Quote from: CRKrueger;803952Well, since my current Cthulhu game is RQ6 Hyboria, combat and the Mythos can be summed up as:

"If it bleeds, we can kill it."
and
"Silver and Fire!"

Well, this sounds cool.  Feel free to share more about this campaign (perhaps in another thread), if you feel like it.

Quote from: RPGPundit;803905Well, that's basically the question: do you buy the notion that you shouldn't have a lot of combat happening in a CoC game? Or do you say "fuck that"?

In a Call of Cthulhu game, yes. The emphasis of the game is on investigation and global conspiracy cults, based on the rules as presented. But that's not to say you cannot have a Lovecraft themed game without loads of combat.

Ive been doing a lot of reading of Lovecraft (re-re-re-reading - don't know how many times) and literary criticism over the last two years, and getting my teeth into the controversy that many people's understanding of Lovecraft come from August Derleth.

My feeling is that Call of Cthulhu is based on Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos rather than Lovecraft's Mythos as Lovecraft presented in various stories he wrote. Derleth and the other members of the Lovecraft Circle (and quite a number of pastiche and themed modern writers) took the mythology as Lovecraft certainly allowed - taking themes, objects, characters, etc as symbolic rather than definitive, and running with it.

I do think Derleth interpreted Lovecraft in ways that is not very Lovecraft.

If you haven't re-read his stories in a while, set aside all the gaming lore you've picked up around Lovecraft, and all the stories of other writers - and just read and accept only what's written in the stories themselves. What do narrators really observe, and how much do they actually learn from seemingly unreliable protagonists? How many narrators could actually be a big bug-nuts already because they happened to read a forbidden tome first, and that coloring their perceptions?

Quote from: RPGPundit;803905Well, that's basically the question: do you buy the notion that you shouldn't have a lot of combat happening in a CoC game? Or do you say "fuck that"?

Completely depends on the adventure. I've run everything from Agatha Christie-style parlour murder mysteries to full-on Hellboy pulp adventures. I see no reason to pigeonhole.

Quote from: Soylent Green;803972I've never read Lovecraft so I don't know what best emulates the genre.

The game De Profundis actually. Lovecraft's Mythos are eminently gameable, but his stories largely aren't, with a few exceptions. Call of Cthulhu isnt actually a very Lovecraftian game anyways, it just happens to be set in Lovecraft's + 100 years of fanfics' and tributes' world.

I found combat in BRP could be absurdly deadly, particularly with automatic weapons.

I had an investigator survive being nibbled by a dark young and flung 60 feet through the air. (Some very, very good Luck rolls)
And then he died in one round walking into a machine gun ambush.

Quote from: Will;804020I found combat in BRP could be absurdly deadly, particularly with automatic weapons.

I had an investigator survive being nibbled by a dark young and flung 60 feet through the air. (Some very, very good Luck rolls)
And then he died in one round walking into a machine gun ambush.

Yeah...thats just absurd. :rolleyes:

Well, coming on the heels of a giant tree-like hydra monster thing chewing on you and then throwing you down, it was a bit ignoble.

Fucking Russian mafia.

(Lead by a weretiger)
((Who ended up biting/infecting a PC))
(((Weird campaign, hee)))

Quote from: Lynn;803991My feeling is that Call of Cthulhu is based on Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos rather than Lovecraft's Mythos as Lovecraft presented in various stories he wrote.  

Sandy Peterson (the original creator of CoC) explicitly rejected Derleth's interpretation and his pastiches when designing the game.

Quote from: Akrasia;804042Sandy Peterson (the original creator of CoC) explicitly rejected Derleth's interpretation and his pastiches when designing the game.

Yeah, I never saw much of Derleth's dualistic Catholic worldview in CoC... maybe some scenarios here and there.
Not that there haven't been compromises away from pure Lovecraft in order to make the game playable and fun. I think it's open to being pushed up and down the spectrum from action adventure to nihilistic horror.
I keep looking for ways to inject more Thomas Ligotti into the game but I always end up with results that I suspect will be too bleak/weird... and not all that fun.

Quote from: Akrasia;804042Sandy Peterson (the original creator of CoC) explicitly rejected Derleth's interpretation and his pastiches when designing the game.

While I think he rejected the pseudo-pantheon that Derleth tried to formulate, the game has Derleth creations from Derleth stories in it (and a lot of other writers as well).

Also, I think August Dereth's original Trail of Cthulhu stories fit the Call of Cthulhu RPG pattern pretty well.

It was Gahan Wilson's lengthy review of Call of Cthulhu in an 85 Twilight Zone magazine issue that got me really interested in playing the game.

I like using combat in Call of Cthulhu. With the older editions also, but especially with the newest edition, where you can choose to dodge or counter-strike a melee attack. Combat now is very dynamic, in that you can actually hurt a foe in his own combat action, if your success degree is higher than his.

I usually have only a little combat at the end to get (what I think of as) a "Lovecraftian" feel, though I find the system itself leans toward a sort of more-fighty style which actually can spawn new ways of playing.

Like this style of play: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2013/06/nosebleed-noir.html …was inspired by the desperate way the combat system works.

One fight at the end . Everybody dies.

Quote from: Will;804034(((Awesome campaign, hee)))

FIFY.