Author: Dan (---.aol.com)
Date: 10-31-2001 12:56
Whoa.
I was kind of agreeing with you to a point, but, man, did you take a twisted turn toward the end there.
Basically you blew of Call of Cthulhu for no reason other than saying it's system is slightly clunky. This is true, but, boy, you missed most of what the game is about.
Worse than that, you went directly into discussing Kult as the best game and system. Yikes. That thing had the most bizarre and clunky system mechanics I've seen. CoC might be slightly clunky (due to its age) but Kult was just plain wonky.
If we compare the two, we find similarities. Both have really twisted views of humans versus the world and that there was much, much more to reality than most humans ever knew. Both have modules that are very frequently long excuses for railroading the players (and Kult went to the extremes of this).
But then we have CoC, which was easy to read but with a sometimes archaic sensibility, as compared to Kult with usually horrible unreadable layouts (they stretched graphic design way past the point of it breaking in an effort to try to be cool) and a sensibility that was gothic splat wannabe. In fact, it's funny that you disparage other systems for being splatty and then talk about Kult being good. Talk about gore and nonchalance about powers. One of the major supplements had people walking around friends with vamps and then becoming vamps like some WoD wannabe game. And the players typically started getting weird powers when their humanity changed or when they started to see past the illusions anyway. Contrasted with CoC where usually the huimans stay human. Even if they do occasionally get access to some whacked spell it's not true power as it's mostly ineffective and destructive.
I can only surmise that the reason you like Kult so much is you had a GM (or were a GM) that molded it into what you wanted it to be. It had a great foundation with the backstory, but I don't think the backstory was any better than the CoC one. Besides, all that only helps if the gamers capitalize on it.
In my mind, we have yet to see the ultimate horror RPG. I think the second edition of Chill could have gotten there. The Chill Companion had some great stuff that most players never used and that were not followed up on in any other product. All the other books for that edition (with the possible exception of the Vodoo sourcebook) were just horrible.
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