Dreaming

[essentialsaltes]

aaronjv ran a Dreamlands-y CoC game over the 3-day weekend. It suffered a bit from what most Dreamlands type things do. You run into a series of extravagantly described things that have nothing to do with you. "You come across a wandering giant marsupial tiger. But not just any giant marsupial tiger... its ears are bedecked with long, draping earrings of chrysobel and iolite, while its shaved forehead is covered in arabesques of black henna. Within its pouch is a latticework sphere of filigreed titanium, which contains a hen's egg as large as a ruby. The tiger's obsidian claws look as if they have recently rent three or four lesser auks into shreds of flesh. All in all, the tiger is as irrelevant as it is remarkable."
"Uh... we, uh, give it a wide berth and continue with our mission."
"OK, next you come across a river of unusual size. But no ordinary...."

Anyway, no fault of Aaron's that the (published) adventure was constructed that way. The climax to the adventure was suddenly a thousandfold more interesting, but we had frittered so much time in sightseeing that our hurried plans came to an inevitable end: ignominious deaths (almost) all round.

Aaron tried out d20 on it, and looked to be almost as confused and frustrated as I was when I ran my one Worldprime game. Seeing CoC run by d20 gave some interesting perspective. It seems to me that d20 automatically creates a much more rules-lawyer friendly and story-telling unfriendly atmosphere. It's hard to run cinematic and enjoyable combat/action scenes when twerps are going on about move actions and flanking and opposed grappling checks. C'mon! This is Call of Cthulhu! Do you actually think you can win?!? Just enjoy yourself for fuck's sake!

I swear, as I get older and crotchetier, my own preferred RPG-style looks more and more like Once Upon a Time.

OK, I'm ranting. But I had fun, and hung out with old friends and new friends and ate and gabbed and rolled little polyhedra.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I've heard that they're going to clean up combat in 4th edition, but not sure how much. I've run a couple episodes of an Eberron game. It feels like the system is being wasted a bit, on my game, since my games tend to have almost no combat. So they've got all these elaborate rules for combat that just rarely come up. I enjoyed using White Wolf's storyteller system pretty well for light action, but all their actual abilities for the various supernatural groups are totally unbalanced and required re-balancing to actually use.