How do you threaten a Call of Cthulhu character with 77 hit points?

[AmericanBadass]

How do you threaten a Call of Cthulhu character with 77 hit points?

I have been running a Delta Green D20 game and have been having a lot of problems with players not being afraid of gunplay.

Here is the situation that happened saturday:

Agent Yuri comes out of his house and has a bad guy waiting for him at the bottom of the walkway. "Hands up Jerky" says the bad guy. Yuri goes for his Berretta 98 without the fear of dying. The bad guy fires 3 times with buckshot damaging Yuri for 27 points of damage. The bad guy being 7th level is no match for Yuri who his 10th. Gunfighting with D20 Call of Cthulhu is very different for the old system....essentially the 2 guys just stood there and unloaded on each other until one was dead. The bad guy only had 38 hit points so he died first.

i am having a lot of stuff like this happen with the 3 guys I have been playing with. they have never played regular Call of Cthulhu and because of the way they are unstoppable it is hard to make them afraid of anything.

what would a 27 points of buckshot damage look like when the paramedics come? i had to say it was lots of superficial wounds.

even with the 10 point massive damage rule the players charge in with no fear at all. i guess i can make the game lower level, but this particular game started at 4th.

i had another incident where the "librarian" Lynda Chambers was supposed to be picked up by english police for questioning. she resisted and the bobbies had to club her. well she had 43 hit points and like 5 bobbies had to beat on her for like 10 rounds before she went down. i actually had to have more of them come to stop her because she put 3 of the first 5 out of action with various objects she picked up in the hallway. i mean it was getting kind of silly. there were people standing by cheering her on as she tussled with 2 carloads cops. this is where i learned never send 1st level police to pick up 7th level characters- even if they are mild mannered english librarians.


i am considering tripling firearm damage or just automatically giving the weapons their crit bonus without having to roll 20's.

i think the problem might be the players. they are die hard d20 D&D players and do not get the concept of call of cthulhu. i have not been able to scare them at all. they just charge right in.

what should i do?
any help?

[Jonny Nexus]

Well I haven't really got any advice, other than:

a) Use the original BRP Call or Cthulhu rules, or

b) Don't start the characters at 4th level.

...but I mainly just wanted to say that I loved the description of the mild-mannered librarian who needed a whole Ford Transit vanful of riot police to be subdued (I guess that the massive damage threshold of 10 points doesn't have much of an effect in brawls where the damage is something like D6+str bonus).

[Darren MacLennan]

(1) For everybody:

If you ever find that one of your posts has been deleted and replaced with one of my posts, that's because sometimes I click "edit" when I mean to click "respond". I just did that to American Badass's post, causing me to utter a panicked shriek of terror as soon as I realized what had happened. Fortunately, I was able to put it back.

(2) I think that this is a troll. I mean, this could easily become the mother of all d20 realism battles.

But anyways. In the next post, I'll point out how I like to run horror.

-Darren MacLennan

[Bradford C. Walker]

It's good to see you, Badass.

As for your problem, I suggest a couple of things:

• Force more Massive Damage checks. These are saving throws, and saving throws (like attack rolls) automatically fail on a natural 1 (and succeed on a natural 20). Their luck runs out eventually.
• They're D&D players? One of them has a DMG, right? If so, I recommend using two rules out of that book: Clobbered and Instant Kill. The former automatically stuns a character when they take half or more of their current HP in one blow, and the latter threatens instant death whenever an attacker rolls two natural 20s in a row--one to hit, one to confirm the crit--and then hits the target (as if to confirm a crit) on a third attack roll. If that last roll fails, then the target take a critical hit and may die anyway.
• Set up Coup De Grace situations. You've seen your share of gunplay films, so you know how this goes: get one character to put his gun to the head of another; this is a CDG situation.
• They're not using cover? Nail them with area attacks, like grenades, early and often. Make certain that the NPCs do use cover whenever they can.
• NPCs with Damage Reduction are a good thing. Zombies are a good start, and you can do more from there. Most PCs won't be able to enchant their guns, and thus can't get around it.
• Sanity Checks: Use them for anything that would rattle a man in the real world. This includes firefights. I point you to Heat and Enemy at the Gates, amongst others, as examples of this in action.
• An overall increase in randomness will favor the NPCs over the PCs because the latter make far more die rolls than the former, so they're more vulnerable to the Law of Averages than NPCs are.

[AmericanBadass]

i also should have brought up an icident that happend with a d20 ctulhu viet nam game where a delta green squad was going to stop some Migo who were going to blow up a huge area for the enemy by using some sort of temporal bomb.

they were all experts special forces so we couldnt be 1st or second level, so the dm a guy named roman made it a 4th level game with the unit commander being 6th.

i was to play a heavy gunner with a m60 named Don McKlusky.

as we trecked throught underbrush we came under a VC attack. my character got hit 5 times with AK bullets for 15 points and survived. then to top it off i also survived a RPG rocket hit which the dm said did 4d6 points of damage. man, if our troops would have been this tough we could have won the war with just one division.

anyway the topper was when later on to save some captured villagers on of the other players dove on a grenade and lived. not only did he live he wasnt even that hurt. the dm rolled low and the grenade only did 6 points of damage. the character actually had over 20.
i argued that he would no way have survived that and the guy got really pissed at me saying i was trying to kill off his player.

the dm let it go and we eventually killed half of viet nam-the vc were all first level.

the game was not fun at all so i never went back.

[Cthulhu-chan]

Badass is a troll? Naw.

Anyway, I think my fix for this sort of situation would be to use levels as a measuring stick for what sort of game I wanted to play, but not allow advancement in the usual sense. I'd probably just reward players with skill points every now and then instead of XP, meaning HP and BAB will stay right where they began. I don't really think CoC is the sort of game that needs the advancement carrot on a stick, anyway.

All IMHO, of course.

[MggM]

I had something sort of similer.

D&D players for years meet GURPS.

"I shoot him in the face!"
"He dies."
"Oh...............Shit.......Really?"
"Sure. His nose comes flying out of the back of his head. Congrats."

"....I feel sick."

"Roll initiative with his friends...."

[Darren MacLennan]

The first problem is that d20's got a little bit of a problem when running gun battles. Tripling gun damage and making crits even worse is a good idea.

But you have to ask yourself if you're out to scare the players, or just run them through a Feng Shui game with the trappings of a Call of Cthulhu adventure. For example, anything by Lumley is basically a bad Hollywood flick with some Lovecraftian trappings; this is why he sucks.

If you want to scare them, if you want to unsettle them, there's one piece of advice that I have:

Violate them.

I don't mean the rules, I don't mean the characters; violate the players. Start playing on the stuff that they don't like. Don't push too hard, but make them uncomfortable. Make them aware that they are playing a game whose central purpose is to scare them. They are here to have a fun time, but that fun time will come at the expense of their characters.

Make them realize that their characters, for as many hitpoints as they have, are still composed of water and meat, and that when bullets go through them, stuff comes out. Bile is yellow, brain matter is gray, shit is black. When they mix together, it's the color of the extinction of the human race.

Blood smells like copper. So do pennies.

Have one of them scrabbling around to find one of their fingertips after somebody takes it off with a .22. There's lots of places where it can hide. Fingers are easy to misplace. So are tips of ears, eyes, chunks of body fat and muscle.

Go to rotten.com. Get any pictures you can of gunshot wounds. Leave them lying around the table when you play. Don't draw attention to them; just write the caliber of the weapon that was used to do the damge underneath the picture. Casually finger the pages when you think that they're not looking.

Rats are everywhere in New York. They don't mind cordite-flavored meat.

Start making them realize that it's a horror game. Take control of their characters at odd intervals, or casually mention that they've been all chanting the same ancient language at the same time while on a stakeout - they stop as soon as they realize they're doing it, but their low Sanities mean that they're losing control of their _own minds._

Hallucinations are fun, especially as Sanity decreases.

Somebody just threw blood on you. Why isn't anybody seeing it? Are they in on it? Did they throw it? Bastards! Fuckers! How dare they not see - where'd it go?

She just put something into your food. Quick - hop across the dessert counter, scream at her, throw the food on the floor. Why is everybody staring at you? Don't they know?

Sure. That cultist is dead. He's not over you, he's not drooling out the stale, slimy water of the lake that he fell into after you shot him, it's not hitting your face, there's not things living in it. He's not gently pawing your face with gelid flesh, and you can't feel the bones through the rotting meat. As a matter of fact, this whole thing will go away if you can just get back to sleep, but the knife that isn't in your belly hurts anyways.

It isn't about gaining power. Seventy-seven hit points just means that you can spend more time in pain before you die.

More later. I need my medication now.

-Darren MacLennan

[AmericanBadass]

bradford i used the massive damage rule on them, but they keep on saving all the time.

Do i do the massive damage everytime they take 10 or more or should i make them roll for every point over 10 points of damage?
that might work.

i was running delta green for a while using the chaosium system but nobody wanted to play. i can get players for d20 cthulhu.

a lot of gamers dont want the level of realism that the old system offers they much prefer the rambo style game.

i was trying to run an x files game, but found i cannot.

i have found at low levels (1 or 2) the characters have so little ability that they are mostly inefective. i usually start games out at 3rd or 4th.
i mean a doddering old professor by no means would be 1st level because he would know hardly anything being limited to 3 points of skill over his level.


and in one case i was running a child with psychic powers like the kid from 6th sense, but i had to be at least 3rd level to have the psychic feats i required. there were players in the game that were mad that i being a 11 year old kid was the same level as them and i made a joke sheet version where he had 17 str.

anyway the kid (Eamon Whately) is a very cool character and has been touched by the psychic emenations of some strange mythos force. he is the parties spirit guide. to be fair i am rolling only 1d3 for hit points and i am putting his stat increases into wisdom only.

he knows spells so he doesnt carry a gun.

i like the system i just have to be more creative in ways to scare the players. i may just increase weapon damage that would make things more realistic.

so a 9mm will do 30 points of damage instead of a measley 10 I will just have the crit bonus active all the time....easy fix.

[Gurgeh]

Originally posted by MggM
I had something sort of similer.

D&D players for years meet GURPS.

"I shoot him in the face!"
"He dies."
"Oh...............Shit.......Really?"
"Sure. His nose comes flying out of the back of his head. Congrats."

"....I feel sick."

"Roll initiative with his friends...."

Congrats on having posted the one thing, so far, that has made me literally laugh outloud while reading RPGnet.

In my youth, back in my college days, when I was just a rude, cruel spirited guy instead of the bitter, cynical bastard that I've become now, I found myself GMing a D&D game where the players were basically beating a pair of kobolds to death, without blinking an eye.

So, I sat there, and got to thinking of the scene in Casino where certain characters are taken out to the corn field to be whacked, and I start using that as the model for how the situation plays out.

Within two minutes, I have the entire group looking rather pale and disgusted where, moments before, they were gleefully beating two helpless dog-lizardboys to death.

Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the problems that AmericanBadass is having with d20 CoC, but your story reminded me of it.


__________________


As for the actual topic of conversation, my first thought is that d20, with its use of passive combat and the Bounty quality of soaking involved in hit points just isn't the system to be using to emulate the game that you're obviously wanting to run.

Perhaps, instead of having hit points build up level upon level, you could house-rule that CoC characters only have hit points equal to their Con score, no more. Granted, I guess that doesn't help if you've already have the game underway, but it's a solution in the future that makes combat much more deadly.

But, ultimately, if you want to scare them, it's going to be more of a matter of narration and finding out what just plain creeps them out, rather than any tinkering with the rules.

Fiddling with the rules until combat runs like a pinkie mouse being dropped into a tank filled with tokay geckoes is only going to increase the ick factor in the long run. While the ick factor is part of creeping the characters out, it's not the entirety.

In other words, while I'd agree that a combat system with a higher degree of attrition would help your situation, I think it's more to do with what you tell the characters.

In fact, look back up at my Casino example, which isn't so pointless now that I think of it. Nowhere did I have to make combat more dangerous for the players, and they could have continued on in their casual slaughter of the kobolds quite easily. However, having one of the creatures beg the rest of the party to just put his dying companion out of his misery instead of continuing to beat him is rather unsettling, isn't it?


(Obviously all the usage of "you" in this section is general and/or directed towards AmericanBadass, and not to MggM, as was the first section.)