The Horror
And what it means is that D&D takes a long time. D&D is heroic, but it’s often a long, arduous journey to become heroic. This is because there are conflicts at every turn. Low level monsters soften up the PCs for more powerful monsters. Dungeons channel the PCs along certain paths, ensuring that those conflicts happen. And ultimately there’s a certain predetermined path that ends with the main bad guy hopefully dead.
The adventures that broke this up were always welcome and interesting and usually took place outside of a dungeon. Green Ronin’s Freeport series is noteworthy for avoiding many of the dungeon crawl tropes and thus breaking up the rhythm of play, making D&D more than a resource-management game.
In modern games and Call of Cthulhu games in particular, monsters aren’t lurking around every corner. There may be one, possibly two encounters with human cultists. The final encounter is often with a monster, but that monster is tremendously more powerful than the PCs. Their options are usually limited and few of them involve combat; if the solution with the monster does involve combat, it’s either stacked in the PCs favor (Dust of Suleiman, for example) or it’s a ritual that takes time, forcing the PCs into a defensive posture until they can complete it to banish the beast.
This means that Challenge Ratings lose their significance. The final monster may have a challenge rating well beyond the means of the PCs' abilities to defeat without that special advantage. And given the special advantage, success tends to be an all-or-nothing deal. There aren’t usually gradations of success. The PCs either banish the Big Bad or they die trying. There are no loss of hit points and certainly no resurrections later.
This made me rethink the Challenge Rating system. I ended up comprising by simply cutting the experience points in half, or my PCs would rocket through the levels much too fast. I’ve found it’s very important to allow players to grow into their characters, especially since my gaming group is new to both D20 Modern and Call of Cthulhu.
The other problem is that where D&D helped channel PCs down a certain path through the physical confines of a dungeon, lack of communication, and plenty of isolation, PCs are totally connected in a modern world. Cell phones are everywhere. People can hop on planes, trains, and automobiles to move from place to place, well away from danger. And conflict has many more dire consequences, like getting arrested for shooting someone – even cultists have rights. And yet…
I discovered that almost all of these challenges, challenges that kept me from running a modern campaign for a very long time, are just as easy to resolve as in a fantasy world. In fact, you can use the supposed freedom of information and travel against the PCs.
For example, reading about Y’golonac can unleash the evil in one’s mind, ultimately leading to possession. Blade ended up being possessed by reading Y’golonac’s name on his camera phone. Suddenly his lifeline became a terrible disadvantage.
Another example: I enjoy having the police show up to ask for identification, interrogate suspects, and otherwise slow down a group that prefers to stay together. In a modern world, it’s much easier to get separated – like say one character convalescing in a hospital at the mercy of a vengeful spirit while his comrades are outside explaining to the police what happened at the old movie theater.
A trope of Call of Cthulhu that I’m not fond of is the slow investigation. In essence, PCs are expected to dig through books, interview people, and otherwise take their time to find out about the enemy before they face the big bad monster. Which is fine for a game of slow dread; but when it comes to action horror, investigation is just plain boring. There’s also no gradations of success – you either figure things out or don’t, which can be terribly crippling if you needed to know that the alien from beyond is only vulnerable olives but you didn’t know to bring any with you. Trail of Cthulhu addressed many of these issues and I’m still considering if I want to adopt them into my game.
Thankfully, there’s the Internet. The palm computers that the PCs use (known as cistrons, taken from the Black Ops GURPS book) gives them access to a special intranet known as Blacknet. Blacknet is my excuse for digging up esoteric info at a moment’s notice, greatly accelerating the days and weeks that research normally takes in a Call of Cthulhu game. This essentially condenses library research to a few taps of a keypad while the PCs are still in the mix, and even possibly still in danger.
I’ve also discovered that making a bunch of rolls and providing an information dump makes my players’ eyes glaze. Instead, I ask for periodic rolls, with the in-game excuse that Blacknet is performing a search and emails the agents back as it finds information. This gives me a chance to provide handouts during the slow parts of the game so that the non-participating PCs have something to read. It also means the information is learned over the course of the game rather than all at once.
On the plus side, these games happen very quickly. We play two to three scenarios per session, which suits me just fine. It also means I can gauge the number of scenarios we play to how much time we have left.
I’ve learned a lot from horror movies, which have just two hours to get character development, rising dread, a horrible encounter, and a resolution all wrapped up in an hour. In fact, I would argue two hours is about the longest any session can retain the height of its tension, with some sort of resolution before moving on to the next conflict. This has become obvious with the Tower of Sanity; when it falls, I don’t bother rebuilding it until the next scenario. Building tension simply takes too long to do it more than once per scenario.
Speaking of horror movies, there’s a lot to be learned from the most horrifying of them all…really BAD horror movies.
Lesson Learned: Short and sweet lends itself to horror but not to adventure gaming.
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