Anatomy of Failed Design: Cthulhutech

[FatR]

I must actually go on the record as saying I don't really understand what the appeal is for various Lovecraftian games, whether this, or Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green or whatever. It's a fundamentally nihilistic universe, so by definition you can not help but lose. If your enemy is an impossibly old, insanely powerful pantheon of protodeities that regard humanity somewhat akin to how we regard insects or bacteria, and the only stage we can ever have hope to make an effect against are human- and human-level minions of those deities, why fucking bother? Put a bullet in your skull and let the cultists raise their mad patrons to wash the universe clean of human civilization.

Assuming you aren't a religious person, why do you bother living in the real world, considering that as far as we can see, humanity's existence is an utterly insignificant speck of light upon the universe's dark and unthinking abyss, forever bound to an equally insignificant blue planet by merciless gravity. And it can be extinguished literally next second by a stray asteroid, a wave of radiation from an exploded star or who knows what else. Lovecraft didn't even manage to write his fictional universe to be as dark and terrifying as he perceived our own - humans can sometimes make a difference there, and even after the humanity is gone, intelligent life will continue in other forms.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Assuming you aren't a religious person, why do you bother living in the real world, considering that as far as we can see, humanity's existence is an utterly insignificant speck of light upon the universe's dark and unthinking abyss, forever bound to an equally insignificant blue planet by merciless gravity.

If I may pop psychologize, I'd say that it's less of an issue of insignificance and more of an issue of fairness. As weird as it sounds, an ending where the universe explodes for no real reason is less offensive than 'but the Necrons survived'.

I said somewhere in a thread way back when that a glimpse of the future where humanity was long gone and Datas or Spocks or even nothing took the place of human critters wouldn't really bother me. A glimpse of the future where in our corner of the universe Space Nazis dominate would, even if the Space Nazis were homo sapiens and I saw a Batman comic in the corner of a crystal ball.

Considering that the Lovecraft deities are portrayed as ineffably evil and implacable rather than just an alternate form of sapient life... yeah. It doesn't really make any sense, but there you go.

[name_here]

The thing with CthulhuTech and rape is not so much that it happens but that it's both front-and-center in like half the adventures, and that the characters responsible automagically get away with it. Like, there's one pre-written adventure where the main villain runs a mind-control rape thing, the PCs manage to convince the magic secret police of this, and... all the evidence disappears, the witnesses are disqualified, and I guess the Orwellian secret police can only disappear people on scanty evidence when it's inconvenient.

[Username17]

Cthulhutech does not qualify for a real OSSR. It's not very old. More to the point, it doesn't feel old. The book is full of bad ideas, but they are bad ideas that feel like they were written in the 21st century. Cthulhutech suffers greatly from being a game system written in the 2000s. So rather than do an OSSR of it, I think it best to just grab a bottle of printer's cream and a bottle of rum and get wasted while reviewing it inside the auspices of an Anatomy of Failed Design thread.

The book begins like a nWoD book - or SR4A for that matter - with a couple of piles of fiction that go on for several pages. This is a book that, once it gets to actual meat, realizes that it has so many gimmicky words that it needs to produce a glossary of all the batshit terminology it incorporates before it even gives you the chapter outline. So having 8 pages of in-character fiction before that is just eight pages of "What the fuck am I reading?" Really, the existence of WYSIWYG typesetting programs and word processors did horrible things to RPG layouts, and Cthulhutech was not spared. People thought that just because they could easily deliver 8 pages of fiction in a day of half assed work that they should, and more importantly that they should put it at the front of the fucking book. This is wrong on many levels.

Now, the specific specialty words are needed because CTech has decided that what it really needs to be is parallel ripoffs of Cthulhu Mythos and Anime. I don't fault it for that, it is what it is. But because the Anime that is being ripped off is generally under copyright, the authors decided to rename it all but still deliver it to you as if it was a pop-culture reference. With the result being that if you are unfamiliar with the anime in question you are going to be confused as fuck, and even if you are familiar with the anime in question, you're going to be constantly confused by the tweaks made to individualize the IP. I really think that they needed to run all this shit past someone who had not seen the various reference anime. Gygax put in a fucking bibliography as well, but you'll note that it was entirely possible to play a campaign with trolls in it where you hadn't read Three Hearts and Three Lions. There's a bit where it gives you a paragraph of plot exposition about various anime source material, but this is not fucking useful at all. If you haven't seen Evangelion, being told that "the end is daring" (which I guess is fanboi for "incomprehensible") is not going to get you any closer to understanding what an "Engel" is about. If you have seen Evangelion, the only part of that paragraph that is at all helpful is "Neon Genesis was an inspiration for the Engels of CthulhuTech".

CthulhuTech has its own timeline. Like many timelines, it really seems like a PoliSci or History major should have spent some time working on it. It has some clunkers in its projections, and of course starts the timeline way too early. Considering how similar to a post-scarcity future the future is supposed to be, I'm not really sure why it was set only 80 years in the future. That's long enough from now that everyone you know will be dead, but not long enough for the early parts of the timeline to not seem weirdly dated almost immediately. And the future stuff seems oddly compressed in places. The Nazzadi peace and the Tagers happened only twenty years ago, which is just not quite enough time for you to play someone who was born after those events who has also graduated from college. I know that most of the anime source material is about children and teens, but at least give people the fucking option to play someone with hair on their nuts!

Then they try to sell you on their vision of the world. It is a tough sell. The Earth is a mono-state where all races, sexes, sexual orientations, creeds, and species can hold hands and rise meritocratically without fear of prejudice. And everyone speaks English. This strikes me as really weird. It strikes me really weird both because they didn't leave themselves nearly enough time for all this shit to have happened. One would think that for the world to be prejudice-free, that the people who were born and raised after the events that made it so should be old enough to be running things - as is the people who are the presidents and department heads and shit totally grew up in a world that had prejudice, national borders, and poverty - so you'd think that would still be a problem. But also it's really weird in that it sacrifices a lot of potential story space for no apparent benefit. Instead of dividing the world into wards like Code Geass or something, they just don't. If you're going to have a homogeneous Earth, why is the action set on Earth? That's the kind of thing you do when you want to set the action on some alien world or something. I just don't even understand the reasoning behind claiming that there isn't much difference between Congo Sector and Korea Sector.

Next, they introduce their Ashcroft Foundation. This is their biggest black box of technology. It's nearly limitless free energy, but it works in weird "non-euclidean" ways (making it painfully obvious that the authors like the word "non-euclidean" more than they like looking up what it actually means). This giant black box of nearly free energy with completely magic-logic limitations would be completely sufficient to explain all the anime-futuretech they felt like including. But (spoiler alert!) for reasons that make no sense to anyone, they later decide to introduce some more black boxes. Also, every time they describe the affects on the economy or everyday life of arcanotech, you have to take a drink. Not because of some sort of drinking game, but because the pronouncements are stupid enough that you need to clean your brain out. Cheap energy caused mining to collapse as an industry. Yes, really. The fact that energy was at least temporarily not a limiting factor for manufacturing meant that people couldn't think of a use for cotton or steel. Rum goes into the glass now.

The Engel project is exactly Neon Genesis Evangelion. Dummy Plugs are called "Engel Remote Pilot Interface". The "Engel Uplift Project" is exactly what it sounds like. However, while they were busily copying Evangelion and scrubbing the serial numbers off, they forgot to explain why the fuck the UN would let NERV do all this shit. Because, unlike in Evangelion, they don't put AT fields front and center. Which is really weird, because that was literally 100% of the reason that you would use these obviously dangerous and insane monsters piloted by mentally unstable children instead of putting the same guns on a fucking tank.

The Villains are... at least numerous. Decisions made in here are hard to understand. You have corporate villains, cultist villains, monster villains, and alien villains. And a couple flavors of each. But for reasons I can't explain, they decided to leave Cthulhu sleeping, even though he is one of the best possible choices of Mythos entities to fight with giant robots in a broken city. I mean, it's basically him and Shudde M'ell, right? Well, fuck you! Shudde M'ell doesn't even seem to warrant a listing and Cthulhu is asleep. The big Mythos entities you might actually want to fight with your giant mecha are simply not available. Anyway, the villains are cast in an unbelievably comical black and white morality. To the point where it actually strains believability and also appears to undermine their mission. Who the fuck calls themselves "The Rapine Storm" by choice? If your shtick was that you wanted to corrupt people by being friendly and giving them access to their vices while slowly ratcheting up the costs and collecting blackmail material... don't you think calling yourself almost anything other than "the disciples of death's shadow" would be a good idea? The Grim Derping of the various team evil variants is so extreme that I genuinely don't know what they think they are doing.

Finally, there's the war between the aliens and the New Earth Government. I think it's called NEG because that's really close to NGE, and they really fucking love NGE. They can't decide whether the NEG is an oppressive police state full of thought police or a post-scarcity utopia. The aliens have plans that make no sense without the understanding that they are ripped off from Robotech.

OK, so we have the stupid out of the way. But can it be pretentious? Oh yes, yes it can. Cthulhutech insists on calling itself a "storytelling game" rather than a roleplaying game. It calls the MC a "Storyguide", and insists on calling the PCs "Dramatic Characters". And yes, there is a sidebar that gives a pretentious rant about why they decided to abandon D&D's nomenclature. It says "The options are broad so no one is pidgeon-holed." but (spoiler alert!) the game designers actually throw a fit if you actually want to make a character who isn't pidgeon-holed into a single "class". And then they present the characters as "brave mecha pilots, cunning Tagers, brilliant arcanotechnicians, and more". But (spoiler alert!) the rules never come clean as to how you could make a coherent team that actually included those people.

What the game really needed was to go all-in on a "war on all fronts" thing where players got more than one character each. And then during the "infiltrate the cults and discover the plans" phase the players could control the investigators and during the "fight the giant monster" phase, the players could control the mech pilots. The whole concept really only would work with single player characters if the giant robots were Power Rangers style and the investigators summoned Zords at need. But they didn't go that route and the end result is pretty damn incoherent.

Finally, they get into the Framewerk System itself. It's basically White Wolf but... worse. Time is in five second increments. They've read a lot of White Wolf, and time is further collected into "scenes", "episodes", and "stories". And of course it has that true mark of pretentiousness: trying to get players to refer to the number of dice they roll with adjectives like "expert" instead of numbers like "4". But where the shit really needs polishing is the dice system. You roll a pile of d10s and take either the highest number or add together the results of dice whose results happen to be related as straights or sets of the same number. And you also get to add a single number based on your stat. This system is a fucking war crime. I'm not just saying that because the results of the dice are so amazingly swingy that being nominally better than someone else is rather unlikely to make the difference. I'm not even saying that because a pre-base die result of 15 is considerably more likely than a result of 14 and infinitely more likely than a result of 13 or 17, making the entire difficulty system into a bizarre sham where many possible difficulties are effectively or actually equivalent to other ones in a manner that is wholly unpredictable because it is based on the interaction with different bases.

It should probably be said (over and over again) that even if this dice system was in any way a positive thing, it still wouldn't do anything that makes any sense. The dice are really swingy and periodically give you really huge bonuses, while the difference in base is really small but you always get it. But you get the base from your inherent stats, and your dice from your skill. The game's "take 10" equivalent rule is based 100% on your base and 0% on your dice. So people who have a lot of raw talent don't do appreciably better on any particular task, unless that task is routine, but they have a small statistical edge over time. People who are really skilled have performances that are all over the place from dreadful to epic - but get legendary results more often. Doesn't that sound exactly backwards? Geniuses simply reliably post acceptable but uninteresting results, while people who simply train a lot fail constantly but make legendary achievements from time to time. The greatest breakthroughs are not made by "geniuses", but by "experts". It's just really weird is all.

Character generation fails in step one, because step one is to get everyone to agree on what organization you all work for. This isn't because the different organizations are at each others' throats like they were in a White Wolf setting, but because the different agencies simply cannot play the same game. If you're in an Eldritch Society game, you can't be a mech pilot. If you're in an Engel Project game, you can't be a Tager. And so on. You can't just make a character at home and make modest changes to their backstories in the first session in order to incorporate the other players - you have to select matching backstories before you can even start spending points. So not only is it basically impossible to bring a Cthulhutech character from one campaign to another, it's basically impossible to start a Cthulhutech campaign in a reasonable timeframe. The first session is pretty much lost to group character generation by default.

Characters have Virtues and Vices Flaws that are basically exactly the same conceptually as the ones in nWoD. They are substnatially improved in that you're allowed to make more of them and the lists are long and include things that aren't considered virtues or vices in Catholicism. Character generation is a bewildering ordeal with nested demands (skills require you to take other skills before you can take them, making them into a weird nested list). And shit isn't remotely balanced. Like, not even close. You get 35 points of attributes and six attributes (in all fairness, the six chosen attributes aren't terribad - Agility, Perception, Intellect, Presence, Tenacity, with only Strength as a true weak-sister stat), but if your Agility and Perception add up to 13 or more you get Shadowrun style Wired Reflexes gratis. If your Agility and Perception add up to 17 or more you get level 2 Shadowrun style Wired Reflexes. Seriously. If you flush half your stat points into the stats that make you good at gunfights, you get to act three times for every one time a player who didn't do that gets to go. And the averaging! It really likes you to add two or three stats and divide them by an integer before comparing them to a table. This is very puzzling, because they could have just not asked you to do any division and just had the numbers on the charts be proportionately bigger. That would have been exactly the same, but better and more approachable in literally every single fucking way.

Despite being a skill-based system with no levels, Cthulhutech nonetheless has no-shit character classes that you get to pick from. The character classes are about as balanced as RIFTS classes - which is to say that some professions come with a giant fucking robot and some of them come with a personal computer. You are explicitly told that you can't have the things that are for other character classes to use (even though it's a fucking skill-based system and there's no apparent reason for that), and the game also tells you point blank that you are not allowed to mix various professions in the same team - thereby causing them to be really nothing but a complex system by which the character you wrote up at home while you were borrowing the book has to be scrapped and the entire table has to waste the first entire session making characters and arguing over who gets to play the professions that are actually interesting to them.

As you might expect from a game like this, character advancement is extremely not on the same scale as character creation. There are things which if bought at chargen are considerably cheaper in terms of opportunity costs than if bought later and of course vice versa. Also, the descriptions of what your various capabilities are for picking various skill levels or abilities are in no way associated with what your capabilities are going to be in real play. This is extremely aggravating when it comes to the "Skillz" chapter (yes, really), because the descriptions of what the skills actually do is only five or six lines of text, while the White-Wolf style list of what the different skill levels are supposed to say about your character (which is literally less than useless) take up 8-11 lines. The Skillz chapter could literally tell you more than twice as much about what each skill does and how it works and be the same length just by having a less useless and pretentious format. After writing that, I drank some Old Crowe Reserve.

The combat skills are non-interactive. Having multiple combat skills is in almost all cases a sucker's game, and it's basically the same kind of "I won't use a knife because I lose all my skill dice if I have anything in my hands" bullshit that permeates skill-based games of all stripes. Now I don't remember whether I've been sufficiently contemptuous about the Technician characters. There are characters whose whole job is to be Q. They like repair mechs after battles and design new super weapons and shit. And they are nominally supposed to be in the same team of Dramatic Characters as the people who actually hop into a giant robot or just charge into personal combat with a plasma rifle. This is completely fucked, because while such characters are important parts of the anime that is being ripped off, they have no fucking way to interact with the adventures of the mech pilots and soldiers in any kind of real-time fashion.

Combat is a masterstroke of insanity, where you have "wound levels", but every wound level is actually full of hit points, so you actually have to keep track of double (or triple) digit damage and hit point totals to determine which wound box you're in. It's like someone thought that they would put together a system that includes all the things that are shitty about D&D damage and nWoD damage. Combat runs on four rolls (attack, defense, damage, armor) before it gets to the long division step (yes, really) - and dice are not even counted the same way during each roll. Possibly includes the worst Coup de Grace rules I have ever seen - you automatically kill the target or not based on whether the Storyguide feels like you should be able to based on criteria that are in no way explained - or you don't if the Storyguide decides you don't for an equally lack of explained criteria. Most of the combat section is like that. You see something that looks like a D&D rule (for example: "Opportunity Attacks") and then you realize that there are basically no hard rules or even coherent guidelines about when you might be able to do that, or what would happen if you did, or in some cases both. The Mech combat gets its own writeup and similar actions mostly have similar rules but different names. In order to make things more confusing.

Insanity is split up into fear and insanity. Fear is the thing where looking at monsters has a pretty decent chance of making you freak the fuck out. If you freak out by looking at a monster (which due to the swinginess of the RNG will happen fairly often), you have about a 2/3 chance of being useless for the rest of the battle. And a 34% chance of "just" losing a turn. Insanity points represent a downward spiral - getting more insanity points not only saddles you with more pop-psychiatry diagnoses but also makes you less resistant to subsequent insanity tests. Oh, and when you get to 10 Insanity points, you lose your character. Special mention needs to go out to how certain character types literally have a time limit. For example: as a Tager, you check for insanity gain every game month.

And yeah, the discussion of rape in this book is totally immature and in most cases completely pointless.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I know that most of the anime source material is about children and teens, but at least give people the fucking option to play someone with hair on their nuts!

Silly frank, testicle hair does not exist in hentai anime.

And yeah, the discussion of rape in this book is totally immature and in most cases completely pointless.

Do it anyway. You're on a roll.

[Wesley Street]

Despite being a skill-based system with no levels, Cthulhutech nonetheless has no-shit character classes that you get to pick from. The character classes are about as balanced as RIFTS classes - which is to say that some professions come with a giant fucking robot and some of them come with a personal computer. You are explicitly told that you can't have the things that are for other character classes to use (even though it's a fucking skill-based system and there's no apparent reason for that), and the game also tells you point blank that you are not allowed to mix various professions in the same team - thereby causing them to be really nothing but a complex system by which the character you wrote up at home while you were borrowing the book has to be scrapped and the entire table has to waste the first entire session making characters and arguing over who gets to play the professions that are actually interesting to them.

That's not accurate. PCs don't take a level of Pilot and two levels of Archanotechnican to create some sort of armored cavalry mage. The professions listed are suggestions and aren't considered "classes" any more than "hacker" or "street samurai" archetypes are classes in SR.

Equipment allocation isn't based on occupation. It's Mother May I based on the type of game the GM wants to run and personal equipment is simply assigned accordingly. PCs are all middle class with cars, shelter and ample food unless the player takes the Wealth Quality. Confusingly enough, Pilot isn't even a requirement to handle a mech - it only determines how many different mech types a PC can drive. Mech combat results are based on PC Agility and Perception rolls, just like hand-to-hand.

[jadagul]

I must actually go on the record as saying I don't really understand what the appeal is for various Lovecraftian games, whether this, or Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green or whatever. It's a fundamentally nihilistic universe, so by definition you can not help but lose. If your enemy is an impossibly old, insanely powerful pantheon of protodeities that regard humanity somewhat akin to how we regard insects or bacteria, and the only stage we can ever have hope to make an effect against are human- and human-level minions of those deities, why fucking bother? Put a bullet in your skull and let the cultists raise their mad patrons to wash the universe clean of human civilization.

Assuming you aren't a religious person, why do you bother living in the real world, considering that as far as we can see, humanity's existence is an utterly insignificant speck of light upon the universe's dark and unthinking abyss, forever bound to an equally insignificant blue planet by merciless gravity. And it can be extinguished literally next second by a stray asteroid, a wave of radiation from an exploded star or who knows what else. Lovecraft didn't even manage to write his fictional universe to be as dark and terrifying as he perceived our own - humans can sometimes make a difference there, and even after the humanity is gone, intelligent life will continue in other forms.

Because in the real world, life is awesome and fun and stuff generally works out and improves over time. I'm never sure why I should want to go live in a fake world where that doesn't happen.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Thanks for your review, Frank. Every time I try to look at the probability of whether an action would succeed in Cthulhutech, my brain rebels and tells me to go rake leaves or scrub the floor instead.

This thread is opening up grand new vistas of terrible game design I dared not contemplate in depth before.

[Username17]

Despite being a skill-based system with no levels, Cthulhutech nonetheless has no-shit character classes that you get to pick from. The character classes are about as balanced as RIFTS classes - which is to say that some professions come with a giant fucking robot and some of them come with a personal computer. You are explicitly told that you can't have the things that are for other character classes to use (even though it's a fucking skill-based system and there's no apparent reason for that), and the game also tells you point blank that you are not allowed to mix various professions in the same team - thereby causing them to be really nothing but a complex system by which the character you wrote up at home while you were borrowing the book has to be scrapped and the entire table has to waste the first entire session making characters and arguing over who gets to play the professions that are actually interesting to them.

That's not accurate. PCs don't take a level of Pilot and two levels of Archanotechnican to create some sort of armored cavalry mage. The professions listed are suggestions and aren't considered "classes" any more than "hacker" or "street samurai" archetypes are classes in SR.

Equipment allocation isn't based on occupation.

This is completely wrong. While professions don't have "levels" and you aren't allowed to "multiclass", they nonetheless exist. It's a part of chargen, you select a profession template. Most of the text body of the profession templates are "suggestions" about how to spend your points, but they nonetheless come with some things that are hard and fast. To be an Engel Pilot you need a Tenacity of 7. That is not a "suggestion", it is a rule. Also, you get a fucking Engel off the big list. On the other hand, if you choose "Intelligence Agent" as your profession, you are required by law to buy the Authority quality, and you start with a personal computer. Seriously, you can fucking look this shit up, there's a whole mini-chapter of these fucking things from pages 71-78.

Confusingly enough, Pilot isn't even a requirement to handle a mech - it only determines how many different mech types a PC can drive. Mech combat results are based on PC Agility and Perception rolls, just like hand-to-hand.

This is also wrong. While you use your own stats and fighting skills and shit to make your mech run around and punch things, your pilot skill is still used to power flight pods and shit.

-Username17

[Grek]

Anyone want to tell me WTF a Tager is?

[Username17]

Anyone want to tell me WTF a Tager is?

Guyver.

This particular piece of copypasta is particularly egregious. The villain monster versions are called "Dhohanoids", while in the original source material they are called "Zoanoids". What I think is weird is that despite being front and center along with Evangelion as an anime they are rippingoff left and right to make their setting, Guyver really isn't that good.

To my knowledge, no one puts Guyver on a top five or even a top ten list. It's just a really weird choice. They could have been fapping to Blue Seed or Yu Yu Hakusho or something that was more directly Cthulhu-relevant or popular.

-Username17

[Avoraciopoctules]

They are the White Hat secret monster shapeshifter. There's a cult where people do a ritual that fuses them with a monster spirit they can manifest as living armor or something, as opposed to the Black Hat version where they actually turn into the monster.
EDIT: ninja'ed

[Sashi]

Guyver had a live-action movie made in 1991 (loosely) starring Mark Hamill that got heavy play on the Sci-Fi channel during that all important mid-nineties anime-explosion.

[hyzmarca]

Guyver had a live-action movie made in 1991 (loosely) starring Mark Hamill that got heavy play on the Sci-Fi channel during that all important mid-nineties anime-explosion.

There's also a sequel staring Solid Snake, which is actually half decent.

But yeah it's obviously based heavily on what little anime was available in America during the 80s and 90s.

It's quite telling that he chose Robotech to rip off instead of Macross, which most contemporaneity anime fans would prefer.

[Koumei]

Remember also that you can totally critsucceed AND critfail at the same time. What happens then is, as with every other fucking thing in this game, left up to Mister Cavern.

[Username17]

Remember also that you can totally critsucceed AND critfail at the same time. What happens then is, as with every other fucking thing in this game, left up to Mister Cavern.

The Critical Failure rules are among the worst I have ever seen. You crit fail when you roll at least half ones on your dice. People will remember that basic system from glitches in Shadowrun 4. And as an amusing anecdote: people glitch noticeably more when they are rolling even numbers of dice than when they are rolling odd numbers of dice and the dicepools are small. This is a fairly minor concern in Shadowrun4 because:

• rolling more dice makes you more likely to get hits, which makes your glitches less likely to be critical glitches (that matter) and more likely to be non-critical glitches (that don't matter).
• No one rolls less than six dice on anything they are supposed to be good at, so the entire question is largely academic.

However, in Cthulhutech there is no differentiation between glitches and critical glitches - it's all just Critical Failure. Also, you're rolling between 1 and 5 dice on pretty much everything, so the fact that your chances of rolling at least half ones on 2 dice is 90% higher than your chances of rolling at least half ones on 1 die is actually really fucking important and blatantly obvious over the course of a game.

-Username17

[kzt]

However, in Cthulhutech there is no differentiation between glitches and critical glitches - it's all just Critical Failure. Also, you're rolling between 1 and 5 dice on pretty much everything, so the fact that your chances of rolling at least half ones on 2 dice is 90% higher than your chances of rolling at least half ones on 1 die is actually really fucking important and blatantly obvious over the course of a game.

I remember corresponding with the designer and he had pretty much no idea how the dice numbers and values related to the probability of success or failure. I hooked him up with a statistician who had gotten bored and done the math for the craziness. It's out there on the web somewhere. But it just reinforced to me how little some game designers think about the math of the basic mechanics they write and just don't think it is important.

[Silent Wayfarer]

I said that the rape camp meme made sense in the game was not gratuitous. In the context of the EoD needing lots of combat able soldiers in a hurry and the fact that deep one children take a long, long time to mature and can't work technology the mass creation of hybrids made sense. it was not put in for a gross factor or anything like that. Within the framework of the game it is a valid thing for the EoD to do.


people act like it was put in for shock value or something and dominates the game. Neither is true.

I hardly encountered the EoD rape camps in the fluff, so I'll gladly concede that that part wasn't gratuitous. What I DID encounter was multiple references to rape and sexual slavery in the fluff (many of the published adventures, and nope, you can't really do much about it), the rape furries who would totally knock up your female characters with a fatal pregnancy (and abortions are fatal too), the literal rape machine that that fucks sacrifices on it to death, etc.

In addition, the art itself is quite sexualized and the existence of the Nazzadi race seems to be there to let people play drow strippers with flimsy in-game justification. While I do like my pornography, associating a roleplaying game with porn imagery worthy of /d/ is hardly the way to make people take it seriously.

May I ask if you're the same person who says that rape is not a major theme of CTech just because word searches reveal that only 2% of the text consists of the word rape?*


*this is paraphrased, but you get the idea

[John Magnum]

http://taharqa.org/?p=249
Holy shit, the part where he starts comparing attribute/skill scores to the actual DCs is fucking batshit. There's always some ludicrously steep breakpoint where your odds of success drop really precipitously just by going up one DC.

Ridiculously pointlessly wonky system. Especially since they honestly do a really poor job explaining how it actually works.

[Maxus]

Wait, it's one of the tARds who showed up to defend Catalyst! Sweet! This should be entertaining...

[icyshadowlord]

I still find it hard to believe how much that one dude I mentioned praised the devs for answering player questions and such when they seem to be complete idiots that restrict the game for the dumbest of reasons. Because really, he made it sound like they were doing the exact opposite, which is both hilarious and really fucking pathetic at the same time. Then again, he did claim the game was good too, but since he wasn't very good at being a DM, I'm not surprised that he's not very good at picking the better games out there either.

[MfA]

reading the story call of cthulhu I doubt the vessel that head on'ed cthulhu was even 10,000 tons, and it sustained no damage in the collision.

To me it has always seemed it's the CoC players who play up the hopelessness angle to present their roleplaying as more mature than the juvenile powerfantasy people like me engage in ... then they construct elaborate fantasies about how the steamboat didn't really hit him when confronted with the actual story.

[Aryxbez]

The problem that gets most people's panties in a bunch (my own included) is that people read Shadow Over Innsmouth, assume that's all there is to the mythos, and try to run games where the players know that their characters are helpless. That shit ain't fucking fun. Play some local heroes. Stop worrying about the human race.

In Concurrent with people saying how Cthulhu stories have some heroism and victory within them, I think you should play the Xbox title "Call of Cthulhu". It's quite an example of a Shadow Over Inssmouth, not being as helpless as might think, sounds the similar for those fans too.

As icyshadowlord said, they pretty much self construct the game as such, limiting their stories to grim loss, much like most RPG fans do with Fantasy thinking first five levels are the only ones that exist. Though I suppose it makes it more "human", even the protagonist in the video game I mentioned above, has far from a happy conclusion to his life at the end of the story. However, in that "bad ending", you're gonna accomplish something awesome, and that seems to how those tales roll.

[name_here]

Shadow Over Innsmouth is the one where the army sweeps in and scours the town while a navy submarine takes a big chunk out of Devil's Reef with a torpedo. It's not exactly filled with helplessness.

[Lago PARANOIA]

To me it has always seemed it's the CoC players who play up the hopelessness angle to present their roleplaying as more mature than the juvenile powerfantasy people like me engage in ... then they construct elaborate fantasies about how the steamboat didn't really hit him when confronted with the actual story.

Tell me more.