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Originally Posted by Ante
But, I wonder about how you handled the spends. You wrote that you had a silent player for whom you had planned a clue, but that another player "hijacked" that by making spends. Are you sure that's the way it's intended to work? I know you said that you prefer a more "detached" GM-ing style, but I'm pretty sure I got the impression that spends are not the GM <i>offer</i> a player to do, not something you can do willy nilly as a player to "mine" a scene for clues.
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That last sentence has two "not"s; which one is it?
Re-reading the example about Boothroyd on pp 54-55, I see what you mean. Woah, that's weird! I've always thought that players dictated player action; i.e. GM can tell them (roll "sense trouble", or "roll for stability loss, diff 4") and/or they can tell the GM ("I'm rolling to climb over the fence", or "I want to climb over the fence, what should I roll?").
The player I'm speaking of is problematic since A) He's a great resource, an active imagination that needs very little prompting to do very much, and B) He can be kind of a lime-light hog unless I actively give stuff to the other players, and C) He's hated tabletop RPGs before, precisely because of the "mother, may I?" GM:ing style others may prefer.
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Also, why on earth do you gripe about racism? Did you feel that was something that made the game less suitable for handling Lovecraftian horror because how it was handled?
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No, but I feel the way it was handled made Lovecraftian horror less suitable for me.
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Do <em>everyone</em> who writes about Lovecraft or lovecraftiana have to chew on that? Joshi did discuss it in his biographical books, but what has it to do in a RPG?
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I brought it up because I have
CthulhuPunk, which I love, and which turn it into something else.
Trail:"The world of the 1930s was a world of omnipresent, absolutely accepted racism." Gee, that doesn't sound very fun. (Kudos, however, for attributing the Congo Ahtu cult to the nightmare of Belgian rule, and other interesting hooks in "The Nightmare Countries", even though we also get the usual bedouin cults).
CthulhuPunk: "H.P. Lovecraft was a racist." [...] "A pervasive theme in the cyberpunk genre is the decline and fall of the white race, as the cultural empire of the European Americans topples and the third-world countries take up the baton of cultural progress." [...] "Chang is a Tcho-Tcho wizard. He's also a graduate of the Sorbonne with a doctorate in clinical psychology."
They keep some of the racist stuff but with so many twists and turns that it triggers so many questions.
I'll yield that not every Lovecraft book needs to deal with this, and that both Trail and Punk tries hard some of the time and forgets about it some of the time.