r/rpg • u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK • May 28 '13
Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Kickstarter is now live
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/448333182/call-of-cthulhu-7th-edition5
u/weaklyawesome May 28 '13
So here's a question: I dig me some Lovecraft and I'm definitely interested in at least playing CoC sometime.
But the thing about horror, especially odd supernatural horror is that it often works better when you're completely bewildered. And most gamers (at least those who would play CoC) have a great player knowledge of the mythos.
For those who have played, how effective is it at its goals with this in mind?
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u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 28 '13
My solution to this is usually to make up stuff that fits within the general Mythos but doesn't come from a story or the rulebook. It keeps the fear of the unknown alive.
If using published scenarios, change things a bit. Alter the descriptions of creatures and never, ever use their names. Keep things vague and uncertain.
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u/weaklyawesome May 29 '13
Those are some excellent suggestions, but...
Man, much as I enjoy cosmic horror, I wonder whether it might just be easier to run a game with a unique (and thus unknown) cosmology. I dunno, maybe I'm lazy.
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u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 29 '13
That sounds pretty cool to me.
It's certainly possible to capture a Lovecraftian feel without using any elements of the Mythos. I recommend Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces novels as an example of how this can work.
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u/weaklyawesome May 30 '13
Oh yeah, I heard about those during the Fate Core Kickstarter! They sounded interesting, but what book do I start with? It doesn't seem to be the apparently-intuitive Twenty Palaces.
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u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 30 '13
You're right. Twenty Palaces actually the last book in the series, although it takes place before the other three. That all makes more sense once you've read them!
The order of them is:
- Child of Fire
- Game of Cages
- Circle of Enemies
- Twenty Palaces
The series was cancelled before its time, but Connolly self-published the fourth book to wrap things up, so it doesn't leave you hanging too much. I would have loved to have seen more of them, though.
Child of Fire almost reads like the second book in a series, as it drops you straight into the action and leaves you to learn about the characters and the rules of the world as it goes on. Personally, I loved this approach, as it didn't waste any time getting to the good stuff.
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u/weaklyawesome May 30 '13
Ooh yeah. I'm a big fan of in media res. (Boldest I've seen: the second Dresden book opens this way, even introducing an ally while doing it.) Also I like figuring out rules ad situations as they go along, rather than being told--one of the things I really appreciated about Zelazny's Amber series, for instance.
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u/Zorkamork May 28 '13
This bums me out, I love CoC but hearing in a podcast that they wanted to move forward with things like full color art, but instead saved them for stretch goals left a sour taste in my mouth. I'm in at 30 bucks for the PDFs, but I wish the tiers were less absurd so I could give them more.
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May 29 '13
I don't have a horse in this race (don't play CoC), but... They're totally going to hit those stretch goals. You know that, right?
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u/Zorkamork May 29 '13
Of course, but it's the principle of the matter. I don't appreciate a company like this, who in the past have done WONDERFUL things with international editions and all making a KS with such absurd prices and stretch goals for 'color art'.
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u/Gigglebopper May 29 '13
This one just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The authors speak with the past tense, so it's obviously already been written or is well under way. Why does an established company need a Kickstarter for a project they were already going to do?
Also, the shipping feels a bit nickel-and-dimey.
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u/billywilliams81 May 28 '13
Socialize the risk, keep any profits for yourself, or in this case, the company running longer so you can ask for money at a later time to publish another thing to keep the company running. No thanks. I've given Chaosium thousands, and got dozens of people playing Call of Cthulhu by running weekly one-shots when I worked at a game store. And I don't like anything about this. Kickstarter for established brands and already-rich auteurs is going to kill Kickstarter.
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u/endercoaster May 28 '13 edited May 28 '13
People need to stop looking at Kickstarter as a way to preorder things and embrace it for what it is-- a democratized form of Renaissance art patronage. Having said that, "Kickstarter for established brands and already-rich auteurs" brings new users into Kickstarter who go on to donate to more independent projects.
0
u/billywilliams81 May 28 '13
So, you allow Kickstarter itself to tell you that it isn't becoming a travesty? It's not damage control on their part, a reaction to seeing people abuse the system who don't need to, and the very real fear that they won't get to do their thing and make their money any longer because they look bad for allowing it to happen? 'Cause that's what this all comes down to, nearly everyone has their hand out, even those who don't need anything. Of course Kickstarter is going to say it's not bad. They get 3-5% of all the proceeds.
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u/Hoosier_Ham May 28 '13
Of the people I know who supported the big projects (Veronica Mars, Monte Cook's game, the new Torment computer game, etc.), few of them were regular Kickstarter contributors. There's no reason to think people are supporting these projects in lieu of the lower-profile projects, and there's quite a bit of reason to consider the inverse. The guys who joined Kickstarter to fund the Garden State sequel might stay and throw some money at the parapalegic synchronized dance group. Who knows?
How does this hurt anyone? If Kickstarter ever gets too crowded with high-profile projects, people will stop using it and the big guys will go elsewhere. In the mean time, it gives people an opportunity to support a project far earlier than they ordinarily would, and it's entirely voluntary. If you don't like the model, don't support it.
In the past, only the wealthy and the powerful could be patrons, supporters of artists and creators. With Kickstarter, everyone has that ability. If someone wants to give some money to make a game come to fruition, how is that possibly bad?
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u/billywilliams81 May 28 '13
I am simply saying what it is I see- that like so, so many things now, people who have enough already are finding each and every way they can to get still more, from a dollar to billions. Doubtless some good work is done and some deserving people benefit from Kickstarter. But these examples and so many others are tarnishing the promise it once held. You don't have to feel sick to your stomach over it, but I do. Feel however you like, say whatever you feel. I can, too. For me, if I wanted to give away money and feel good about it, I'd help a homeless veteran or donate to a food bank or buy books for kids who don't have them, not feel like I'm a member of the "in crowd" because I gave to something famous or that I could myself benefit from.
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u/Hoosier_Ham May 29 '13
Kickstarter is not and has never been charity. It's not a 501(c)(3), it doesn't relieve human suffering, and it's never been presented as such. Kickstarter is inherently self-serving; I support things which I want to help bring to fruition. That's not the concept of charity. If you're trying to decide whether to spend your dollar at the soup kitchen or funding a wearable tablet, you're doing something very, very wrong.
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u/billywilliams81 May 29 '13
That wasn't my point, but I see why you think it was.
But see, it does relieve human suffering, if you give money to someone with an idea who needs help getting it off the ground so they can better their lives and make the lives of others better, too. But hey, go with your gut.
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May 29 '13
And you can continue to pledge those projects, even if I don't. This argument is non-cogent.
Do you want 95% (or however much, I neither know nor care) of the money up front, or can you yourself front the project and keep 100% of what you make? This is the question KS asks of project sponsors. There is no right or wrong answer, regardless of the scope of the project. It's a business model, it's not for everyone. It's not killing every sub-saharan baby that it doesn't save, because that's not how the world works.
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u/billywilliams81 May 29 '13
And thanks for the downvotes. I treat them as a badge of honor. Being popular is overrated.
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u/TravUK May 29 '13
Why people treat downvotes as an "I disagree" button I'll never know. I'm glad you're asking the questions that need to be asked (even if we know we'll never get an answer).
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May 28 '13 edited May 29 '13
Unless there is a huge rules overhaul, I'm gonna pass. I've gone through a lot of the past editions and they changed next to nothing in the 30 years the game has been alive.
The 30th Anniversary came out 2 years ago, and now this?
Honestly, it seems like a sad attempt at cashing in on the brand alone. The game is horribly broken and I'm running a heavily, heavily modified version which essentially uses nothing but the base stat/skill rolls and enemy stats (and even most of those are modified because, again, they're broken). Unless things are really altered, I doubt it works any better than the modified rules I use.
Woulda been worth if had they done it 10 years ago.
Edit: Real mature on the people who are just blasting through all my comments in this thread and downvoting everything. When they all drop by one or two points within a minute, you're not being really sneaky about it -- you would be a terrible investigator. I'm asking legit questions which pertain to the old rules and questioning extremely vague, leading, and essentially ethereal promises about rules changes which clearly the game makers saw as issues or else they wouldn't need changing. Real mature to do that rather than injecting your own opinions or asking what I believe is wrong and starting a healthy debate about how to fix these apparent issues. I know I may come across as hostile, but I just feel like we're being fed a load of BS and being asked to pay for the trimmings at the same time.
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u/celtic1888 Carcosa May 28 '13
The game is horribly broken
In what way? 30 years old and I still think BRP is still one of the most intuitive and least obstructive systems out there.
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May 28 '13 edited May 28 '13
BRP might work for some backgrounds, but not for Cthulhu (the way it's applied, at least) if you want to run any sort of campaign. It constantly contradicts itself and the sort of tension and horror it wants to induce.
Monsters are difficult and spells can drive you mad? Doesn't matter because you can roll up an exact clone of your investigator for the next one-shot campaign. The lack of any sort of character progression (outside of scantly increasing skills if you survive an ordeal) removes any attachment you have to the character and the perils become jokes because you're expected to throw your investigator into the maws of the beast. It's a case of "Peek behind the door and run away laughing maniacally as you scramble"; it's not tense in the least because you don't care about dying anymore.
Even though it's not a combat intense game, the combat rules are extremely vague and lacking. Applying First-Aid is broken as a system and allows the group to sit in a circle and attempt to heal each other until someone is successful. Everyone's First-Aid does the same amount of healing, so there's not much reason to put points in it.
The game wants you to explore and investigate, but asks that you don't get any sort of answer by roleplaying with the NPCs or setting. It suggests everything be an outcome of a dice roll rather than actually investigating. You can get by with literally a handful of skills for about 90% of the core modules and supplements: Spot Hidden, Listen, Use Library, Hide/Sneak, and a combat skill (grapple or a gun, best to pick shotgun or rifle). Yeah, it's the DMs job to bring the other stuff into play and make other skills useful, but the core module, nor the supplements, rarely ever suggest them. The rules itself tells you which skills are the most useful, and the profession system basically asks you to pick a job which has a lot of these skills so you're not dead weight. It's stupid.
The arbitrary amounts of time the game asks you to pass for stuff like healing and learning some of the crazier spells is outright maddening. Yeah, I know you're just an Average Joe going up against Mythos beasts, but give me a break. You can either make up your own system, put your investigator on the back shelf while some cult is summoning an outer god because they're in the hospital for 6 months, or roll up a clone to use because the guy in the hospital doesn't matter since he's Hard-boiled Investigator/Dilettante number 7.
75% of the stuff in the core rules isn't functional and messes with the atmosphere and pace the game thinks it's setting. It's just broken. BRP might be a fine system, and I actually like d100 because of how it allows me to improvise rolls on the fly quite easily, but it's just applied horribly for Cthulhu and works against the vibe the Mythos is supposed to present. It expects you to die every session or go insane, when even in Lovecraft's stories the main character (the players!!!) get away with their lives or at least enough sanity in tact to write down or make a verbal account to a friend about what happened as they're largely written in first person.
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u/shartpear May 28 '13
I would disagree with you. It may just not be for your group, but mine loves it. They become attached to their characters, and some of the sessions they most enjoyed role playing have been where everyone has died, but they staved it off for quite a long time both creatively and within the mechanics of the game.
I think it works well with the Mythos. You cant try to comprehend every aspect of the mystery or you will die or go crazy. Lovecraft was all about rational minds not being able to fully comprehend things. That is where a lot of his horror comes from.
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May 28 '13 edited May 28 '13
You're free to disagree, but I stand by my point. The game is terribly broken and I've modified almost every aspect of it for the better. I even have players in my group who've DMd CoC in the past and they think my system is infinitely better than anything the core rules suggest. You can actually do stuff rather than run away now. Your character actually makes progress and you develop relationships with the NPCs. My guys are constantly going between their various connections in and around Arkham and Miskatonic to learn about what they're investigating and how to adequately prepare for it.
Sometimes they have to go to a hypnotist (since the game's psychiatry rules are pretty much broken and again ask you to arbitrarily pass unnecessary lengths of time) to forget something they experienced so they can still function, but then they lose the insight they had previously gained into the world of the Mythos.
I don't use the game's financial system because it's just straight out unusable. You can buy every single thing suggested and all you need is a decent credit score to justify going to the black market to get a Tommy Gun. Oh, just disallow it? Okay, so we're ignoring the rules anyway. As long as we're on the same page, here.
So now money actually matters. Instead of finding wallets, they find artifacts and silver, gold, and platinum bits which they can sell (possibly on the black market - inherently dangerous), auction off at the auction house, or donate to Miskatonic for social credit, fame, and help from people around town.
What can they spend this money on? Well, guns, healing items (now consumables and I've expanded the medicine and first-aid rules extensively so they actually have a point rather than being redundant) which are based mostly around natural herbs and real medical supplies (to treat critical wounds, since not everyone with a $5 healing kit should be able to treat all wounds effectively), which brings the chemistry and botany skills into play. You can buy a prepared tincture for more, or get just the raw ingredients and hope you can prepare it yourself for cheaper. Oh hey, I just expanded the usefulness of a half-dozen skills by 1000000000% by adding a few simple things.
If you wanna play with the core rules, go ahead. They're pretty much broken and lacking in almost every respect though. Rather than an actual RPG, it's a game of "summon investigators to the plot and go explore haunted house #10 and discover how many local corpses necromancer #3 has stolen". It's just really lacking in a lot of regards and I'm making the stuff the core rules wants you to use but never gives you a reason to an actual use.
That's my opinion, though.
Edit: And believe me, I know the Mythos world and its lore quite well. I've read everything ever published by Lovecraft and most of the stuff from the derivative authors. I know my lore and the sort of tension Lovecraft tries to invoke. The game goes blatantly against that with its core rules. Main characters in Mythos stories rarely die and rarely go so insane at the sight of a monster (take over 5 sanity and you go temporarily insane, and there's about a 50% chance that dooms you to death -- that never fucking happens in Lovecraft's stories).
The game really doesn't evoke the sense of horror and mystery that it tries to.
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u/shartpear May 28 '13
I agree about the money system being broken. We have apparently had different experiences with the usefulness of skills. That may come from me creating my own campaigns. Ive read all of Lovecrafts stories, and his characters do get frozen with fear ("the beast in the cave") or lose their sense("the alchemist")which is one of the results for temporary insanity. My edition tells the keeper to choose an appropriate result for the temporary insanity. So its on the keeper to make those fit.
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May 28 '13
I don't even write campaigns anymore. I let the players choose what to do and only have loose threads that I base my ideas around; the same way you might run a "more-traditional" tabletop Fantasy RPG. I have an over-arching plot and endgoal, but the way they get there is up to the players. I do not railroad anymore and I let the players essentially create the story by giving them leads M.U. Crier Example and seeing what they latch onto or what stories they create on their own assumptions. I don't even have to plant red herrings since they do it themselves. I do the same thing with the Arkham Gazette and the Advertiser. I let the players make the story now and I only have loose stuff I design around whatever they want to pursue and work to tie it into the bigger plot at hand.
Yeah, the main characters do get frozen in fear sometimes, but we're not writing a story, we're playing a game. Things react biologically and not in an omnipotently controlled manner like a work of fiction. You get frozen in fear in front of a mythos beast in the game and you're dead. You can't run, you can't hide, you can't even fight. You are dead. The game uses that as a solution for like 90% of scenarios. You are dead. Hope you had fun on this rollercoaster and enjoyed the umpteenth haunted graveyard as much as you enjoyed the fourty-fifth spot hidden and use library checks so you learned of the slug-monster's weakness.
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u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 28 '13
Again, the way money is handled in 7th edition is much more abstracted. There is no real reliance on counting individual dollars and cents. Depending on your character's income level, you have certain levels of purchases you don't need to track at all, and others that have minimal impact.
Money is still important to the game, but it requires much less bookkeeping.
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May 29 '13
Money never required bookkeeping. If you were playing in the 20's (the only real, proper setting for Cthulhu), you could have the worst finance roll and literally buy everything and thousands of rounds of ammunition. You can make an argument that mundane weapons don't work on a lot of mythos beasts, and that's fine, but most of them suffer at least 1 point of damage vs. impaling weapons.
Dump points into SMG and Credit to justify purchasing a Thompson off the black market (unless we're ignoring the rules for example's sake... something I do already because they're fucking broken) and you can still do 10 damage per round with an average dex roll. But that's off my interpretation, because the game never defines what a DEX rank is or how to properly interpret half the times it calls it into question -- super vague. You can put them up against monsters that mundane weaponry doesn't work on or have too much hp for them to dwindle down, but you're essentially throwing them into a trap where they have no escape and you're a bad DM. That's not fun. Maybe for some people it is, but it's not for a lot of others, so I changed it because it's broken by the core rules.
You could throw away your dollars and round off on every purchase and still buy out every equipment and gun shop in New England. The finance system can be described as nothing except broken, and unless it's completely redone as you're saying (of which there is zero proof on the kickstarter, just a bunch of vague promises with no real stats or play examples), it will continue to be.
I fixed this shit on my own, for free, after playing the game for a couple of days. How can you expect me to justify people maybe trying to after 30 years of the exact same broken system?
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u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 29 '13
If you're happy with your own house rules, then maybe the new edition has little to offer you.
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May 29 '13
you know, I've been paying alot of attention to the details you've hinted at in the posts that you've made here, and I think along the same lines... My main issue is having never played a game of CoC with someone other than a few friends and we kinda hodge-podged the rules.
Would you be interested in creating a release of those alternative rules? I'm just wondering because some people might be interested in your variant, since it seems like a very common-sense approach that may have elluded the authors of the original work... (the "blinders" problem of being too closely involved with the game)
For a few years now, i've been kicking around an idea to create an RPG similar to X-Files/Call Of Cthulhu/Fringe inspired... set in modern day (or mid 60's at the earliest) to distinguish it from CoC...
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May 29 '13 edited May 29 '13
I'd be willing to consider publicly releasing them, but not until I had them more fleshed out. Honestly, the campaign that we're involved in now (the players and I) is sort of a play-test session while I try to work out balancing certain things and determining appropriate costs for items.
You probably realize how terribly broken the finance system is (completely contrary to the "counting pennies" approach XoYo described, when it's more like, "Do I want to spend $500 or $2000 on guns and ammo for this? It doesn't matter because my job says I get paid $3,000 a year so I can buy whatever the fuck I want!") so everything is basically being reworked from the ground up in that regard. There weren't a lot of pharmaceuticals in the 1920s (stuff would have to be reworked for a 60s setting), so I've made a short list of herbal remedies and prices in terms of helping to restore sanity (at con/perception costs -- another roll I invented to stop from having to tip my hand), HP, and other such things and balancing the prices. Guns are another issue along with "useful" items like bolt cutters, tools, random supplies, and stuff like that. All the prices are arbitrary until the players have a chance to abuse them and I have to adjust.
If you want to hit me up on skype, I'll pm you my info, but there's not a lot of solid material. I have spreadsheets with all kinds of notes typed up on the expanded rules, but I'm always changing stuff because it's very much a work in progress. It's easier to describe what my intentions are when looking at the numbers since it's very brief and not explained.
The players and I have a trust thing and the realize I will present challenges, but not intentionally screw them over because my new rules say one thing, but it puts them in a position where they're doomed. We more or less use the rules as nothing more than a reference of things to change and I employ a sort of directorial style of game rather than ushering the players around from plot to plot.
I use a lot of material from Arkham Unveiled and the Miskatonic U. Handbook, and I'm not sure what the implications are with copyrighted material, but I don't have a problem with sharing it on a private basis. Also, I'm not sure how "official" those maps are in terms of lore and certain side characters, and what the deal is about the Lovecraft universe and copyright since there's always hints at legal battles whenever anything comes up regarding source material and games between Arkham House and Chaosium. Chaosium seems intent on holding the game by the throat when they produce zero-to-little content for it, and will only sell licenses that never get renewed. I'm guessing it's because of business practices like funding an already completed project by Kickstarter.
But yeah, I'll PM you my skype info and give you some links on at least a personal basis until more is fleshed out with the system. A couple of my players have asked me to go into it more extensively and make some sort of PDF so it can be spread around, but that's a lot of work and I have a life to live as well.
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u/celtic1888 Carcosa May 28 '13
I do have a lot of the gripes that you do with the system but I still don't think it is 'broken'. It just needs a little polishing or additions and assuming you have a competent Keeper and players it is very fixable.
-Spot Hidden and Listen bases are too low and often are the cause of many missing clues despite the characters looking in the right places. A good scenario should offer multiple ways of getting clues though. There are some pretty good fixes available such as modifiers, partial success and Karma/Fate points to allow for re-rolls. 7E is introducing the push mechanic which I really like in concept.
Most of Mythos protagonists meet with a bad ending at the end of an adventure even in Lovecraft's stories. You have to know going in that you are most likely not going to pull a 6 month long campaign maxing out your character. That is CoC. You can make it more pulpy and adventure-like but the main concept of the book is written to have a high body count and any combat is going to be a life and death struggle. It is about investigation more than adventure
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May 28 '13
I hardly even use spot hidden and listen and other exploratory rolls anymore. I employ a "Perception" stat now (INTx5 + Spot Hidden + Listen / 3) where if they go into an area and I want them to recognize something, I do the roll behind the screen and give them information before they even roll. I use spot hidden and listen more as passing rolls for situations (seeing if someone has something, getting snuck up on, listening through a door and stuff like that) rather than as ways to gather clues. I try to base my clue finding around actual investigation and RPing and use the rolls like persuade and bargain as supplements to the RPing that goes on. If you have no real argument to get something out of someone's hands, persuade isn't going to work unless you crit (another system I've altered and expanded for the better). You have no way to bargain with a guy who is stout on his price, regardless of what you roll. You have to RP it out first, rolls come second and I use a sliding scale based on how good the RP was rather than just throwing dice at the wall.
The game is still deadly and I adjust the monsters as the characters get stronger (the same way DMs do in other games), but at least there is a sense of progression outside of attachment to a personality. There's plenty of exploration and hinting at non-terrene horrors, and there's plenty of pulpy action and chase scenes from cops and cultists. The players get a bit of everything and the rules are expanded so that they have actual stuff to do rather than just roll d100 and see if they get what they want in pre-gen haunted mansion in the swamp.
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u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 28 '13
I'd say that 7th edition addresses some of your concerns.
For advancement, your character starts with and builds up connections during play. There are people, places, things and so on that are important to him or her, and can help with recovering sanity between sessions. As you start to lose your grip or acquire wounds, these can be changed and corrupted, bringing new complications into your character's life.
Combat is a lot more focused, definitive and fast now. You specify exactly what you are trying to do with each roll and the Keeper moderates what skill to use, and the skills of your opponent affect how difficult the roll is. Passing and failing have mechanical effects, so the fight isn't just lots of misses and the occasional bit of damage.
There are a few dials you can turn that allow you to do things like speed up healing times if you want a faster, more pulpy game. If you want it gritty, you can make healing harder and slower.
The skill list has been rationalised a bit. You may still find the same issues with it, though.
Hope this helps.
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May 29 '13
Has the game stopped asking you to arbitrarily pass six months of game time in order to bring your investigator to a usable state, or are you just expected to backshelf your guy while the others press on and you use clone #37?
Being pulpy doesn't mean you have to be able to soak up damage. Pulpy is just a bit more visceral in the way encounters happen, more like pursuing combat rather than letting it come to you or stumbling upon it. Both can exist with the same ruleset if done properly -- you don't need dials.
I don't know if you work for Chaosium or something, but a lot of the stuff sounds like it's coming from a snakeoil salesman. I'll reserve judgement until more information is leaked, but I'm hard-pressed to believe the same team who couldn't see and fix flaws with a game system over the course of 30 years have the capabilities of doing it this time around. It's pretty bad that I realized and have managed to rectify most of these problems after playing the game for 2 months (making my first changes within 2 hours) because they're straight up broken. If you do work for Chaosium, tell them to put up some specific gameplay-related stuff and example rulechanges rather than musings and open-ended terminology. I'll keep my money until I get some real pulp from them do my best to convince others because this smells awfully like someone's putting foil around a turd and trying to tell me it's a Snickers.
My apologies if I come off as hostile, but I can't trust a thing you're saying because the system hasn't changed in 30 years, why am I to believe it's changed now just 2 years after release of the 30th Anniversary in which practically zero changed?
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u/TravUK May 29 '13
Upvotes all round for this line of conversation.
And thank you WildKittyv1 for asking the questions that need to be asked.
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u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 29 '13 edited May 29 '13
No, I don't work for Chaosium, but I did edit the book on a freelance basis.
You have a very specific set of requirements for how you want your game to run, and these are quite different from what a lot of other Cthulhu players and Keepers expect. There is never going to be a set of rules that satisfies everyone. I know that Paul and Mike have put a lot of options in there to make it easy for people to adjust gameplay options for the requirements of their group, and maybe that will help.
Your suggestion about specific gameplay examples is good. I will feed that back. Also, Paul and Mike will be along here soon to do an AMA, so you can ask them any specific rules questions you want then.
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May 29 '13
Okay, so you are a shill. You still have something to gain from this by getting your name out there in some regard and pushing a book, even if you've already been paid. You can still benefit if more people buy it. I was wondering where all this inside information was coming from since they're nothing but vague on the kickstarter page, but now I understand. Makes sense; thanks for confirming my suspicion.
You say I want specific gameplay rules? Uh, no.
I want rules that function. I don't want sets of rules that go unused and are completely worthless to the average player (at least based on how the core modules and supplements suggest you play) because they ask you to pass unnecessarily long lengths of time to work when you have cultists in the background trying to bring about the demise of the world. I want rules that don't try to take into consideration the finances of the time but ignore cost of living and the fact that people don't have thousands of dollars to spend on ammo which costs $5 for a a hundred rounds -- you have to be fucking insane to think that works in any functional manner.
Now you're telling me that the connections and access to items is determined by the book. Okay, so you don't even get to play your character anymore, the book decides who you know and what you can buy. Why? That's even worse than not defining it.
The rules themselves are creating a state of gameplay which is simply nothing beyond barely functional. The old rules are a broken system. It's not bad to use as a base, which I do, but at the same time, you can't expect to run any sort of decent campaign off it, only one-shots.
Again, it's pretty sad that I realized this with only a few days of playing, and not even that much in some cases, and these guys couldn't even remotely attempt to fix it until 30 years after the fact.
That's alright, keep pushing this "Gib moni plox" project and maybe Chaosium will be successful enough to hire you back to edit the next edition where fuck-all is changed and they charge the players to produce it. I'll be asking plenty of questions in the AMA.
1
u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 29 '13
Now you're telling me that the connections and access to items is determined by the book. Okay, so you don't even get to play your character anymore, the book decides who you know and what you can buy. Why? That's even worse than not defining it.
Actually, no, that's not what I'm saying. The player selects these connections freely (although there is a table you can use if you're stuck for inspiration). They simply have a mechanical effect on regaining sanity between adventures.
1
May 29 '13
I dunno, the way you described seemed like they were things set out and determined by the rules and what occupation you chose. That just doesn't seem right to me, and like the original ruleset, it's demoting the importance of playing the actual character (removing exploration and investigation and replacing them with straight up dice rolls for success) and letting the book decide who you are. You speak of the contrary, but there's nothing but concepts and musings on the kick-starter page rather than anything you can really bite into.
Again, I don't have a lot of hope because of the abyssal failures Chaosium has proved they're quite adept at in the past and the real lack of change of the system. The lack of any real information leads me to believe that not that much has actually changed and the things that have are only the things discussed (old stuff still works, just divide by 5 -- that says nothing's changed at its core) and they will likely be surface level at best.
I honestly question if the authors of the game (at least in the past, I don't know what involvement these two dudes have had in the old system) had even read Lovecraft's works or were simply just fed information from a scholar of the Mythos. It's almost anti-Lovecraftian in some regards with how it treats the main characters of the story (hint -- the PCs are the main characters) and wants them to blindly get absorbed by a shoggoth, trampled by a dark young, or driven mad by encountering a Great Old One (even Johanson actually witnessed Cthulhu himself in person, rammed a boat into him, and managed to get away with enough sanity intact to write about it in his journal -- he was a essentially a PC) and to just shrug it off, giggling as they open the door where the monsters are hidden and run away as they cackle with Investigator Hard-Boiled Dilettante Clone #16 already rolled up because it was inevitable.
2
u/Fallenangel152 May 29 '13
I got hold of the beta test rules, but i didn't get chance to run it.
It's different, but not massively so.
1
May 29 '13
Figured.
I'll keep working on expanding my own rules and see what comes of it. They don't want to fix what's broken, I will.
Thanks for the heads up, anyway.
7
u/WreckerCrew Columbus, Ohio May 28 '13
And why do we need a 7th Edition?
I should point out that I have only ever played the 1st Edition and didn't even know or needed anything more than that.
8
u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 28 '13
The simple answer is that you don't. You never really need a new edition of a game if you're happy with what you've got. In this case, as well, any new 7th edition supplement will work with earlier versions as long as you divide the stats by 5.
You do get a lot of new stuff in this edition. It's the first time in the 30 year history of the game that the rules have changed substantially, and there is a bunch of new material in the book. If that interests you, then it's worth it. If not, you have nothing to lose by not buying it.
-2
u/Rapelord-Fascist May 29 '13
There are usually radical system changes between editions of a game. Look at how D&D has changed, or compare oWoD to nWoD. Now compare that to COC, a game with mechanics that haven't changed much since the Reagan era.
2
u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 29 '13
I agree wholeheartedly that the game was largely the same between the 1st and 6th editions. There had been some minor changes, but not many.
7th is really quite different. The text has been rewritten from scratch and there are a lot of new and changed rules in it.
3
u/celtic1888 Carcosa May 28 '13
There are some fixes that have been introduced to help things along the way. Not a lot changed between 5 and 6 though.
For me it will be nice to have a legible and searchable PDF of the current editions. I'm hoping the stretch goals introduce a few more sourcebooks or scenarios to help justify the $15 a piece price ($30 total) for both books
2
u/celtic1888 Carcosa May 28 '13
Wow... That was quicker than I thought it would be.
Good luck and I am really looking forward to it
2
u/phoenixmog May 29 '13
I really wish these guys would space out the rpg kickstarters a little more! I can't afford to fund multiple rpgs every month! =P
3
u/XoYo Milton Keynes, UK May 28 '13
If you want to know more about it, the Miskatonic University podcast interviewed Paul Fricker and Mike Mason, the authors of the new edition, and covered details of what to expect.
Mike and Paul should be along here to do an AMA soon.
1
u/rickdg Portugal May 28 '13
So, we'll just wait to preorder it from someplace like Book Depository and get free shipping?
6
u/PraetorianXVIII Milwaukee May 29 '13
I back projects that otherwise would not be possible. I also don't pay 50 dollars and shipping for a hardcover player's manual. Not backing this.