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>GMing for friends
>Eldritch themes and the whole cosmic hopelessness shebang
>By the time the players find out that the world is going to be reshaped into a nasty by a not!Shub-Niggurath who is arriving in a year's time atop a meteor
>Players are all noblebright fantasy heroes as per the norm of the olden times
>Going on and on about stopping the big evil
>Mandatory wizard NPC researcher says that not!Old God's arrival is inevitable because there is always a way for him to come back, so diverting the meteorite is the only way to prolong the inevitable since destroying it would do nothing
>Players still all going on about stopping to baddie for good
>NPCs start going along with them because either too scared to even think otherwise or to comfort the PCs since they are in denial
>Game goes on, plan succeeds and the meteor is diverted
>"You are truly our heroes! With this you have prolonged the coming of the Old One and given these people hope. Maybe if more like you arrive sometime in the far future our civilization either manages to fight back properly or have become dust in the winds of the cosmos. But for now, let us rejoice for we still live!"
>PCs are all like "No no, it is gone for good"
>"For our generation maybe, but the next one has to have it's own heroes because He will come back. He is patient, but ceaseless in his attempts"
>Other players are ok with this, their characters are now just a little down, but they knew what they were into since early parts
>One player however thinks that I am a hack and remains sour about the ending being sort of hopeless. saying that it has no resolution and that bad endings are bad endings for a reason ("because nobody wants them")
Are Lovecraftian endings (completely hopeless in the grand scheme of things) actually fitting ever for an RPG?
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>>55063885
sounds like your playgroup are pussies t b h.
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>>55064274
agreed
>>55063885
The issue is that that one guy didn't want to play an eldritch Lovecraftian game. Also are previously stated is a pussie
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>>55063885
I like pizza and I like donairs.
But if I order a pizza and I get a donair, I'm going to be kind of confused. I won't enjoy the donair as much.
So here's what you did. You decided to run "a game". The players wanted to run Big Damn Heroes. You wanted to run Lovecraftian Grimdarnkess.
And so you ended up running Lovecraftian Grimdarkness anyway, and ignored the noblebright stuff /your players wanted to do/.
If they'd signed up for Lovecraftian Grimdarkness and done that, sure, you'd have a point. But did you make the themes, goals, and tropes of your game clear before it started? Did the players buy in?
Because at the end of the day, everyone didn't get what they wanted. And that's dumb. Don't be dumb. Plan ahead. Talk to your players. Set tone and theme guidelines and then stick to them. Don't bait-and-switch and go from Noblebright to Grimdark (unless your players signed up for that).
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>>55063885
>Are Lovecraftian endings (completely hopeless in the grand scheme of things) actually fitting ever for an RPG?
Yes.
For a fantasy super heroes game? No.
If this was the end of the game then this is the lot of you failing to communicate, if this was part of a longer running thing then the former still applies but your player is also a little bitch boy for not being able to handle a recurring villain. Unless its a case of you being a little bitch boy for not rewarding a long journey and great effort.
But more to the point here's a couple of things it seems you missed about cosmic horror.
A) From the sounds of it you made some very definitive statements regarding the nature of the threat and its implications for the world. This detracts hugely from the central ambiguity of horror. A defined threat is not scary, its a challenge or a chore. And furthermore that statement seemed to indicate that...
B) You made all of this matter. It didn't. Not because the threat is to great and inevitable, but because your entire world and all its potential is of no consequence in the grand cosmic order of things. Its not Lovecraftian horror because the threat has tentacles and pays lip service to transcending time, space and understanding, but because its incredibly nihilistic.
Humanity isnt doomed in Lovecraft because the gods are out to get us, we're doomed because they don't care. We're gonna be an archaeological curiosity to a bunch of bugs that rule earth a million years from now and it may just as well be because we were hit by a huge rock that had been spinning through space since matter formed as it might be because someone managed to tick off the immune system equivalent of a creature that spanned most of our galactic neighborhood.
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>>55063885
You wanted a different game to the game that your players wanted and you didn't stop to talk about that or attempt to compromise
Nobody is right. Everyone is wrong.
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>>55063885
From the way you were describing it, I was honestly expecting you to turn this campaign on its head, and what you were building up to was putting classic heroes in a Lovecraftian world. I think maybe it might be that the players were having a different experience from the experience you created, and that's fine but if you are going to have any sort of ending it should be consistent with the themes of the game up to it. If you didn't challenge their characters to adapt to the theme, which would have been fine if the player were cool with it and interested in a lovecraftian campaign, then that ending honestly would have been pretty hopeful as far as lovecraftian stories go. However, if they got that far maintaining the personalities they had and having a good time of it, I think it's your job to adapt to them - it's a push and pull thing and while I wouldn't go so far as to say just think of it as group improv, because there is definitely a story planning component, everyone has the best time if everyone is contributing to the story in complementary ways. Your mate gave a really poor reasoning - bad or hopeless endings definitely work if they are satisfying to players who realized that that was where the setting was going, but if nothing really foreshadowed it because they were able to play standard heroic characters up to the end, giving them a hopeless ending smacks a little bit like a last minute disappointment.
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>>55063885
>Are Lovecraftian endings (completely hopeless in the grand scheme of things) actually fitting ever for an RPG?
Of course. Just try to make sure your players know what they are getting into.
Grimdark crushing anguish games are more about the characters and their struggles.
But do note that without 'any' glimmer of hope, the story can lose the reason for actually doing anything.
Lovecraftian stories are not about hopelessness, but about irrelevance.
Essentially that what humans do is extremely minor on the power scale of what happens in the universe.
Humans in Lovecraftian stories have 'hope', it's just that the grand cosmological horrors don't care about them.
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