amvteknoboy wrote:Great episode you guys!
In regards to balancing games, I was more concerned with using the Mythos creatures to push the story forward instead of killing off characters too quickly. I guess I could always fudge rolls, limit the contact that the players have with the creatures, or any variety of other options. I did enjoy your answers though!
Yeah, I wasn't sure if we really answered your question in that show. Pacing out the sanity loss and monster contact in a campaign or scenario can actually be tricky.
I have kind of a funny story about a rookie move that I did in my first campaign. I'll probably tell it on the show at some point if it's relevant. I decided to try dropping two different plot hooks at the same time to kick off a campaign. I wanted a sense of "sandbox" possibility in the game, so the players could follow what they were most interested in.
Problem is, plot hooks are pretty much evidence or events that players
can't reasonably ignore. So one was a PC hiring the group to investigate a haunted place, and another was a parent concerned about their kid getting into a bad crowd. Of course, they followed up on both. Man, was that a mistake. When you run two scenarios at the same time, that's double the sanity loss with no possible recovery until the end of at least one of those threads.
But, assuming you don't do something so boneheaded as that, it's still good to throw in a few 0/1 or 1/1d3 SAN losses before the badness in your story hits the fan. Check out the rulebook for a guide to what kind of horror triggers what level of loss. (Page 76 in my bookThis is pretty much how horror stories go anyway. First, there's some small evidence of big but natural threat -- like a fisherman pulling up half a tuna or bite marks in a boat, then missing people, then a body might turn up, then noises down by the pier, people with torches out at Light House Island...you get the picture. You can add up the average losses for each character if they miss all their SAN rolls and get a good picture of how unstable they will be when you bring the Mythos Hammer down.
("
Smokey, my friend, you're entering a world of pain.")
This is all more bean counting than you really ever need to do, but I think it helps to go through the process ahead of time once or twice just to get an idea of how the game tends to play out. You might use an existing scenario and add up what the average sanity losses would likely be over the course of a story.
For the climactic sanity-blasting scenes, it's good to remember the magic number of 5 -- if any one sanity loss is 5 or more, you've got a possible temporary looney on your hands. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but keep it in mind. So if the SAN loss is 1/1d6, (that format means a loss of 1 SAN pt. for those who make their roll, 1d6 for those who don't) there's a small chance that someone will flip their gourd. If you want to push for a scenario that ends in the Asylum, go for big 1/1d10 elements like corpses rising from the grave (this is the example in the book). If you want to go for more atmosphere and want to keep the PCs intact for the next scenario, dial it down so that the evidence and threat that they witness is more on the forensic, scientific or slightly supernatural level.
Likewise adjust the level of cumulative losses written into the final showdown. If you include more than one kind of monster (characters can get used to strangeness so you don;t have to roll for each instance of a Mi-Go, for example), extra bad things to witness or any of the serious Servitors within the same game hour, you might trigger the Indefinite sanity loss. If your buildup has included tons of losses, and you predict you'll have most characters at 40 or less in SAN by the time shit gets real, then you're looking at characters failing lots of their SAN checks and going batty if they lose more than 8 in a game hour. That's not a great chance for survival. Plus, any single creature that will cause a SAN loss like that is probably going to slaughter a party anyway.
At some point we're probably going to get into the 7th Edition chase rules. But I mention chases here because it's one way that you can have an action-packed scene in Call of Cthulhu that is not strictly about combat.
Okay, I've opined enough. I hope that helps, man. If anyone out there with more experience thinks I'm off the beam here, please let me know!