MU Podcast 022 – Survival Tips for Players

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Dr. Gerard
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Re: MU Podcast 022 – Survival Tips for Players

Post by Dr. Gerard » Thu Jan 17, 2013 2:43 am

We tried it with Luck, and it didn't make it any less distracting.

I just think it imposed too much. I think you can offer carrots for role play that don't take over the game. The thing that made them particularly aggressive is that you had these six categories to check during a session/adventure, and it just felt too much like a checklist. With ToC's Pillars and Drives, both comparable mechanics, those elements only cast influence on the game to the degree that players and keepers want them to be in play.

I think there are other ways, like role playing by example, like asking leading questions, like using the Socratic method, like avoiding a climate where ideas are shut down...all things that can be done without mechanics. No, you can't force players to role play. But I think you can encourage it. And a little positive social pressure to do so can go a long way.
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Re: MU Podcast 022 – Survival Tips for Players

Post by WiseWolf » Mon Jan 21, 2013 8:18 pm

Great show as always, guys. Honestly you get better with every release.

I disagree with the use of connections. I believe they are a great source for character development and they provide great tools that can be used by the keeper. In the mentioned Trail of Cthulhu scenario "Hellfire Club" that we played in Skype of Cthulhu, Toni, David and even Jim's characters were truly affected by their pillars, Dan's character was lucky enough to avoid stability loss during the whole game, so he never needed to use it. I can see those same artifacts been used in CoC.

I remember that game of Trail where one of the investigators returns home to find his wife hanging from the ceiling. That shattered pillar really worked during the next sessions for role-playing and story building, developing the character even more, turning him into a dark human being.

Of course, every resource can be abused, but even on the example provided by Jon where the watch even turns into a joke during play, what if he loses the watch? How is that going to affect him? Is his character going to be willing to participate in situations where luck seems to play an important role? How is Jon going to roleplay his character fear of loosing just because he doesn't have his "lucky watch" with him? I believe those tools can always be used against the players as Chad mentioned. Connections is a good addition to CoC, we just need to get used to use them so the players and the keepers won't abuse them, and that will take some time as with everything else. Again, just MHO.

Eibon
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Re: MU Podcast 022 – Survival Tips for Players

Post by Eibon » Mon Feb 18, 2013 9:35 am

I was looking over the T.O.M.E. material on yog-sothoth.com and looking at the PDF fragment "Unpleasantness At The Diogenes Club" I spotted that the charcater sheet for this 1890s adventure by John A. Diaper (which predated the release of Cthulhu By Gaslight) included two unusual entries: a set of checkable boxes next to a list called "Interests", and a list with space to write comments next to, under the heading "Attitudes". I reproduce both lists below:

Interests:

Weapons
Drinking
Religion
Horses
Sex
Magic
Brawling
Clothing
Money
Trading
Languages
History
Geography
Legends
Thievery
Crafts
Foreign Lands
Artifacts
Alchemy
Food
Plants
Gems
City Politics
National Politics
Pleasure
Hunting
Dogs
Gossip
Family
Farming
Self

Attitudes:

Family
Other Kin
Overlords
Religious Leaders
Deities
Friends
Acquaintances
Equals

It occurs to me that this was an attempt to do the kind of thing I've been talking about and which Connections was getting at. The lists, as is, have their faults: Sex and Pleasure seem to overlap, Dogs seems a rather odd category and Brawling rather narrow (no Sports, which might cover Brawling and Hunting); likewise "Overloads" and "Deities" categories sound like hang-overs from a Fantasy RPG. But it is fair to ask what attitude one's character has to one's "Betters, Equals and Lessers", rather like the "class sketch" from the British TV series The Frost Report, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_sketch)

It's interesting to me that back in the 80s someone had notice this as an issue and attempted a solution. Maybe this is something to be built upon. There remains an issue of encouraging players to play these attitudes.

(source: http://www.yog-sothoth.com/local_links. ... linkid=465)

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fox01313
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Re: MU Podcast 022 – Survival Tips for Players

Post by fox01313 » Sun Nov 03, 2013 6:17 pm

Finding that the 10 commandments for Investigators to be highly useful & wondering if there's anything else from the older scenarios/books that might be helpful the the same way for essential traveling gear or other general things to know.

As there's a lot of modern horror films that have been rather lackluster to say the least especially in how they're written, I was delighted to hear about Dead Snow as being something new to check out & rather pleased with how it turned out though I couldn't help but remember a well-loved zombie nazi film, Shock Waves (trailer link below). One would think with all the occult dealings that the nazis did, for WWII or later scenarios, easy to come up with some mishap where they found something interesting yet not in time to help them win the war.

Shock Waves trailer (1970s film with Peter Cushing)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlgYDKZQk7s
"That's funny, usually the blood gets off on the second floor." -Mr. Burns in The Shinning episode (Treehouse of horror V)

Dr. Gerard
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Re: MU Podcast 022 – Survival Tips for Players

Post by Dr. Gerard » Mon Nov 04, 2013 12:04 pm

Great film! Yeah, you can't go wrong with Nazi zombies.
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fox01313
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Re: MU Podcast 022 – Survival Tips for Players

Post by fox01313 » Tue Nov 19, 2013 11:12 pm

One thing while relistening to this at work is that with the Gug, there's a few things I thought of which could work apart from just having some Great Old One opening a portal between the normal & dream worlds to just have the players walk through. Not sure if these are in any scenarios (for the spells) but they seem easy enough to do if in the right hands of some cult.

*Simple little spell/alchemy item used in other rpgs-a spell of a waking dream/hallucination where the person affected by this might have seen one in the dreamlands & forgotten about it until now. For CoC, I'd leave any hallucination SAN loss as real or half of it goes away upon waking up but definitely if the person sees the gug & gets hit by it to just mark the hit points as temporary (save for a point or two when falling) so they will believe they are getting attacked only to go unconscious if they hit 0, waking up later to find no trace of the monster being there.

*Nifty necromancy puppet: have a cultist or some big bad know of the gugs & while they couldn't bring one through they could just as easily craft one out of bone/clay/flesh/etc. then a simple spell to let the person take control of it for a set amount of time. For this I'd make it where it's not as durable as a gug but would freak people out as long as the Scooby Doo gang doesn't arrive to show it's a fake monster.

*Lastly taking a cue from The Thing on the Doorstep story. Sure the gug might not be able to get through a gate in the dreamlands but what if some cultist finds a spell to mind swap (or mind remove) something in the dreamlands to take control of it. Now with it being a normal dreamer in a gug body it might know a way out with all kinds of messy problems resulting from that.
"That's funny, usually the blood gets off on the second floor." -Mr. Burns in The Shinning episode (Treehouse of horror V)

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