Jumping off from Alexander Macris'
simulationism thread (https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/simulationism/), I was thinking about why Call of Cthulhu is emblematic of genre emulation - a version of dramatism or what the Retired Adventurer calls "Trad" play.
(ref) (https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html) I'm far from a nihilist in real life, but there are feature about why it makes a great genre for gaming.
- Story structure is loose. Lovecraft wrote short stories for pulp magazines, but he avoided most of the pulp horror cliches like damsel in distress, etc.
- Antagonists are horrific but also impossible to understand and seemingly chaotic.
- Main characters can die at any time, for no moral reason.
I think this makes it a lot easier to emulate with a traditional dice-based system. There are still some awkward places between genre and system, but overall it works pretty well.
This is a lot different from a genre like four-color superheroes, where the good guys always win, and there are a lot of repeated tropes.
Dice games are great for emulating Cosmic Meaninglessness and Chaos.
(https://socialecologies.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/zz14_azathoth_9.png?w=268&h=178&zoom=2)
Quote from: jhkim on March 10, 2023, 01:19:27 PM
Jumping off from Alexander Macris' simulationism thread (https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/simulationism/), I was thinking about why Call of Cthulhu is emblematic of genre emulation - a version of dramatism or what the Retired Adventurer calls "Trad" play. (ref) (https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html) I'm far from a nihilist in real life, but there are feature about why it makes a great genre for gaming.
- Story structure is loose. Lovecraft wrote short stories for pulp magazines, but he avoided most of the pulp horror cliches like damsel in distress, etc.
- Antagonists are horrific but also impossible to understand and seemingly chaotic.
- Main characters can die at any time, for no moral reason.
I think this makes it a lot easier to emulate with a traditional dice-based system. There are still some awkward places between genre and system, but overall it works pretty well.
This is a lot different from a genre like four-color superheroes, where the good guys always win, and there are a lot of repeated tropes.
I think any kind of existential horror can work well. I am doing a purgatory setting in the style of Jacob's Ladder (so it is almost at the opposite end of the Nihilism spectrum) but it is working really well with Lovecraftian elements----I'm finding myself more influenced by Lovecraft for this project than I normally would be). Obviously in a purgatory setting, character death could be funky but it is on the table (and I am approaching it in different ways to see what works best). Horrific antagonists and loose structure also works really well here
I don't think it has anything to do with nihilism, but rather that the protagonists aren't endowed with plot armour as in most fiction, so it's easier to emulate in this sense.
In a certain sense, both OD&D and Traveller have the same conceit, while in contrast, both Conan the Barbarian and Captain James Tiberius Kirk are much larger than life, so harder to translate to inherently unsafe role-playing form (though not for lack of trying).
Quote from: jhkim on March 10, 2023, 01:19:27 PMI'm far from a nihilist in real life, but there are feature about why it makes a great genre for gaming.
- Story structure is loose.
- Antagonists are horrific but also impossible to understand and seemingly chaotic.
- Main characters can die at any time, for no moral reason.
These are good points and I agree. However, to look at the other side of it, I think there are also several factors which render cosmic-horror RPGs quite different animals from the original stories:
- The classic reward structure of an RPG is for characters to grow in power and impact on the world, and for players to enjoy the emotional investment in their characters' development over time. A strict emulation of most cosmic horror settings would make it difficult both for individual characters to last for long and for those which did to gain much in the way of real power.
- Games by their nature are a fundamentally pro-social and optimistic activity, whereas two of the strongest emotional notes of cosmic horror are isolation and helplessness. The simple fact that the players are consciously participating in a team exercise to try accomplishing a set condition of "victory" under consistent rules undermines, at least in part, a good chunk of cosmic horror's atmosphere.
- It is in the nature of gamers to try to impose order on the chaotic environments they find (even if sometimes it's only the empty order of wiping out as many enemies as they can), and as a result, gamers tend to grow bored and resentful of environments explicitly defined as being beyond their capacity to meaningfully affect -- it may be acceptable to die for no moral reason, but it's only frustrating and annoying to die for no logical reason, like a sailor who disappears on R'lyeh by falling into an obtuse dimensional angle he couldn't see beneath his feet.
I strongly believe that for games to be entertaining as games, there has to be a fundamental fairness about how they are played -- not necessarily meaning an equal match between opponents in terms of capacity or competence, but fair in the sense that the rules are the same for both sides, are mostly known by both sides, and can't be changed once established. As a result, I think cosmic horror games work far better when they settle for being a separate (albeit related) genre, one which uses the trappings of much cosmicist literature without necessarily trying to emulate exactly its themes or atmosphere.