Exciting news! I enjoyed the computer games reboot a lot! Maybe I should start with the beginner's box first?
This is not making my decision easier haha. I really enjoyed the down time of my game sessions. I guess I'll ask for a vote from the players. Would you say it's easy to pick up?
CoC is easy to pick up as the core rules are pretty much percentages off of a d100, or statx5 as a percentage on a d100. It's really easy to pick up for everyone, but sure, go with what your players want :-) If the players choose it and haven't played it or read the fiction before, might be worth sending them some links to free Cthulhu short stories so they can get the atmosphere of dread, investigation and vulnerability.
To be honest, so much of it is bogged down in trying to give stats for pretty much any equipment a player might want across 120 years of history, the actual core rules are really small, most of it is reference. The character creation section could be a bit more streamlined but it's random nature throws up ideas for investigators players may never have conidered, the best way to get your head around what your players will ask first is to roll up a few characters and see it from their point of view. :-) As an example, my favourite character (a British retired military officer in 1895) rolled really badly on everything but wealth, and so I decided his money had carried him through life, bought him a commission as an officer and membership of any club he wanted to be a member of. He's actually proven to be a great asset in terms of funding expeditions and extracting the party from legal trouble due to his overworked solicitors on retainer :D
Absolutely, the pre-generated ones are a good start, rounded characters, save loads of time and players aren't too attached to them. What I normally do for games that need to run in an evening and nobody will be able to play the scenario/characters again are to write each encounter and it's essential clues/information as a list, and use that to prepare a way of shortcutting the game to the endgame once we reach the final hour of play. It's one of those gm tricks up your sleeve where hopefully you won't need it, but if you do you'll need it really badly!
Very good information!! Now I'm very interested in running this one. Maybe I'll look up a quick start guide when they're done with the current's dungeon boss.
Good luck! Feel free to ask me anything, I've been organising tabletop and larp CoC games for a long time.
I think an introductory game with premade characters is a great idea, it means you know exactly what skills the party will have and can design an exciting session with that in mind to have a potential moment of glory for each of them :-)
Forgot to say thank you! :) I intend to do a bunch of short stories first, to see if they like it, in between D&D sessions to change the mood, and get them roleplaying as other characters in other settings.
No problem, I'm just glad to have some people to chat to about RPGs :-)
I only got to play a much earlier edition, not even sure which one it was. I'm really interested in trying the new FFG edition, even though I hate custom dice.
I feel you, not a fan of FFG's love for custom dice at all, but somehow I quite like what they did with L5R. Last thing I expected, really. Definitely going to be slower for resolving results, but it feels like an improvement over old roll and keep because it actually introduces some decision making to the "keep" part.
Yeah, it really seems like the bosses came to them and said something like, "We want you to use weirdo dice and keep the roll+keep dynamic, make it work."
Yeah, the custom dice are a massive bummer here. I honestly hate that FFG keeps doing it.
I live up north near the Delaware border, but I have some friends down that way. I could ask them if they know of anywhere to play. You have any interest in Pathfinder Society at some of the board game/comic shops in that area?
Yeah so far I've only seen games during the week fairly far north of here. Prefer Saturday or Sunday games if they know of one.
We usually set aside 4-5 hours for a session - about 3-4 hours of those are actual playtime. Every 2-3 weeks. Before we were all functioning adults, we would do 6-8 hours sessions as well, but I think those days are gone now. I think 2.5 hours is a little short for a session, but if you guys are super super focused it could be done, though I don't think it'll be ideal.
Yeah, we also got some settling time though I'm trying to keep that to under 15 minutes, but people like to talk about random stuff so it ends up taking around 30 mins in reality, hehe.
I see. I want to keep all our games to in-person stuff. Ideally every week on, say, Wednesdays for even just 2.5 hours would be great though. I'll see what my players think. The first game we played was about 5 hours though, which was quite fun too.
That's the one thing that worries me, yeah... :/
It's the 20th anniversary book. It's sort of like a re-release with some fixes and some updates. They did the same with Vampire, Mage and Werewolf. Only tried V20 and it was great, as expected from Onyx Path.
