What I Learned From The Haunting Session 1

One of the things I love most about GMing a game, besides exercising my storytelling capabilities, is what I learn about the process of creating a shared fiction through roleplaying. Here is what I learned from last night's Call of Cthulhu session.

1) SHARED CREATIVITY IN RULINGS

We had a situation where a PC shot the knife-wielding leader of a group of toughs threatening the investigators. The question was how to determine if the toughs would stay & fight or cut and run.

I put the question to the players - in clunky old CoC, how should we adjudicate this?

One player suggested using SAN as morale when a henchmen sees his leader shot.

GENIUS! I applied it on the spot and the investigators rightfully drove the toughs off in a hail of gunfire, then got their wounded man to the hospital.

Rulings should not be the sole responsibility of the GM, but players should also be invited to bring their creativity to the process.

2) NO NPCS AS PUNCHING BAGS

I see this so much in players coming from D&D. They think social skills are magic and they can intimidate NPCs just by talking (I've posted on this previously HERE). I find it much more engaging and immersive if NPCs are the centers of their own worlds with their own objectives, and that the bigger world rolls on with or without the PCs. This makes even more sense in Cthulhu, where man is insignificant in the face of the cosmos, as opposed to the human centric conception of pre-Renaissance thought which also dominates heroic fantasy.

So when some NPCs with nefarious purposes were found hanging about the haunted house (my addition to the scenario), they of course tried to scare away the PCs and were deaf to any types of intimidation. The toughs were armed with switchblades, and although the PCs had firearms, they kept them hidden and just tried to scare off a group of toughs that outnumbered them.

Things escalated, a PC was stabbed, the investigators drew their guns (finally), winged the assailant and sent the thugs packing.

3) MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

One thing I found myself saying during the session was "Make it make sense," and this is now my GM / Keeper mantra. I think players get too hooked on rolls for social interaction and make up unconvincing stories just to get things out of NPCs.

For example, in our session, a surgeon approached a sanitarium where two survivors of a mysterious incident were kept. The players first discussed trying to fast talk their way in. This could lead to a dead end in the investigation, or even serious professional consequences if their ruse was found out.

"Make it make sense" I advised. I suggested they could offer themselves as wanting to learn more about psychology, or else offer to do a medical procedure.

"Why don't we say the surgeon is doing research on the environmental effects on victims of violent crime, and wants to interview the two patients?"

Brilliant. It made perfect sense in the context, and they rolled with it beautifully. I interjected once or twice when they strayed back into 'con the NPCs' territory, bit in the end they got lots of clues without compromising their professional standing.

And that is how it should be.

4) NO UNCLEARED ROLLS

Finally, I told the players to try not to just start making rolls without consulting the Keeper (me).  I am open to most suggestions, ie a player's idea of using SAN for morale was genius and I ate it up. But in my experience, players sometimes do a roll without clearing it with the GM first. The problems with this are the roll might not fit the situation, so the player wastes their time and feels dumb and the GM is uncomfortable having to shoehorn in something just because a roll was made. So better to clear it first so both sides can be satisfied.

OSR Style Problems, Stormbringer, and D&D

Ben from Questing Beast just did a deep dive with This video about OSR style gaming. I think one of the reasons Stormbringer has lasted as long as it has with minimal changes is because it meets lots of the requirements he outlines.

Is Stormbringer OSR?

First, he notes the characteristics of an OSR style game:

1) The System Needs to be Incomplete

(As I've noted, original Stormbringer is almost rules lite in its lack of rule minutae)

2) System Supports Rulings via Disconnected Rules

(Elementals, Elan, Demons, all pretty disconnected and again rules lite)

3) System Has A Way To Resolve situations

(skill system)

Stormbringer's Crunch

Ben also notes that 'crunchy' systems don't allow OSR style gaming, but what do we mean by crunchy? Crunch, in my estimation, implies two things:

1 - There is a number or stat for everything

(Contrast the statted out Arioch of D&D's Deities and Demigods, who is a 10th level Bard for some reason, versus the paucity of stats for any god in Stormbringer)

2 - All effects have been laid out, leaving no room for interpretation (ie rulings)

(In D&D, all Arioch's attacks and abilities are clearly spelled out, conversely making him more limited in power. In Stormbringer, summoning an avatar of any Chaos lord makes them have all attributes at 10 x that of the summoner, with SIZ and shape at will, and as we are told, "Lords of Chaos may accomplish anything up to the destruction of the world... by fiat." This means power is effectively unlimited, as a god should be.)

Deities and Demigods shows up the difference in the D&D and Stormbringer / OSR mindset. In the Melnibonean Mythos section, all gods are given stats. This means they are killable.

"To a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Hit points imply combat, and feats & powers limit action to what is on the character sheet.

By this metric, Stormbringer 1E Elemental rules are very OSR, while demon rules become less so from 1E to 4E and its laundry list of powers, which is a very 90's thing.

Stormbringer has accumulated some crunch as it aged, witness the jump from 1E rules lite demons to 4E catalogue of powers demons, and Elric! spells. But this still pales in comparison to modern D&D.

Rulings Not Rules

Next, Ben asks, "How do you support the rulings not rules principle at the adventure level? You give players problems that can only be solved with innovation." He also notes, "I've noticed that fairytale and mythology frequently contain great examples of these types of problems."

What Ben has hit on is the narrative aspect of old school gaming. This is the influence of the source fiction, where triumphing comes from being inventive, not just the game of whittling down hit points of enemies. Moorcock's stories are very mythic, witness the golem Aubec defeats by showing it its own reflection, or how Elric uses elementals to escape the Sack of Imrryr, which is emulated in the Elemental rules' lack of heavy simulationist crunch. In game design, I think we forget the source fiction to our detriment. Part of the reason D&D went down the crunch for crunch's sake road is that it made its own (to me) lukewarm settings that I never got into, and that had no guiding narrative constraints for its designers. Thus D&D became its own game-narrative genre unto itself, an ouroboros eating its own tail.

This may be why Dragonlords of Melnibone failed - it is hard to have Moorcockean mythic stories in a game of preset feats and spells.

Zeroing in on OSR Style Problems

Ben then resumes OSR style problems according to the venerable Goblin Punch blog:

1 No easy solution

2 Many difficult solutions

3 Requires no special tools

4 Can be solved with common sense

5 Isn't solvable by ability on character sheet

Here is where Stormbringer falls down a bit. As I have noted, original Stormbringer is schizophrenic. It has stats and skills for characters, but none for Elementals. Some of its published scenarios are nothing more than reskinned D&D dungeon crawls, but even the starter adventure, Tower of Yrkath Florn, has hints of the mythic OSR style in it. The demon trapped in the tower can be bypassed, fought, or bound, depending on what the players feel they could or should do. This is a stark difference from the norm of monster = combat from other games.

Another way to express this dialectic is "Is the GM a computer, or is he a philosopher? Are the players bean counters, or fellow storytellers?" Stormbringer's inherent mode of combat = avoidable, emulated in the lethality of rules and inspired by the source material, pushes this question to the fore.

Ben calls the  principle "Create Problems Without Solutions" and notes that it is the players' job to find solutions, with or without GM help. Readers may remember I touched on this in my Moorcock bestiary, in which I changed the Kay from boring Kobold stand ins to mobs of psychic crabs, and wrote:

"How can the PCs defeat an innumerable enemy? I don't know. That is their job to figure out. Maybe their sorceror-noble can call on the Lord of Crabs, or use flaming oil, or start a Cajun crab cook up."

I agree with Ben when he notes, "For me as a game master, I just love seeing players find a way to bypass these OSR style problems." In my Laughing Tower playtest, young players unfamiliar with Moorcock / Stormbringer tried to emulate skills by rubbing mud on their face for camoflauge, while older Moorcock-loving players interacted with NPCs in unforeseeable ways to get what they wanted.

Conclusion

I agree with Ben when he notes, "Anything that gives you a numerical bonus is not an OSR style tool. What you want are tools that allow innovative problem solving, that stretch the brain." Stormbringer has tons of such tools in its Exotic Treasures section, all ripped directly from Moorcock. But its Elementals, though lacking hit points and other crunch, provide very flavorful yet unpredictable ways to solve problems.

As Ben says, "If OSR problems are problems without solutions, then OSR tools are solutions without problems." And this is a lot easier to do in Stormbringer than other games, due to both its system and source fiction. 

For this reason, in my next Stormbringer post, I will be looking closely at how the game mixes a minimum of stats with a modicum of narrative options in its Virtues vs 1E Demon rules, a dichotomy of power I have unfairly overlooked for decades.