Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;497653The other really great gaming purchase I made was I once got ten steaks for under $20 because of some mad cow scare discount, and me and my gaming group, who were all poor university students working minimum wage dead-end summer jobs and who I had just met that summer, all ate steaks for a couple of days and hung out and became bros instead of just some dudes I played games with.

Outstanding ! Cooking and gaming, male bonding at it's best.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Rincewind1;497362Yes it is, and I found it exactly what I was looking for when I was running CoC games. I highly recommend it.

I was really disappointed by the Gumshoe system. It seem to trade one type of railroading for another type. And then actual skill system seemed odd to me.

Quote from: Tetsubo;497681I was really disappointed by the Gumshoe system. It seem to trade one type of railroading for another type. And then actual skill system seemed odd to me.

I never really felt railroaded when playing or GMing Gumshoe - I just draw a basic plot design (So this guy did X, which resulted in Y, and Z must be done to prevent X from happening again), and let the PCs mostly choose how to solve the mystery. It's a bit odd, but it works for me.

I WANTED to put Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition...but it would have to be the old Uncanny X-Men boxed set for Marvel FASERIP...because all I knew was "X-Men" and "game". That was what hooked me into the hobby.

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;498226I WANTED to put Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition...but it would have to be the old Uncanny X-Men boxed set for Marvel FASERIP...because all I knew was "X-Men" and "game". That was what hooked me into the hobby.

Also, it taught me the difference between "supplement" and "game"...=P

Rolemaster boxed set. Character & Campaign Law, Spell Law and Arms Law for £7 in a local model shop. The guy knew he charged us too little after we bit his hand off on the price offered.

Quote from: Tetsubo;497681I was really disappointed by the Gumshoe system. It seem to trade one type of railroading for another type. And then actual skill system seemed odd to me.

Yeah. Doesn't solve the problem it claims to solve, using a clunky mechanism that doesn't work in actual play, built around a false-premise of how mystery stories are actually built, and loaded up with advice that says "railroad your players"*.

The last can be discarded by simply having the semi-automatic clues point in multiple directions. The others aren't really soluble.

(*My least-favorite bit of Robin D. Laws writing ever is the design essay where he says (in summary), "The players who fought hardest against my railroad and forced me to stop railroading them complained the most about being railroaded... despite the fact I had stopped railroading them!" It was a classic case of a guy just not understanding the problem.)

I never came into the problem of railroading, and I led like 20 - 30 ToC sessions. *shrugs* IMO a criminal session will be partially predictable - after all, you expect the players to find the clues and connect the dots.

Nightlife in the summer of 1991.

That silly little game of Vampyres, Werewolves, and other Kin led to twenty years of awesome fun which still colors our gaming experiences here, today.

We used it for everything back in the day, despite it's easily house ruled clunkiness. We still refer to the setting constantly and have enjoyed a game or two with other systems such as Savage Worlds.

Amazing how a simple game can have such a big impact on a large time investment in your life.

My best impulse buy was probably The Arduin Grimoire... not that I ever played it as is, but it had a HUGE influence on my games after I read through it.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;498628Yeah. Doesn't solve the problem it claims to solve...

Which wasn't ever a problem to begin with... maybe an issue of some poor scenario design or GMing... but not a problem of CoC's system.
TOC makes for great supplementary material for CoC though.

Quote from: Simlasa;498792Which wasn't ever a problem to begin with...

I had the exact opposite problem: My issue with ToC is that it's just punting the problem down the field.  Just because the players automatically find the clues doesn't mean they're going to understand what they mean or follow them in the direction they're supposed to go.  I find the middle ground between "players get completely stuck" and "GM just outright hands the players all the solution to the mystery" to be extremely difficult to tune for.

Quote from: Skywalker;497285Probably the 4e Core Set recently. I was a staunch hater of 4e but something wouldn't let me not buy it when it was in the store (probably having bought the last three editions on release). It provided me with a lot of great gaming in 2008 to 2010 and was probably the consistently best D&D experiences I have had since I started playing the RPG.

and when did you start playing D&D? just curious.

Quote from: Benoist;497428Narrative-bullshit be damned, I'd like to try Trail one of these days. I suspect that, much like WoD games, you can actually ignore all that 'story'-based bullshit and have a blast with this game. I'd give it a shot with a competent GM at least.

Definitely buy for the Ken Hite stuff, but I doubt you'll run a gumshoe system game.  It's one of the things you hate: a game providing rules to fix bad GMing.

Quote from: daniel_ream;498801I had the exact opposite problem: My issue with ToC is that it's just punting the problem down the field.  Just because the players automatically find the clues doesn't mean they're going to understand what they mean or follow them in the direction they're supposed to go.

Exactly. They only partially fixed the potential fail rate for a clue while pretending that they had fixed it entirely.

And, in actual play, their partial fix is either (a) ineffective or (b) painfully boring. (The characters "automatically get the clue", but only if they use the right skill. Which means that either (a) there are still scenarios in which they won't find the clue they're supposed to automatically find or (b) every scene turns into a dramatic reading of a laundry list as the players plow through their entire skill list.)

Ultimately, the problem they're trying to fix is a scenario design failure. Fixing it mechanically is, at best, overly complicated. (And, in the case of Gumshoe, a failure anyway.)

QuoteI find the middle ground between "players get completely stuck" and "GM just outright hands the players all the solution to the mystery" to be extremely difficult to tune for.

Put 'em in a clue-rich environment. It ain't rocket science.

Quote from: CRKrueger;498805Definitely buy for the Ken Hite stuff, but I doubt you'll run a gumshoe system game.

I'll definitely second this, too. The games actually have some great material published for them. Pity about the system.

You actually get the core clue of the location for free, you don't have to pay for it with a skill point. Those are for additional clues you're intentionally seeking.