Thread: Defeating Extraordinary Opponents

The situation in that CoC campaign was a strange and tough one. It was a 1920s campaign and some mob boss had gotten into the Mythos and was using the Mythos beings to do his dirty work for him. Not the really powerful baddies, but still Mythos nasties. It's hard to pin a murder on the guy if the DA dies under mysterious circumstances and the witnesses are either incoherent or babbling on about flying nightmares. For example, just try to prove that a Treasury agent was murdered by Deep Ones because he was disrupting Capone's booze shipments from Canada. It just worked out that it was actually safer for us to try and call up a Mythos horror that it would haven been for the group to get at the mob boss any other way.





Changing stats, and/or keeping them secret if fine. But...

Unleashing a monster on a group of PCs isn't fair play either. Especially if the monster is immune to the player's attacks or is so powerful than it will waste the group or a good portion of it regardless. In D&D, with escalating hit points, and encounters that are "balanced" (read fixed),a given monster can only be so much of a threat. In BRP with Dragons doing enough damage to kill most PCs with a single hit, regardless of armor or parring, it's a whole different game.

One of the reasons (not the only one, but a major valid one) why players often memeorize the monster stats and weaknesses is becuase the way many D&D adventuers and ZGMs just spring things on the PCs with no warning or clue. Let's face it, wih the way the monsters are taken out of context and culture, the odds of a adventuerer finding a monster's wekness is practically nil if he is from a different culture.

What facts the PCs might "know", could easily be wrong. The Vampire's vulnerability to sunlight and the werewolf's vulnerability to silver are both inventions of the cinema, and either could prove to be a disastrous revelation in a RPG. Especially one that is an unforgiving as BRP.

I have to admit to having a more that one of my investigators die screaming with a Tommygun in one hand and a fistful of dynamite in the other as they are drawn into the gullet of some indescribable horror. Even in Call of Cthulhu many problems can be solved with the right quantity of explosives.


The ganster game actually sounds kind of fun. Sounds like it may not have been the best run game, but neat idea.

Originally Posted by Toadmaster

I have to admit to having a more that one of my investigators die screaming with a Tommygun in one hand and a fistful of dynamite in the other as they are drawn into the gullet of some indescribable horror. Even in Call of Cthulhu many problems can be solved with the right quantity of explosives.

Two of my favorite gaming situations went alone those lines. The first had my Tommy Gun wielding character talk another PC into "holding off" a shoggoth for a few rounds while I went "upstairs for help". This was after I had fired a few busrts into the thing for no (good) effect. Running upstairs did he;p me greatly. Didn't do my shotgun toting friend much good.

The second was when my British Aristocrat blew a Byakee to bits using a H&H .600 Nitro Express (both barrels). It was just so sastifying to be on the other end of the slaughter for a change.

The ganster game actually sounds kind of fun. Sounds like it may not have been the best run game, but neat idea.

It wasn't all the GM's fault. A lot of it was the player's fault. They all kinda went into it expecting monsters behind every door, and so when it turned into a ganster advenure we were caught flat footed. With the odd mix of investigators we had, we were no really suited for going up against a grop of gangsters. Deep Ones we could handle but tommy gun toting killers doing drive by shootings? No way.

There were some wonderfully comic moments in that campaign.

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

The situation in that CoC campaign was a strange and tough one. It was a 1920s campaign and some mob boss had gotten into the Mythos and was using the Mythos beings to do his dirty work for him. Not the really powerful baddies, but still Mythos nasties. It's hard to pin a murder on the guy if the DA dies under mysterious circumstances and the witnesses are either incoherent or babbling on about flying nightmares. For example, just try to prove that a Treasury agent was murdered by Deep Ones because he was disrupting Capone's booze shipments from Canada. It just worked out that it was actually safer for us to try and call up a Mythos horror that it would haven been for the group to get at the mob boss any other way.

From a law enforcement point of view, of course, it is safer... But from a Sanity point of view, it is surely not...

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

Changing stats, and/or keeping them secret if fine. But...
Unleashing a monster on a group of PCs isn't fair play either. Especially if the monster is immune to the player's attacks or is so powerful than it will waste the group or a good portion of it regardless.

Of course. Which is why I never do that with my player, no matter the campaign genre... Players must have the possibility to find hints about the monster before encountering it. Otherwise, it is not anymore a game; it becomes a slaughter. And players don't stay very long with slaugthering GM.

Originally Posted by Gollum

Now, to come back to the main topic of this thread, Dragons, in a lot of stories, are exactly like what you described here... They killed dozens of knight before and when you attack them, you absolutely don't know how exactly powerful they are (except that it is terrible) and what are their specific strengths or weaknesses... Players shouldn't know their stats more than Call of Cthulhu players should know those of Cthulhu entities. Unfortunately, in most fantasy role playing games, experimented players know by heart the stats of dozens of creatures... Even when their character didn't meet them yet. The problem is exactly the same...

This is why I like Tolkien's take on dragons. In a lot of games, stories and movies, dragons are merely huge, dangerous beasts, like Godzilla. In The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham, however, they are also sentient beings that heroes can talk to, bargain with, and (maybe) outwit. Bilbo manages to discover Smaug's weakness and pass the info along to someone who can use it to advantage. Farmer Giles -- with a mixture of bravado, luck, hard bargaining, and a magic sword -- manages to not only stop the dragon's attacks but gets it to become an (unwilling) ally against a greedy king. This opens up a whole new range of adventure possibilities. What if, instead of trying to poke the dragon, the PCs persuade it to invest venture capital in their latest trading enterprise? The Good: They now have (within limits) vast resources and credit to launch world-spanning enterprises. The Bad: If the deal goes sour, if the investment doesn't deliver a profit, or a sufficient profit, their "silent business partner" gets noisy real quick. If they thought having the thieves' guild after them was bad .... On the other hand, the dragon might save their butts from the guild or from another monster at the last minute in order to protect its business interests. Maybe they can bribe the dragon not to eat the princess or the whole castle -- "Sure, I'll hold off this time, for an exclusive royal monopoly on (valuable commodity). Deposit the profits in my Swiss bank account." What? You don't think a dragon would take logical provisions to protect its fortune, increase its net worth, and avoid income taxes?

Originally Posted by Gollum

From a law enforcement point of view, of course, it is safer... But from a Sanity point of view, it is surely not...

Wanna bet. Technically speaking there is a potential SAN loss for things like seeing a dead body, or witnessing a friends death. Had we tried some sort of assault on the gangsters we'd have seen more dead bodies and dead friends than we'd have lost in the summon spell. Especially since not everybody was involved in the summoning.

Of course. Which is why I never do that with my player, no matter the campaign genre... Players must have the possibility to find hints about the monster before encountering it. Otherwise, it is not anymore a game; it becomes a slaughter. And players don't stay very long with slaughtering GM.

That's not how the published CoC adventures are written though. Players are often brought into and adventure with some idea of supernatural involvement but little knowledge of just what that menace is or how to deal with it, Basically to be a good investigator a PC needs a good Mythos skill and that also lowers their SAN. To get any sort of decent campaign probablyrequires the players to act with far better knowledge of the Mythos than thier characters should have. Especially at the start of a campaign.

Originally Posted by seneschal

This is why I like Tolkien's take on dragons. In a lot of games, stories and movies, dragons are merely huge, dangerous beasts, like Godzilla. In The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham, however, they are also sentient beings that heroes can talk to, bargain with, and (maybe) outwit. Bilbo manages to discover Smaug's weakness and pass the info along to someone who can use it to advantage. Farmer Giles -- with a mixture of bravado, luck, hard bargaining, and a magic sword -- manages to not only stop the dragon's attacks but gets it to become an (unwilling) ally against a greedy king. This opens up a whole new range of adventure possibilities. What if, instead of trying to poke the dragon, the PCs persuade it to invest venture capital in their latest trading enterprise? The Good: They now have (within limits) vast resources and credit to launch world-spanning enterprises. The Bad: If the deal goes sour, if the investment doesn't deliver a profit, or a sufficient profit, their "silent business partner" gets noisy real quick. If they thought having the thieves' guild after them was bad .... On the other hand, the dragon might save their butts from the guild or from another monster at the last minute in order to protect its business interests. Maybe they can bribe the dragon not to eat the princess or the whole castle -- "Sure, I'll hold off this time, for an exclusive royal monopoly on (valuable commodity). Deposit the profits in my Swiss bank account." What? You don't think a dragon would take logical provisions to protect its fortune, increase its net worth, and avoid income taxes?

Now THAT I've seen happen! In once case in particular a PC had a good sized fortune and just gotten a new fief. He talked a dragon into living underneath the manor and acting a guard and treasurer for the PC Knight. When it was explained to him that he could sit in the treasure room and people would come and bring more treasure due to a process called taxation, it completely revised the dragon's evaluation of humans. The whole feudal system seemed like a work of genius.

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

Wanna bet. Technically speaking there is a potential SAN loss for things like seeing a dead body, or witnessing a friends death. Had we tried some sort of assault on the gangsters we'd have seen more dead bodies and dead friends than we'd have lost in the summon spell. Especially since not everybody was involved in the summoning.

I don't remember exactly where, but there is a rule which says that when you see a lot of monsters of the same kind, you just loose the maximum roll of the sanity loss die and not a new roll for each creature. Seeing dozens of zombies (1/1D8) will make the character loose 8 sanity points at maximum and not 1D8 for each zombie, for instance.

So, seing a lot of dead bodies won't make you loose too much sanity points. Furthermore, for dead bodies, the rules say that you loose sanity points when the bodies were unexpected. Which is not what happens in this example. For the violent death of your friends, the maximum is 6 points.

Now, summoning a monster, knowing for sure that it will kill a lot of people (and certainly some innocents) and also knowing for sure that you will be responsible of all these horrible and insane murders is surely worse than that... For a Byakhee, it could make something like 1D3 (the invocation spell) + 1D6 (the Byakhee appearing) + 1D6 (realizing what you have done), which makes 9 sanity points on average.

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

That's not how the published CoC adventures are written though.

Yes. A lot of Call of Cthulhu adventures are designed to be slaughters. I don't found that funny for the players. That is why, in my humble opinion, they have to be adapted, which is always what I do.

Somehow this reminds me of the "Mark 13" robot in the movie Hardware. The thing could repair itself if it was near any source of power that could be turned to electricity by it's components, which included solar and direct electricity within the examples the movie used. it had a near endless variety of killing tools, including a drug that would cause death within seconds and make the victim enjoy it even if he or she was being turned into giblets at the time. The only real weakness the robot had was water falling on it's circuitry, which was either ironed out or ignored by the gov't when it began mass manufacture at the end of the film.

The whole purpose of the robot was euthanasia for all life- basically it was supposed to kill anything it came across that was living because the world had turned into some post-apocalyptic scum bucket.

As for stats for such a creature, I'd think that I'd give a medium amount of health, good armor, and very good weapon skills in each weapon type it has, lots of sense skills (it has infrared heat vision and others after all), high damage dealing potential, a low dex rank total and move speed, and it's signature abilities to repair itself in sunlight and near electrical outlets and arcs as well as it's poison injectors.

It's alpha version would be weak to water sources (which would damage it and prevent regen), but both alpha and completed versions would be hackable. Of course, things like explosions and being run over by tanks would instantly destroy it, and it would require intervention (coincidental, accidental, or otherwise) to repair itself after such a thing.

Originally Posted by Gollum

...A lot of Call of Cthulhu adventures are designed to be slaughters. I don't found that funny for the players. That is why, in my humble opinion, they have to be adapted, which is always what I do.

I always wanted to run BRP Call of Cthulhu, having collected numerous scenarios for years. My players wanted to play a Pulp Adventure campaign like White Wolf's 'Adventure', SW'Thrilling Tales', or FATE 'Spirit Of The Century'.

In the end I made up a few 'Pulp' rules and now we're running our own 'BRP Pulp Cthulhu'. Its being going great for a few months now, I'm going through heaps of previously unused CoC scenarios, and the characters are surviving due to the Pulp mechanics. We're onto the Masks Of Nylarthotep campaign, and its playing out more like an Indiana Jones adventure than a Lovecraft Horror. We'll keep playing this for a while (although some also want to alternate with a fantasy campaign), and the only reason we can keep playing these Cthulhu adventures is due to some Pulp mechanic adaptions for the PCs, there is no way I think the investigator party could have lasted the distance otherwise.

That's not to say that its all fedora hats and blazing guns. We have our academic type who specialises in Research, Knowledges, and the Occult; there would be only limited opportunities for the investigators to proceed in many situations otherwise. Some Cthulhu scenarios are the most well designed scenarios I have ever seen, and also the most deadly. The standard CoC rules are great for short scenarios with a focus on horror, but yes, our group has found that there is some benefit in rule adaptation for campaign play, especially if you prefer Investigation Adventure to that of the Investigation Horror genre.