Fixing Call of Cthulhu

[erik]

I don’t care that it was an attempted inversion. It still reeks of backdooring “racial purity of whites” as something founded in fact in the setting. And that’s fucked up. And I do use quotes on racial purity because that’s what tussock fuckin was saying via thesaurus with his less genetically diverse whites. Maybe he didn’t mean it that way, but that’s what he said. And i don’t see the value of hard coding that shit into a game.

And as if billions year old entities give a fuck how much melanin a person has. Like people get randy about cillia length on microbes. (Ignoring that rule 34 will rebut my simile)

[DrPraetor]

So... okay. Two points:
1) I was quite interested in the discussion of actually fixing Call of Cthulhu, and would like to go back to that.

2) Less diverse ≠ "more pure", but let's subdivide this a bit.

The proposed conceit that European-ancestry makes people genetically more vulnerable to the evil virus is a bad one, because obviously. I once joked on this board that Europeans are genetically predisposed to violence due to selective pressures in the long period when Europe was a shit-smeared war-zone. That was outside even my generous bounds of good behavior, and I shouldn't have said it.

Now, it happens that I am a professor of this stuff (pharmacogenetics and health disparities). Histocompatability genotypes - these genes are responsible for chopping up antigenic proteins and presenting them to other cells in your immune system, which is part of the process by which your immune system "learns", and therefore a key genetic contributor to differential infectious disease susceptibility - vary a lot between populations. These are less diverse everywhere except Africa, due to historically small population sizes when humans migrated out of Africa.

There are other population-specific adaptations clearly linked to infectious disease resistance besides (sickle cell trait, cystic fibrosis, duffy antigen) so making disease tolerance population specific (human populations do not map to notions of "race", which is a social construct) is plausible. But, when writing fiction, especially fiction including implausible elements like diseases which are magic, which turn you evil, and etc., you shouldn't use the real population-differences in infectious disease related genes to shoehorn in weird racist shit.

I gotta go but if people want to talk about human genetic diversity, take it to the medical questions thread, and let's save this for talking about fixing CoC.

[infected slut princess]

Lovecraftian horror is not very effective for an RPG game IMO. While some people might think it's cool to discover their grandpa was a fishman, that might be really upsetting to some people. But how is that useful for a RPG game with a group of people?

Cosmic horror and unfathomable oblivion might be scary as well and induce an some existential crisis or whatever in people. But how is that useful for an RPG game with a group of people?

Detective work, research, encounters with scary monsters... those can be good for an RPG game with a group of people. But the other stuff doesn't really translate into fun gaming from what I can see. Lovecraft's has many wonderful tales that are unnerving and work great as weird horror stories. Trying to translate that into RPG stuff is perhaps a hopeless cause.

[Login]

One of the peculiar things about white supremacists is that whenever they play their fantasies out, they are always the villainous bitch-ass cuck even as the protagonists in their own stories. This is because history is a thing. If we’re going to start judging people based on their race and we use white supremacist metric of race, then white people are the most pathetic, murderous, raping, rapacious, dumbasses to ever walk the earth — in their own framing. Not only did they commit horrible acts like slavery and the holocaust, they are — again, this is their position — they are being beaten out by people who are their inferiors. Do recall that RaHoWa made it explicit that white people were biologically inferior to all other races as a direct result of white supremacist worldview implementation.

To be clear: if you judge individuals as individuals and you don’t condemn a person because of some arbitrary portion of their phenotype seems visually similar to that of a wrongdoer, you don’t have this problem. White supremacists do.

Indeed, white people are so inferior, in the white supremacist mind, that there are white people who collaborate with non-white inferiors. And, yes, the white “supremacist” has, in mere seconds, just shat on the definitions of “superior” and “inferior.” The entire edifice is an intellectual clusterfuck because, obviously, white supremacy is an excuse to just steal, rape, and murder with impunity (and targets of these evils explicitly include other white people) and any attempt to broaden the excuse beyond this function could serve as a dictionary example for failure.

The newest racist to visit this site is no exception. He identifies black people as an alien other as a source of horror in his fantasy, even though nazis et. al. already do that, so it can’t be horror to at least some people. Meanwhile, the actual source material (from a dedicated racist, no less (at least at the time of writing, ignoring any future recantation)) gives an example of horror merely being a white person finding out that she’s black. If you wanted to racialize mythos horror, you’d have members of racial majorities turning into acidic piles of putrid unpleasantness, especially world leaders, because that would be scary to —

• a) racial majorities who discover that their policymaking demographic fellow-travelers weren’t bad because of imperialistic cultures but because they’re literal aliens and so are you!!!!!!! and

• b) racial minorities who have all their worst fears confirmed: they are literally surrounded by, and the earth is run by, monsters.

So if the nazi nugget was being honest, white people and Han Chinese would suddenly start shapeshifting.

This, of course, would still be ridiculous since “race” is made up by humans. If taken completely literally, you could turn anyone into a mythos starfish monster by pointing at them and declaring that they are now “white” (or whatever race is “alien”) and, if enough people agreed upon your new racial definition, the target would grow tentacles since whiteness is purely politically defined. See also, the Irish experience in the U.S. (Hell, in correspondence, Jefferson and Franklin refused to include the Germans in whiteness, ignoring monarchial implications.)

***

Practically speaking, there’s no point in scaring nazis; they’re already scared shitless. Finding out that their intended victims aren’t human would reduce their pants-shitting terror as it would reduce the ethical burden on that whole being-a-murderous-monster thing. We already have social scientists confirming what people have known for centuries: individual rightwing followers have a big-ass fear response (especial for Tha Other) compared to non-rightwingers. The only way to really increase their fear is a fairly obvious one: make it very clear that the only way they “win” their imperialistic civil war is by allying with Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, giving them one more example of the universe making it clear that they’re wrong about everything. This isn’t that much different than a racist sending their kid off to a clearly racist, immoral, and illegal war cuz nationalism and said kid coming home in a box. Even that horror already exists in the real world. The difference would be a matter of degree: cosmic horror would add telepathic torture and a completely cognizable afterlife where All Sins Are Remembered. Interestingly, if white supremacists got an extra-special bad version of the latter, that would make the world less horrible due to the implicit justice involved.

So nazis and their fellow-travelers are already as bad, and in some cases worse, that a good sampling of Mythos horror, and only existential, metaphysical threat can trump them. Meanwhile, they can’t get anymore scared themselves — it’s the rest of us who have a larger capacity for terror.

[Mord]

I've spent the last several days mulling over the various ideas and challenges that have been tossed around, and unfortunately during that time this thread became a crazy fucked-up disaster zone. So, before I continue, let me make it very clear that I have no interest in laying the conceptual groundwork for Infowars: The RPG or storyboarding any narratives that stem from the question "what if people who are [race] have a special relationship to [monster beasty]"?

Lovecraftian horror is not very effective for an RPG game IMO. While some people might think it's cool to discover their grandpa was a fishman, that might be really upsetting to some people. But how is that useful for a RPG game with a group of people?

Cosmic horror and unfathomable oblivion might be scary as well and induce an some existential crisis or whatever in people. But how is that useful for an RPG game with a group of people?

Detective work, research, encounters with scary monsters... those can be good for an RPG game with a group of people. But the other stuff doesn't really translate into fun gaming from what I can see. Lovecraft's has many wonderful tales that are unnerving and work great as weird horror stories. Trying to translate that into RPG stuff is perhaps a hopeless cause.

I think I pretty much agree with your point there; the story elements have to be removed pretty far from what you would associate with "Lovecraftian" fiction if there's to be any hope of capturing the big themes from his work, and even then those big, resonant ideas do not translate at all to an RPG if you try to make them the central focus. They have to be worked in somehow around and behind the core game processes of "this is why a party gathers, this is what they gather to do, here are their common obstacles and their methods." So let's first talk about those things and see if we can come up with a framework that is conducive to being used as a vehicle for telling stories that might have some thematic content in common with the best of Lovecraft.

So far the greatest enthusiasm for "who are we the players playing as" is for a cult.

The first question related to cults that I want to address is, why don't we play Warp Cult instead of inventing our own wheel? Well, the answer is basically that this isn't a tactical miniatures game and shooty shooty pew pew is not the primary activity of characters. Also that in this game everyone seems to want to be able to become a psyker-equivalent so we're going to want to lean in to that angle a lot harder. There's nothing wrong with shooty shooty pew pew but that's not what I'm about here. However, there are definitely concepts and approaches to be stolen from inspired by in Warp Cult, such as the Designing a Cult section, the Running a Campaign of Warp Cult section, and the Clothing Beam.

What we can do is lay down the basic premise that a Cult is a collection of people, all of whom are in possession of Lore, and who are in pursuit of some goal that they believe is best achieved by acquiring more. Lore doesn't have to be a page ripped from the Miskatonic copy of the Necronomicon, and indeed probably shouldn't be. It can be something like a madman's diary, a minor eldritch artifact, a chunk of a Mythos critter, or even a painting they made after an extremely weird dream. Every PC is going to start the game in possession of at least one scrap of Lore of some variety, and every PC needs to have a backstory that explains how they came by their Lore scrap, what it is that they want such that they think that acquiring more Lore would help, and why they would coordinate with other Lore-seekers. At the beginning, these goals can be pretty nebulous and loosely-defined, or very concrete - I want to have my boss' job and I'm pursuing Lore that will help me hex him out of my chain of command, or I just want to understand why I keep having dreams where I'm being pursued by a white serpent into caves under the Temple Mount.

The party doesn't need an initial unifying goal beyond cooperation in pursuit of their personal agendas. You could, if you wanted, set up a framing device where they are all members of a small Cult led by an NPC Priest who has a little more Lore than everyone else and acts as the party's Mr. Johnson. You could also have the PCs be part of a larger organization that already has defined goals, but this isn't necessary either.

Inducting new members into the PCs' Cult may or may not be something that the PCs are interested in doing depending on the players. However, whether or not the PCs are active recruiters for a new tentacled religion of their own making, we're going to want to have a heavy emphasis on social contacts, possibly to the point of introducing troupe play. If your players are going to induct a contact into the Cult, letting the players take full control of that character only seems reasonable. It's also pretty thematic that a person who has joined a cult dedicated to eldritch mysteries might become a "new person" dominated by someone else's goals and plans. Cultivating contacts for their wealth, knowledge, or personal access to more Lore is something that the PCs should absolutely be interested in doing.

So, while classic Call of Cthulhu just kind of naturally assumes that your PCs are Investigators and that this gives local quest-givers adequate reason to come to them when there are some weird footprints in the abbey's pumpkin patch or half-chewed fresh corpses in the morgue, I'm more interested in setting up a framework where the PCs are naturally encouraged to take action in directions that will result in adventure. The drive to acquire more Lore suits this nicely, and as such the basic framework for sending the party on new adventures is going to lean heavily on the idea that, because the PCs are always in pursuit of Lore, they should pretty consistently be taking some kind of active steps to look for promising happenings. In response to their efforts, the MC's job is to contrive some way to dangle the plot hook in front of them. Voila, we no longer need struggle any further with explanations for why the police come to the Investigators for help or why the Investigators would give a shit.

Gaining the tools they need to accomplish their personal ambitions will be the driving factor pushing PCs to go on adventures, so let's next ask: what is Lore and what does it do? I imagine some kind of series of random-roll tables as a Lore generator that will have things like 1d100 "an expurgated edition of the 1872 Russian translation of..." 1d100 "... De Vermis Mysteriis". This fluff text is accompanied by game mechanics of Point Value and Aspect, such as "Snake 1." You can learn specific spells to do specific things if you can combine together enough scraps of lore of the right Aspect and Points Value. Initially the scraps of Lore the party starts with should be combinable into two or three spells, or however many spells is enough to give the party some nifty tricks right out of the gatee.

Let's say for the sake of argument that we have five different Aspects for Lore and they all go up to Level 10: Snake, Smoke, Sand, Salt, and Silver. Note that the names are deliberately vague and artsy because that lets us use Aspects as puzzle pieces just as much as we use them to define spell lists a la D&D Conjuration, Necromancy, Evocation, etc. You can and should expect that Snake rituals are usually themed around lies or betrayal in some way, but keeping the labels vague and artsy lets us slip in effects that are a bit off-theme. Let's say there's a spell "Your Lying Eyes", that causes its victim to perceive others as lying when they tell the truth, and that codifying this spell (i.e. making it available for casting) requires the party to expend 2 levels' worth of Snake Lore. This might be the usual fare for spells learned with Snake lore, but because we call it Snake instead of Divination, we can also have a different spell like "Unseen Fang", Snake 3, that is a combat hex that deals poison damage to a target when the caster breaks a specially-prepared bone while making eye contact with the target. We can also make Snake Lore a requirement for more complex spells, such as something that might need Salt 4 and Snake 1. I don't know what Salt is supposed to generally do; it's all hypothetical right now.

So, the second question, why don't we just play Bookhounds of London? Well, because we're not just looking for Lore to turn it around for a quick buck - we're looking for Lore because we want to get together enough compatible bits of it to magically conjure fire inside our uncle's skull so we can inherit the Worthingford fortune. We want to be people who have ambitions and drives beyond just survival, dangerous desires that tempt us down a path of self-inflicted damnation, who could quit the cult at any time and go back to a normal life but don't, even when the corners of the room start writhing in spasms of frenetic motion when we take our eyes off them for even a second.

[tussock]

So, uh, sorry for the continuing threadshitting, but oops, so.

I don’t care that it was an attempted inversion. It still reeks of backdooring “racial purity of whites” as something founded in fact in the setting. And that’s fucked up. And I do use quotes on racial purity because that’s what tussock fuckin was saying via thesaurus with his less genetically diverse whites. Maybe he didn’t mean it that way, but that’s what he said. And i don’t see the value of hard coding that shit into a game.

And as if billions year old entities give a fuck how much melanin a person has. Like people get randy about cillia length on microbes. (Ignoring that rule 34 will rebut my simile)

You likely have a fair point erik, odds are these days anything that mentions white people as a separate entity will somehow be taken to make them right and everyone else wrong by horrible people that I would rather not be associated with.

But like, genetic diversity is the fucking bees knees for combating novel diseases, because there's more modifications of the immune functions across the population so the disease agent is unlikely to have the tools to to get past all of them, and mutations to get into one person do not get into many.

Where, basically, "white people" are a subset of Syrians, who are a subset of the Asia Minor group, who are a subset of the Kenya/Somalia group, who are a tiny subset of the great base of diversity that is Africa. And I get Hitler thought Germans were supermen and everyone else was some sort of cross-breed with the submen, but we've since learned that Germans are just massively inbred Africans, and so is everyone else outside Africa, and it does make them more vulnerable to new diseases, which in turn tends to thin out the genome even further every time one strikes.

US-based white people are of course less so, because they include many Italians and Russians and every little bit of diversity helps. Quite how they missed including the Spanish seems to come down to that whole annexing Texas from Mexico thing.

So that's where that brain fart of mine came from, but I'd stick with Cthulhu being a hallucinogenic brain worm of some type and defeating it with public education and government immunisation programs paid for with taxes and promoted with science and reason, opposed by grand conspiracy theories, fascist haters, religious groups, conservative media conglomerates, and Republicans because taxes.

Because that is just terrifying and hello, it's how the real world works. People oppose public healthcare, and it kills millions, and they do it for super bullshit and hateful reasons. Like neoliberalism forced on tiny economies that prevent them from building up the basic infrastructure, education, and heathcare that is the only thing makes it even half workable in rich countries. Horrifying, and all around us. Plus, the racism of it all harks back to HPL, even inverted.

whiteness is purely politically defined.

I mean, true, there's no dividing line, it is a continuum of humans all the way around with very recent divisions in genetic terms that don't really do much of interest outside the melanin thing and associated vitamins D and B9, but it's still a tiny subset of African genes existing across native Europeans, and for instance there are a few medicines don't work well on people who aren't "white", because so much medicine is developed and tuned specifically on native Europeans that a few of them just treat peculiarities of the immune system genes which are common there and end up not helping anyone else.

[Username17]

So, before I continue, let me make it very clear that I have no interest in laying the conceptual groundwork for Infowars: The RPG or storyboarding any narratives that stem from the question "what if people who are [race] have a special relationship to [monster beasty]"?

Basically this. Even when that sort of thing isn't attempting to transgress your safe space or whatever, it still has a tendency to end up like World of Darkness: Gypsies. There just isn't a way to respectfully and rationally confront racism and racial stereotypes in the format of a 3 hour Role playing game where people are trying to talk about kung fu fights against yetis. There really isn't. Racial stereotype game mechanics are always going to come across as uncomfortably racist. They can't not.

For fuck's sake, we get a little squicked out by Orcs having an intelligence penalty and they are Orcs. Do that sort of thing for real people and them's fighting words. There's no traits you can assign to Turkish people or Mexicans that isn't uncomfortably racist. Anyway...

Well, the answer is basically that this isn't a tactical miniatures game and shooty shooty pew pew is not the primary activity of characters.

Yes. Warp Cult was made to do Necromunda-style small scale shooty fights in the 40K universe. I think it was made on a dare or a request or something. Obviously a game of Cthulhuesque cultists isn't going to want to do that because the setting is somewhat undermined by the 40k extreme dick waving. I mean, in a way Azathoth is even more something off the pages of Heavy Metal Magazine than 40k's space cathedrals, but you know what I mean. It's hard for your cult to feel particularly subversive in the traditional "searching for secret knowledge" sense when people have city sized war robots and shit. It's hard to take your "dark bargains for knowledge" seriously when the state religion endorses flaming chainsaw wielding mobs.

That being said, the fact remains that SR4 is a pretty decent set of core game mechanics for resolving tasks in a modern environment. So assuming that your cultish behaviors are intended to be taking place somewhere between the early 20th century present that original Lovecraftian stories were set and the Star Trek future, it's a good set of core game mechanics to have. Dicepools with fixed target numbers give you very easy to calculate average values but still present the possibility of failure on tasks, making rolling a reasonable thing to do. The Stat + Skill paradigm gives easy answers to the question "what do I roll?" and resolution is tolerably swift.

So the generic "how do I do action?" mechanics that Warp Cult used are also fine to steal. I went in a pretty similar direction with After Sundown and it felt like the core mechanics helped more than hindered.

-Username17

[Pedantic]

So....you've just described the essential mechanics of Cultist Simulator. Learn lore, use lore to recruit followers, send followers on missions, read the books brought back from missions, learn more lore, eventually do rituals and stuff with the lore and the artifacts you find on missions.

[Username17]

So....you've just described the essential mechanics of Cultist Simulator. Learn lore, use lore to recruit followers, send followers on missions, read the books brought back from missions, learn more lore, eventually do rituals and stuff with the lore and the artifacts you find on missions.

Cultist Simulator was already mentioned in this thread and praised for its topic and scope. Mechanically it was derided as being basically a standardly unfair Choose Your Own Adventure book that forced you to play a deeply dissociated card game. So I'm not sure how much there is to steal from the game itself. Maybe "some of the events," but possibly not even that.

-Username17

[Grek]

I would actually suggest the ritual system. You have a large number of ritual frameworks, and each ritual framework can fit into it some combination of Lore, Ingredients, Implements, Sacrifices, Assistants, Significant Times and Significant Places which are combined to meet the requirements of specific spells. No spell requires a specific framework, you just have to get enough dots (or, in an RPG, hits out of your dicepool) in each requirement for the spell to work. That would translate over quite well to an RPG system. Now, obviously you'd want to get rid of the part where some ritual frameworks are just flat out better than others, but you were going to do that regardless because you're not doing Cultist Simulator: the RPG, you're making your own IP.

[Mord]

So....you've just described the essential mechanics of Cultist Simulator. Learn lore, use lore to recruit followers, send followers on missions, read the books brought back from missions, learn more lore, eventually do rituals and stuff with the lore and the artifacts you find on missions.

OK, you got me. While I was writing up the Aspects I realized that the idea was lifted from Cultist Simulator, since that abomination has obviously been on my mind lately. To be fair, the idea of mixing and matching bits of crap with particular keywords to make the stuff you actually want isn't unique to CS, but I would be lying if I claimed to have a more proximate source of inspiration. I will, though, vehemently deny that CS is the reason I've been thinking about "the After Sundown treatment for Call of Cthulhu" in the first place.

The basic motivation for this project comes from one of the throwaway posts in the Call of Cthulhu OSSR that I quoted above, in which Frank broke down the Sanity mechanic into Corruption, Trauma, and Despair. That basic idea - how to better model mental collapse in a way that's not ridiculous to the players or unsatisfying in terms of genre emulation - is where this whole thing initially came from.

Trail of Cthulhu goes a few inches in the right direction in terms of modeling Sanity, but I'm still not happy with the final result and I'm equally unhappy with how far it goes (or doesn't go) in terms of giving your characters a coherent story prompt, reason to associate, and reason to keep adventuring. Like, I don't think it even addresses the question "why are you doing this?" It's legitimately disappointing to find such a void of self-awareness in a book that is otherwise a comprehensive improvement over the Chaosium original.

I honestly had not considered that there would be such unequivocal support and interest from participants in this thread in playing as the cultists and making the game about diving deeper into the Mythos and acquiring eldritch power deliberately to achieve some goal, and frankly I'm kicking myself for not having seen it from the beginning. This is kind of feedback that makes posting on the Den worth doing.

I would actually suggest the ritual system. You have a large number of ritual frameworks, and each ritual framework can fit into it some combination of Lore, Ingredients, Implements, Sacrifices, Assistants, Significant Times and Significant Places which are combined to meet the requirements of specific spells. No spell requires a specific framework, you just have to get enough dots (or, in an RPG, hits out of your dicepool) in each requirement for the spell to work. That would translate over quite well to an RPG system. Now, obviously you'd want to get rid of the part where some ritual frameworks are just flat out better than others, but you were going to do that regardless because you're not doing Cultist Simulator: the RPG, you're making your own IP.

Oh yeah, if we're going fully down the rabbit hole here in terms of playing as a magic gang who gets into magic fights with other magic gangs, then having a selection of ritual spells that have complex variable requirements is a must. Flipping over to the Blood Magic OSSR thread, you can see just what a mistake it is to define rituals without going whole-hog on making them into elaborate things where the casting event itself is something you can make into a session. You won't want every single spell to be like that - combat spells that require elaborate human sacrifice rituatls are obvious nonstarters - but anything that accomplishes a strategic goal should require some pomp and ceremony. And maybe some hunting down of specialized ritual components (oh look more adventure!).

Incorporating a lot of different elements of ritual magic that may variously be required or merely advantageous for any given ritual is definitely something we will want to do. I remember reading somewhere about rules giving bonus dice on casting mighty rituals of vast power if you have a bunch of followers participating in an appropriate synchronized swimming routine while the high priest does his chanting or whatever, and I thought that was in After Sundown, but for the life of me I cannot find it. But that right there is another way to make "building a cult with more members than the PC Anime Club" an important thing you would want to do for actual practical reasons rather than just being a thing that the game expects you to do for no particular advantage.

[Username17]

Mighty Rituals of Vast Power are extremely important for supernatural fiction. They have been a mainstay of horror fiction since before the invention of the movie. Many of the gothic horror books from the original era crucially depend on "black masses" and the like . And while those things aren't actually all that scary anymore, the "big ritual" event has over two centuries of pedigree as a trope now and we couldn't get rid of it if we wanted to.

That being said, the Mighty Ritual of Vast Power is a great hook for an RPG game. It's a great hook on both sides of the MC Screen.

First of all, the fact that Mighty Rituals of Vast Power have a series of parts means that they lend themselves to episodic adventure. You do a thing to get piece A of the ritual, you do a thing to get piece B of a ritual, and so on. Alternately, your opponent is trying to do the ritual and then can try to figure out what the next piece they need is and stop them from getting it. This allows you to have a series of related adventures without having to constantly invent new things to be at stake. Further, they allow the players to get progress without giving out combat bonuses or dollar bills.

Secondly, the fact that there are Mighty Rituals of Vast Power creates hooks for players to care about the setting. Sepcial places, special objects, special dates, special people, and so on. All of these potential ritual components are also bricks that can be used for world building. They create dimensions by which locations can be worth fighting over and objects can be worth acquiring.

Now here's the bad part: a Mighty Ritual of Vast Power becomes boring if used repeatedly. Once achieved, the ritual wants to either become institutionalized or dropped entirely. It's fine to go on a three adventure quest to get a ritual going, but you aren't going to want to do those three adventures again.

And yes, a chapter for Mighty Rituals of Vast Power is something for After Sundown 2. No question. It has to happen.

[Pedantic]

Now here's the bad part: a Mighty Ritual of Vast Power becomes boring if used repeatedly. Once achieved, the ritual wants to either become institutionalized or dropped entirely. It's fine to go on a three adventure quest to get a ritual going, but you aren't going to want to do those three adventures again.

Is there some fair way to use temporal components to keep those under control? The stars being right is definitely a staple trope of this sort of thing, but that usually just comes down to GM handwaving.

[Username17]

Now here's the bad part: a Mighty Ritual of Vast Power becomes boring if used repeatedly. Once achieved, the ritual wants to either become institutionalized or dropped entirely. It's fine to go on a three adventure quest to get a ritual going, but you aren't going to want to do those three adventures again.

Is there some fair way to use temporal components to keep those under control? The stars being right is definitely a staple trope of this sort of thing, but that usually just comes down to GM handwaving.

There's a couple ways to use "special times." The first and most obvious is "can only be used once in a long time." And outside some non-standard campaigns with very long time-skips or player-accessible time travel, there isn't really much difference between "once every twenty years" and "once every twenty million years." In either case the stars will be right exactly once during the campaign at a time the MC pulls out of their ass. Such a ritual is different from a deus ex machina only in that players can potentially research uses (or attempts) of it from the past. So it acts as a delivery system for world building, but it's essentially all one-way: the MC dictates to the players when the ritual will take place and also gives exposition if and when the players decide to research previous uses of the ritual.

The second system is "can only be used once in a short time." Things like "Only on a full moon" or "Only on Sundays" or whatever fit here. These rituals could in practice be done every session or even more often than that, because time skips of a few weeks are perfectly cromulent even if the game is taking place in the rolling now. But while they are in many ways similar to an X/Session charge limitation, they actually emergently create a number of important facets of the campaign world.

• Obviously it means that the MC can create a scenario where the players cannot use the ritual before a major event happens. They find out about the event on Tuesday, the event is on Friday, the Full Moon is on Sunday. The reason that the players can't power up with the ritual before the confrontation is organic and already accounted for in the world.
• It also means that there's an in world reason for characters to be able to respond to enemy actions. The bad guys kidnap the reporter lady, but they aren't going to just sacrifice her right away, they are going to wait until the Full Moon, which means that the players have both a sense of urgency and also the idea that the goals are plausibly achievable.
• By creating specific and predictable times that things happen, there becomes a solid reason for the players to be able to expect setpiece encounters. You don't have to explain why all the bad guys are in the room when the player character barge in - they are barging in during the ritual period because that is when the players know where the villains are going to be, and the villains are there loaded for a fight because it's Full Moon and time for the big ritual of evil power.
• Having distinct ritual periods on the calendar encourages players to allow the clock to move forward and experience down time. Also, because characters can only get their ritual freak on a set number of times, they have other nights that they can spend wooing a waitress or working on their disturbing paintings or whatever. Characters are no longer punished for having non-magical pursuits because they chronologically cannot do magic all the time anyway.

So I'm a lot more sympathetic to short recharge periods than really long recharge periods. But they definitely don't adress the separate issue that players don't want to repeat the same adventure over and over again.

-Username17

[Grek]

Not wanting to do the same adventure over again isn't quite the same thing as not wanting to do the same ritual twice. Let's put it in cultist simulator terms: Your character has traveled in foreign lands and discovered the Rite of Map's Edge and wants to call up the ghost of his dead father. To do so, he needs a combination of lore, implements and locations combining particular powers. This in turn demands an adventure to uncover the Bone Flute, learn the Words that Walk (to play on the flute) and then find a particular place in the city where the walls between the worlds are thin enough for the dead to be summoned. But it doesn't require a second adventure - once you have the flute and the song and the hospital, all you have to do is go there and do the magic dance every time you want to summon ghosts.

It's only the stuff that gets consumed by rituals (ingredients and sacrifices in Cultist Simulator's parlance) that demand a new adventure every time. And if you're writing up your own ritual system regardless, there's no reason why you couldn't simply make it so that Ingredients and Sacrifices the sort of thing that either A] don't require an adventure to obtain, or B] give out aspects that are used in rituals that basically demand a mini-adventure every time they're used, like locks of hair from your chosen victim, or the blood sacrifice of a powerful vampire's descendant.

[maglag]

Dragon ball comes to mind. Collecting the titular dragon balls was the main focus at the start of the series. Then they had a one year cooldown. However as the series progressed collecting the dragon balls became something that happened in a 5 minute montage plus there were massive timeskips all the time so waiting one year was just a minor incovenience. Of course the characters also kept finding bigger and bigger sets of dragon balls and there was that time when they became corrupted for being spammed too much.

[Username17]

Not wanting to do the same adventure over again isn't quite the same thing as not wanting to do the same ritual twice. Let's put it in cultist simulator terms: Your character has traveled in foreign lands and discovered the Rite of Map's Edge and wants to call up the ghost of his dead father. To do so, he needs a combination of lore, implements and locations combining particular powers. This in turn demands an adventure to uncover the Bone Flute, learn the Words that Walk (to play on the flute) and then find a particular place in the city where the walls between the worlds are thin enough for the dead to be summoned. But it doesn't require a second adventure - once you have the flute and the song and the hospital, all you have to do is go there and do the magic dance every time you want to summon ghosts.

It's only the stuff that gets consumed by rituals (ingredients and sacrifices in Cultist Simulator's parlance) that demand a new adventure every time. And if you're writing up your own ritual system regardless, there's no reason why you couldn't simply make it so that Ingredients and Sacrifices the sort of thing that either A] don't require an adventure to obtain, or B] give out aspects that are used in rituals that basically demand a mini-adventure every time they're used, like locks of hair from your chosen victim, or the blood sacrifice of a powerful vampire's descendant.

It depends on how big a deal your ritual is. In narrative and game mechanical weight.

If the players succeed in performing a ritual that can be done every new moon, you have to accept players doing that ritual 13 times a year or you have to come up with reasons why they can't or don't want to. If the ritual is intrusive enough on the story or the game play that players doing it 13 times in a year would be annoying or cause the story or game to lose focus, then you better start coming up with those reasons.

Now obviously a ritual which solves a problem or creates a state of affairs is going to be something that players won't need or want to do every session because they won't have those particular problems all the time. A ritual to open or close a gate, for example, only needs to be used when a gate opens where you don't want it or you move house and need a gateway opened in it.

But a ritual that powers the characters up for their next adventure or increases power in a stackable way or creates minions or wealth that add to the ones they already have or whatever and so on is something that is going to be requested at virtually every opportunity. And in that case it fucking better become something that characters do during time skips after it's established that they have the ability to do it the first time.

A good example of this is the Elemental Summoning rituals in Shadowrun. Actually a kind of big deal, they take hours and can end up with rampaging demons destroying city blocks and shit. But honestly players mostly just mark off some moneys on the character sheet and make some die rolls during down time cleanup phases and write down their elemental services. Doing them as fully roleplayed events is just not in the cards because characters do kind of a lot of them and they stop being interesting.

-Username17