Thoughts on Trail of Cthulhu and Gumshoe system in general

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>>51430617
Bump

CoC, at least the original version, was very lethal because you had extremely limited options in terms of offense. Almost nothing you did hurt the mythos critters and just being around them fucked you up so the best course of action when that shogoth shambles in is to run. Because that revolver of yours ain't doing shit.

Anyways 1d4chan has articles about gumshoe and this game you know

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Trail_of_Cthulhu

>>51430617
>Is that desirable, or is this fixing something that isn't broken.
it's a little complicated, it's been said that Gumshoe fixes a problem which any good GM can avoid if they know what they're doing. I quite like Gumshoe because to me the operative word of the previous statement is 'if'. Gumshoe makes it so that the GM can't make those mistakes (assuming they use the game mechanics correctly)

>>51431201
>>51431204
That helps, thanks. Anyone have any personal experiences with the game or system?

>>51431201
>If a player enters a location where a clue can be found, he needs only declare that he is using an investigative ability, such as Library Use or Forensics. If a clue is vital to the plot then he finds it automatically simply by using the correct ability. If a clue is not vital but merely useful, he can spend points from his skill pool to obtain it; these points do not refresh until the end of the adventure.

I gotta say, that sounds not great. Someone sell me on this.

>>51431238
>>51431204
yeah I have experience with Gumshoe, in my experience if you plan out the investigation in the way the rulebook says to, the system works very well for creating interesting mysteries which are tricky to solve but never unfair.

>>51431272
the way it winds up working is this
>the are guaranteed the bare minimum clues
>if they have all the correct skills and do the right stuff the answer will be obvious
>they will end up somewhere between the two, they can solve it, but it wont be obvious, which (in my opinion) is exactly where a mystery game should end up

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>>51431339
Ok, yeah. As I read more about this game it seems like it's built around solving mysteries rather than having adventures in the traditional sense. I can see that being good, then. Maybe not exactly the type of game I want to try to run, but you gotta use the right tool for the right job.

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>>51430617
>it's essentially a port of CoC to this Gumshoe system.
That's wrong. Aside from a few aesthetic similarities such as the naming of skills it's a completely different game.

>I know that CoC is well regarded around here
This, in large part, is also wrong.

>I was wondering what everyone's thoughts on Gumshoe are
The dice system is good. It allows you to guarantee that a character who's supposed to be good at something will be good at it, and allows characters to guarantee solid performance at the cost of expenditure of resources. It achieves what most dice pool systems set out to do with a minimum of complexity. The main area that causes confusion is the bifurcation of skills into 'Investigative' and 'General' abilities, which each have completely different mechanics associated with them. Then, some general abilities double as investigative abilities, some investigative abilities function differently than others by acting on gradations rather than as binary switches (where having any number of points is treated identically, as long as that number of points is greater than zero).

Splitting sanity into a 'Sanity' and 'Stability' track is a bad mechanic. You can soak Stability damage by converting it into a smaller amount of Sanity damage. But there's no penalty for losing Sanity until you run out completely, whereas Stability damage has huge mechanical consequences at certain thresholds. The game frames it as a tradeoff, but it's really a no-brainer to swap out any Stability hit over a certain amount for Sanity damage instead.

The idea that you "don't need to roll" to find clues is barely even worth discussing. It's brought up a lot by the devs, and by people who have never played the game but heard other people talk about it, but it's totally irrelevant because it can easily be done in any system and has nothing to do with Gumshoe's actual mechanics.

>>51431272
The mystery doesn't come grinding to a halt just because everyone critically failed their search checks.

>>51430617
The system is designed to solve this problem

>>51435259

But that's not a problem for most Keepers who have learned gaming tricks to avoid this.
Gumshoe is a system to solve a problem that be easily fixed by creative GMs

Other than that it has only two real merits. The unique descriptions of gods and the idea behind Drives.

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>>51434692
>That's wrong.
I think the game's creators might disagree with you.

>>51431201
>Almost nothing you did hurt the mythos critters and just being around them fucked you up so the best course of action when that shogoth shambles in is to run.
that's a proper lovecraftian approach, his stories were about "this shit so cray cray your brain tangs just by knowing about it" and "this niggas come from another dimension and are not made of matter as we know it"
PCs are not supposed to win a confrontation with a mythos creature, HFY and proper lovecraft are mutually exclusive
not that great for RPing, tho

>>51435389
The game's creators can disagree all they like, but the facts remain the same. They tried to spin their system as similar to an existing one people already knew in order to increase sales, but it just isn't true.

>>51435308
>But that's not a problem for most Keepers who have learned gaming tricks to avoid this.
>Gumshoe is a system to solve a problem that be easily fixed by creative GMs
Read the fucking question I was answering, Anon.

>>If a player enters a location where a clue can be found, he needs only declare that he is using an investigative ability, such as Library Use or Forensics. If a clue is vital to the plot then he finds it automatically simply by using the correct ability. If a clue is not vital but merely useful, he can spend points from his skill pool to obtain it; these points do not refresh until the end of the adventure.

>I gotta say, that sounds not great. Someone sell me on this.