Tag Archives: GMing

Clues in the Dark

Last fall I watched a lot of the TV series Marple with my wife, and there are few better inspirations for writing good mystery than Agatha Christie, who spins quite a ball of yarn only to unravel it with perfect logic just when all seemed lost. It gave me a lot of respect for mystery novelists (a genre I have only a passing interest in, which is strange considering my interest in mysteries), especially good ones who can build layer upon layer of dramatic intrigue and obtuse clues.

There is little difference between writing a mystery novel and writing a good investigative story (whether for the Cthulhu Mythos genre or more specifically for a RPG system like Gumshoe), because, ultimately, you’re building a series of clues for the characters (PCs) to uncover, discuss, and follow to the next scene/clue. Investigative RPGs are my favorite to both write and play because of that clue trail – building an interesting and original set of clues for the PCs to follow is hard, but so ultimately satisfying if done right.

For the longest time, Call of Cthulhu (COC) was my favorite investigative game, though not as a system so much as for the atmosphere and breadth of materials available for it. But over the past few years, multiple new takes on the Mythos investigative game have cropped up, highlighting both the breadth of the market as well as the need for a new take on how RPGs investigations are run.

Cthulhu Dark (a rules-light system by Graham Walmsley) is now my favorite Cthulhu RPG for one simple reason – the rules never get in the way of the story. Ever. I never have to stare down a bad roll and try to figure out how to make it work – it’s all positive creativity. In COC, I am always trying to figure out how to make a bad roll fit into making sure the story moves forward. Even Trail of Cthulhu, which is based on Gumshoe and aims to always make core clues available, can get bogged down in some of the illogical bookkeeping that goes into spending points to expand the clues.

When I play Cthulhu Dark (CD), though, I can use the die rolls (including my own house rules for skill rolls) to judge the varying degrees of success the PCs face when finding clues. This, in turn, puts the onus on the scenario writer to develop an intriguing set of clues for the PCs to follow, which then makes it easy to turn a die roll (whether high or low, as success is guaranteed) into figuring out the best manner for the story to play out. You can use the randomness to add flavor to the story, not determine whether or not the PCs actually succeed.

I know there are still plenty of old-school COC players who live and die by what the dice tell you, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that providing your players are having fun, which is the ultimate litmus test for a game’s success. But why make interpreting the dice easy (pass/fail) while making interpreting the clues (where do we go next) the hard part? Nothing good comes for free, and the challenge for how to interpret rolls is what makes playing CD fun. The PCs are going to get the clues regardless – what comes next is the degrees of success that follow the roll.

And there’s no reason to make it binary, saying pass or fail – again, make the die rolls interesting and fun to understand. The die rolls are a spectrum to work from, letting you interpret a high, medium, or low roll however the story best needs it, at that moment. Yes, that’s hard, but, again, that’s what makes it fun.

As part of He Who Laughs Last, I’ve written some house rules for using skills in the game. Funnily enough, the rules and skill list mirror the skills listed by Graham in his other book, Stealing Cthulhu (starting page 52 – go get it from the shelf, I’ll wait). In a nutshell, I’ve found that people like the boundaries of having a limited list of skills to choose from. We then use three dice (color coded green, blue, and red) to represent the three types of rolls: general, skills, and insanity. So there’s still some crunch (rules) to the game, but it never gets bogged down in figuring out rules to keep the game going.

Then, if the rules are easy and transparent to the game, the story becomes the platform to run the game, not the other way around. Your job then, as scenario writer, is to write the most interesting, intriguing, and dangerous set of clues your story demands. The trail of clues and how your players follow that trail then becomes the most critical component of your game. Something I’m sure Miss Marple would appreciate.

No Signal – Limitations in Modern Horror Gaming

One of the most compelling and scary components about Lovecraft’s horror is its remoteness. There’s a reason why he set Whisperer in the Darkness in the remote White Mountains – removing yourself from civilization and all its protections is not easy for most people, and certainly must have been unnerving 100 years ago, when still so much of the United States was unexplored.

But finding that level of isolation to use in a modern horror game is a bit challenging. Sure, you can set your game in some actual remote location (mountains or jungle far away from civilization), but not all horror stories take place far removed from people and power lines. And not every critical moment can be born from the device that your character can’t reach someone else, that they don’t have a signal (one of the worst parts of the entire Mission Impossible movie franchise is in MI:III when Tom Cruise is driving around Shanghai trying to get a signal on his phone to make a call – this does not make for good drama).

In fact, I think the more a GM can give PCs access to their everyday technology, the more normal the scenario will feel, at least at the outset. Verisimilitude is a great place to start for modern horror. So what else, besides isolation, can we use to make things scary in modern horror?

Well, a lot of it comes back to all the crazy stuff Philip K Dick wrote about in some of his later works, especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly. Well, and pretty much anything he wrote (which is a lot) about identity. One of Dick’s favorite themes is that our reality is not as it seems, that we are not who we think we are. The idea that (SPOILERS HA!) that Deckard and Rachael don’t know that they’re androids, or that Bob’s drug use creates two separate personalities unaware of each other strike at the heart of what identity means. And with identity theft continually rising, and online privacy becoming a larger concern for everyone, we seek more and more to verify that no one is watching, that we are who we think we are, and that our fundamental understanding of who we are has not been compromised. As that gets harder and harder to do identity “theft” (in whatever broad terms) becomes scarier and scarier.

Good art needs limitations, but a good modern horror scenario needs different limitations than our traditional 1920s-30s Lovecraftian story. In today’s world, it’s very difficult to remove all communications and information from people and how they use technology. So one of the things we can do is play with player characters’ identities, and twist their understanding of their world. If you aren’t sure who you are, then suddenly all of your perceptions and perspectives have limitations. This is good gaming material.

One of the main components in He Who Laughs Last is that a PC is not who he seems to be, which is slowly revealed over the course of the scenario. From my playtesting, this sort of twist of identity really freaks people out, which is pretty much the point. But identity can’t be the only component for good horror gaming. What else is there?

Toastmastering and Gamemastering

I have been a Toastmaster since February 2013, and it may very well be the best professional decision I’ve ever made. If you don’t know, Toastmasters International is a world-wide organization dedicated to helping its members develop their speaking and leadership skills. For a relatively cheap price (~$100/year, which most employers will pay for), TM will help you grown your public speaking and leadership skills, yes, but they also develop your ability to think on your feet.

One of the key elements of the weekly TM meeting is Table Topics, in which someone brings a list of questions that you are asked to answer within one to two minutes, without having known the question ahead of time. The first few times can be pretty scary, as you wrack your brain to answer a random question in a thoughtful and organized manner. But then it gets easier, after you do it five or six times, and soon the fear is gone. Yes, it’s always challenging to think on your feet like that, but when you know you can do it without panicking or just saying um over and over again, you become confident in your abilities.

This ability directly applies to Game Mastering RPGs, which is really just a series of answers to other peoples’ random questions based on some loose parameter (the game). When the PCs take your well-planned and strictly-plotted scenario for a ride way the hell outside of where you though it would go (which happens all the time), having confidence in your abilities to go along for the ride without being rattled is a critical skill. And that confidence directly relates to your ability to run the scenario and own the table, allowing the players to thrive in a thoughtful and imaginative environment.

If you are looking for an unconventional way to improve your GM skills, I highly recommend joining a Toastmasters club (there’s bound to be one near you – check the website). For just an hour a week, you’ll be quite surprised.