The Philosophy of Roleplaying Games

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Leperflesh: May 17, 2007

Secret missions that are good for in-game rewards are a fun and cool thing. They're even built-in parts of some games. The challenge of course, is making sure everyone's secret thing is similarly easy/hard to do, if you're going to give a reward for it.

# ? Aug 5, 2020 19:54

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 15:44

admanb: Jun 18, 2014

Waterfall Watcher posted:

I'm not sure if this place is the best place to post this question but is making motivation cards with little objectives and small perks a good way in motivating players to be engaged in the game?
I've been doing them for a while for my Coc shorts so the players would feel an extra drive to keep their character alive and focus more on the game. The objectives are usually pretty small like keep this character alive but don't let anyone know you're protecting them, or you heard that this dude has money stored somewhere so check out if the rumors are true and if they are steal it.

PCs having individual goals or personal connections to a scenario can definitely increase players engagement as it means that not everyone in the group is focused on the exact same goal. The grand goal may be "solve the mystery", but PC A is focused on the missing person because that's their sibling/cousin/mentor, while PC B is focused on the spooky house because it used to be owned by an old family friend that was said to have hidden incredible wealth in the walls, etc. The secrecy aspect of it I don't like because I much prefer the dramatic irony of players knowing everything while PCs try to keep secrets, but that depends on you and your players.

The main difference between doing it in shorts and in a campaign is that in a campaign you want those to be more tied to larger stories or character backgrounds, unless you're aiming for a pulpy episodic tone where every scenario feels like a one-off.

# ? Aug 5, 2020 19:56

Thanlis: Mar 17, 2011

Pulling the Delta Green discussion over here since I can't find a Cthulhu thread and I think it's more in line with the stated purpose of this thread.

The problem with DG isn't that you're playing cops -- make your own call on whether you want that campaign, we've all played evil people. The problem is that it explicitly validates the thin blue line myth. Namely: law enforcement officials are always in terrible danger that only law enforcement officials can understand, and breaking the law is justified in order to protect civilians. In fact, killing civilians by mistake is justified in order to protect civilians in general. You gotta burn the village to save it.

Running in the Cowboy era doesn't really fix that problem, because then you're just playing one of those constitutional sheriffs who believes that the elected government has been corrupted and it's the duty of the local sheriff to protect the Constitution. And once again, in the fiction, you are absolutely correct to believe that.

You can run a DG campaign without buying into that myth but you need to put some effort into it.

# ? Apr 9, 2022 00:03

Leperflesh: May 17, 2007

I pretty much agree with that. "Hard men making hard choices" is a toxic (not uniquely, but very much) American myth that has a lot of momentum behind it. That said, we can engage with harmful tropes if we acknowledge them openly. It may be difficult to avoid them, regardless, since they infuse so much of our media and entertainment already.

# ? Apr 9, 2022 00:16

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Thanlis posted:

Pulling the Delta Green discussion over here since I can't find a Cthulhu thread and I think it's more in line with the stated purpose of this thread.

The problem with DG isn't that you're playing cops -- make your own call on whether you want that campaign, we've all played evil people. The problem is that it explicitly validates the thin blue line myth. Namely: law enforcement officials are always in terrible danger that only law enforcement officials can understand, and breaking the law is justified in order to protect civilians. In fact, killing civilians by mistake is justified in order to protect civilians in general. You gotta burn the village to save it.

Running in the Cowboy era doesn't really fix that problem, because then you're just playing one of those constitutional sheriffs who believes that the elected government has been corrupted and it's the duty of the local sheriff to protect the Constitution. And once again, in the fiction, you are absolutely correct to believe that.

You can run a DG campaign without buying into that myth but you need to put some effort into it.

I get where you're coming from but ultimately...nothing they do is ultimately fundamentally correct or good on a macro scale, it's extremely just frantically laying down track for the train to go another mile every step of the way. The world in DG is hosed, plain and simple, though there's a lot of the Lovecraft nerd canon crap that can be leaned into like the Dreamlands as an alternative success scenario. The stars will be right, there's no way around it, the Mi-Go abandoning the Grey disguise is because they got everything they wanted out of us and feel no reason to save us, the Yithians only care about us to ensure they exist at the end of all time, the Lloigor hate the Yithians and don't care about us. You don't matter, it's pure-strain white dude existentialist nihilist horror, you're a sacrifice on the alter of the American machine and the blue line myth is the lie you tell yourself to just flick a Bic once at the bottom of a mineshaft. The problem with DG is that it buries its lede on that point pretty solidly unless you specifically get into stuff like STATIC Protocol and the King in Yellow, which is that you are literally fighting entropy and cannot win that war.

And like personally I'm over it, all I want to do with DG is steal the mechanics and run giggling into the night while revamping the Sanity mechanics into something less dumb and bad, I'm so loving tired of Cthulhu and cosmic horror, but the point is you're gonna loving die because you are a bunch of very smart mutant ants that grew up on the kitchen floor while the house was abandoned and no matter how much you rationalize your actions and hide behind the toxic veneer of authority and protection, the bug bombs are coming whether or not you understand how they work and where you exist in existence.

Also here's the Cthulhu thread. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3504205 Worth a skim if you're interested in further discourse and discussion.

Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Apr 9, 2022

# ? Apr 9, 2022 00:31

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 15:44

Thanlis: Mar 17, 2011

Doh, thanks. I missed the whole thread.

And you�re right, that�s how you have to play it.

# ? Apr 9, 2022 02:10

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