn't actually believe he was in control. Years of that sort of thing cynism lead to him expecting to be railroaded, so he saw it everywhere. Of course it also paralyzed him, so in some ways he was "railroaded"....by the other players. :rolleyes:

Quote from: blakkieThe playtest also notes an effect I thought was interesting. There were more complaints of percieved "railroading" when the GM was letting the players steer things more.  I've seen something like that once. It was like the player didn't actually believe he was in control. Years of that sort of thing cynism lead to him expecting to be railroaded, so he saw it everywhere. Of course it also paralyzed him, so in some ways he was "railroaded"....by the other players. :rolleyes:

I've seen that before.  It seems like no matter how many times I repeat it, sometimes after a game they'll ask "Is that what we were supposed to do?"  You were supposed to do anything, it is what it is.  Even online I can say that I don't have a preconcieved notion of how things should go, but people tend to presume I'm doing illusionism and really have a goal in mind.

As far as mystery games, I read an excellent way to run on on the Forge.  Don't worry, not a bit of theory-speak contained herein, just plain english.

Many times, IME, mystery games can be unsatisfying.  If you look at mystery stories, they usually have Sherlock Holmes or whoever notice tiny, seemingly irrelevent bits of information then put that together to solve the mystery.  Now how do you do this in a roleplaying game?  If the GM tries to describe these seemingly irrelevent details the players can find they are drowning in them.  Conversely if he just gives them the important ones it feels like he's pretty much giving you the answer.  And oftentimes the players won't see the puzzle or will miss a vital notice roll and end up not knowing what to do.  I've played in games where we sat doing nothing with the GM going "Come on guys it's SO obvious!" for hours.

It sucks, and I'm very opposed to suck.  That's when I saw this technique on the Forge.  It proposed that rather than throw data at the PCs and hope the put it together to work it the other way.  Present the PCs with the mystery and let them propose a possible theory.  The GM knows the real answer so he can evaluate how close they are.  Once they have some kind of theory, *then* the search checks come out to see if they can find clues that confirm or deny different parts of the theory.  This continues until the villian is revealed.

I've not gotten a chance to try it, but it looks very promising!