Thanks for the feedback. The names web sites are really good!Dr. Gerard wrote:Ok, with due respect to a veteran Keeper, I'd like to push back a little here. I obviously can't say I've had tons of experience with this rule yet, but I'd urge you to give it a chance. I've been exploring a similar mechanic in the rules-light system Cthulhu Dark, which calls for players to roll to determine the degree of their success for a given action instead of pass/fail. [edited to save space, see original post for full text]
I actually see the merits of that argument, but have learned that it's not for me.
Very curious to hear more of your thoughts on this, Mr. Eibon. This seems like good stuff for discussion on the show.
I did think twice before including a "negative" comment. I'm not a natural troll.
My comment came from recording of the seminar on the yog-sothoth.com site. Mike and Paul suggest that a character, returning to an "old bookshop", having failed his roll, gets the clue he needs just as the "Closed" sign is put up and people in the shop start drawing knives. Do cultists hang around bookshops hoping for after-hours knife-fights? It feels Pulpy and could well be counter-productive -- what if the player is seriously injured before transmitting the clue, you're stuck again! This is a bad example of a fail having consequences and the examples given here are much better and more persuasive.
However, a "fail" has other elements to it.
Suppose I go into a local library and look for the Necronomicon. I fail to find it. That has two explanations: either my search was not good enough, or the library doesn't have the book. I don't know which is true (only by finding the book would I resolve that question). But an RPG fail of the kind suggested, would seem to mean I find the book, because the book contains information relevant to the adventure, so I can never really "fail", only be inconvienced while succeeding. In the more realistic version I don't know if the book is in the library or not, so I have a reason to take a second look. Maybe again I fail, but because I've already looked in all the obvious places first time, now I'm looking for cross-references and I find a copy of Nameless Cults in which von Junzt quotes just the passage I need for the adventure. We're off again and I'm not left with the anomaly of a local library containing such a rare book as the Necronomicon. I was looking for the Necronomicon and failed to find it, but am still in the adventure. So rather than closing off avenues, the fail leaves us open to look a second time while maintaining believability.
Fails can also add to adventures. I'm thinking here of a book like Colin Bateman's Divorcing Jack. In the book the protagonist hears someone's dying words as "divorce Jack" and goes on a quest to find Jack. Only toward the end does he realise that things might not be as he believed. A role-play version of this story run under this mindset would tend to "correct" the protagonist's misunderstanding because the real plot is different to the one the protagonist is pursuing -- but the adventure is more interesting because the protagonist failed his listen roll. We can learn from failure as well as from success. That needs keeping.
I did have something like this happen in a game once. The players discovered an English public school where the children were being transformed by Yuggothian technology. The players naturally assumed it was an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" plot and acted accordingly by killing the teachers and burning down the school with it's child-pods in it. Except that wasn't what was happening. The headmaster has been driven mad by encountering the Mi-Go while on a climbing holiday in the Alps. He concocted a plan to trick the Mi-Go. Using their technology he would convert his pupils so they could live on the surface of Yuggoth. He would then open a gate to Yuggoth and send his pioneer army to conquer Yuggoth in the name of the British Empire -- it was a reverse of the Body Snatchers plot. It was my fault the plot got lost. My plan was that the players would stand in shocked horror as the teacher explained the plot, but what they really did was blow his head off. I should have set it up so they could have found his diaries earlier and got the plot set-up before the final encounter. Only after they wiped-out the school did they discover the true plan, and then suffered some serious San loss. The adventure still worked, and is well remembered by the players, but not how I'd planned it. But RPGs are at least partly about these kinds of unanticipated variants. It's how come we've all played Shadows of Yog-Sothoth but it has never played out the same twice. Players don't always do what scenario writers expect -- a Keeper needs to go with the play as it is happening.
If the purpose is to drive the plot, then it becomes a story-telling RPG and game mechanics cease being important, so using game mechanics to "fix" a plot becomes irrelevant.
The way I play right now is that I tell my players that straight dice rolls don't automatically mean success or failure. There are other factors, which may give pluses or minuses, which I apply after the roll. I ask to know how much above or below their skill the roll was. I then give a statement, avoiding success/fail terminology. Sometimes a success is obvious ("You smash open the door with your shoulder"), but other times its not.
For example, the players are shadowing a Cultist, who turns a corner onto a street, it will be maybe 30 seconds before he's back in sight. Reaching the street the player has a Spot Hidden. He succeeds by 26 points, but the villain as taken the opportunity to jump into a waiting car. So I'd say something like, "You scan the street ahead, but there's no-one on the sidewalk who resembles the man you're following. There are about a dozen men and women walking about. A Ford is pulling away from the kerb. You look the other way, but you still can't see him." I'd expect most people to pick up on the car, but some will start checking that he's not hiding in a doorway or something. If they are clearly lost, I'd drop a hint about the car. If they realise the car early enough they might ask to memorise its number-plate. When they come to recall it or write it down, I'd ask for an Idea roll (as a reflection of how good their memory is). A fail here would give them a partial number. This might return three addresses in the Boston area who own that model of Ford with those numbers. Now they have to check out three people. You can either make something of this, or quickly have them eliminate the two innocents. But what I try not to do is go, "You succeed: you can see him sitting in the back of a car as it pulls away from you." That response has its place, but perhaps less so in a Lovecraftian game.
Feel free to move clues from one location to another, if your players have missed something vital. Give them something intriguing, like a key. Players will go out of their way to find a lock that can be opened by a mysterious key. The key opens a locked draw which contains the handouts they need but have missed so far -- yes, it's crude, but it works. Puzzle-boxes, lockets and briefcases with combination locks can also be used here. As an aside, if you are using an published adventure, remove handout reference numbers from the handouts. I've seen players notice that they are missing handout 4b from the collection. It spoils the illusion and makes it harder to slip extra clues in if needed.
While I do think the CoC rules are pretty close to perfect, I'm not against looking at them and seeing if they can be improved/simplified/refined. The cynical part of me thinks it might just be another way to get me to buy Masks of Nyarlathotep for the eighth time, but I do see that it's a worthwhile project and being done for the right reasons by Mike and Paul. But if it ain't broken, then don't fix it, as they say. The MU Podcast can do as much to "fix" the issue by suggesting options to new players. Mike and Paul went on to say that good scenario design and Keepering would fix much of this anyway. They also say, if you don't like the rule, don't use it. All of this sounds good to me. I am excited to see how Connections works (less so the Luck bit) and am not against this update. Having brought the rulebook several time with little more than a change of typeface to tell them apart, I do applaud the experiment and want to see good things coming from it. But remember AD&D -- its a warning to history --it was revised to death. I don't want CoC to go the same way. So long as they don't think that it must be changed for the sake of change rather than because it improves the play, then I'm right behind them.
I've not played the rules, so my opinion on the rules themselves is uninformed, but from that ill-informed position I'm not eager to try this rule. It doesn't seem to solve any issue that I've not already solved through sensible application of the existing rules.
The mimicry of the shoggoths reminded me of the novel